She hoped it was Grayson. Then she saw him come around a bend in the trail and smiled. Grayson. But then she frowned. His face was all black and blue.
Three male hikers were with him, watching over him.
“Hey, how is our patient doing?” Grayson closed the gap between them.
“She’s doing better. This is Anne Whittaker. Anne, this is Grayson Stone. He’s a bounty hunter like me. The teen was prepared to kidnap a young woman alone.”
“Oh, no,” Anne said.
The hikers looked shocked.
Kendra touched Grayson’s face below, where his face was red and swollen, his eye blackened. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Younger was much bigger and heavier than I thought. And muscled.”
Kendra hated seeing Grayson like that. “I hope he looks worse than you.”
“I didn’t get in another hit once he knocked me out. I was just lucky he didn’t kill me when I was down and out. But these men chased him off.”
“We were glad to,” one of the hikers said.
Anne frowned. “I guess I didn’t stand a chance fighting against the teen.” She sounded like she was finally coming to the realization that she couldn’t have done anything differently to save herself.
“I had a taser and pepper spray,” Kendra said.
“Oh, is that what made him leave me behind?”
“Uh, yeah.” Nope, a big grizzly bear saved her.
Grayson said, “If you’re alright with staying with Anne, I’m going to check on the teen. I need to call Ivy too.”
“Sure. The police are coming, and they’re going to arrest him and question us as to what happened.”
“Do we need to hang around? To help you further?” one of the hikers asked.
“Yeah. Rowland will need to get your statements about what you saw concerning Younger,” Grayson said, then he headed into the forest. Kendra heard someone else coming. She sure hoped it was the EMTs and Rowland.
Soon, she saw the EMTs with Rowland and four deputies right behind them.
Grayson carried the teen out to the hiking trail while the EMTs checked on Anne. They glanced at Grayson.
“Whoa, what happened to you?” one of the EMTs asked Grayson.
“I ran into the other kidnapper’s fist.” Grayson was just glad Anne would be all right, that they had saved her, that they had the teen in custody, and that Grayson had survived the encounter with Younger because of the hikers. Once he got the photo from Ivy, it confirmed that the teen they had in custody was Billy and had shared it with Rowland.
Rowland smiled and shook his head. “I can’t imagine anyone getting the best of you.”
“Lucky punch.”
Then the hikers wrote their statements for the police and set out on the trail, probably the wildest hiking trip they’d ever taken.
Then another deputy, now fully aware of what was going on, took the teen into custody and escorted him to his patrol car. The EMTs carried Anne into the waiting ambulance and took her to the hospital for evaluation. Rowland took Grayson and Kendra’s statements.
“So Mimi’s son, Billy, lives with her in Kalispell. He drives the car. Even though Younger isn’t from here, he married Mimi and lives with her when he’s not traveling across the states to see family farther east. She said he hasn’t been home for a couple of weeks. She didn’t realize he had hooked up with her son, and the two of them were running around together.”
“And kidnapping women,” Grayson said.
“Right. She might not have thought they were doing anything wrong. She might have blinders on when it comes to Younger. She doesn’t believe he was guilty of any of the other criminal cases that led to his prison sentence. That he was innocent of anything he’d been found guilty of,” Rowland said. “Or, she knows everything.”
