Sleepwalker (9 page)

Would Uncle Nicco’s men—would Uncle Nicco—believe the thief was stealing the boat, and her with it? She could only hope so. The last thing she wanted was to firmly plant herself in what they would consider the enemy camp until she had decided what to do.

She was a cop. No matter how much she might wish it wasn’t so, she had evidence that a murder had been done, and her uncle—by affection, if not blood—was involved. There was also compelling circumstantial evidence, by way of wads of cash stuffed in a trio of suitcases, of other illegal activities. What other choice did she have but to turn the evidence, and him, in?

Thus spake cold logic. But add in close family ties and years of affection and kindness, the whole tangled web of alliances that had supported and nurtured her throughout her life, and the picture became less clear. Loyalty versus duty, right versus wrong, and none of it entirely black or white. That’s where she found herself: mired in shades of gray.

If only she hadn’t found out about Nate’s cheating at this particular time. If only her New Year’s Eve had gone as planned, with an elegant dinner for two, champagne, fireworks, confetti, romance. She would have been tucked up in bed on Mackinac Island right now …

With a louse.

Well, he’d been a louse before she’d found out about it. Would delaying her discovery of the fact by twenty-four hours have upset some great cosmic plan?

Maybe she should just “forget” about the pictures. And the cash. Erase them from her mind. Let them go.

“Hey.” The thief moved up to stand behind her as she hitched herself onto the captain’s chair. Mick grunted by way of a response. The white leather seat was positioned about four feet off the ground, high enough so that the pilot could see through the windshield while sitting down. Its twin, the mate’s chair a few feet to the left, provided a similar vantage point. The leather was so cold that the usually soft seat was hard as a board when she first sat down on it; the frigidity of it seeped through her pants and the back of her thin tank. Ignoring this new source of extreme chill, she kept the
Playtime
going slow in an effort to be as quiet and inconspicuous as possible, which meant that they experienced only gentle rocking as they nosed out into the lake.

“You’ve got to be freezing.” His hands settled onto her shoulders, then slid down her bare upper arms. The heat of those hands, the size
and sheer masculinity of them, sent an unexpected thrill shooting along her nerve endings. Of course, some of her reaction might have been due to the fact that she
was
freezing, and his hands were blessedly warm. But most of it—she had to face the truth here—was a purely physical reaction to a really hot guy.

“You want to get your hands off me?” His hands were already on their way back up to her shoulders. She realized he was slowly chafing her arms in an effort to warm her. Didn’t matter. The last thing she wanted was to feel any kind of attraction to him.

“Sorry.” He lifted both hands in the air. “Didn’t realize you were untouchable.”

“Well, now you know.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“You do that.”

Hands on the wheel, guiding the boat through the darkness edging the moonlight in an effort to avoid detection, Mick couldn’t help glancing toward shore. Uncle Nicco’s estate was lit up as bright as Vegas. Every window, every outbuilding, every walkway, bush and tree now glowed brilliant white. A full-scale search was clearly underway, but as far as she could see, the stretch of snow leading from the tennis courts to the boathouse was empty. For now.

“So you want to tell me why you’re helping me escape?” he asked.

“I like you?”

He laughed. “Your name’s Mick, right?”

She was surprised he knew her name, until she remembered how many times the guys had shouted it out. He would have to have been slow on the uptake indeed not to have eventually realized that when they’d yelled “Mick” they’d been referring to her.

“Yes. And yours is …?” she asked craftily, hoping he’d assume that, because she was helping him escape, they were now friends. Just in case
his picture or fingerprints or whatever weren’t in any law enforcement database. Just in case he should manage to elude her before she could bring him in. Which she wasn’t intending to allow, but, as tonight’s adventures so far illustrated, stuff happens.

“Whatever you want it to be.”

Okay, maybe he wasn’t totally stupid. “Fine. I’ll just call you Ali.”

“Ali?”

“As in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”

“Cute.”

“Look! The boat! He’s stealing the boat!” The shout from shore was thinned by distance but still perfectly comprehensible. Glancing around, Mick saw tiny dark figures racing through the snow toward the edge of the lake.

