Sleepwalker (6 page)

She didn’t argue. Instead, she ran with him. Her feet slapped the marble floor aggressively, her steps as quick as his. Her expression was intense. Flushed with exertion, her arm warm beneath his imprisoning fingers, keeping a tight grip on the suitcase stuffed with stolen cash she’d done her best to part him from before, she didn’t offer the slightest degree of resistance.

If she’d fought, he probably would have had to release her. He didn’t have time for another pitched battle, and he wouldn’t have shot her, for sure, or even have knocked her unconscious, as Jelly had suggested. As she almost had to know.

Ah, there it was: the exit. French doors leading to a terrace, which led to a set of stone steps, which led to a shrubbery-shielded sidewalk, which led around past the pool to the rear of the pool house. The van, with Tina at the wheel and Jelly closing in, would be waiting.

“This way.”

Beyond the door, the night beckoned: a moonlit black sky shaking loose more flakes upon a glistening layer of snow. Just a few minutes more and …

“Go.”

As he propelled her ahead of him out the door into the icy darkness, a question started blinking on and off like a warning light in his mind.
Why isn’t she busting her ass to get away?

God, it’s cold.
That was Mick’s first thought as a frost-laden wind slammed into her body. Her second, as she leaped down the steps to the walkway, was
My feet are freezing.
Then the details got swamped by the big picture:
This should not be happening. I should be taking this guy down, not taking off with him
.

But under the circumstances, taking off with him was the only thing she could think of to do.

The pictures … those damning pictures. The images remained seared in her brain. Remembering, her heart pounded. Her pulse raced. Her stomach coiled around on itself like a writhing snake. Although she might wish on every star playing peekaboo with the thick layer of clouds overhead that it was different, there was no escaping what she had seen. And what she had seen changed everything.

Unbelievable as it seemed, her uncle Nicco had been involved in the death—the
murder—
of Edward Lightfoot. There was no mistake. The photographs had been perfectly clear. Uncle Nicco’s face had been perfectly clear. Since Lightfoot’s wife and daughters had been killed at the same time, Uncle Nicco almost certainly had had a hand in their deaths, as well. Barring some exotic hoax involving Photoshop, there was no doubt that he had been on the scene, that he was guilty. She had to face it. And she had to face one more terrible thought, too: Seeing the pictures made her as much of a witness as if she had been there when the shooting had gone down.

I’m not safe. I’ll never be safe again.

Panic threatened to rear its ugly head. By sheer force of will she managed to clamp it down.

There’d always been vague rumors floating around that Uncle Nicco was affiliated with the mob. That he was a crime boss, a gangster kingpin, the Godfather-like head of a wide-reaching operation. But it was the kind of nudge-nudge, wink-wink thing that no one paid much attention to: gossip and hearsay and something to occasionally tease Angela about. He actually owned Marino Construction, an extremely successful business with more than two hundred employees in three divisions: a home remodeling firm, a concrete company and a gravel company. As Mick’s dad’s best friend and the father of her own best friend, Uncle Nicco had always treated her like his blood niece. In the months and years after their mother’s death especially, he had assumed an almost parental role in her and Jenny’s lives. Mick loved the genial sixty-year-old unreservedly.

If she had not seen the evidence with her own two eyes, no one would have been able to convince her that he was capable of murder. But she had …

“Toward the pool house.” The thief’s voice was taut with tension. His fingers dug into her arm. Her gun—and it irked her to no end that he had her gun—was aimed at her. Glancing up at his face, she saw that it was hard and set. As she’d thought, he was young—maybe thirty. When she’d snatched off his mask, she’d been surprised to discover that he was way handsome, with close-cropped black hair, a lean, angular face, a straight nose, well-cut mouth and strong jaw, and the kind of naturally swarthy skin that took easily to a tan. He was also as physically fit as she was, although a whole lot less skilled in hand-to-hand combat, to say nothing of less determined to win.

