Sleepwalker

by Karen Robards

  “You know I can’t shoot, right?” she yelled, peeping over the dashboard just long enough to discover that the car was aimed straight for Iacono and Rossi and closing like a heat-seeking missile. “Remember the handcuffs?”

  “I remember.” Seen in profile, his face was a study in grim intent. Clearly he meant to run Iacono and Rossi down. Both were on their feet, holding their ground, weapons up, firing away as the cruiser torpedoed toward them.

  “You have a key that unlocks them?”

  “Nope.”

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

  The windshield exploded. Pellets of safety glass peppered them like shrapnel. Mick yelped and ducked.

  “Then I’m out. So grab the damn gun and shoot the fuck back,” she shouted as Jason sent the car hurtling toward Iacono and Rossi like it was the only weapon they had.

  “Can’t.”

  At the last possible second, Rossi and Iacono leaped out of the way.

  “Why not?” Mick screamed, then got thrown from the seat as Jason slammed on the brakes. Shaken from smacking into the dashboard and then sliding partway down into the footwell, Mick was blinking to reorient herself when she heard the driver’s door open.

  As her gaze slewed sideways toward the sound, her reaction was pure, unadulterated fear.

  Rossi? Iacono? Some other hideous threat? were the possibilities that reeled through her mind.

  She was shocked to see the suitcase crash onto the seat between her and Jason. For a moment, as it tipped onto its side and he slammed the door, reversed, and hit the gas like he meant to shove his foot through the floor, she was too dumbfounded to say anything.

  “Are you kidding me?” she yelled at him a split second later, having recovered the power of speech. She chose to stay down where she had fallen as the car rocketed backward and bullets smacked into it. “You stopped for that damn suitcase?”

  Head down as low as he could get it and still drive, looking back over his shoulder as he reversed at rocket speed, Jason shot her a narrow-eyed glance. His lips were thin and his jaw was tight. With his black hair ruffled, a day’s worth of scruff darkening his chin, and tired lines bracketing his eyes and mouth, he looked tough and disreputable and so handsome he made her toes curl.

  Too bad the man was an insane, money-loving criminal.

  “Yep.”

  “I don’t believe you just did that!”

  “Hey, be glad I stopped for you first.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Remember arresting me? Remember handcuffing me? Baby, it would have served you right if I’d left you back there.”

  “I’m a cop. You’re a thief. Arresting you is my job. Besides, it was for your own good.”

  “What?”

  But having dared to pop her head up high enough to look where they were going, Mick was instantly distracted by another, more urgent, concern.

  “Door’s closed,” she shrieked the warning. They were careering toward it, trunk first, traveling so fast she could practically smell the smoke coming off the tires. A glance his way reassured her that he was still looking over his shoulder, definitely watching where they were headed, so how he’d missed that tiny detail she couldn’t even begin to imagine. Gaze swiveling forward, she saw that Iacono and Rossi were chasing them, shooting as they ran through the haze of gunsmoke.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

  “Stay down!” Jason yelled.

  The warning was unnecessary: she had already ducked. By now her ears rang so with the sound of gunfire that she couldn’t separate the current shots from the echoes. The whole place sounded—and looked, and smelled—like a war zone. Sneaking another peek at the reinforced steel door, Mick felt her stomach flip. What was getting ready to happen was a horrendous, life-threatening crash.

  “Turn! Stop! We can’t …”

  “Hang tight,” he yelled, stomping the gas to the floor.

  “No!”

  But he didn’t even slow down. Mick’s heart gave a great leap. He was going to try to smash through.

  Realizing there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop him, Mick screamed, “You lunatic, the door’s probably reinforced steel,” and ducked and closed her eyes and braced herself as well as she could and waited to die.

  Boom!

  With a sound like a bomb going off, the cruiser hit. The jolt sent Mick flying forward. Fortunately she was already in the footwell, so she didn’t have far to fly. Metal screamed, debris flew, and the suitcase toppled down on top of her.

