Sleepwalker (7 page)

I’ll give you good girl,
she thought as she did as he told her, but this was not the time. For now, much as she hated to face it, his objective was hers, as well: they both needed to get out of the compound as quickly as possible. Peripherally she was aware of fat flakes of snow falling like fresh-sifted flour, forming a gossamer curtain between her and the guys. They settled on her bare skin like frozen bits of New Year’s confetti and melted where they touched. She blinked as flakes caught on her lashes. Her nose had to be as red as her pants, she knew. Her feet felt like blocks of ice. As soon as she straightened with the suitcase, the thief’s arm once more curved close around her throat.

Choked again. This time she did elbow him in the ribs. Not hard enough to free herself but with just enough force to get her message across. He grunted, then slightly relaxed his grip.

“Jackass,” she hissed, just loud enough so that she could be sure he heard.

“Let her go,” Otis shouted, while the group jostled around and pointed their weapons at her and the thief some more. But the jostling had purpose, Mick saw: the guys were spread out in a C shape now, sneakily working on cutting them off.

“Don’t come any closer,” the thief yelled and started dragging her back toward the pool house. Every single gun swerved to track them.
At the thought that they all probably had their safeties off, Mick’s skin crawled. Her heart, which was already pumping pretty fast, kicked it up another degree or so. The potential for disaster was terrifying, but dwelling on it did no good. Deliberately she closed her mind to the possibility that at any minute somebody’s trigger finger might twitch. Even so, she could almost feel a bullet ripping through her flesh.

We’ve got to get out of here.

We—as in her and the thief. The thought of what side of the fence she was now on was mind-boggling.

“Stop right there!” Otis yelled. He was holding his gun so tightly that it quivered.

“I’ll kill her,” the thief warned. Making a token show of reluctance while taking good care that she didn’t actually hamper him in any way, Mick stumbled backward in his grip while eyeing her would-be rescuers warily. Besides an accidental discharge, it was always possible that an individual idiot might take it into his head to try to shoot the thief to prevent an escape. Which, since she was plastered against him and had grave doubts that any of the contingent on duty tonight could put a bullet in an eighteen-wheeler parked inches away, could end badly for her. Plus, she had her own iron in the fire here. What she needed was for them to let him drag her away unhindered.

“Otis, all you guys, don’t try anything!” she called to them with what she considered a truly artistic degree of shakiness in her voice. “You heard him: he’ll kill me.”

“We can’t just let him take her.” Bobby Tobe sounded panicked. “The boss’ll be pissed.” Around Mick’s own age, he was thin and nervous. Even across the distance that separated them, she could see that his gun hand shook slightly, and she winced in response. Accidental shootings were just as deadly as on-purpose ones.

“You need to let us go,” she called to them again, not even having to
fake the conviction in her words. “If you don’t, if I get killed, the blame will be on
you
.”

“Nice,” her captor approved in her ear, prompting Mick to longingly picture three different scenarios in which she decked him. But that, like many other things, was going to have to wait for later.

His arm was once again locked beneath her chin as he pulled her backward with him, but he wasn’t choking her anymore, at least not on purpose. As long as she kept pace with him, as she took good care to do even while doing her best to appear reluctant, his grip allowed sufficient room for her to breathe.

“Stop! I’ll shoot,” Otis bellowed, assuming firing stance as the thief dragged her within a few yards of the pool house, in the shadow of the tall shrubs that ringed it. The others immediately followed Otis’s lead.

“You do, she dies,” the thief warned.

Mick felt her gun shift from her side. A split second later she felt cold steel nuzzle her temple. Alarm shot up her spine. Her pulse rate instantly skyrocketed.

“No!” she cried to the guys. “Stand down! I’m giving you an order.”

The guns pointing at them wavered. Otis’s dipped; he looked uncertain. Because she was considered practically a member of the Marino family, and because she was a cop, her words carried weight, she knew.

“You tell ’em, baby,” came the maddening voice in her ear.

