Sleepwalker

by Karen Robards

  Tina wound up on such a righteous note that Mick had to smile.

  “I’m not sure everybody would agree with that, but I see your point,” Mick said. “So how did you three end up here? On Grand Cayman?”

  “We came for the financial system. Cash is a problem a lot of places, you know, banks report it, everybody reports it, but not here, especially not if you’re a resident, which we are now. And if you have legitimate businesses, you can put your money in the bank and go about your business and nobody thinks a thing about it.” Iggy raised his head right then and let out a harsh, guttural hiss. Mick refocused on him in a hurry.

  “Oh, he just wants more apple.” Tina apparently had no trouble interpreting Mick’s expression for the alarm it was, and her tone was reassuring. Scooping up what looked like the leftover makings of her fruit salad from the cutting board on the counter, she dumped more apple chunks in his dish. “Where was I?” she asked, straightening. “Oh, yeah, Grand Cayman. We came for the banks, but we stayed because Jason fell in love with the place.”

  “It is beautiful,” Mick said, once again trying not to watch Iggy and kind of/sort of succeeding.

  Tina eyed her.

  “You do see that if Jason wasn’t a real stand-up guy he wouldn’t have gotten fired and none of us would be where we are, don’t you? I mean, he could have just let Zenner be killed. He could have left Jelly hanging in the wind. Those were his orders. But he went in for Zenner, and he didn’t abandon Jelly. In my book, he’s a hero. Me and Jelly, we’d do anything for him.”

  Mick wasn’t sure she’d go quite as far as Tina in calling Jason a hero, but she no longer totally condemned him for what he did, either. Stealing was a crime, and he was a thief who would be charged with multiple felonies if he was ever arrested, but stealing dirty money from criminals made it different. Made it better. Didn’t it? God, she had to stop thinking like a cop, at least where Jason—and Jelly and Tina—were concerned.

  “Mick?” Tina looked worried, and Mick realized she’d been silent a little too long.

  “I really admire the fact that Jason was loyal to the people who depended on him,” Mick said, and she realized even as she said it that it was true. If there was good and bad in the story she had heard, that at least deserved respect.

  Tina took that as an endorsement of her point of view and nodded. Looking relieved, she glanced down at Mick’s plate, where half the sandwich and a good portion of the fruit salad was still uneaten, mostly because Mick had been so enthralled that she’d forgotten all about it.

  “You know, if you don’t want that, it’s okay.”

  “Oh, no, the food is wonderful! It’s just that I was so interested I forgot to eat.” Mick smiled at Tina and picked up her sandwich again. “Thank you for telling me that. I really appreciate it.”

  “If you’re going to be with Jason, you should know what kind of guy he is. He really deserves some—”

  The back door opened without warning, and Jelly walked in. He was wearing plaid shorts and a red polo shirt with a baseball cap. Clearly he and Tina were accustomed to treating Jason’s house as their own, and he probably did the same with theirs. Here on the island, he made Mick think of a banty rooster: small, with bright plumage, and full of basically harmless bluster. When she had first encountered him in Uncle Nicco’s house, he had seemed like bad news all the way through.

  His brows snapped together the moment he saw her. He grunted a greeting.

  Mick smiled at him and gave him a little wave.

  Okay, so they weren’t exactly friends yet.

  “Back so soon?” Tina asked as he approached her while skirting Iggy, who, having finished his snack, trudged away.

  “I only played nine holes today.” He kissed Tina on the cheek, picked up a chunk of her apple salad and popped it in his mouth, then looked at Mick semi-distrustfully. “I would have gone home, but I saw your car out front. You ladies been chatting?”

  “Of course we have,” Tina replied with a twinkle.

  “Thought so.” Jelly sounded gloomy.

  “I’ll just go get dressed.” Mick slid off the barstool. She would have picked up her plate and carried it around to the dishwasher, except Tina forestalled her by taking it from her.

  “I’ve got it.” Tina smiled at her.

  “Thanks for lunch,” Mick told her, smiling back, a very different smile from the one she’d given Jelly. Tina had become a friend.

  “Speaking of lunch …,” Jelly said.

  “You’ll get some, don’t worry. Just give me a minute here, then we can go home.” Tina turned away to clean up the dishes, and Mick missed the rest of the conversation as she returned to the bedroom she’d originally meant to use. It was an almost identical twin of Jason’s, with a big bed dressed in a white comforter, a pair of chairs in front of the wall of windows, and a flat-screen TV affixed to the wall. A quick glance around reassured her that Iggy was nowhere in sight. Which was good, because the big lizard still made her nervous, and she had something she had to do.

  Carefully closing the door behind her, Mick crossed to one of the chairs where, before taking a shower the previous night, she had laid out what she’d planned to wear today, chosen from the items Tina had lent her—a lemon yellow caftan, with a pair of bicycle shorts in lieu of panties, which she didn’t have, beneath.

  But before she started to get dressed, she reached for the sweatpants she’d worn down from Detroit. They were folded on the chair beside the caftan.

  As she picked them up to thrust her hand down in the pocket, her heart started to beat faster. She had done what she’d felt she’d had to do, but she did not feel good about it. And that was the understatement of the year.