“You got a getaway vehicle back there?” Her voice was faintly
breathless. Yes, he could shoot her, but he hadn’t done it yet and she didn’t think it was going to happen, at least not on purpose. As a four-year veteran police officer who had just gotten promoted to investigator in the major crimes division, she’d dealt with plenty of killers, and he didn’t give off that kind of vibe. Her verdict was robber, yes, murderer, no.

“Just run.”

Right now his long strides were eating up the distance to the pool house, and, weighted down by the suitcase, she had to struggle to keep up. The pool house—a tiny marble replica of the Parthenon—glowed palely against the jagged backdrop of the giant pine trees behind it. Tall evergreen shrubs set in pots around the pool sparkled with white Christmas lights. The snow atop the pool cover glittered like soap bubbles. It was only as Mick registered that the crystalline sparkle of the snow was a reflection of the Christmas lights that she realized the outside lights had just been turned on.
All
the outside lights.

Someone, somewhere, had flipped a switch. The yard had suddenly lit up bright as day.

Trouble.

“Shit,” her captor said, obviously noticing.

Shit, indeed.

“Guess what? They can
see
us.” Throwing the taunt up at him as he practically towed her along after him as he ran, Mick nodded in the direction of the closest security camera, which was affixed to a light pole disguised as a Greek column at the edge of the pool. The night was so cold that tiny puffs of white smoke came out of her mouth as she spoke. Goose bumps raced over her skin, a lot of which was exposed. She was dressed for bed, not the great outdoors, and her nerve endings were already quivering in shock from the unexpected arctic blast. The crisp, damp smell of fresh snow filled her nostrils. Yet she barely registered
any of it. Her head spun with plans, scenarios, recipes for disaster and redemption. Spun so fast that she could barely make sense out of any of them. All she knew, with absolute conviction, was that she had to get away while she could. Later, when she was safe, she could reason this whole mess through.

“Faster,” he ordered.

“The only way you’re getting faster out of me is if I drop this damn suitcase.” Which was heavy and clumsy and hard to hold on to and contained nothing that interested her anyway.

“If I have to choose between you and the suitcase, baby, believe me, you’re history.”

“Is that supposed to scare me?”

“Depends on how smart you are.”

“Smart enough not to rob a house with a cop in it, anyway.”

“Shut up and run.”

Mick’s lip curled in contempt even as she complied. If she’d made any one of half a dozen moves, he would have been flat on his face in the snow. Lucky for him, she had a reason to be cooperative. For now. The problem was, she was having a hard time reconciling her instincts with what she was rapidly concluding was the inescapable fact that she needed him.

Certainly she wasn’t happy about it. The guy was a criminal, and she was letting him—no, helping him—get away. With a suitcase filled with stolen money. It went against every bit of moral fiber she possessed, every bit of training she’d ever had, even the oath she’d taken. But try as she would, she could come up with no alternative. She was shaken to the core, conflicted and upset. None of which was optimum for clearheaded thinking. Plus, his fingers digging into her arm hurt, and the suitcase kept banging into her legs. The cash was in paper bills: who would have guessed it could weigh so much?

“You really think you’re going to get away?” she threw at him.

By way of a reply he tightened his grip and growled, “What part of ‘shut up’ don’t you understand?
Run
.
”

“Because from this end I have to tell you I don’t think it’s looking so good.”

Before he could reply, a commotion on the other side of the eight-foot-tall holly hedge that blocked the pool area from the sight of the rest of the property drew their mutual attention. No sooner had Mick looked that way than the wrought-iron gate that provided access through the hedge burst open and a half dozen members of Uncle Nicco’s security force poured through. Armed to the teeth, dressed in dark uniforms that had been deliberately designed to make them look like cops, their reaction—the ones in front stopped dead, causing those behind to bump into them and then stumble off the semicleared walkway into the midcalf-deep snow on either side—told her they were almost as surprised to see her and the man hanging on to her as Mick was to see them.

“There they are,” Terry Abrizzo shouted from the back of the pack, pointing out to the other guys what they had clearly already realized. Well, Abrizzo had always been a little slow on the uptake. Short and faintly pudgy, he had a perpetually worried expression that had just become even more pronounced than usual as he tried to keep his balance in the snow while taking in the scenario in front of him.