Later,
she promised herself grimly. Even though she was 99.9 percent certain he wouldn’t shoot her, knowing that he had a gun pressed against her head was scary. She had no idea whether or not he was competent with a weapon, or what kind of nerve he possessed. If he should get jittery, the consequences could prove fatal. But she knew for a fact the safety was on, because she could see it from the corner of her eye, so how wrong could things go? Obviously very wrong, considering how her New Year’s Eve was already turning out, but she didn’t want to think about that.

“Want to get the gun away from my head?” she growled.

“What, am I scaring you now?”

“As incompetent as you’ve been so far tonight? Oh, yeah. Absolutely.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to pull the trigger. As long as you behave.”

Mick seethed. But with Otis’s and the guys’ eyes on her, she grabbed her self-control with both hands and held on. Ordinarily, just the fact that a criminal had turned her own service weapon against her would have made her boiling mad. And, being boiling mad, she would have reacted strongly. But this instance was unique. Having him think he was calling the shots suited her. Having Uncle Nicco’s guys think she had been taken hostage suited her. Therefore, instead of doing her best to take him out, she relaxed in his hold, letting him use her as a shield, helping him out, facilitating his escape, even though doing all those things went against every instinct she possessed. Her pulse raced, and she was breathing faster than normal, but that was from the situation in which she found herself, not fear. She was shivering, but that was from cold, not fear. She was doing what her captor said, but again fear was not the motivating factor. The good news was, she doubted anyone else could tell that, and she deliberately exaggerated her reactions so that hopefully fear was what the guys saw. She even tried to keep a look of wide-eyed panic on her face, just so the gang would register it and report how scared she was to their boss later.

It was all a matter of keeping her options open until she could figure out what to do for real.

“He’s getting away,” somebody—she thought it was Abrizzo—cried out in alarm as the shrubs around the pool house, unfortunately bare of their foliage now, partially obscured them from view.

“Go,”
somebody else answered, and the pack moved after them in a group surge.

“No,”
Mick yelled, real fear in her voice now at the idea that the thief
might be killed or captured and she might be “freed” to await Uncle Nicco.

“Stay back,”
the thief yelled at the same time. Her gun nudged her temple. The arm around her neck tightened. He still wasn’t deliberately choking her, just taking her with him as he picked up the pace, but the net result was the same: if she moved in any direction other than the one he wanted her to take, she couldn’t breathe. They had reached the walk that led around the pool house now. Another couple of feet, and they could duck around the corner and out of sight.

From there, she could only hope his escape plan was sound.

“I gave you a fucking order,” Mick screamed at the guys, who were still following them in a slow-moving but relentless advance. “What part of ‘stand down’ don’t you understand?”

Her voice came out sounding more high-pitched than usual, probably because she was terrified they were going to rush them, but it stopped them in their tracks. The situation was touch and go: she could feel the thief’s tension in the rigidity of his muscles, in the heat he emanated, in the rapidity of his breathing. She could almost hear the gears of his brain grinding as he tried to work out what to do next.

“What do we do?” Kevin Touro demanded of his companions. He was a thick-set, hairy, twenty-something punk, but he had a good heart. She could see him clearly because he was standing at the edge of the gang, almost directly beneath one of the security lights. He stared at her bug-eyed, biting his lip, his gun jiggling nervously. A number of the guys looked at him, but no one replied.

To hell with it. She wasn’t about to wait for any of them, the thief included, to figure this thing out.

“Tell them you’ll let me go as soon as you’re safe out of here,” she instructed her captor in a husky whisper.

Before he could respond, Ed Snider and Ray Petrino burst through
the French doors she and the thief had exited moments before. The goons pounded toward Mick and her captor, riveting everyone’s attention. Clearly they’d been the first responders, the ones who’d rushed into the house, the ones she and both thieves had been fleeing.

“Stop them,” Snider screamed. Tall and thin, with a watch cap pulled down over his head to his eyebrows, he snapped his gun into firing position as he ran. “Iacono said hold them. He’s on his way!”

Behind him, Petrino’s eyes locked with hers as he, too, ran with his weapon at the ready.

“Stay back,” the thief yelled, dragging her farther along the path. Just a short distance more and …

“Yo, look out, he’s got Mick,” Otis shouted at the newcomers, as if they couldn’t see that for themselves.

