Sleepwalker

by Karen Robards

  By the time she made it up the semicircular marble staircase to the second floor, her head was on straight and she felt normal again. Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The anger and sense of betrayal that had been with her for almost twenty-four hours now had come back, and had once again settled into her stomach like a rock.

  “Bastard,” she said out loud to her absent ex-boyfriend. She’d said it to his face before she’d left, along with a lot of other things. She didn’t know why she’d been so surprised to learn he’d been cheating on her. She knew men. She knew cops.

  What was surprising was how much it hurt to find out that Homicide Investigator Nate Horacki of the Detroit PD was no better than the rest of them.

  This time yesterday, she would have said she was in love with him.

  But now … no way. She wasn’t that big of a …

  Clink.

  Mick never would have heard the slight sound if she hadn’t been right where she was, striding along the open second-floor gallery that ran across the top of the enormous, eye-popping entry hall, nearly at the doorway of the bedroom she was using, the one she always used, which she’d come to think of as her way-luxurious home away from home. But she was there, and she did hear it. Stopping dead, she listened. To nothing at all except the hum of the heating system. Except for the faint glow of moonlight streaming through the windows, the house was dark. Not wanting to advertise her movements to anyone outside who might be interested, she hadn’t turned on a light on her way back to her bedroom. Now every sense she possessed focused on the shadow-filled spaces stretching out all around her. The house was huge, and tonight, except for her, it was empty. At least, it was supposed to be.

  Clink.

  There it was again. Mick went taut as a bowstring, every sense on the alert. The smell of pine from the Christmas garlands tied to the gallery’s wrought-iron railing wafted in the air. Shimmery gold ornaments in a glass bowl on the console table to her left glinted as a shaft of moonlight played over them. Trying to remember how the house had looked before darkness had swallowed it up, she concluded that the tall, menacing shapes in the corners were the human-size toy soldiers and nutcrackers her aunt Hope, Uncle Nicco’s wife, had used as Christmas decorations. She relaxed a little even as she listened hard.

  Silence once again blanketed everything. But she knew she hadn’t imagined the sound. And it hadn’t been a random creak that she could put down to the settling of floor joists or something equally innocent; it had been sharper and metallic. Purposeful, was how she characterized it. Which meant she needed to check it out.

  She embraced the thought with relish. Checking it out was something to do, something to think about, something she was good at. And it was a whole hell of a lot better than lying sleepless in her bed trying not to think, which she knew was the fate that awaited her for the rest of the night.

  Uncle Nicco had hired her to house-sit while he, his wife, five grown children and their families spent New Year’s and the week after at their place in Palm Beach. Because of the bust up with Nate, she had arrived a day early, just a couple of hours after the family left. The house should have been empty for this one night.

  New Year’s Eve.

  So if the house was empty except for herself, what was the source of that sound?

  Moving swiftly, Mick slipped into her bedroom and retrieved her gun from the nightstand. The familiar, solid weight of the Glock 22 felt good in her hand. Her handcuffs were on the nightstand, too. She grabbed them, tucked them into her pocket just in case, and thrust her feet into terry flip-flops, which had been part of the spa basket her longtime best friend, Angela Marino Knox—Nicco’s daughter—had left on her bed as a Christmas present and which she had been using for slippers after painting her toenails with the hot pink Passion Fruit polish that had also been in the basket. Then she retraced her steps, quiet as a whisper, moving cautiously but quickly back along the gallery, listening.

  Clink.

  There it was again. Probably it was nothing. Still, her heart rate accelerated as she focused in on the location of the sound: first floor, toward the rear. Padding down the stairs, the marble hard and silent beneath her feet, she tried to pinpoint the location more exactly. Left, past the huge formal living and dining rooms and the music room and the library. Slinking purposefully along, moving from shadow to shadow, she gave a fleeting thought to hitting one of the panic buttons that had been placed in strategic locations for the purpose of instantly summoning the security guards. The odds were high that the sharp, metallic sound she was hearing was something entirely innocent, but backup was always a good thing. Then Mick considered who had pulled security guard duty on this icy New Year’s Eve and made a face.

