Sleepwalker

by Karen Robards

  “Look, I know you’re not going to like this, but the smartest thing we can do right now is drive straight to the Precinct Thirteen station house. That’s my precinct. It’s only a few miles from here. I know everyone. We’ll be safe there.”

  Jason shot her a glinting look. “Oh, yeah, right—because running to the cops for protection worked out real well the last time, didn’t it? Or did I just imagine we almost got killed back there?”

  “Okay, so those two were dirty. Most cops aren’t. When I report what happened …”

  “No.” His dismissal was brutal. “I’m not going to the cops. You’re not going to the cops while you’re with me. End of discussion.”

  “Like hell it is.”

  “Baby, in case it’s escaped your notice, I’m the one driving and you’re the one in handcuffs. Nothing’s happening that I don’t want to happen.”

  “If you’ve got a better plan, I’m all ears. Oh, wait, I bet I know what it is: we wing it.”

  “You know what? I don’t give a—” He broke off, frowning suddenly as he stared hard through the place where the windshield had been. Obviously something on the road ahead had caught his attention. Even without knowing any more than that, Mick’s stomach tightened. Whatever it was could not be good. Following his gaze, she saw she was right. Her heart started to pound and her throat went dry.

  On the opposite side of 1–94, heading in the direction from which they had come, roughly a dozen cop cars raced toward them. Bubblegum lights flashing, sirens wailing, they were clearly intent on urgent, official police business.

  A moment ago, she had wanted to be surrounded by police with all her heart. Now something about this was giving her a real bad feeling.

  “We need to get off the expressway,” she said. A glance at the overhead signs told her that the next exit was Buckner Street. She knew the area well. Southfield was one of the more dangerous areas of the city. High unemployment, high crime, crowded, lots of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Usually. Only this was New Year’s Day.

  He glanced at her. “What, you don’t want me to flash the lights or honk the horn or something to get their attention? I thought those were your people.”

  The first of the speeding caravan flashed past. Luckily there were several lanes of traffic and a median between them. The rest of them followed like the noisy, flashing tale of a comet, while all other traffic going in the same direction pulled to the side of the road.

  Mick ignored his sarcasm. “Turn on the radio. We need to know what’s going on.”

  Already reaching for the button, Jason looked at her and hesitated. “You don’t say a word, understand? You just listen.”

  “Do you think I’m going to start screaming for help now? Do it.”

  His mouth tightened, but he punched the button.

  “—Industrial Park,” a dispatcher’s voice crackled over the radio. “1-8-7, multiple victims. Police officers among the victims. Repeat, police officers among the victims. Two suspects have been identified. One is Detroit Major Crimes Investigator Micayla Kristen Lange, twenty-seven years old, five foot six inches, one hundred and sixteen pounds, auburn hair, brown eyes, fair complexion, last seen wearing a man’s black coat and black sweatpants. She is traveling with an unknown male, early thirties, approximately six feet two inches, one hundred eighty pounds, black hair, eye color unknown, last seen wearing a dark hooded jacket and pants. They were last spotted traveling in a police cruiser. They are to be considered armed and extremely dangerous. Repeat …”

  But Mick heard no more. Still stunned by what she was hearing, she was nonetheless instantly distracted when Jason said, “Shit.”

  She knew that tone, and it sent a thrill of dread down her spine. He was looking in the rearview mirror. Mick glanced around, over her shoulder, to eyeball for herself what he was looking at, only to make a terrifying discovery: a police car was speeding up behind them.

  Chapter

  21

  Heart in throat, Mick turned back around. The radio was rebroadcasting their descriptions. Her pulse rate was already off the charts. Shock didn’t even begin to cover how she felt at being named a suspect in a multiple murder. Terror was barely adequate to describe her reaction to what was coming next: faced with cop killers, police officers tended to shoot to kill. Swallowing hard, she glanced sideways at Jason.

