Sleepwalker

by Karen Robards

  So, hard as it was, he did the smart thing and shut the fuck up.

  When Jason didn’t say anything more, the gun was withdrawn. Looking down at Mick collapsed against him, Jason did his best to regulate his breathing and to force his bunched muscles to relax. She had slithered so far down that her head now rested on his thigh. Friedman produced a pair of handcuffs—handcuffs!—grabbed Mick’s wrists and cuffed them behind her back.

  Thank you, Jesus, Jason breathed. Because Friedman wouldn’t have bothered to cuff a corpse. He closed his eyes on a wave of relief.

  “You saying your prayers?” Friedman jeered. Jason opened his eyes again in time to watch him grab Mick’s shoulder, haul her semi- upright, and belt her in. If the way Jason felt was any indication, his eyes promised deadly retribution, but with Mick’s life, as well as his own, at stake now he didn’t say a word. “I’d be saying my prayers, too, if I were you. You’re going to pay for trying to rip off Mr. Marino.”

  With that he withdrew and slammed the door.

  “Mick,” Jason said urgently. She had slumped sideways again so that now her head rested against his shoulder. The familiar sweet smell of her hair made his chest tighten. “Mick!”

  There was no response. Her eyes stayed closed. He could see the thick black fans of her lashes lying against her pale cheeks. Her lips were bloodless. He still couldn’t tell whether or not she was breathing, but she had to have been: Friedman wouldn’t have cuffed her otherwise.

  It was one of only a very few times in his life that he could remember being that afraid for another human being.

  “Damn it to hell and back anyway.” Swearing under his breath, he unclenched his fingers and started in with the bobby pin again. If he wasn’t able to get free, any small chance they had of surviving this debacle flew out the window. Mick moved a little—thank God!—and he was able to relax enough to reinsert one metal end into the hole and start probing for the sweet spot.

  The driver’s door opened. Friedman slid into the car along with another blast of icy air that smelled of snow. Jason stopped what he was doing and sat perfectly still until the guy was situated behind the wheel with the door closed, his attention on starting the car, his back solidly turned. Had it not been for the standard cop car wire barrier between the front and back seats, Jason would have been working feverishly in an effort to free his hands so that he could wrap them around Friedman’s neck. With the barrier in place and the back doors impossible to open from the inside, care became more important than speed, because escape just wasn’t going to happen at this point. What Jason needed to do was keep his cool, do his thing and bide his time. When the chance presented itself, he had to be ready. It was unlikely there would be more than one. Keeping a worried eye on Mick, he watched at the same time as Friedman’s partner got in, shoving the suitcase over so that it rested between them.

  “How much you think is in here?” the partner asked, thumping the suitcase with a forefinger as Friedman shifted into drive. Like Friedman, the guy was maybe late twenties, with a round baby face and light brown, military-style hair. He wasn’t fat, but he wasn’t particularly fit, either. The neck of his blue uniform shirt was too tight, making the flesh bulge around it.

  “More than me and you are ever going to see, that’s for sure.” Friedman made a U-turn and headed back in the direction from which the cruiser had come, accelerating until the snow-laden trees flashing past were no more than a blur. Morning mist made it look like smoke was rising from the snow on either side of the road. It was coming on for full sunrise now, and a gorgeous orange light suffused the sky to the east. A glance out the back window told Jason that the snowmobiles had fallen in behind. They zipped along in single file in the path between the road and the forest. Guarded by six armed men, with Mick totally out of it, Jason wasn’t liking their odds. The chances of escape were looking more remote by the second. But unless Friedman was planning to stop somewhere within the next few miles, they would be losing the snowmobiles soon, he calculated. The vehicles wouldn’t be able to ride behind them past the forest.

  Just let him get out of the handcuffs …

  “Half a mil,” Jason said, throwing it out there just in case one of them was feeling particularly tempted by the money. The wire barrier meant neither cop could just turn around and shoot him or Mick—the chance of a ricochet would be too great—so Jason wasn’t worried about Friedman’s earlier threat. If he could get one or both of them interested in the cash, maybe he could stir up a little friction between them or otherwise use it to get some leverage. And maybe, just maybe, he could get them to stop the car and open the rear door. “In untraceable bills.”

