Sleepwalker (12 page)

His perspicacity briefly took her aback. Well, there wasn’t any point in denying it, but she didn’t have to be nice about it. “Worked that out all by yourself, did you?”

“It took me a while, but yeah.”

“Anybody ever tell you not to look a gift horse in the mouth? If I hadn’t helped you, you’d be dead by now.”

“I’m not saying I don’t appreciate it. I’m just saying I know you’ve got a problem yourself.”

“If I’ve got a problem, it’s because you decided to break in and steal money that doesn’t belong to you.”

“The house was supposed to be empty.”

“Oh, what, you wouldn’t have done it if you’d known I was there?”

“Nope. You screwed up the whole plan—which was very carefully worked out in advance, by the way. If you hadn’t popped up we would have been long gone by now, a million and a half dollars richer, and nobody would have even known Marino had been robbed before January tenth at the soonest.”

The date was when the family was due to return from vacation. He was well informed.

“Well, let me apologize right now for screwing up your robbery.”

“I realize it was an accident,” he said in the tone of one making a generous concession. “I’m not holding it against you.”

Mick shot him a fulminating glance. Before she could say anything more, her attention was caught by a pencil-eraser-size circle of white sweeping across the surface of the water maybe a mile to the north.

As she stared at it, her mouth went dry.

“Uh-oh.”

“What?” He followed her gaze, then went silent, too, tipping his head back just as she was doing as they both traced the circle up to its source. “Shit. That’s a searchlight.”

“They’ve got a helicopter looking for us.” Mick’s stomach knotted. The aircraft would have been difficult to see if she hadn’t been alerted by the beam of light moving over the water. But now that she knew it was there, she could make out the helicopter’s tadpole-like shape as a denser patch of darkness against the vast ceiling of the night sky. The faintest of thumpety-thump noises that she could just hear over the steady thrum of the engine and the sloshing of the lake—that would be the chopper’s rotors.

“Marino works fast,” he said.

“Could be anybody’s. Just because it’s out here doesn’t mean it’s looking for us.”

“Its lights aren’t on. That lets out just about everybody with a legitimate purpose for searching the lake.”

They both watched the searchlight continue its slow sweep of the water.

“If it finds us, we’re sitting ducks out here,” Mick said. Her chest felt tight. Then her eyes widened. “Ohmigod. Look at that.”

She pointed aft, where two pinhead-size lights and one slightly bigger one bobbed and weaved in a kind of loose zigzag pattern as they raced across the water. The lights were far away, but given the direction
they were coming from, Mick had little doubt about who and what they were.

“They got the Jet Skis going,” he said, echoing her thoughts.

“And the runabout. That bigger light’s the runabout.” Her voice sounded hollow. She could feel her pulse kicking in hard. If the searchers got close enough, the
Playtime
’s white hull would give them away even without the spotlight or the headlights hitting them directly. And from the look of it, one of the Jet Skis was skimming close to the shoreline, swooping in and out while checking out all the little coves and inlets. That torpedoed her first, instinctive plan: get in close to shore, kill the engine, stay on the boat, let darkness hide them.

“I was afraid there would be a second set of keys.” He sounded rueful.

Mick turned away from the lights chasing them and gunned the throttles. The engine responded with a roar, but she figured that, given the noise the helicopter, runabout and Jet Skis were themselves making, their operators wouldn’t be able to hear it over their own noise.

“You planning on trying to outrun them? Problem with that is if we’re unlucky and one of them spots us, we’re stuck out here in the middle of the lake. We’ve got nowhere to go. And as for firepower, we’ve got two pistols, with one clip each. I’m betting they’ve got us outgunned.”

“We’re going ashore,” Mick answered over her shoulder, absorbing the fact that he apparently had his own gun on him, then tucking it away for future reference. “I just need to find a good spot. We couldn’t outrun them even if we wanted to: the Jet Skis are way faster than the
Playtime
. So’s the runabout.” She held out her hand. “Give me your phone.”

“What? Why?”

“The only sane thing to do now is call my captain and get some squad cars on the way. That way, we’ve got protection.”

He snorted. “You want me to give you my phone so you can call the cops? Baby, let me give you the short answer: not happening.”