“Shit,” the thief muttered, echoing Mick’s sentiments exactly.

“Stop him!”

“Shoot him!”

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Gunshots. The sound was unmistakable. Mick’s heart lodged in her throat.

“Get down!” she yelled. Following her own instructions, she ducked low over the wheel and grabbed at the throttles. Was the boat too far away to be hit? She didn’t know. Distances over water could be deceptive.

Pop. Pop. Thunk. Pop
.

It took Mick a second to register that the sound like a palm smacking the wooden strut near her head was actually a bullet slamming into it. The hair stood up on the back of her neck. Clearly nobody was worried about accidentally shooting her. Or, more likely, they just assumed the thief was driving the boat and were aiming at the pilot’s seat, where they assumed he would be.

Yikes!

“Whoa.” The thief crouched beside her seat. “That was close. Another inch or so and …”

He didn’t need to spell it out. She got it. “Hang on.”

Now that the need for subterfuge was past, Mick slammed the throttles forward and gunned the engine. The thief grabbed onto the edge of her seat for balance as the
Playtime
skipped like a stone across the surface of the water. As more gunfire peppered the air, he stood up, balanced a hip against the back of her seat, and returned fire in a quick burst.

The explosions of sound so close at hand made her jump. Her head jerked around so that she could see him. “Stop that!”

“What? They’re shooting at us.”

“There is no ‘us.’ Anyway, I don’t care. Stop it.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Give me my damn gun.”

“I don’t think so.”

But he didn’t fire any more shots even though the return barrage from shore exploded like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Bright bursts from the nozzles blinked on and off like hyperactive fireflies. No more bullets hit the boat, which raced away as fast as Mick could make it go, fast enough so that the bow came up and sheets of water blew past them in twin showers of fine white spray. The windshield and half roof over their heads kept them dry and protected them from the brunt of the weather, but the wind howled past, and within minutes the cockpit became as cold as the inside of a freezer.

Now I know how an ice cube feels,
Mick thought, shivering. Shifting so that she was sitting cross-legged in the wide seat, she tucked her poor frozen feet beneath her flannel-clad thighs. As far as keeping herself warm was concerned, it was the best she could do.

Hanging grimly on to the wheel, she willed herself to ignore the biting cold. Now that they were gunning it, waves slammed into the hull, making the boat heave and dip like an airplane in turbulence. With
his hand gripping the back of her seat not far from her left shoulder, the thief held on and braced his legs apart for balance, but he didn’t speak. In front of her, the lake was so dark that it blended seamlessly into the night. The distinctive-to-Lake-Erie smell of carp on the wind was strong. For a moment it brought to mind a kaleidoscope of happier occasions, summer nights when she and Angela and a group of their friends had stayed out on the water on this boat until nearly dawn. With a pang, she realized those days were probably over.

Life as she knew it was probably over.

If only, instead of going to investigate that sound, she had headed back to bed!

“They’re really pissed,” observed the man at her shoulder, who, she discovered with a glance around, was watching the action on the shore. She looked, too: the guys now milled around the edge of the lake in a loose knot. The shooting had stopped. Mick watched one lower his weapon and shake his fist at them, signifying, she hoped, that he felt the boat was now out of range. It was impossible to know who it was. “Good call stealing Marino’s boat, by the way.”

“If I was robbing a house, I’d make sure I at least had Getaway Plan B,” she told him acidly. “You know, in case my partner left without me.”

“Winging it’s more my style. And Jel—my partner had no choice.”

“Oh, I’m not supposed to know his name? Guess what, babe: I’ve got
you
. I don’t need small potatoes stuff like a name.”

“More like,
I’ve
got
you
. I’m the one with the gun, remember?”

“It’s my damn gun. I want it back.”

“Tough.”

Mick huffed to show what she thought of that, then tensed as, from her periphery vision, she watched the guys on shore turn and run toward the boathouse in a group, leaving one man behind to, presumably, keep watch on the
Playtime
. If she had to guess, she’d assume the intent of the others was to give chase via the runabout and the Jet Skis.

Thank God I took the keys.

Then a corollary thought reared its ugly head:
Of course there have to be duplicates.

