“You can get the handcuffs off?” The idea of being able to move her arms again was even more appealing than the thought of coffee. And the thought of coffee made her toes curl. “How?”
“I may have lied about the bobby pin.”
“You jackass.”
“Yeah, well, last time your hands were free, you arrested me.” He was pulling off the expressway as he spoke. “What is it they say? Once bitten, twice shy?”
“Just get the handcuffs off.”
The exit he chose had a number of strip malls running on either side of a four-lane road. Fast-food places occupied pride of place on every corner. McDonald’s was the only one open; the drive-through line was surprisingly long, probably because there was no competition. After he placed their order, which included burgers and fries because they were both famished, he told her to turn around. In a surprisingly short time—before they made it up to the window to collect their food—he had the handcuffs unlocked and was pulling them off her.
“There you go.”
“You sound way too proud of yourself.” Mick gingerly flexed her arms and shook her fingers. As they reached the window, she glanced back in time to see a cop car pull into the back of the line. Her nerves instantly went haywire. “Oh God, we have to go.”
“Thank you,” he said to the woman who handed their food over. He passed Mick the cup holder with the coffee in it and drove on out of the parking lot, cool as could be. Mick looked sideways at the squad car as they passed it, but the two cops in it didn’t so much as glance their way. She felt jittery anyway.
“We need to get out of the state, at the very least.” Even in the face of fear, she couldn’t resist the smell of the coffee. Cradling the Styrofoam cup with both hands, she enjoyed the warmth against her cold fingers as she took a revivifying sip. “If we even can. They’re probably setting up roadblocks everywhere as we speak.”
“Not a problem.”
He sounded so carefree that Mick frowned at him. “Why is that not a problem?”
“Because we’re not driving anywhere. You see that airport over there? That’s where we’re headed. I’ve got a plane.”
Chapter
22
Somewhere over the sea, Mick woke up. She’d fallen asleep over northern Florida, about two hours back, and Jason hadn’t heard a peep from her since. Now her eyes opened, not fluttering but popping wide open in an instant, making him wonder if something had startled her. Maybe the air current they’d just hit, which had caused the Bonanza to bounce a little, or maybe the change in the droning of the engine as he’d increased the speed to 210 knots to combat the prevailing crosswind.
“Hey,” he said. She stared at him hard, as if it was taking her a minute to compute who he was. Then she sat up, shaking the tousled mass of her glorious hair back from her face, rubbing her hands over her sleep-heavy eyes. The cut on her cheek, which, once she had washed the blood off her face in the onboard restroom, had proven to be little more than a long scratch, was still visible against her pale skin. Her left shoulder had a bruise the size of a baseball. Otherwise, their ordeal had left her unmarked.
He couldn’t help it: he snuck a quick, admiring glance at the pert little tits that sat up with her, on display now that she had jettisoned his coat and shirt. If he was ever asked to vote something into the sexy hall of fame, it would be that clingy white tank top. And the tits beneath it, of course.
“Where are we?” she asked, frowning.
He watched her face as she looked out at the bright blue sky complete with fluffy white clouds, then down at the deep blue water ruffled by whitecaps below. Between sky and water, there was nothing but the warm, golden, early evening sunshine. No land anywhere in sight. A view more different from the freezing gray gloom they’d left behind in Detroit would have been difficult to imagine.
