Sleepwalker

by Karen Robards

  “She’s going to be a problem,” Jelly warned.

  “Damn right I am. Your asses are going down.”

  “You just don’t know when to shut up, do you?” Jason said to the cop. It was becoming increasingly obvious that she was the type to hunt them down to the ends of the earth. If she’d been holding a gun on him instead of the other way around, he would have been getting nervous about now, knowing that the smartest thing she could do was kill him. But she—she hadn’t turned a hair as far as he could tell. Either she had cojones of steel, or she had guessed that he had a weak spot where women were concerned.

  “You just don’t know when somebody’s trying to do you a favor,” she retorted.

  “A favor.” Jason’s tone was skeptical.

  The door to the safe was only a couple of steps away. He’d blown the lock to gain access, but the opening itself was unimpeded. Take care of her, grab the suitcases, and he and Jelly were out of there. Thirty seconds to get out of the house, another minute and a half to get to the van, which was parked out behind the pool house, Garza’s Snow Removal emblazoned on its plain white side. Floor it down the delivery driveway, which Tina on the small rent-a-tractor, posing as scheduled maintenance after a snowfall, would have cleared by now, out through the side gates before the goons could summon the brainpower to lock it down, then onto the expressway and away.

  With one and a half million dollars in untraceable cash. Worth it? Absolutely.

  “Yeah, a favor. Doing ten to twenty beats being shot in the head,” the cop replied, echoing his own guess as to the time he was facing if the legal system got involved. “These guys don’t mess around.”

  “Get in the safe.”

  “You know you’re not going to get away with this.” She stumbled, supposedly on the ruffle of loose papers littering the floor, which, since they hadn’t been there before, had to have spilled from the burst suitcase, and “fell” to her knees maybe a foot shy of the threshold. A delaying tactic, which wasn’t going to work.

  “Get up.” His tone was deliberately brutal. There hadn’t been anything in the advance work that would have indicated something might have been in the suitcases besides cash, but it didn’t really matter: whatever else Marino might be sitting on, Jason, Jelly and Tina had no interest.

  “I don’t believe it.” She was still on her knees, her voice scarcely louder than a whisper.

  “What?” When she didn’t move, but instead started spreading out the papers and really looking at them, he took a proactive role in speeding up the process by bending down and catching her by the elbow, with the intention of hauling her upright. Her arm felt almost fragile, which, when he remembered the fight she had put up, surprised him. She was very slender, her taut physique more that of a ballet dancer than an athlete. Maybe a hundred fifteen pounds soaking wet. Which was embarrassing, when he thought about it.

  “It was a lie,” she said.

  Even as he hauled her upright, she was still looking down.

  “What was?”

  A little unsettled by her attitude, he automatically glanced down, too, just to see what she was looking at so fixedly. The papers on the floor were pictures, he saw, eight- by-ten-inch photographs on ordinary typing paper that looked like they had been printed from a computer. He wouldn’t have spared them another thought if one of the faces hadn’t immediately leaped out at him: Edward Lightfoot, the city councilman who had shot his wife and two teenage daughters in their home just before Christmas, then turned the gun on himself. The story had been all over the news, a grim reminder of the holiday season’s dark side. But these pictures, even in the quick glance he allotted them, they told an entirely different tale. They showed a badly beaten Lightfoot tied to a chair in what looked like a basement. A gun was being held to his head. Jason didn’t recognize the gunman, who had been only partially captured by the camera, but he sure as hell recognized one of the men in the background: Nicco Marino. Another shot showed Lightfoot’s eyes closed and his brains exploding out through the back of his head: it clearly had been taken just as the gunman had pulled the trigger. A third was of Lightfoot after the deed had been done: slumped in the chair, a bullet hole—no, make that two bullet holes—in his forehead.

  Looked like someone on the scene with a cell phone had been busy taking pictures.

  “That’s Edward Lightfoot,” he said before he thought.

  “They killed him.” The cop sounded like she was barely breathing.