  She didn’t need backup, anyway.

  No longer hearing anything out of the ordinary, she proceeded with quick caution, clearing each dark room as she passed it. As Uncle Nicco was always bragging, the security system was state of the art, not the kind of thing a burglar could easily breach. Plus, given the presence of the guards, the cameras, the fact that the estate was ringed on three sides by a twelve-foot-high fence (the fourth side was secured by the lake) and every outside door had at least two top-of-the-line double bolts, the house was a virtual fortress. What were the chances that …?

  Boom.

  Okay, that wasn’t nothing. It was a soft boom, a muffled, barely audible boom, but a boom nonetheless. As if something had exploded, maybe, only quietly. Mick’s eyes widened as she rounded a corner and spied the faintest of yellow glows emanating from a door about twenty feet away. A click, a boom, a glow—good God, could the house be on fire?

  The security system included state-of-the-art fire detection. If the house was on fire, by now the system should have been wailing its little heart out.

  Unless something had compromised the system.

  Adrenaline pumping, Mick glided quickly and silently to the open door, then flattened herself against the wall beside it. The yellow glow was gone. The hall … the room … the house … were once again silent and dark. A quick, careful peek around the door frame revealed exactly nothing: there was just enough moonlight filtering through cracks in the floor-to-ceiling drapes to help her ascertain that the room was empty. But there was a smell: a kind of acrid, smoky scent that reminded her of a detonated cherry bomb. And barely audible sounds—a shuffle, a click, a thunk. Although she liked to think she possessed a highly honed sixth sense, one wasn’t required to deduce that she was not alone. Her heart lurched. Her stomach clenched. She wet her lips.

  Then professionalism kicked in, and icy calm descended like a curtain.

  She was still peeping around the door frame, formulating her next move, when a man, tall and lean, dressed all in black and wearing a black ski mask with one of those miner’s lights affixed to a band around his forehead, walked out of an open door on the opposite side of the room as brazenly as could be. She hadn’t previously been more than vaguely aware of that door. If she had thought about it at all, which she couldn’t recall ever having done, she had probably assumed it led to a closet. Only no burglar—and a burglar this certainly was—would bother to blow open a closet door, and it was clear from the sulfurous smell, from the boom she’d heard, and most of all from the fact that the door appeared to be hanging drunkenly from one hinge, that it had been blown open.

  The room was Uncle Nicco’s private office, which meant the door almost had to belong to a safe. A closet-size, walk-in safe that held God only knew what in the way of valuables. A safe she’d never even known existed.

  Which it was nevertheless her job to protect.

  The man was maybe six foot two, broad shouldered and athletically built, with a young man’s confident gait. Open military-style jacket over a tee, pants and boots. With—she squinted to be sure—surgical gloves that made his hands look as white as a cadaver’s against all that black. Still absolutely unaware that she was anywhere in the vicinity.

  Having registered all this in the space of a s
plit second, Mick did what she had to do: she stepped into the doorway, planted her feet and jerked her weapon up.

  “Freeze,” she barked. “Police.”

  Chapter

  2

  When you stole things for a living, unexpected developments—naturally—were to be expected. Finding a hot, female, pajama-wearing, pigtail-sporting, self- proclaimed cop pointing a gun at him at 2:36 a.m. on New Year’s Day in what was supposed to have been a gangster’s deserted house was, Jason Davis reflected as he obediently froze in response to her command, just one more twist in the game.

  “Damn.”

  His partner’s muttered expletive barely reached Jason’s ears. Behind him, hidden from the cop in the stygian depths of the safe they were in the process of robbing, Jelly also stopped dead. The beam of light from his headlamp streamed past Jason’s shoulder, blending with Jason’s light. At least Jelly, who tended toward the hyperactive and preferred action to inaction every time, had the good sense not to turn it off. At five foot eight and a hundred nineteen bony pounds, John “Jelly” Bean was good at passing unnoticed. He stood unmoving for now, listing slightly to the right under the nearly sixty-pound weight of the suitcase he carried in one hand.

  The suitcase that was stuffed with five hundred thousand dollars in untraceable cash.