  “Half a million dollars.” The partner sounded slightly awestruck as he looked at the suitcase.

  “I told you to shut the fuck up,” Friedman growled at Jason, scowling at him through the rearview mirror.

  “Say the word, and I’ll hit him with the Taser. Maybe he’ll flop around like she did,” the partner said.

  A Taser. Along with a hot flash of anger on Mick’s behalf, Jason felt a rush of relief. If Mick had been hit with a Taser, she should suffer no permanent harm. The original jolt would have been brutal, and the voltage must have been set for someone far larger than she was, because she was still unconscious, still slumped against him, but chances were almost 100 percent that she would recover shortly and be fine. At least, he amended wryly, she would be fine until they killed her, which, Jason was almost sure, was where this was headed. Clearly somebody wanted to hear what she had to say first. Possibly, given her ties to Marino, she might even be allowed to live. But he didn’t think so. Marino had too much to lose if she talked. And if Marino knew Mick at all, he had to know she was going to talk. No way was she keeping quiet about a multiple murder. Not out of love, not out of fear. She was too conscientious—and too smart.

  But if Friedman had Tasered Mick, and the partner was threatening to Taser Jason rather than shoot him, that was valuable information. No matter what threats they made, these guys weren’t going to kill them, because someone higher up the food chain wanted them alive.

  His vote was on Marino.

  “Shut up, Carl.” Friedman looked at Jason through the mirror again. At the same time, Jason registered that they were leaving the forest and the snowmobiles behind. The service station Mick had mentioned was up ahead on the left, and beyond that was the entrance to the freeway. “You can forget the Taser, asshole. You don’t want your brains blown out, you just sit back there and be quiet.”

  Mick gave a tiny gasp and sucked in air. The slight choking sounds she made distracted Jason. While he watched her, he was busy trying to calculate how best to continue to work on unlocking the damn handcuffs without the assholes in the front seat catching on. He needed to get it done, because the endgame was getting close: he knew it as well as he knew his own name. As for Mick, her lips parted as she took a series of deep breaths, and her lashes quivered against her cheeks. The slightest hint of color had returned to her face. She’s waking up, he thought. The need he suddenly felt to safeguard her from what was coming was the height of idiocy, considering how she had turned on him, he knew. But, damn it, he felt it anyway.

  “I hear there are two more suitcases just like this one. That’s one and a half million dollars, Ben,” Carl said in a hushed voice.

  “Forget it, fathead. We don’t want any part of that money. We touch it, and it’d be like signing our own death warrants. You don’t want to fuck with Mr. Marino.”

  The cruiser flashed past the service station—a Texaco, it didn’t look like it was open—and whizzed up the ramp onto the freeway. Traffic was light, mainly just a few eighteen-wheelers rattling along. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was, after all, New Year’s Day.

  “Yeah, okay, I know.” Carl sounded glum. “But it’d sure pay some bills.”

  “We all got bills.”

  “We could maybe make a deal,” Jason said to them, acutely aware of the small, jerky movements
Mick was making, knowing that they meant she was swimming back to the surface from the depths of unconsciousness. Her shoulders shrugged, her chest heaved, her legs twitched. “I tell you where the other suitcases are, and you let me go.”

  He deliberately left Mick out of the equation because he didn’t want to repeat the mistake he’d already made when he’d challenged Friedman on Mick’s behalf. When Mick had turned on him, what the cops had seen had been another cop arresting a thief. So for what it was worth, she and he were enemies in their eyes. If their captors were to understand how strong a connection the two of them had forged during the hours they had spent together prior to that, it would make them warier. It would also give them a weapon they might be able to exploit. As in, put a gun to her head and threaten to shoot her, and he might very well cough up the location of the other two suitcases along with anything else they wanted to know. Not that anything he did or said was probably going to matter in the end, because he knew that whatever the assholes in the front seat promised him, he, and probably Mick, too, were dead unless he could conjure up a means of escape.