  Her hand closed over the hard plastic case. Her stomach knotted in silent protest. Nevertheless, she pulled the object out.

  It was a disposable cell phone. She had picked it up at the little convenience store inside the airport where the plane had refueled, and she’d had the clerk charge it to Jason’s credit card along with the gas. She knew how disposable cell phones worked: they were the bane of law enforcement. They could not be traced.

  Then she had gone to the ladies’ room and made a call. To Stan Curci, her captain and immediate supervisor, to tell him the truth about everything that had happened. At the time, it had seemed like the only thing to do. She had not—had not— been able to just run away. She had not been able to just turn her back on the murders of two cops, dirty though they might have been, or the murders of the Lightfoots, either. Curci had been horrified. Sympathetic. Angry. He’d asked her to meet him, to come into the office, to let him put her under protection. She’d said she was in hiding out of town, although she’d refused to say where. He’d told her to come back, that he would make sure she was safe while they launched an investigation. Knowing Jason had been outside waiting for her, knowing that whatever she’d done he’d needed to get away and stay away, she’d told Curci she hadn’t been able to talk anymore, and that she would call him back at precisely 2:00 p.m. the next day.

  That was today. In five minutes it would be 2:00 p.m. Detroit time.

  Mick was just wondering about the best, safest place to have a very private phone conversation—the bathroom? walking through the grounds outside?—when she heard the unmistakable sounds of Tina and Jelly leaving. Hallelujah! That meant she was alone in Jason’s house.

  She didn’t have to worry about her call being overheard. She only had to worry about whether or not to make it at all.

  Mick looked down at the cheap plastic phone clutched in her hand. Her heart pounded as if she had been running for miles. In that moment, she knew with absolute crystal clarity that she had a choice: she could hide the phone away, forget she’d ever had it, comfort herself with the fact that she had done her duty by calling Curci in the first place. She could stay here in this tropical paradise with a man who rocked her world and make a whole new life.

  Or she could call Curci as she’d promised, assist with the i
nvestigation, help catch the bad guys.

  The only constant in both scenarios was that whatever happened, she would keep Jason—and Tina and Jelly—absolutely out of it. Except for Uncle Nicco and his crew, who were going down now that the truth was in the process of coming out, nobody cared about the theft they had committed. They could go on with their lives.

  And if anybody had told her as recently as New Year’s Eve that she would ever do her best to make sure three thieves could continue with their lives of crime unimpeded, she would have laughed in his face.

  A glance at the clock told her that she had about a minute and a half left to make up her mind.

  Watching the seconds tick down, holding the phone so tightly that it hurt her fingers while her palms started to sweat and her throat went dry, Mick finally faced the fact that, for her, there was no decision to make: she was a cop.

  Sitting down on the edge of the bed, feeling cold all over, knowing that this was one of those moments in life that could never be taken back, she turned on the phone and punched in Curci’s cell phone number.

  “Yeah,” he answered on the first ring.

  “It’s me,” she said, relieved to hear that she was sounding like herself, like the consummate professional she had always been.

  “Mick.” The male voice took on an ugly undertone, and Mick’s heart gave a leap. It absolutely wasn’t Curci’s. Before she could recover from the shock enough to even try to identify it, he said, “There’s somebody here who wants to talk to you.”

  There was a scrabbling sound, as if the phone was being handed over.

  Then a woman spoke into the phone. She sounded shaken, scared. “Mick? They grabbed us out of our house. The girls and I. They say they’re going to kill us if you don’t do what they want. Mick?”

  A thrill of absolute horror ran down Mick’s spine.

  She knew that voice as well as she knew her own.

  “Jenny?” she responded.

  Chapter

  27

  Jason heard her voice first, of course. From that moment, before he’d ever opened the door and walked into the bedroom, he had known something was up.

  Jelly and Tina had met him outside when he’d pulled up and, despite the fact that they’d just left, had followed him back into the house. Having just returned from George Town, where he’d picked up a few things for Mick in addition to taking care of his banking errand and checking in at Tradewinds, he’d been about as cheerful when he’d walked in his own back door as he’d ever remembered being in his life. Last night had been—well, last night. He hadn’t been about to get all sentimental about it, but it had been special. Just like Mick was special.

  When he’d carried her up from the beach, she’d been dead asleep. When he’d left this morning, she’d still been dead asleep. Considering how they had spent the night, that hadn’t been such a surprise. But he’d been looking forward to seeing her wide awake.

  She wouldn’t blush, he’d been willing to bet, because Mick was not the blushing type. She wouldn’t pretend nothing had happened between them, either, because Mick was nothing if not direct. But what she would do—well, he’d been interested to find out.

  Which had probably been why, as Jelly had told him with disgust, he’d been grinning like a fool when he’d started to shoo Jelly and Tina back out of his house.

  That’s when he’d heard Mick’s voice, just faintly. She was in the second bedroom, obviously talking to someone. Jelly and Tina had heard her, too, and they had all exchanged puzzled glances. Iggy had been sunning himself on the lanai, the three of them had been right there together, and there shouldn’t have been anyone else in the house.

  So who had Mick been talking to?