“Hold it right there!” Lenny Otis yelled, his gun coming up and his feet planting on the walkway as he got his act together and assumed lock-and-load position. Bald and beefy, Otis was older than the others, had been on Uncle Nicco’s payroll for years, and tended to be more intelligent than Uncle Nicco’s average thug. Thus, the group seemed to look to him as an unofficial leader. Mimicking Otis, everybody’s guns came up and their feet planted.

“Don’t fucking move,” a bunch of them screamed in almost perfect unison.

“Stay back!” The thief yanked her against him and imprisoned her with an arm wrapped around her throat. Caught by surprise, Mick lost her footing. The brick walkway down which they had been racing was cleared of all but the newest snow, but underneath it was icy; her flip-flops were already wet, and they slipped on the brick like bowling balls sliding down a lane. When her feet went out from under her, she dropped like a rock and, in the process, lost her grip on the suitcase. Her chin caught on the thief’s hard-muscled upper arm, snapping her jaws together, jarring her teeth, wringing a surprised
oomph
out of her. She hung there, choking, feet scrabbling for purchase, shocked to find herself in such a position. Uncle Nicco’s guys, most of whom she’d known for years, goggled at her in astonishment. Her momentary discomfiture embarrassed her as much as it surprised them, and even as she fought to regain her balance she glared fiercely back at them.

I can kick all your butts, and you know it, so you can just quit looking at me like that
were the words she mentally hurled at them. She would have shouted it out if she hadn’t been choking at the time.

As she desperately clutched at the thief’s imprisoning arm while fighting for breath, it was all she could do not to react to her predicament with a sharp elbow jab to his ribs, which would have freed her in a heartbeat. But by keeping the endgame firmly in mind, she managed to hold off on doing him bodily harm long enough to get her feet underneath her again.

Coughing, wheezing, shifting from foot to frozen foot as she regained her balance and stood up, Mick looked around to find the suitcase tipped onto its side in the deep snow beside the path. Mick had thought that her fall had stopped their escape cold. Now she realized it had been his refusal to abandon the stolen money.

“Get the damn suitcase,” her captor muttered in her ear.

“Oh my God, can’t you think of anything else?” she hissed back. “You think they’re going to let you keep that money in jail?”

“Get
it.”

“Let her go,” Otis yelled, reclaiming their attention.

“Back off,” the thief yelled in reply. Mick felt her gun jab her in the side. Her primary reaction was more annoyance than alarm: she knew the gesture was not so much threat to her per se as posturing for the benefit of the guys. Then, into her ear at a volume meant for her alone, he added, in the tone of a man whose patience was being severely tried, “We’re going to move, then I want you to lean over and pick up that suitcase.”

“What are you going to do if I refuse?”

“Believe me, you don’t want to find out.”

“Ohh, there you go, scaring me again.”

“You know what? I’m surprised somebody hasn’t shot you before now.”

“I’m not saying I think you’re Einstein or anything, but I’m guessing you’re smart enough not to shoot me when I’m all that’s standing between you and
them
.”

She nodded at Uncle Nicco’s numbskulls, who, clumsy in their confusion, jostled each other and watched as, during the course of this whispered exchange, the thief jimmied her to the edge of the sidewalk next to where the suitcase lay in the snow. Having so many guns aimed at her by her longtime friends and acquaintances was unnerving, she discovered as she faced them. Brains weren’t these guys’ strong suit. It was clear that, faced with a problem such as the one confronting them now, they had no clue what to do. Watching and elbowing one another while making indecisive sounds and vaguely threatening gestures with their weapons was just lame, in Mick’s opinion.

“Keep away,” the thief warned when Otis took a step forward and a couple of the others followed suit. Otis looked undecided, and Mick knew the others would take their lead from him.

“Do what he says,” Mick yelled to help them out in the decision-making process.

“Good girl,” came the slightly surprised sounding whisper in her ear. The arm around her neck shifted abruptly. She felt his fist curl into the back of her tank while the gun eased off enough so that, while it was still aimed at her, it was no longer touching her. “Now pick up the suitcase.”