“Over the Caribbean,” he answered, then smiled at her expression, which was horrified. From the moment she’d first beheld the Bonanza, a gorgeous little red and white bird that, sizewise, was to a commercial airliner what a child’s pedal car was to an eighteen-wheeler, trepidation had shown in her eyes. Except for asking, in a constricted voice, “Are you sure you can fly that thing?” when she’d first beheld the plane, she hadn’t objected to escaping by air, probably because, given the forces that were certainly being massed to hunt them down, there hadn’t been a whole lot of choice. Being Mick, she’d done her best to project cool unconcern after her initial, openly dismayed response. But by the time they had taxied down the runway and then lifted off into the leaden sky, she had been gripping the armrests hard. As they had banked away from the airport and soared up toward cruising altitude, it had started to snow again. Fat flakes had hit the windshield, dense gray clouds had stacked up in foggy layers. They’d hit some turbulence, flown through some clouds. At one point visibility had been reduced to near zero and the plane had bounced like a child on a trampoline. She had turned white. After a while the ride had settled down, and so had she. Now she was looking big-eyed and anxious again as she peered down at the water some fifteen thousand feet below. He saw that her fingers were once again curling tightly around the armrests of the copilot’s seat beside him.
Maybe the bright hair and the tits were addling his brain, but he found her nervousness, and her determination not to let it show, charming.
Her eyes slewed around to him. “I thought you said we were going to Miami.”
“I lied. We’re actually going a little farther south than that.”
“To where?”
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
The woman had no sense of humor: she shot him one of the deadly looks with which she typically greeted his jokes. He smiled.
“Jason.”
“To my house, okay?”
Once again she looked out the windows and visibly shuddered. That cool-hand Mick should have such a visceral reaction to flying both amused and, to his own surprise, touched him.
“Where is it?”
He’d known this moment was coming, that in the end there wasn’t going to be any keeping it from her. When he’d made the decision to bring her with him, he hadn’t done it lightly. When all was said and done she was still a cop, and letting a cop know exactly where he could be found when he wasn’t robbing people for a living probably ranked right up there as one of the stupidest things he had ever done. Even the frog hadn’t given the scorpion the chance to sting him twice. But leaving her behind hadn’t been an option, either.
“The Caymans.”
“The Cayman Islands?” Her eyes widened, and she took another look out the windows that was at least as much interested as nervous, he was glad to see. On the way down, he had learned during the course of their conversation that she had traveled very little outside the Michigan area, the exception being Canada, of course, and Florida for occasional vacations, most of which had involved staying at Marino’s Palm Beach mansion. Her only previous experience in planes had been in big jetliners heading for Florida. She had imparted this information when she’d finally admitted to being just a little bit anxious in the air and had blamed it on the Bonanza’s small size; the Bonanza had been rising and falling like an elevator on the fritz as they’d been flying through a thunderstorm over Atlanta, and her white-knuckled response had been obvious. Instead of copping to being scared to death, which she’d clearly been, she’d admitted only to being “a little tense.” That refusal to admit fear was vintage Mick. “So why did you tell me Miami?”
Jason looked at her without replying. The truth was, he’d wanted to wait as long as he possibly could to give her the information that, if she turned on him, could ruin his life as he knew it. Over the last few years, he’d built up a comfortable existence, found contentment and a way of living that suited him. By bringing her into it, he was putting all that in jeopardy. Not just for himself, but for Jelly and Tina, too.
“You don’t trust me!” she accused.
“Not entirely,” he admitted.
He shrugged. On the horizon, specks of white and green appeared. He smiled, partly in relief at having this uncomfortable line of questioning interrupted and partly because he was simply glad to be almost home. He nodded at Mick to look out the window.
“There it is.”
She looked, and he had the pleasure of watching her face out of the corner of his eye as they approached the islands, which from the air looked like tiny, diamond-encrusted emeralds floating in the deep blue water. There were three of them, the largest of which was Grand Cayman, where he lived, and then Little Cayman and Cayman Brac. Paradise on earth, he’d thought when he had first discovered them some six years before. Shaped like a jawbone, or, as he preferred to think of it, a whale flipping its tale, Grand Cayman had two distinct personalities. The west end was a tourist mecca, with almost daily visits by cruise ships. Thousands of visitors flocked each year to George Town, Grand Cayman’s capital, drawn by its duty-free shopping and ritzy hotels and gorgeous Seven Mile Beach. The rest of the island was laid back and sparsely populated. Few tourists ever made it past the Turtle Farm, which wasn’t far outside George Town, and the few who did were usually on their way to Hell, a tiny settlement with a couple of souvenir shops and a sign that said Welcome to Hell, just to say they’d been there. The north shore, where he lived, boasted mile upon mile of sugary white beach and almost no people.
