Keeping one eye on the water as she tried to calculate how much farther it was to Deer Ridge Park, Mick reached out to the ship-to-shore radio on the console in front of her and turned it on. The resulting loud burst of static made her grimace: keeping this on the down-low until it was done was imperative. Trying to remember the frequency of the channel the police monitored, she twirled the dial to silence the static and picked up the microphone.
And had it promptly snatched from her hand.
Glancing around, she met the thief’s eyes.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
Chapter
7
“Checking the radio to see if there’s anything about the Playtime out there on the airwaves,” Mick lied, so promptly and plausibly that she impressed herself.
He looked at her for a moment. His expression was hard to read in the dark, but she got the impression he was less than convinced.
“Good idea.” His tone was bland. He glanced down at the microphone he now held. The curly gray cord that attached it to the radio stretched past Mick’s shoulder. “You planning to talk to somebody?”
She shrugged. “Picking up the microphone is kind of automatic when you use the radio.” To demonstrate, she turned the dial again, honing in on some harmless chatter between, she gleaned from the tenor of the conversation, two barge crews. “Under different circumstances, I might ask them if they could recommend a good place to get pizza, for instance.”
“See, the thing is, I have to assume that whoever is looking for us is going to be monitoring radio transmissions coming off the lake. In their place, I would be.”
“You know what? You’re probably right,” Mick said, sounding so disingenuous that she mentally applauded herself.
“Never thought of that?” His inquiry was affable in the extreme. The next moment he reached past her and yanked the radio off the console. Then, as her jaw dropped in surprise, he walked to the rail and dropped the radio overboard.
“What the hell was that?” Mick demanded, incensed over the sound of the splash as her best link to her department sank into the deep. She was so irate that she practically came off her seat. Not that decking him would have brought the radio back, but she was tempted.
“Watch the water.” His command was sharp: she guessed the encounter with the log remained fresh in his mind. Then his voice turned bland again as he added, “Anyway, I figure the thing probably had a tracking device built into it. You know, like a cell phone or a car GPS.”
“That radio was as old as the boat!”
“Was it? Well, then, my bad.” He retraced his steps until he was standing beside her, then smiled gently down at her. “So who were you planning to call?”
Mick met his gaze, which wasn’t nearly as gentle as his smile, head-on, and once again lied through her teeth. The last thing she wanted to do was alert him to the fact that she was going to have a couple of police cruisers waiting for them if she could possibly arrange it. That would clearly make docking where she chose problematic, as he would certainly resist. No point in getting physical unless she had to.
“Uncle Nicco’s security crew, of course.” Her reply dripped sarcasm. “While you were below, I had a change of heart about helping you escape.”
“So you’re Nicco Marino’s niece.”
Mick could have kicked herself for that slip of the tongue. Not that it really mattered: she just didn’t like the idea that she had inadvertently given him a piece of information she hadn’t meant to reveal, even if, factually, it still meant he had her relationship to the Marinos wrong. With a shrug that said she wasn’t answering, she focused on driving the boat. With the outskirts of the city well past, all the light was behind them now. The deep black velvet border just beyond where the water ended in a gleaming strip of snow meant the shore was now lined by forest. She could see the treetops as a jagged outline against the night sky. Except for the moonlight cutting a shimmering stripe across the lake, they were in total darkness, and all alone for as far ahead as she could see.
“I knew Marino was a bad guy, but I didn’t realize he was so bad even his own family was scared to death of him.”
“I am not scared to death of him.”
“You’re running from him. Because you saw those pictures.”
Mick’s lips pursed. It was true, but she wasn’t about to acknowledge it to him. She didn’t reply.
“That’s why you’re helping me. So you can get away yourself.”
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, instinctiv
e 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.”
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. …
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