  Jason had turned and walked toward the spare bedroom. He hadn’t even been aware of Jelly and Tina behind him until he’d heard Jelly mutter, “I got a bad feeling about this,” and Tina answer, “Hush!”

  He’d just been registering that Mick had sounded upset when he’d turned the knob and walked in to find her sitting on the side of the bed. She had his bathrobe tied tightly around her waist, and her hair cascaded over one shoulder in a glorious spill of color. No makeup at all, pale as death, and still she looked so beautiful she made him catch his breath.

  She was talking on a disposable cell phone. Even as he saw it and realized what it was and what she must have done, even as her eyes met his and he saw that they were wide with fear and that the wide, soft mouth he had kissed stupid last night was shaking, he knew he’d been played. And he knew it didn’t matter, not right now, because for Mick to look like that, something was going down that was way worse than her being caught out in the act of stabbing him in the back.

  “I’ll be there.” It was her cop voice, cool and hard. Then something made the tenor of it change, made her say with fierce anger, “You sick son of a bitch, don’t you dare hurt them. They don’t know anything about this. Lauren and Kate are just—”

  But instead of finishing, she broke off, pulled the phone away from her ear and looked down at it with stark fear. He got the impression that whoever was on the other end had hung up before she’d been able to finish talking.

  “What the hell?” He was angry about the phone. Nervous about who she had called with it. But most of all, he was alarmed at the stricken look on her face as her eyes met his. Two strides, and he loomed over her. She didn’t resist as he took the phone from her hand. It was cheap plastic, a disposable. He knew without her having to say anything: she’d done what she’d wanted to do from the beginning and called the damn cops.

  “I’ve got to go home,” she said. Her voice was thin, strained. She had a deer-in-the-headlights look about her that wasn’t like Mick at all. “Right now.”

  “Who’d she call?” Behind him, Jelly sounded as furious as Jason himself might have been if it hadn’t been for Mick’s obvious distress. Making an impatient shut-up gesture at his friend, who, with Tina at his side, stood just a few feet away looking at Mick with murder in his eyes, Jason crouched in front of Mick.

  “So talk to me,” he said, his eyes intent on her face. Had she betrayed them? The phone was damning evidence that she had, but he wasn’t even sure that it mattered particularly at the moment. There was more to this than that. Her expression said it all.

  She firmed her mouth, swallowed, breathed in deeply through her nose.

  “Nicco’s men have taken my sister and her two daughters hostage.” Her voice was stronger, and Jason noticed that, to Mick, Marino was no longer “Uncle” Nicco. “If I don’t show up, alone, in front of Michelangelo’s Restaurant on Wick Street at eleven p.m. tonight precisely, they’ll shoot Lauren. If I’m not there by midnight, they’ll shoot Kate. If I’m not there by one a.m., they shoot Jenny.” Her hands, which had been resting in her lap, clenched into fists. Her mouth contorted. “That son of a bitch Iacono. He was the one on the phone with Jenny. He did something to make her scream while she was right there by the phone so I could hear. And Curci. I called my captain, Stan Curci, yesterday from that airport in Georgia. I told him about the pictures, the murders, the whole story.” Jelly made an outraged sound, but Jason silenced him with a gesture again. Mick was looking at him like she was shell-shocked, spilling her secrets like she didn’t care that he could be expected to be livid about what she was telling him. “Curci’s either in on it, or they were tapping his phone and heard me. I don’t know. I don’t know who I can trust.”

  “Welcome to the club, sister,” Jelly said bitterly, while Tina said, “My Lord, Jelly, can’t you be quiet for just one minute?”

  “You know you can trust me,” Jason said. Okay, he should have been in wring-her-neck mode about now. He should have been feeling outraged, betrayed. But finding out his scorpion was still a scorpion wasn’t any real surprise, and anyway he was discovering that what he felt for her wasn’t as easily squelched as all that. At the moment, what mattered was that she needed him desperately. Setting the thrice-damned phone down on the bed, he took her
clenched hands in his and smoothed the fingers out: her skin felt cold as ice. Jason could have done without the disgusted sound Jelly made, or his audience entirely for that matter, but there was no doing anything about that. His focus was all on Mick. When he touched her, she met his eyes like she was really seeing him for the first time since he had entered the room. She gripped his hands, took a deep breath.

  “Jason,” she said. “I had to do it. I had to call Curci yesterday. I couldn’t just walk away.”

  “I know you couldn’t.” His tone was wry. “I knew you couldn’t all along. The only reason I’m even surprised is that I just didn’t think you had the means to make a call.”

  “My question is, did she tell them where we are?” Jelly was bouncing up and down on his toes with anxiety.

  “Jelly—,” Tina protested in a warning undertone.

  “No, I did not. I told them I was alone, that Jason and I split up right after we escaped from the warehouse. And I only made the one call, and I turned the phone off right afterwards, and the phone I used is disposable. There’s no possible way anybody could trace it.” Looking over Jason’s head, Mick addressed Jelly directly. Then she looked at Jason again. “I wouldn’t tell anyone about this place. You know I wouldn’t. But I couldn’t just walk away from those murders. And I have to go home.”