  “When they pull us over, let me do the talking,” she said. Her fingers locked together. Her spine was rigid. The thought of ducking occurred, because the BOLO had been issued for a man and a woman, not a man alone, and it was always possible that the pursuing uniforms might just be pulling up behind them for a look-see rather than a stop, and if they saw just the single man they might assume this was not the couple they were seeking, and. … Well, anyway, it was instantly dismissed. If she was spotted, a move like that would make any halfway-wide-awake cop immediately assume she was guilty. End of story.

  Jason snorted. “Babe, if you think you’re going to be able to talk your way out of this, you’re living in la-la land. They think we just shot two cops. They catch us, we’re toast.” He was grim-faced as he continued to drive at just over the speed limit. Clearly he, too, was expecting a siren to go off behind them at any moment.

  “You did shoot Friedman,” Mick pointed out uneasily. Like all self-respecting police officers, she despised dirty cops. Plus Friedman would have killed them if he’d gotten the chance. But there was still something about the murder of a fellow cop that got under her skin. It felt unforgivable.

  “That wasn’t me. At the time I didn’t have a weapon. He opened the door, I punched him in the face. He went down, I grabbed his gun, and when he jumped up and came at me somebody from your side of the car shot him before I had the chance. Just FYI.”

  “Thank God.” Mick cast a quick glance through the sideview mirror at the oncoming patrol car. It was maybe ten car lengths back now, and closing fast. There was no exit close enough to allow them to ease on off the expressway in hopes of not being followed. Speeding away would clearly result in a chase, with backup converging on them from all over the city. All they realistically could do was continue on. The atmosphere as they waited for the squad car to catch up and signal them to pull over was intense.

  “Here he comes,” Jason said.

  Mick felt her clasped palms grow damp. She closed her eyes. Any second now …

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he’s pulled over to the shoulder.”

  “What?” Mick could not stop herself from looking back. Sure enough, the squad car was slowing to a halt on the shoulder of the highway.

  “Looks like we caught a break.”

  “Thank you, God,” Mick said fervently, then added to Jason, “get off the road.”

  “Oh, yeah.” The Buckner Street exit was right in front of them. Jason took it, and the cruiser twisted down into one of those sections of town that cops only patrolled in daylight and in pairs.

  “You think he might have recognized that we were the people described in the BOLO and stopped to call it in and wait for backup?” Mick glanced back over her shoulder uneasily. The radio was issuing instructions to various units heading to the scene, but so far nothing about a possible sighting of the prime suspects.

  “It’s possible. No way to tell. Maybe he stopped to take a leak.”

  Mick shot him a disgusted look. “You know, you’re not funny.”

  “Now you’re hurting my feelings.” His lips curved in the slightest of smiles, and a glimmer of humor brightened his eyes. Mick realized that it was the first smile she’d seen out of him in a while. But at the moment she had more important things to worry about than what was up with Jason.

  “If so, this whole area is going to be crawling with cops any minute.”

  “Look on the bright side: if enough police cruisers show up, we’ll blend right in.”

  Too anxious to do more than frown dampeningly at him, Mick turned sideways in her seat, the better to keep a look out behind them.

  A
bandoned storefronts and blighted apartment buildings marched alongside pawnshops and bars and a couple of rent-by-the-hour hotels. Cars lined the curbs, most of them beat up, a few of them tricked out. In a nod to the holidays, a woebegone Christmas wreath clung to the side of a dilapidated bus stop shelter. A battered streetlight was adorned with a wide red ribbon that wound around it like stripes on a barber pole. The only thing that appeared to be open was a tiny convenience store on a corner. At least, its lights were on. It was always possible that whoever had worked the late shift had celebrated just a little too much and forgotten to turn them off.

  “That SOB Iacono must have called the murders in, then claimed to be a surviving victim and named us.” As the worst of the shock wore off, Mick thought out loud. “They can’t be allowed to get away with this. I have to talk to my captain. He’ll believe me when I tell him what happened. The whole squad will believe me. I—why are you stopping?”