“If Uncle Nicco’s guys catch us, they’ll kill you for sure. You turn yourself in to my unit and the worst you’re looking at is getting arrested and losing the money you stole. Get a good lawyer. Fight the charges. Maybe you’ll get off. Maybe you won’t. But you’ll be alive.”

“I don’t want to get arrested. I sure as hell don’t want to lose my money. And I hate lawyers.” He started rummaging through the clothes that were left on the mate’s seat. “We’re going ashore, but we’re not calling the cops. Take us in.”

“We can’t just put in anywhere. We need a dock, unless you want to swim the last ten yards or so in. Anyway, as soon as they spot the boat they’ll know where to start looking, and with us on foot I don’t see us getting away. Of course, if you want to call your partner to pick us up …”

She trailed off hopefully.

“They’re too far away to do us any good.”

They.
She processed his confirmation that there was more than one person in the van even as she realized that the helicopter’s search pattern was slowly, methodically and relentlessly bringing it closer.

“Give me the damn phone.” Having done a quick calculation about who best to call for help—Nate, both because of their breakup and because he was presumably still in their hotel room on Mackinac Island, where’d they’d planned to spend a romantic New Year’s together, was definitely out; her old patrol partner, Bob Rush, was on vacation in Disney World with his wife and kids; her retired-cop father was also in Florida, where he had spent Christmas with his third wife, not to return until January 2; her sister, Jenny, schoolteacher single mom to two daughters, she wouldn’t involve in something like this for the world—she came to a decision: Vicky Harris, a friend and fellow cop now with Vice who’d
gone through the academy at the same time she had. At least, Vicky would get the first call. Given that it was New Year’s Day, getting anyone to answer might be a problem. Well, she’d just keep calling people until someone did.

“We’ve had this conversation,” he said.

“We’ve got to get off this boat, and we sure as hell can’t walk back to the city. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s freezing. And snowing.” It was true: more crystalline flakes were starting to sift from the sky. She held out her hand imperatively for his phone. “I’ll call a friend to pick us up, okay? Not the police, I swear.” That was only a tiny lie. But the thing was, most of her friends were police. “We need a way out of here, and I don’t think hitchhiking’s going to be an option.”

“Know what the problem with that is? I don’t trust you.”

“I saved your ass back at the house.”

“Yes, and now you want to lock it up.”

That was so true that Mick missed a beat before replying. “
Now
all I want is a ride back to the city.”

“Just put us in somewhere where we can get off this damn boat. Then we can talk about what calls we are or are not going to make.”

“That’s stupid. That wastes time. Even if I call right now, it’s going to take somebody half an hour or more to get close enough to where we can walk to meet them. This isn’t exactly right off the freeway.”

“Stupid would be if I just handed over the phone and let you call anybody you like. Which would probably be the cops.” Pulling out his phone, he flipped it open, then frowned.

“So you call somebody,” she said.

“Bad news, cupcake. There’s no signal.”

Mick slewed around to look at him. “What?”

He held up his phone so she could clearly see the glowing message: signal is currently out of range.

She glared at him. “Now look what you’ve done!”

“What I’ve done? You’re the one who headed out into the middle of nowhere.”

“The alternative was to head for town where anybody standing on shore could track us. And get a welcoming party together for when we docked. And march you off and shoot you dead.”

“You think Marino is just going to let
you
waltz off into the sunset? Obviously you don’t, or you wouldn’t be helping me.”

“You let me worry about me.”

He snorted. “You want to argue, or you want to put the boat in? That spotlight’s getting closer with every sweep.”

“Damn it.” Because what he said was true, Mick abandoned the argument in favor of hunting for the best place to dock. Given the darkness, she had to get in as close to shore as she dared and follow the shoreline. It was the only way to see any possible dock or boat ramp or, if it came to it, place to beach the boat. Given the danger of debris, she had to throttle way down, which wasn’t good. Because they were closer to shore, the helicopter was farther away, but the Jet Ski following the shoreline behind them was definitely getting closer with every passing second. Mick’s heart thudded as she realized that if they didn’t move fast, they would be overtaken.

“There’s no dock anywhere along here.” The panic she was trying not to feel put an edge on her voice. “I’m going to have to beach us.”

“So do it.”