“Shouldn’t you be talking to an air-traffic controller or something?” Mick asked uneasily as the Bonanza started its descent and she saw the same thing he did: a gleaming Boeing 727 with its landing gear out, powering down toward the airport several miles away. From the way she stiffened, he knew the sight alarmed her.
Banking toward the north, Jason shook his head. “We’re on visual flight rules. The whole point is for no one to know where we are. Since I didn’t file a flight plan, and we’ve been avoiding major airports, they won’t be able to track us even if they ever do figure out we flew out of Ypsilanti. Which isn’t likely.”
“Won’t there be a record that we refueled at that airport in Georgia?”
“Not that anyone will be able to find.”
The truth of the matter was, the credit card he had used for the gas, like the pilot’s license he was currently flying under, were all part of a fake identity created specifically for this job that he would never use again. Even if someone were to figure that out and start searching for his real identity, it was sheathed in so many layers of misdirection and protection that he was confident that his true name, Jason Davis, would never be found. Just like the ownership of the plane, which was his, and which Jelly and Tina had flown in on, could be traced, if anyone dug deep enough, to a real company in Buffalo, New York, that had gone bankrupt during the worst of the Great Recession and no further. When he landed, he would change its identification number, and the plane that had left Ypsilanti would effectively cease to exist.
“This is how you do this? Fly in somewhere, commit a robbery, and then fly back to your home in the Cayman Islands with what you stole?”
There was a note in her voice that made him give her an assessing look. “You’re sounding like a cop, Mick.”
She regarded him unsmilingly. A pretty, delicate-looking, big-eyed thing with a to-die-for body and the soul of Elliot Ness. What the hell was he thinking?
“I am a cop.”
“I saved your life. I brought you home with me. I didn’t have to.”
“Why did you?”
“Oh, I don’t know, because I didn’t want you to die?”
“Are you saying I owe you because of that? Just for the record, you got me into this mess in the first place. I’d say that kind of evens things out.”
“Maybe, but now we’re both in it together. Back in Detroit, you agreed we were a team. You standing by that, or not?”
“I’m standing by it.” Her tone was faintly grudging. “Which doesn’t mean I approve of what you do.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“You say that like you think I’m going to be here a while.” Her lips tightened, and faint lines of worry appeared between her brows. Her eyes were troubled as they met his. “I have a whole life back in Detroit. I can’t just disappear.”
“Baby, that’s the only thing you can do.”
They were coming in over the north end of the island now, and the sight of the rolling surf and long crescent beach of Old Man Bay lightened his spirits as it always did. The Bonanza swooped toward the waves until an unexpected updraft sent them soaring. Mick’s eyes widened as she grabbed hold of the armrests. Jason had to smile again even as he brought them back around in a wide, banking turn.
“Anybody ever get airsick on you?” Mick asked. “Not that I’m going to or anything, but … just asking.”
Jason laughed. “We’ll be on the ground in a minute.”
A moment later he was setting them down on a private runway within sight of Sea Pond. His house, which fronted on Old Man Bay, was visible only as a red tile roof in the distance, where the land sloped down to the beach. The hangar where the Cessna Jelly and Tina had flown home in, and where the Bonanza would soon be parked, was directly in front of them.
“You remember that I don’t have my passport or any ID, right? Because if there’s going to be customs or something, we’ve got trouble.”
“There’s not going to be customs. This is a private runway. The property belongs to me.”
