Sleepwalker

by Karen Robards

  “What?” Mick looked at him sharply.

  He nodded. “Yeah. It was the only thing to do. I finally figured out a way to take Nicco down and at the same time keep from going down myself for all the things we’d done together. Little things,” he added hastily, with a quick look at her. “Your mother deserved some payback, after all this time.”

  “Dad,” she began, only to be interrupted by the emergence of Wheeler and Rice from the hospital. They spotted the two of them on the bench and came toward them.

  “Hey, Charlie. I was looking for you,” Wheeler greeted her father. “You ready to do this thing?”

  Eyes widening, Mick shot to her feet. “What thing?” She turned to her father, who had risen more slowly. “Dad?”

  “I told them what I had. They cut me a deal: if I gave them the pictures and agreed to testify, I’d have immunity against any crimes I might—and you hear me saying might— have committed. It was a good deal. I took it.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. Then he handed it to Wheeler. “It’s all in there.”

  “Let’s go give a statement,” Wheeler said, looking at the phone like it was pure gold.

  “Dad. You need a lawyer. You need …” Mick was still sputtering when her father wrapped her up in a big bear hug.

  “No, I don’t. Wheeler and me, we shook hands. It’s all fixed up. Don’t you worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

  Then he let her go. Giving her a smile and a thumbs-up, he turned to go with the agents.

  “Wheeler.” Mick looked at the man with a combination of entreaty, fear and warning.

  Wheeler said, “He’s right, he’s going to be fine. He’s the break we’ve been waiting for for a long time. We’ll take such good care of him, he’s never going to want to come home again.”

  “But I will be home,” her father called back over his shoulder. “You can count on that. Wouldn’t leave my girls for too long for anything.”

  “Dad.” Mick kept repeating it helplessly because she didn’t know what to say. He was already getting into the car with the agents. She walked toward it. As he disappeared inside and the doors slammed, she leaned down to look at him through the driver’s window. Wheeler was right there. He rolled the window down.

  “Where are you taking him? How long will he be gone?” She looked into the backseat at her father, who was putting on his seat belt and seemed perfectly happy. “Dad?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll be in touch,” her father said as Wheeler started the car.

  “You need to get hold of him, you can always call me.” Wheeler shifted the transmission into reverse. “I gave my card to your sister. If worse comes to worst, Davis knows where to find me.” He grinned. “I almost forgot. Davis gave me a message for you. He had to go home suddenly—not that I know where home is for him, because I don’t—because things were starting to get a little hot around here for him when some of the guys started asking questions about how this entire series of events came about in the first place. But he told me to tell you, you might want to think about taking a vacation real soon.”

  Then he rolled up the window and drove away, leaving Mick standing there in the parking lot with her arms folded over her chest, staring after the car.

  Epilogue

  Four days later, Mick walked down the sloping green lawn toward the white crescent beach at Old Man Bay. It was a perfect day, bright and sunshiny. The sky was blue, the bay was bluer, and whitecaps rolled in toward shore in an endless rhythm that she didn’t think she could ever grow tired of. She could see Jason, wearing shorts and a tee, sitting on the overturned catboat. He was looking out to sea, with no idea she was there. She smiled. The smell of the sea, the sound of the waves, the warmth of the sun: they had managed to claim part of her heart during the brief time she’d been there before.

  But not nearly as big a part of her heart as the man in front of her.

  He didn’t know she was coming. She’d taken a commercial flight, then a taxi from the airport, only to be confounded by the compound’s locked gate and high walls. Before she’d had to resort to something as drastic as scaling the wall in the summery skirt and soft yellow tee she wore, Tina and Jelly, returning from the grocery, had shown up in their car. Tina had greeted her ecstatically, Jelly with a lot less love. But they’d let her in, suitcases and all, and told her that the last they’d seen of Jason, he’d been walking down by the shore.

  She had almost reached him when the sound of her steps on the sandy beach betrayed her, and he turned and saw her.

  “Mick!” He smiled, looking so glad to see her that she knew she’d done the right thing, knew she hadn’t imagined what was between them, or exaggerated it, or made more of it than it was.

  “Hey.” She was smiling, too, as he took the few steps necessary to reach her, picked her up off her feet, and swung her around. Then he set her back down and kissed her. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back.

  And the earth moved on its axis, electricity crackled like lightning, and the air around them turned to steam.

  Finally he let her go, and, still holding her hands, stepped back to take a look at her.

  “So what brings you out to this neck of the woods, Investigator?”

  Mick smiled at him. “Somebody told me I needed to think about taking a vacation.”

  “That’s it, huh?”

  Her heart was beating way too fast. But she kept it light. “It was snowing in Detroit.”

  “So you came here.”

  “Silver linings,” she said.

  He grinned. Standing there with his black hair shining in the sunlight, his handsome face alight with humor, his tall, broad-shouldered form tanned and muscular in island wear, he looked so wonderful, so familiar and dear, that her breath caught. And she suddenly didn’t feel like keeping it light anymore.

  She looked at him very directly. “I’m in love with you,” she said, putting it on the line.

  His grin faded, and his eyes turned serious. “I’m in love with you, too.”

  Then he pulled her into his arms and kissed her again.

  A little later, as they still stood on the beach wrapped in each other’s arms, he whispered in her ear, “Now just think, if I’d chosen some other crook’s house to rob on New Year’s Eve, we wouldn’t be here right now.”

  Mick smiled.

  Silver linings.

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