  “Ow!”

  “We made it!” Jason exulted. Mick was just shouldering the suitcase off herself and emerging from the footwell like a hatching baby bird cautiously poking its head through its shell when he reversed directions, slamming the transmission into drive. The cruiser shot forward. She fell against the seat. This time the suitcase slid down beside her with a thud that told her it would have hurt if it had hit her. Shoving it out of the way again, she craned upward for another terrified bit of recon. She instantly saw two things: an enormous hole where they’d burst through the wall beside the door rather than crashing through the door itself, and Iacono, taking a last shot at them, framed in it.

  “Duck,” she screamed, following her own advice as the bullet smacked into the side of the car.

  Jason floored it.

  At least, she thought with a blast of relief as the cruiser peeled rubber down the street, they’d survived.

  Then, remembering that they would have Uncle Nicco’s entire security apparatus after them as soon as Iacono and Rossi reported what had happened, she amended that to survived temporarily.

  “Go, go, go!” she cried, eyes riveted on Iacono, who had run back inside the warehouse, until she could no longer see him. Her greatest fear was that at any second the pickup or SUV would come bursting out after them and the chase would be on.

  “No shit, Sherlock.” The cruiser practically tilted on two tires as he rounded a corner. The suitcase fell over on her again.

  “Where to?” She gasped out the ten-million-dollar question. To stay safe from Uncle Nicco, she feared the only right answer was far, far away. Like China.

  “Expressway, 94 west,” he replied. “I know where the on-ramp is. I saw the sign on the way in.”

  Seeing as how the expressway was undoubtedly the quickest way to put a lot of miles between themselves and the warehouse fast, and heading west toward the city would probably offer more places to hide than heading east toward not so much, Mick had no problem with that.

  “Okay, good call,” she agreed, grabbing onto the tatters of her composure and trying for Zen-like calm as she fell against the door when he whipped around another corner. The suitcase whacked into her side. Giving it an evil look as she nudged it out of her way, she climbed back up on the seat. With the windshield and passenger window blown out, they might as well have been riding in a convertible with the top down. She braced herself against the rush of the wind, and cast a quick, anxious look back to check for pursuers. So far, so good.

  Jason reached over to swipe a thumb across her cheek. So much for Zen-like calm: at his touch, Mick jumped like she’d been goosed.

  “Just checking,” he said. “You’ve got a scratch, that’s all.”

  She realized he’d been worried about the blood on her face.

  “Splinters from the floor hit me. When you shot Rossi, he was getting ready to blow my head off, but the bullet went into the concrete instead.”

  His eyes darkened. She could tell he didn’t like what he’d just heard. But his response was a dry “You can thank me anytime.”

  “Thank you,” Mick said, meaning it.

  “You’re welcome.” Their eyes met, they hit a pothole, and the resulting jolt refocused his attention on the road.

  The area they were in was a rabbit warren of interconnecting streets. Mick tried to look in every direction at once, fully expecting the SUV or the pickup to pop up at any second. For the moment, simply running away as fast as possible was the
only thing they could do. Just as soon as she caught her breath, she would get busy coming up with a longer-term solution. Even trying to imagine what Iacono and Rossi were doing at that precise moment gave her the willies. Killing Friedman’s partner and double-tapping the rest, for starters, probably. They would take care to leave no one alive. She glanced at the police radio. It had been turned off, probably because Friedman and his partner had wanted no one listening in to what had been going on in their car. Or maybe they’d been off duty and had just been patrolling the forest at Uncle Nicco’s people’s behest. The idea of calling for help on it was tempting, but she couldn’t be sure who would respond. Police frequencies were notoriously easy to monitor, and Uncle Nicco’s crew would be pulling out all the stops to find them now. If she put a call out, all she was likely to do was alert the bad guys to where they were. Anyway, she couldn’t operate the radio: she didn’t have the use of her hands. Then she remembered something and looked at Jason.