But she didn’t know where they were kept, and she could only hope the guys were equally ignorant.

“You sure you got all the keys?” the thief asked, having apparently followed the same mental path she had taken.

“No.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“We’re winging it, remember?”

She glanced back. Uncle Nicco’s place was now no more than a small sliver of light glowing on the shore. They were too far from it to see anything that might be happening with the guys, which was good, because that meant the guys could probably no longer see them. And, the farther away they got, the safer she felt. The very expensive houses near Uncle Nicco’s estate that they were at that moment speeding past were all lit up by security lights, too. Large, multistoried, gated and fenced, complete with swimming pools and elaborate landscaping, the houses took on a fairy-tale quality when viewed from the lake, as she had noted before. This was an area of over-the-top McMansions owned by the newly rich, most of whom firmly believed that more was more. Comparatively modest neighborhoods flanked the big houses, and as the
Playtime
sped along the curve of the lake past them, the light reaching the boat from shore dwindled because the amount of security lighting dwindled. Electricity was expensive, and in these difficult times, people who worked hard for their money—like her—had learned to be frugal. Likewise, the city considered outdoor security lighting expendable, so even most of the streetlights in these quiet residential neighborhoods were currently nonoperational. The residential areas, in turn, gave way to industrial complexes, most of which had gone broke and closed down. After those came large tracts of forest, fields and undeveloped
wetlands. Once they got that far, the lighting from shore would be nonexistent.

Probably they needed to dock before that. But where? Frantically she started reviewing possibilities.

“Here.”

Mick jumped as her thoughts were interrupted by something heavy dropped, without warning, onto her shoulders.

“What …?”

It was only as Mick felt it settle around her that she realized that what had just dropped onto her shoulders was his coat. Up until that moment, she’d been doing her best to tune out how cold she really was, but obviously her shivering had been noticed. He hadn’t touched her again—she had to give him that—but he clearly hadn’t been prepared to simply let the matter go. Her immediate instinct was to reject the coat—as a general rule, she accepted favors from no one—but then she felt the heat radiating from the garment to her skin and simply could not. She was dressed for bed, not the great outdoors on an icy night. The truth was she was so cold that she ached with it, freezing from her head to her poor bare toes, probably flirting with frostbite in a dozen places. She wouldn’t be functional for much longer if she didn’t protect herself from the elements. With that in mind, she accepted the gift, sliding her arms into the sleeves, buttoning up the buttons with fingers that shook. The coat was too big, big enough to wrap around her twice, but it was so
warm
.

She glanced back at him. He was looking out through the windshield, but as he felt her glance, his eyes met hers. “Thank you” stuck in her throat. When the words finally emerged, they were stiff.

“You’re welcome.”

For a moment neither of them said anything else. Pushing the too-long sleeves up her arms so that her hands were free to grip the wheel,
glancing at him again out of the corner of her eye, Mick realized that he was no longer holding on: his hip was braced against the side of her seat and his feet were planted apart for balance, while his arms were folded over his chest. Since she now had his coat, leaving him facing the elements in what looked like a black, long-sleeved thermal tee, she presumed his arms were folded like that for warmth.

So maybe in some respects he was a nice guy. That didn’t make him any less of a criminal. At least with him the situation was black and white. Him she would feel no compunction whatsoever about bringing in.

Except he had seen the pictures, too, which made him even more of a target for Uncle Nicco than she was.

Mick’s breath escaped in a little defeated sigh. Oh, Lord, why had she had to sleepwalk on this of all nights? And when she’d woken up, why hadn’t she just gone back to bed?

“If you go down in the cabin …” Mick indicated the door to her left; shoulder height, it was part of the woodwork that made up the front of the cockpit below the windshield. Now that she had been reminded of how cold she was, not even his coat could stop her from shivering, or her teeth from chattering. Her feet were so numb that they didn’t even tingle anymore, which was not a good sign. Her fingers already once again felt like claws frozen to the wheel. He had to be freezing, too, and she owed him for the coat. “There are clothes in a closet beside the head. Sweatshirts, I know, rain jackets, maybe some boat shoes. I need shoes, at the minimum, and you need something so you don’t freeze.”