  “We’re losing the car.” Jason pulled into an alley and parked behind an overflowing Dumpster. Fire escapes piled high with boxes and garbage bags rose up the sides of the brick apartment building to her left. On the other side of the alley, a strip club with a sign that included a dancing naked woman in a Santa hat looked deserted except for the cars in the parking lot. “Stay put.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Don’t you ever just do what you’re told?” Shaking his head at her, he got out of the car, leaving Mick to watch in slightly wary surprise as he walked toward the strip club’s parking lot. Even before he took off his jacket, wrapped it around his hand, then put his fist through the back window of a dinged-up Ford Taurus, she realized what he meant to do. Eyes widening as he stuck his hand through the broken window, then pulled it back out to open the driver’s door, she looked hastily all around to see if anyone else was watching. The alley was deserted; no one on the fire escapes; out of the dozens of windows facing the parking lot, not one showed any sign of movement.

  Thank God for New Year’s Day.

  A second later Mick watched a squad car cruise past on the main drag, which she could just glimpse on the other side of the strip club. Her heart thudded. Her pulse took off at full gallop. Her stomach did a somersault. Which was ironic, when she thought about it: always, from the time she was a little girl, she had viewed police officers, the police force, as a stalwart source of safety and security, the ultimate defense against bad people doing bad things. When she had joined the department, she had been proud to think that she was making a difference as a soldier in the fight against the random evil that was loose in the world. But just now, seeing a police car had made her afraid. How sickening was that? She had no time to worry about it, however. Jason was already in the stolen car and was driving it out of the parking lot, and the squad car she had glimpsed could have been anywhere, even circling around to take a closer look. When the Taurus pulled up beside the cruiser, Mick would have hopped out to join Jason like a frog jumping out of boiling water except—that’s right—she couldn’t get out.

  Jason opened the door for her.

  “That took way too long,” she said. Springing out, she hustled past him toward the Taurus, her feet sliding a little on the cleared but still icy street. The thought of the squad car being somewhere nearby made her want to jump out of her skin.

  “What? Investigator? Excuse me? You’re not going to give me grief about stealing us a car?”

  “Would you just come on?” With her hands cuffed behind her, she felt that anyone who even caught a glimpse of her would know to call the cops. Luckily, everybody seemed to be still asleep. And in this neighborhood, the residents and the cops weren’t exactly best friends. “Didn’t you see that squad car? It was heading down Buckner.” Following behind her, suitcase in hand (of course), Jason was regarding her with rather quizzical humor, she saw as she glanced back at him. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Wait a minute: you mean you’re finally accepting the fact that we really need to keep away from the police? I thought you were just saying how you wanted to rush right over to your precinct to talk to your captain.”

  “Whoever was in that car wasn’t my captain.” Jason opened the door for her, and Mick jumped in. “It wasn’t anybody in my squad. At this point, I don’t think we can trust anyone else. Cops or not.”

  Closing her door, he strode around to the other side and got in, too. Then they were moving. Mick heaved a sigh of relief at leaving the banged-up cruiser behind. In it, she felt, they might as well have been waving a flag that said, Here we are. Come get us.

  “I do still think our best bet is to head for my precinct,” Mick added. “Mainly because right at this moment I’m not feeling up to dying in a blaze of glory.”

  “God give me patience.” Jason cast his eyes skyward, then looked at her. “Tell me something: if you went to your captain with this, what do you think would happen?”

  The Taurus was already pulling out of the alley and heading down another street, which actually had a pedestrian on it—a bundled-to-the-eyes woman out walking her flea-bitten-looking dog. It was cold as a refrigerator inside the car, with not a lot of prospects for warming up much despite the blasting heater. Mick could hear the wind whistling through the broken window in the back and feel its breath curling past her face and neck. Still, it was an improvement over the virtual wind tunnel they had been riding in before. Shivering, she glanced all around for the squad car and did her best to ignore her various aches and pains as she tried to give Jason an honest answer.