  “They near here? The suitcases?” Carl glanced around at him with transparent interest, while Friedman looked at him through the rearview mirror and snapped, “You’re gonna tell somebody where those other suitcases are, all right, but it isn’t going to be us.” To his partner he added, “All we’re going to do is deliver these fuckers as promised. Then we’re going to be on our way. We stay out of what doesn’t concern us, and we live a long life.”

  “I know, but it wouldn’t hurt to just …” Carl broke off as a white pickup truck whizzed past, then nosed over into the lane in front of them. An incongruous blast of song—Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville”—surprised Jason for a moment until he realized, as Friedman pulled a phone out of his pocket with a curse, that it was the ring tone on Friedman’s cell phone.

  “Hello,” Friedman answered. There was a note of caution in his voice that told Jason that, whoever was on the other end, Friedman was nervous about him. Friedman listened a minute, then said, “That’s right. Yeah, we got her, too. Yeah.”

  With both cops focused on Friedman’s conversation, Jason stealthily resumed his work on the handcuffs. Time was growing short, he knew. He twirled the bobby pin between his thumb and forefinger and—finally!—felt it touch the internal catch. In this position, he thought that one or maybe two judicious sideways shoves to the pin would do the trick, but he was afraid to make too vigorous a movement. If the guys in the front got the least inkling of what he was trying to do before he succeeded, it would be all over.

  Patience, he cautioned himself. But he was on edge like never before. As he had learned previously, his fingers were too big to be as delicate with a damn bobby pin as he needed them to be. But shit was getting ready to go down, he could tell, and he and Mick were only going to get one chance.

  “You got it,” Friedman said into the phone, then disconnected.

  “What?” Carl asked.

  “That’s them up there.” Friedman nodded in the direction of the pickup. “We follow them in.”

  “To where?”

  “How the hell do I know?”

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  “What do you want from me? They said follow them. I’m following.”

  Jason watched the pickup pull into the far right lane. The cruiser did the same. Getting them to pull over and jerk him out of the car in a quest to learn the whereabouts of the other two suitcases wasn’t going to happen, he realized. The appearance of the pickup had put an end to that possibility. Marino’s men were now in charge. Some fifteen minutes later, still a good distance short of the city, both vehicles sped down an off-ramp into what Jason saw was an aging industrial area. Factories, warehouses and a variety of tired-looking commercial buildings stretched out all around as far as he could see. In the distance, against the steely gleam of the lake, a plume of whitish smoke belched from a smokestack to rise into the brightening sky.

  This was the kind of setting thugs like Marino used for their dirty work.

  Stay cool.

  Tuning out the conversation in the front seat, which was basically an argument about whether or not Carl was actually dumb enough to even think about stealing anything from Marino, Jason fiddled carefully with the bobby pin. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the flutter of Mick’s lashes and glanced over to discover that her eyes were open. Her head moved, and their gazes met. He wasn’t sure if she was aware enough to realize what was going down, but he was fairly certain she recognized him. Her eyes were hazel-brown with flecks of gold and green. Wide and dazed, they were gorgeously, outrageously, game-changingly beautiful, with their long, feminine fringe of black lashes. Looking into them, looking at her delicately boned face and wide, lush mouth and mane of auburn hair, having a momentary flashback to the silken texture of her skin and the supple firmness of her lithe, ballet dancer’s body, he felt a rush of heat so strong his body reacted. That’s when he was forced to acknowledge it: no matter what she was or how coldly she had betrayed him, she turned him on. The sexual chemistry between them was so potent that even under these conditions he could feel the sizzle of it heating his blood.

  Looks like we’re back on the same side, babe, he told her silently. Only this time, he was going to remember that they were a team only as long as it worked for her.