  “Marino and his goons do that. So what else is new? Start walking.”

  Her head slewed around and she glared at him. “That’s a lie!”

  Jason recovered his sense of what was important fast. “Don’t care. I said start walking. Get in the safe.”

  “Nicco Marino doesn’t murder people.”

  “Oh, yeah? Looks like murder to me.” When she still didn’t move, he pushed her toward the safe. “Go.”

  “If that’s true—” She took a quick breath and turned those big brown eyes on him. “Do you have any idea what you’ve stumbled into here?” Her shaken-sounding question was fierce.

  “Shut up and keep moving.” The truth was, he didn’t want to think about it. He shoved her past the damning pictures even as they lodged themselves indelibly in his brain. An uneasy feeling already churned in his gut. Jesus H. Christ. Marino was involved in the death of Edward Lightfoot? This was knowledge he didn’t want to have. Dangerous knowledge. The kind of knowledge that got people killed.

  And the fact that he possibly had that knowledge had been recorded for posterity by that thrice-damned security camera, and sooner or later somebody was going to find the footage.

  Shit.

  “Good to go,” Jelly announced to the snap of a suitcase lock. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Thud. Crash.

  The sounds came from about half a house away—which, considering the size of the house, was fortunately a fairly good distance. Freezing on the threshold of the safe, his hand tightening on the cop’s arm, Jason felt his pulse quicken. The goons in the guardhouse not only weren’t missing in action but they had also arrived faster than he’d expected. Luckily, they didn’t have the smarts to try to sneak up on them. Instead they had obviously burst in through the front door and were charging this way at full throttle.

  Time had officially run out.

  “Grab that other suitcase,” Jason ordered Jelly. The distant, muffled shouts and the pounding of approaching feet had Jelly hauling the one he’d just filled toward the door. Jelly shot Jason a look. Jason said, “Do it. Go.”

  With the sound of pursuit closing in, Jelly wasn’t arguing. Detouring to snatch up the second case, bearing up manfully under what was pretty much his own weight, Jelly sprinted away.

  “You don’t want to shoot her, knock her out,” Jelly threw over his shoulder as he ran out the door. “Just do it and come on.”

  Then he was gone.

  “Hand me my bag and get that one. Quick.” All too aware that the difference between escape and capture was now down to about a minute or less, Jason gave the cop a meant-to-be-intimidating, don’t-mess-with-me look. She glared balefully back. He’d swung her around, had her by the arm with her gun pointed at her, and still she didn’t appear particularly impressed. But to his surprise she didn’t give him grief, instead picking up first his tool bag, which she thrust at him, and then the suitcase. Clearly she found it heavy: her mouth tightened, and the muscles in her arm and shoulder tensed. But he couldn’t carry it and take her with him, too, and suddenly taking her with him seemed the right thing to do. A hostage in the hand was worth two in the safe, and all that. And he was starting to have the feeling that they might need a hostage.

  Besides, she’d seen those pictures, too.

  “Move. Down the hall and to the left. Fast.”

  With his tool bag now slung over his shoulder, he hauled her, she hauled the suitcase, and in an awkward tandem run they followed Jelly along the preplanned escape route.

>   “You call the cops?” The shout came from one of their pursuers. They weren’t in sight yet—Marino’s faux Greek Revival mansion was huge —but they were close enough now that Jason could understand the words they were yelling at each other. If he hadn’t gone into ice-cold mode, as he naturally did when situations got hairy, such proximity would have gotten his nerves jumping.

  “Hell, no! No cops! Don’t you know nothing?”

  “Yeah, but … Mick’s a cop.”

  “Mick don’t count. I called Iacono, okay?”

  “Faster.” Jason’s fingers tightened around her arm. He didn’t know who Mick or Iacono were, but then, he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to know anything at all. All he wanted was to get out of there with his money. Slip-sliding a little on the marble, they turned a corner, heading toward the exit. A cold rush of air told him that Jelly had gotten there already, had made it outside and left the door open for him.

  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?

  Chapter

  4

  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.