  Jason, who at six foot two and a hundred eighty muscular pounds was carrying two similar suitcases with much less effort, plus a bag of tools slung over his left shoulder, gave a slight shake of his head to warn his partner to cool out and stay put.

  “Hey,” Jason addressed the woman easily. “You work for Nicco, right? I take it somebody forgot to clue you in that we were coming to get this stuff tonight.”

  The sound she made was a cross between a snort and a laugh. “Yeah, right. Get your hands up.”

  Briefly one-handing her weapon, she hit the light switch on the wall. The desk lamp and a floor lamp in the corner blinked on, bathing the sumptuously furnished, teak-paneled room in a warm glow. Gold curtains, red-based Oriental carpet, life-size oil painting of Marino’s blond, bosomy missus on the wall behind the desk: a barrage of colors hit his retinas. Jason narrowed his eyes a little in defense against the sudden brightness and kept his focus on the cop. Her gun—a regulation Glock, which she was two-handing again—didn’t waver. Neither did her eyes, which were fixed on his face. Clearly she wasn’t buying what he was selling.

  Smart girl.

  Still, he wasn’t about to just give up. Behind him, he could feel Jelly’s nerves fraying. That was worrisome, because when he hit a certain degree of anxiety, Jelly was liable to do something counterproductive. Like pull out his own gun and start shooting it off. In Jelly’s sometimes shortsighted view of the world, the only good obstacle to their plans was a dead obstacle to their plans.

  “You shouldn’t-a done that,” Jason drawled. Meaning turn on the lights, which his glance at the offending light switch, he hoped, made obvious. He shook his head at her in reproach. He had gone into dumb-muscle mode, adopting the body language and speech patterns of one of Marino’s goons. A chameleon-like ability to change his persona to fit the exigencies of the situation was one of the many secrets of his success. “Guys in the booth might take notice, boss’s study lights up bright in the middle of the night. Boss didn’t want anybody, including the security guys, to know something was going down. Shit hits the fan about this, you be sure to tell him you’re the one who fucked up his operation, not me.”

  Despite his warning tone, her lip curled in contempt. She made a threatening gesture with the Glock. “Put the suitcases down. Get your hands in the air. Do it now !”

  Her tone, her expression and the gun pointed at his heart were all business. The sparkly pink toenails and pigtails and small, pert breasts with clearly visible nipples thrusting at him through a thin white tank top were something else. First time he’d ever encountered a cop pointing blatantly braless breasts at him along with her gun, and he found the juxtaposition distracting, to say the least. Nevertheless he figured she was probably legit. Nicco Marino’s security force was all male, and anyway she didn’t have the crook-on-the-make look of one of Marino’s guys. Despite her appearance, her attitude had real, sworn-in, badge-carrying cop written all over it. To say nothing of her gun, which he reluctantly recognized as regulation-issue Detroit PD.

  What the hell was a cop doing in Marino’s house, especially tonight, of all nights?

  “Lady, you’re making a helluva big mistake …,” he tried.

  “Suitcases down. Hands in the air,” she barked, her stance widening, her grip on her weapon tightening. Forget the girlish tits and braids. Her eyes glinted at him, cold as a shark’s. “Do it now.”

  “Okay, fine. Whatever you want. Don’t blow a gasket.” His tone remained easy, casual. A quick upward glance toward the security camera trained on the safe’s door told him that its lens was still covered with the aluminum foil he’d put in place some three minutes before, at the beginning of what was supposed to have been a five-minute, in-and-out operation. Capping a lens with aluminum foil was easy, cheap and practically foolproof if you wanted whoever was monitoring the camera to think they were watching a dark, motionless space. Even turning on the light as she had done wouldn’t make a difference: the palm-size piece of foil he’d wrapped around the lens hugged it closely enough to block out any illumination. So as far as the guards in the booth knew, providing they were even paying attention and not asleep or busy with their own private New Year’s Eve celebration, nothing would have changed.

  Jason meant to keep it that way.

  “Put the suitcases down! Get your hands in the air!” Her voice was sharp. Her gun meant business.