  At the moment, though, job one had to be figuring out a way to keep them both alive. Pulling his gaze away from her, he refocused his efforts on the handcuffs.

  He was close, so close, to getting the lock open. All he needed was just a few minutes alone.

  Then the cruiser took a hard left, and he looked up to discover that in front of them the pickup was barreling through the open gate of an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence that led into a storage yard and, from there, a warehouse. The cruiser followed right behind, jerking and bumping over the path that had been cleared through the snow, driving in the pickup’s wake right into the warehouse.

  The lights were on, overhead fluorescents putting out a pale, fitful light that left the corners of the cavernous space thick with shadows. The pickup stopped, and two men got out. A moment later the cruiser rolled up beside the pickup and braked.

  Friedman threw the car into park, cut the engine and looked at Jason through the rearview mirror.

  “It’s funtime, dickhead,” he said. Then he and Carl got out of the car, slamming the doors behind them.

  “Mick.” Jamming the bobby pin against the little metal knob that he was sure was the handcuff’s internal catch, Jason cast a desperate look at Mick. Her eyes were closed again, her body was limp, and she gave every appearance of being unconscious once more. “Damn it, Mick, wake up. This is …”

  The door beside him was jerked open before he could finish. Too late, Jason thought savagely as he jammed the bobby pin against the knob one more time with no damn result, and at the same time looked up into Friedman’s grinning face. He was just registering that Carl stood behind Friedman and that Friedman had something in his hand when the door beside Mick was yanked open, too.

  Jason automatically glanced her way, and as he did he got hit squarely with something that felt like a mule kick to the chest. It was only as his breathing stopped and his muscles began to spasm that he realized he’d been Tasered.

  Chapter

  18

  When they dragged her out of the car, Mick tried to continue pretending she was still unconscious, hoping they might feel she was not any kind of a threat. She felt woozy, nauseous, and had the mother of all headaches, so keeping her eyes closed actually worked for her. Staying totally limp proved impossible, though, especially when the scumbag who’d been holding her up with a fist gripping the back of her coat and an arm around her waist let go. Just like that. No warning at all. Crashing down onto a hard floor, she automatically twisted so that she caught the brunt of it with her shoulder rather than her face.

  Ow. She managed to bite back the cry, but her eyes
flew open as pain shot through her shoulder like a hot knife. Where am I? was her first thought. Her second, arrived at as she glanced around, was that it was obviously a warehouse. The floor was poured concrete, dusty and cold. It smelled of antifreeze and car exhaust. From the angle at which she lay—she had instantly turned onto her stomach because her shoulder throbbed like it was broken and, with her hands cuffed behind her, lying on her back was impossible—she could see eight tires, two pairs of cop shoes, two pairs of boots plus the pants that went with them from about midcalf down, and a section of corrugated metal wall.

  None of the footwear belonged to Jason. God, where was he? Still in the car, or …?

  “Get up,” a man said. The voice was not one she recognized, and she had neither the strength nor the inclination to obey. Then somebody grabbed her by the back of the coat and hauled her upright. Scrambling to get her feet beneath her, Mick succeeded, only to discover that her surroundings whirled around her and her legs were rubbery as all get-out. Nonetheless she stood under her own power, jerked free of the fist in her coat, shook the hair back from her face, and, as her surroundings settled down, glared at the man in front of her. Midthirties, about six foot one, stocky, a shaved-head baddie with mean eyes, he was wearing a forest green goose-down jacket over jeans. She didn’t know him, but she knew the type: the same kind of formidable-looking tough that had been part of the team that had come after her and Jason on snow mobiles. Uncle Nicco’s security crew, version 2.0.

  “Who the hell are you?” she asked him. Taking the bull by the horns had always been her style. A quick glance around told her that she was indeed in a warehouse, empty except for the aforementioned objects and people and some wooden pallets piled high against the far wall. An oversize garage-like door behind her was closed. Her stomach fluttered as she realized that this was the kind of place where someone could be murdered without anyone outside hearing or seeing a thing.