  “He’d have Iacono and Rossi arrested for murder, for starters. He’d pass my information on the Lightfoot case up the chain of command to be investigated. And he would get us taken off the suspect list.” She kept casting nervous glances out the windows as she spoke. For anonymity, the Taurus beat the cruiser by a mile, but still she didn’t feel safe. Between the cops and Uncle Nicco’s security apparatus, danger could lurk anywhere. “The last list you ever want to be on is the suspected cop killer list, believe me.”

  “Or maybe he’d shoot you on sight because he believes what he’s heard, or he’s in on this. Or, if he’s honest, he’d listen to what you had to say, then have you arrested, because you don’t have any proof that you’re telling the truth about Lightfoot or what happened in that warehouse today or anything. Even if he didn’t arrest you, even if he listened and believed you and did everything you think he’d do, what do you think would happen to you eventually? You think somebody eager to make sure you never testified might blow your head off just as soon as they could?”

  Mick narrowed her eyes at him. She firmed her lips. She flexed her poor, aching shoulders. But none of that made any difference to the sorry reality that Jason had a point.

  “You know I’m right,” was how Jason interpreted her expression. His tone was smug, and Mick made a face at him. The Taurus sped up the ramp onto the expressway, and suddenly Mick felt like they had a target the size of Lake Erie pinned on their backs.

  “Maybe,” she admitted reluctantly.

  “No maybe about it. Face the truth: it’s you and me, babe. We’re all we’ve got.”

  Mick looked at him. The gray morning light was harsh and unflattering. Playing over the hard planes and angles of his face, it made him look tired and faintly haggard and exactly like the unrepentant criminal he was. The fact that he also looked handsome as hell and sexy enough to make her remember just how hot he’d gotten her in that sleeping bag was flat-out annoying. Twelve hours ago, she’d had no clue this man even existed. Now he had become the most important person in her life. Sizzling sexual passion was one thing: that was purely physical. That he should turn her on the way he did really wasn’t all that surprising given that he was absolute eye candy, and anyway there was no accounting for chemistry, after all. But the thing was, she liked him, too. There was an easy intimacy between them that made her feel like she had known him for years. Plus he was engaging, and considerate, and made her laugh. Mind-boggling as she might have found the thoug
ht just a few hours earlier, she even trusted him. Whatever side of the law enforcement fence they happened to be on, they had each other’s backs.

  “Fine. We’re a team. For now.” If she sounded a little sulky, it was because she wasn’t sure she particularly liked this turn of events. In fact, she was pretty sure she didn’t like it.

  Jason smiled at her, a slow and charming smile that had the unexpected effect of making her stomach flutter, as if half a dozen butterflies had just taken flight in there.

  My God, she thought, I better be careful. The last thing on earth I want to do is start liking him too much.

  Because at some point, they were both going to get their lives back. And when that happened, she would still be a cop, and he would still be a thief.

  “Welcome to the dark side, baby,” he said, his smile widening into a grin.

  “Hah, hah.” Actually, that was so exactly how she felt that she couldn’t even summon a smile. To quiet the unnerving little sense that she had just crossed some invisible moral line, she looked all around—a few more big rigs, a few more cars, but nothing alarming—and then turned her attention to Jason again. “We’re heading south. They’ll expect us to go south, I think. Because by now they’ll know I don’t have any identification on me, which means we won’t head north, because the only real place to hide up that way is Canada.”

  “You think we ought to get out of the country?”

  “I told you: I can’t. I don’t have a passport or any identification.”

  He grinned. “See, you’re still thinking like a law-abiding citizen. Those are not insurmountable obstacles.”

  The look Mick gave him was not one of amusement. “I’d really rather not break any more laws than I absolutely have to.”

  “Duly noted.” The twinkle was still there in his eyes. “How about we get off the expressway for a moment, grab some drive-through coffee and get those handcuffs off you?”