  “Do you still have your phone? That’s a murder scene back there. We need to call it in. And maybe get ourselves some help at the same time.”

  He shot her a disgusted look. “You never give up, do you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I just saved your ass. And you’re still trying to haul me off to jail. What part of you owe me didn’t sink in?”

  “I owe you? If it wasn’t for you, I’d be thinking about going to my sister’s for brunch about now. My worst problem would be that I broke up with my boyfriend yesterday.” She glared at him. “What I’m trying to do is keep us alive. Both of us. The fact that you committed an illegal act—namely a robbery—means that if we get help from the only people who can protect us—namely the police—you’re going to get arrested. Don’t blame me. It’s your own damn fault. I arrested you because as the arresting officer I can make things easier on you. And just for the record, I’ve been saving your ass from the word go. If anybody should be grateful, it’s you. You owe me.”

  “To hell with that.”

  The cruiser hit a dip and bobbled. Mick almost got bounced off the seat.

  “Look, we don’t have time to argue.” Her voice was a little breathless as her calm started fraying around the edges. She wriggled back into position. “How about this? I give you my word I won’t arrest you again, and I won’t tell anybody that you’re the thief whose crime started this whole thing. I’ll just keep my mouth shut and maybe nobody else will figure it out. So please would you get your phone out and call the number I’m going to give you? Before we get shot?”

  “I couldn’t get my phone out if I wanted to. Friedman took it.”

  That was a blow. Mick regarded him suspiciously. “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “You can search me if you want.”

  The look she shot him was withering. Of course, handcuffed as she was, that was impossible.

  “I won’t say a word about the money, either. I’ll even help you hide it before we hook up with everybody.”

  “I like where your head is at, but I still don’t have a phone.”

  Mick gave it up. He knew as well as she did that if the police got involved he was getting arrested and the money was gone. “So how’d you get your handcuffs off? I know you didn’t use the key.”

  Because she’d had it in her pocket, and Favara had taken it.

  “Bobby pin.”

  “Bobby pin? You mean you picked the lock?”

  “That’s right.”

  For a moment Mick just regarded him in silence. As a cop she didn’t like it, but as an accomplishment it was pretty impressive, she had to admit: handcuff locks were supposed to be virtually pickproof.

  “Great. Then you can get these off me.”

  “You may have noticed I’m a little busy right now.”

  “I meant later. When we stop.”

  “I might have lost the bobby pin.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Keeping track of a bobby pin was not the most important item on my agenda at the time. I had other things to think about. Like not getting killed. And, oh yeah, saving your ass.”

  Mick’s lips firmed. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed him, but for now there was no doing anything about it. The gun had slid against her thigh during their recent gyrations, and she nudged it out of the way. Getting situated as comfortably as possible, she glanced back once more just to be sure they weren’t being followed—not yet—then looked at Jason again.

  “What did you mean back there when you said ‘can’t’?” Thinking how much safer she would have felt right now if Iacono and Rossi had been rendered unable to report in by, I don’t know, being shot, she narrowed her eyes at him.

  “What are you talking about?” Reaching the end of another run-down street, the cruiser fishtailed as he hung a right near an abandoned factory. Up ahead, the sign announcing the expressway entrance listed sadly on its pole beside a wooden utility cross supporting a lineup of droopy wires.

  “I said, ‘shoot them.’ You said, ‘can’t.’” Mick was still way more shaken up than she would have been willing to admit to anyone, and as the adrenaline rush waned, she was just starting to realize it. Otis hadn’t been her friend, exactly, but she had known him for years, and to have seen him shot right before her eyes had been horrifying. Knowing for sure that she’d been right about the pictures was unnerving. Having seen them marked her and Jason for death; it was the equivalent of having a mob contract out on both of them. Even the thought of the others who had died back there bothered her. She was a cop, yes, but she was still a long way from having grown accustomed to witnessing cold-blooded murder. Plus, on a purely physical note, her shoulder throbbed painfully, her head ached and her cheek stung. The handcuffs felt like they were cutting off the circulation to her hands, which were tingling, and her arms were starting to be really uncomfortable from being in the position the handcuffs forced them into. She was hungry, thirsty, dirty and dog tired. Her pulse and her breathing were still elevated. Her paranoia level was off the charts. Darting wary glances all around as the cruiser sped along, she tried to check every conceivable side street and parking area and garage for possible pursuit vehicles coming at them from some unlikely angle. But the entire area appeared deserted, which seemed strange to her until she remembered that this was New Year’s Day.