“I’ll kill her,” the thief roared, and Mick was once again supremely conscious of the gun held to her head.

Snider slid to a halt. Petrino had already frozen in place a few paces back. Weapons at the ready, they looked from Mick and the thief to the gang of their colleagues, clearly undecided.

“He’s got Mick,” Petrino repeated, staring at them. Petrino was one of the reasons Mick hadn’t called the security staff for backup in the first place. Good-looking if you liked guys who looked like they belonged on
Jersey Shore,
he’d been coming on to her for years. The fact that she’d been more or less serious with Nate for the last six months hadn’t even slowed him down.

“I’ll let her go when I’m out of here,” the thief yelled, picking up on what she’d told him earlier. He was already in the act of dragging her around the corner of the pool house. As she was moving backward, she didn’t have a view of where they were going. But she knew the property well: to her right were the tennis courts, and all the way around behind the pool house were an overflow parking area and a service driveway. She presumed the parking area and driveway were his goal, as the sidewalk
they were on led directly there. Hopefully the getaway vehicle—she was assuming there was a getaway vehicle—waited there.

“Hurt her and—” Petrino’s threat, uttered as Mick was pulled around the corner of the pool house out of the guys’ sight, was drowned out by a sudden explosion of gunfire that made Mick jump and sent her heart leaping into her throat.

Crack. Crack. Crack.
Shots fired in rapid succession were accompanied by shouts and a flurry of movement. But they didn’t come from Otis’s crew, or from Snider and Petrino. They came from the opposite direction.

“Sonuvabitch,” the thief said, stopping dead as Mick, eyes swiveling toward the sounds, sucked in air. The suitcase dropped with a thud, but this time neither of them paid the least attention. The firefight, because that’s what it obviously was, was taking place behind the pool house, where the getaway vehicle should have presumably been waiting. Blocked from their view by the pool house’s marble wall and yet another eight-foot-tall hedge, the action was impossible to see.

“Halt!”

“Shoot ’em!”

“They’re getting away!”

The shouts from behind the pool house were punctuated by squealing tires and more gunshots.

“Fuck. That’s it. The van’s gone,” the thief said.

The arm around her neck slackened noticeably. Mick could almost read his thoughts, could almost feel the calculations running through his brain. The quickening of his breathing, coupled with his sudden, turned-to-stone stillness, provided confirmation of the obvious: his escape plan had just been blown to hell. Mick thought she had a fairly good handle on what had happened: Iacono and crew had arrived via the property’s second and only other entrance besides the main one, surprising the getaway vehicle. In consequence, the thief’s ride out had
just left without him—and her. Dodging bullets and peeling rubber all the way.

He now found himself, literally, left out in the cold. The problem with that was, so was she.

And the guys with the guns were closing in.

“Come on!” It was Otis’s voice, sounding nearer than ever and breathless. He was running, Mick realized. Her stomach knotted as she heard and identified the crunch of half a dozen pairs of feet rushing toward them through the snow.

“Quick. Down there. To the tennis courts,” Mick directed urgently, pointing.

There was no time to hope the thief had gotten his act together enough to think of another way out. Turning within the loose captivity of his arm around her shoulders, she shoved him in the direction she wanted him to go. He was solid, so it was like shoving an oak: he didn’t budge, but he did look down at her in obvious surprise. Mick hissed with impatience. One or the other of the groups of her would-be rescuers would be upon them in a matter of moments. Their only hope was to get out of sight and hope that Otis’s group thought they’d made it to the van. Iacono’s guys would soon set them straight, but the confusion should buy them a few precious minutes.
If
they were quick.

“Go.”
She pushed him again, hands flattening on his chest, still with no success. All he did was crinkle his brow as his suspicious stare morphed into a frown. Her heart pounded at the realization that they could be surrounded at any second. Shouts and the rush of movements both in front of and behind them added impetus to her urgency. Forget the terrified hostage scenario, at least as long as there was no one but her supposed captor to see. If she had any hope of escaping this debacle, she clearly was going to have to take charge. “You want to get out of here in one piece or not?
Head for the tennis courts
.”