Mick grimaced. “There are two problems with that: first, the hull’s too deep to let us get all the way in, which means we’re going to have to wade whatever distance is left, and the water’s cold enough to be dangerous. Second, as soon as they find the boat, they’ll know where we went ashore. Since we’ll be on foot and there’s snow, we won’t be hard to find. They can just follow our footprints.”

“Can you back this thing in somewhere?”

“Yes, but—”

She broke off as he started wrestling a child-size, bright red hooded sweatshirt over the back of her seat. Leaning forward in automatic accommodation, she frowned at him.

“What are you doing?”

“Making a fake you. What we’re going to do is get off the boat, then wedge the controls so that the boat goes on without us. When the helicopter or the thugs on the Jet Skis spot it, which they will, they’re going to think someone’s on board, driving the boat. By the time they catch up, manage to board and figure out we’re long gone, they won’t have any idea where we went.”

Mick thought that over, then looked at him with dawning respect. “That’s actually kind of brilliant.”

“Thank you.” He was stuffing bathing suits inside the hood in an attempt to make it stand up.

“Of course, it doesn’t address the problem of what we’re going to do once we get off the boat and we’re stranded out in the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold.”

“We wing it.”

“Great. Just what I wanted to hear. That’s the same kind of well-thought-out planning that got us out here on this boat in the first place.”

“If you can think of something better, I’m all ears.” Holding the fully stuffed hood up by the peak of its crown, he let go. The thing flopped limply backward. “Hmm.” He frowned, then looked at Mick, who, since she couldn’t think of a better plan, stayed silent. “Just hurry up and find a place to take us in, would you? I don’t like our chances in a shoot-out.”

Then he headed below. Since she didn’t like their chances in a shoot-out, either, Mick racked her memory and visualized the shore simultaneously, trying to come up with the best place to get off the boat.

If she remembered correctly, there was a rocky beach just up ahead that was known as Muddy Flats. She and Angela and a group of friends had stopped there a few times when they’d had the boat out, most memorably the summer before they’d turned eighteen. The guys had fished and shown off for the girls, who had flirted with the guys and sunbathed. But the important part was that somewhere in the vicinity of Muddy Flats was a store—more of a shack, really—that sold fishing tackle and supplies, along with a gravel road that led to it. Of course, the business was entirely seasonal, and since it was the dead of winter, to say nothing of it being around 3:00 a.m. on New Year’s Day, the chances of finding it open were as close to zero as it was possible to get. Still, they could break in. There should be a phone with a landline. Even if there wasn’t a landline, or it was disconnected, they would at least have shelter.
If
the store still existed, and if she could find it.

Both big ifs.

Where was Muddy Flats? She knew it was nearby, but finding it in the dark and with snow covering all the markers was proving to be a nightmare. The only chance she had was to locate the big rock that she and Angela and the other girls had lain on while the guys had done their thing on the beach. The rock had been the size of a small car, maybe five feet high with a flat top. It had been on the south edge of the beach. Tonight it would be covered with snow. …

“We’ve got to put in, now.” His terse remark as he emerged from the cabin sent Mick’s blood pressure skyrocketing. She instantly left off scanning the shoreline to check out the positions of their pursuers. The helicopter, with its trailing Jet Ski and runabout, was definitely closer, while the Jet Ski following the coast was just a few coves back, and closing fast. As a group, they formed a rough triangle that was going to be difficult to evade.

“I’m looking for—,” Mick broke off as she spotted it. “That rock.”
Relief cleared the frown from her face as she pointed. “I know where we are.”

“Good.” He was all business. “Back us in. Let’s do this. Uh, can you stand up and drive? That would make this easier.”

“This,” obviously, was his fake driver construction. Sliding off the seat, Mick stuck her feet in the too-big boots to protect them from the cold deck even as she manipulated the controls. At the same time, she watched out of the corner of her eye as he stuffed the hoodie until it did, indeed, look almost human, if the human had a wobbly neck that kept letting the head pitch backward in a way that was impossible in nature. Turning the boat around while distracted by his efforts and the progress of their pursuers wasn’t all that easy, but she managed it, easing back as close to the beach as she could before the propellers started nudging up against something solid, which she presumed was land. That still left them about ten feet short of solid ground, but there was no doing anything about it. Push any further, and the
Playtime
would be stuck. Positioning the throttles with just enough power to hold them in place, she looked around to discover the thief at the stern, leaning over the water doing who-knew-what.