  “I was out of ammo. By the time I punched Friedman in the face and took his gun off him, he was down to one bullet. I plowed it into your friend back there when you yelled. After that, nothing to do but improvise.”

  When Mick thought of Rossi standing over her ready to fire and Jason having just one bullet with which to stop him, and when she pictured their run around the end of the cruiser while bullets whistled around them, and when she remembered their vehicular assault on Iacono and Rossi, her heart stuttered.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Could have gone either way,” Jason agreed. The cruiser zoomed up the ramp onto the expressway, which Mick saw was practically devoid of traffic. Only a few cars and maybe half a dozen big rigs lumbered along the winter-ravaged pavement. Crumbling in places, marred by potholes that the city lacked the money to repair, it made for a bumpy ride.

  “Let me get this straight: we have one gun, no bullets, which means that at this point, for all intents and purposes, neither one of us is armed,” she said.

  “You got it.”

  Mick thought of the pursuit that was surely being organized at that very instant and felt her stomach fall. “We need guns. We need bullets. This is bad.”

  “I’m open to suggestions. The friendly neighborhood gun store option is probably out, though. Everything’s closed.”

  He could have been talking about the entire city, Mick thought as she cast another uneasy glance around. By now dawn had ripened into full daylight, which in terms of brightness didn’t mean a whole lot. A gray, overcast sky hung low over everything as far as the eye could see. The sun was behind there somewhere. Mick knew this because earlier she had watched it
turn the eastern horizon orange and gold. But now it was nowhere to be seen. The deep pile of graphite-colored clouds that threatened more snow completely obscured it. The industrial areas that still stretched out on either side of the highway looked dirty and dreary, crushed by years of blight. In the distance, the city’s skyscrapers were superimposed over the dark gleam of the water stretching out behind it. Closer at hand, the expressway was lined by mounds of gray slush. In fact, gray was the predominant color everywhere she looked: even the previous night’s snowfall, so pristine hours earlier, had already turned dingy. It looked, and was, miserably cold outside. With the wind rushing in, the interior of the car was almost as bad. Mick was glad of the heat blasting through the vents for the modicum of comfort it provided.

  “I’ve got a spare gun in my apartment,” she said, already knowing that was not the solution. “And a lot of ammunition.”

  “Your apartment’s not happening. First place they’ll look.”

  The scarcity of other vehicles on the expressway bothered her. If someone came looking for them—and someone would come looking for them, probably very soon—they would be way too easy to find. A helicopter, for instance, would spot them in a heartbeat. At the thought, Mick felt her pulse quicken even as she nervously cast her eyes skyward.

  “Remember that helicopter? Last night?” To her own ears her voice sounded hollow.

  “Oh, yeah.” From his tone that possibility had already occurred to him.

  Mick had another terrible thought. “We’re in a police car that probably looks like it got hit by a train. No way is a helicopter going to miss us. No way is anybody looking for us going to miss us. There’s not even any traffic for us to hide in. We’re going to get caught.”

  “There goes that optimistic streak of yours again.”

  All hopes and wishes to the contrary, the truth was they weren’t going to be able to survive for long out here on their own. Unless something changed fast, they would be recaptured, and this time they would die. Terror tended to clarify things, Mick discovered. She was suddenly certain of what they needed to do. She was also certain that Jason was going to give her trouble over it.