He could see her drinking it in. It was about ten acres, not including the semiprivate beach. The road was hidden from view by a stucco wall that was nearly hidden itself by a profusion of lush greenery, including broad-leafed palm and banana trees and the gorgeous scarlet blooms of hibiscus and bougainvillea. On either side of the asphalt runway, the grass was golf course smooth and emerald. To their right, the sea stretched out endlessly, shades of turquoise and teal and sapphire all the way to the horizon. The roof of his house was just visible, and a crushed shell path leading down to the house gleamed faintly pink in the golden light of the low-hanging sun. A flock of seagulls wheeled in the powder blue sky.
“Whoever said crime doesn’t pay sure didn’t know what he was talking about, obviously,” Mick said, and Jason laughed again.
Even with a snarky, disapproving, not-so-pleased-to-be-there cop in tow, it was good to be home, he thought. Then, as she looked back out the window some more, and he thought about showing her around, introducing her to the island way of life, getting her into a bikini and out on the beach and watching her relax, he amended that to especially. Especially with a snarky, disapproving, not-so-pleased-to-be-there cop in tow, it was good to be home.
Which was something he probably ought to think about. But later, when he had some time. Not now.
As the Bonanza bumped down the runway toward the hangar, a golf cart appeared over the rise from the direction of the house. Watching its approach, Jason’s smile was wry.
“Here comes Jelly. He must have been watching for us.”
Mick shot a look at him. “Oh. Oh.” She looked back out at the oncoming golf cart. “I didn’t realize he lived with you. He doesn’t know you have me with you, does he?”
“He doesn’t live with me. He has his own house next door. And no, he doesn’t know. Although he’s about to find out.”
“He isn’t going to be happy.”
“Probably not.” No probably about it: Jelly was going to be pissed. He would get over it. “Don’t worry about it. Once he gets to know you, Jelly’s going to love you.”
“Yeah, right. That’s always provided he doesn’t shoot me on sight.”
“Way to look on the bright side.”
“The bright side sucks.”
Chuckling, Jason taxied into the hangar and parked. A moment later, suitcase in hand, he opened the door and climbed out. The scent he always associated with the isla
nd hit him first: salt air and fresh-cut grass and frangipani. The purr of the surf was music to his ears. The heat embraced him like a lover.
“Tina and me, we were getting worried about you,” Jelly called from outside the hangar, where he was sitting in the golf cart’s front seat. It was a club car, with a front and back seat, and a roof to provide protection from the sun. He saw Jelly’s eyes touch on the suitcase, watched him grin with satisfaction. Money on deck: mission accomplished. “You timed that perfectly, you jerkoff. We were just getting ready to eat.”
“A little late for supper, isn’t it?” Jason grinned back at his friend even as he turned back to the plane. Dressed in baggy shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, flip-flops and a baseball cap, Jelly in island mode looked totally different from the black-clad operative who was his partner on jobs. “What is it, like, nine-ish? You’re usually headed for bed about now.”
Early to bed, early to rise, that was Jelly. He had no bad habits. Except, as Mick would undoubtedly point out, stealing.
“Yeah, well, I was thinking I was maybe going to have to climb back in the Cessna and take off on a search and rescue—” Jelly broke off as Mick appeared in the Bonanza’s doorway. His jaw dropped and his eyes bugged even as Jason set the suitcase down, turned back to the plane and reached up to lift her down. Not that Mick waited for his help: she jumped. “What the hell …?”
Jason couldn’t help it. He grinned. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember Mick.”
Chapter
23
“The cop. You brought the fucking cop.”
“Micayla Lange, say hello to John Bean.”
“Hey,” Mick said. She looked, and sounded, about as enthused as Jelly did. Hanging back in the shadow of the plane, she tossed her hair back out of her face and took a good, solid grip on a wing strut. Her body was tense, her eyes wary. Like she thought Jelly really might have been thinking about shooting her.
“Jelly,” Jelly corrected automatically, before his popping eyes met Jason’s again. “Are you nuts? You just totally screwed us over. What, did you get arrested or something and you had to give up Tina and me in some kind of deal? What did they offer you? What did they threaten you with? I’m telling you right now, there’s no way they could have forced us to turn on you.”
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