  “Now, see, we got a problem.” Still holding on to the suitcases—he was willingly parting with a million dollars he had worked hard to obtain when Lake Erie sported mermaids—he took a step forward, clearing the doorway for Jelly to emerge if necessity dictated, relieved that the light in the room meant that the beam from Jelly’s headlamp no longer had to sync with his. Following him, her eyes narrowed warningly, and he stopped. No point in pushing her into doing something he might be the one to regret. “I don’t want no shooting or nothing”—this was a message meant as much for Jelly, who, if Jason knew anything about his partner, had pulled out his beloved .38 and was spoiling for a shoot-out, as it was for the cop—“but I got orders to deliver these here suitcases to a certain party tonight. Boss’s orders,” he emphasized. Boss, as they both knew, meant Nicco Marino. Her expression continued to remain grim, but he thought he saw the tiniest flicker of doubt in her eyes.

  That’s right. You have no way of knowing if I’m telling the truth or not, do you? You don’t know what the program is because you weren’t supposed to be here tonight.

  His advance work had told him that much, and his advance work was never—well, almost never, with tonight being the glaringly obvious exception—wrong.

  “You moron, you’re wearing fucking surgical gloves. Think I’m going to swallow your bullshit? The only place you’re going tonight is jail. Put the suitcases down, get your hands in the air. I won’t tell you again.”

  Damn, she had a point about the gloves, which he’d forgotten all about. At least he managed not to glance down at them. The gun pointed at him never wavered. He didn’t move, figuring that if she was going to shoot him for standing there talking while he held on to the suitcases, he’d already be dead. Bottom line was, she had no way of knowing what Marino’s orders to him had been. Maybe Marino had told him to wear gloves. At least that was how he was going to play it.

  “Your ass,” he warned her. “And for your information, Boss don’t like us to leave fingerprints anybody can trace back.” He shrugged, his tone and movements still slow and easy and untroubled, then waited for her to order him to drop the suitcases one more time. Her mouth tightened. Then she took a step sideways, one-handed her gun again and flung her left palm outward, going for the wall. Her tits jiggled. Hell, he could
see her nipples. A fraction of an instant to register that distraction was all it took to make the situation nearly catastrophic. Luckily, his focus returned just in time for him to perceive what she was up to: she meant to hit the panic button placed discreetly on the wall just to the left of the light switch. He’d discovered that component of the security system when he had first scoped the place out, and he’d decided disabling it wasn’t necessary. After all, the house was going to be deserted on New Year’s Eve, so who would be around to activate it?

  Miscalculation. Once she touched that button, the goon squad would be all over them within minutes. He’d just officially run out of time.

  He did the only thing he could: dropped one suitcase and flung the other at her, hard. She dodged, yelping. Shrugging out of his tool bag, he dived at her. The suitcase hit the wall with a thud and burst open. He saw this from the corner of his eye while in mid-dive, watched the suitcase disgorging rubber-band-bound bundles of cash, manila envelopes and papers, which exploded across the room like so much shrapnel. Before she could recover enough to go for the panic button again or snap off a shot or do anything else remotely effective, he connected, knocking the gun from her hand and grabbing her around the waist, meaning to spin her around and lock her down before she could cause him any more problems.

  “Damn it, no,” she cried. Struggling to free herself, she was as hard to get a grip on as a wriggling snake. “Get back!”

  Strong-arming his shoulder in an effort to back him off—fat chance of that—she tried whirling away and almost succeeded. But even as he caught her by a hip bone and an arm and jerked her back toward him, he felt steel talons dig into his wrist. Without any other warning, he heard a triumphant “Hah!”

  Then he was airborne, sailing high before slamming hard into the floor—oomph. The crash landing knocked the breath out of him. It happened so fast, and was so unexpected, that he didn’t even have time to react. For a moment he saw stars. Stunned to find himself lying on his back wheezing as he blinked dazedly at the ceiling, he had no time to properly assess the situation before two sharp objects—it took him a second to identify them as her bony-ass knees—slammed into his rib cage. A throat chop that would have been disabling if he hadn’t reflexively hunched a shoulder in time to deflect it sent pinwheels of pain shooting through the base of his neck.