Sleepwalker (11 page)

“This thing has to have lights.” He sounded uneasy. Well, she didn’t blame him. The lake was black as ink, and the sky wasn’t much lighter. The moonlight allowed her to discern water from sky from land, but that was about it.

“It does, but if we turn them on finding us gets way too easy.”

“Point taken.” He frowned as he scanned the water. Unless his eyes were a lot better than hers, it was nearly impossible to see anything in enough detail to discern even a ripple or shadow on the surface. “On the other hand, I’d hate to hit something. Like a rock.”

“We’re too far out for rocks. The thing would have to be as big as a mountain. They’re more of a hazard closer to shore.”

“You know this lake pretty well, don’t you?” His tone was thoughtful. When her only reply was a shrug, he continued, “You were in Nicco Marino’s mansion in your pj’s on New Year’s Eve, you’re familiar with his security staff, you know his estate down to having the code to get into his boathouse memorized, and you know how to operate his persnickety classic boat. So what are you to him, exactly?”

She gave him a long look. “What’s your name?”

“What?” He frowned at the apparent non sequitur.

“Your name? What is it?”

“I think we’ve had this conversation.”

“Exactly. You don’t want to tell me anything about yourself. I don’t see why you should expect me to tell you anything about me.”

“Big secret, is it? You his girlfriend?”

“Of course not.” She blurted out the rebuttal before she thought, then eyed him with real hostility.

“But you’re something to him, obviously. So how is it that finding out that he’s a murderous criminal seems to come as such a surprise?”

“He is not a. …” Mick’s heated reply trailed off. Hard as she might find it to accept, the pictures, plus the money in the suitcases, proved otherwise.

“Oh, yes, he is. Believe me, baby, I know.”

“Crooks know crooks, is that what you’re saying?”

He said nothing, just looked at her with the smallest of smiles. After a moment—smart guy!—he changed the subject.

“So where we headed?” he asked.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Probably you want to put in pretty soon. They know we’re out here on the lake, which kind of simplifies the whole ‘find them’ thing.”

“Yeah, well. Out here we have a vehicle. On land we have our feet,” she said.

He made a face. “True that.”

“Unless you want to call your friend back and have him pick us up.”

“I don’t.”

“You’ve already got plans to meet him somewhere, don’t you? Probably you have a set rendezvous point in case you got separated.” The first observation had been gleaned from what she’d overheard of his phone call, but the second was pure guess. But it hit home: she could tell by the narrowing of his eyes.

“How about you just drive the boat?”

The sharp
thunk
of something hitting the bow refocused their attention in a hurry.

“What the hell …?” He moved to the port rail and peered over the side as Mick eased back on the throttles, slowing the boat way down. “That was a log. We hit a log.” He looked back over his shoulder at her. “I thought you said we were too far out to hit anything.”

“I said we were too far out to hit a rock. I never said anything about logs.” From the way the boat was moving and the readings on all her instruments, she could tell that it hadn’t done them any harm. “Logs happen.”

“Great. Good attitude.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do about it.” Before he could say anything she added, “I’m not turning on the lights.”

He seemed to see the sense of that, because he didn’t argue. Instead he said, “I’m going below to check for damage.”

“What are you going to do if you find a hole? Stick your finger in it?” she called after him as he went below. He didn’t answer. She kept the boat throttled down, because hitting something at speed carried a lot more potential for disaster than just nosing into it, and where there was one log there were likely to be more. The boat rocked gently; the sound of the water was more gurgle now than splash. She could just make out the curl of whitecaps, pale against the jet-black surface of the lake, and realized the wind was picking up.

Turning on the lights would draw the attention of whoever or whatever was searching for them, like, for example, every minor street hood in Detroit whom Uncle Nicco’s guys had probably alerted by now to look out for them. She knew most of Uncle Nicco’s guys from way back, she knew they were connected, and how that had failed to translate into having her take seriously the rumors that Uncle Nicco was a big-time crime boss she couldn’t really say. Probably because he was family, because she was as fond of him as if he were actually her uncle, she’d never really even considered that the rumors might be true. But now—now she had to consider it. Had to accept it, in fact. As for his guys, they would be using their contacts in whatever way they could. They knew as well as she did that Uncle Nicco was going to be furious about being robbed, and even more furious that the thieves had been allowed to escape with his money, his boat and his almost niece as a hostage. Add in his anger when he found out about the incriminating pictures, and the result wasn’t going to be pretty. The guys would pull out all the stops to capture the thief—and, as collateral, her—before he blew a gasket. In an effort to make that as hard as possible, her plan was to stay dark, go past the highly populated areas, then take the boat in at a remote dock. If she recalled correctly, there was a small dock connected to a boat launching ramp at Deer Ridge Park. It was used mainly by casual boaters in the summer and should definitely have been deserted now. It was sufficiently remote that its existence shouldn’t have occurred to any of Uncle Nicco’s guys or anyone else who might have been looking for them. She hoped.

Having decided where to make landfall, she turned her focus to the problem of who to tell about what she now knew. The supposed murder/suicide of the Lightfoot family had been big news. Nate had been one of the homicide detectives on the case, and like the others he’d been convinced that Lightfoot had killed his family before turning his gun on himself. Now, tucked safely away inside the pocket
of her flannel pants, she possessed definitive proof that that was not so in the form of three of the pictures, which she had folded up and tucked away when the thief hadn’t been looking. The only conclusion anyone seeing those pictures could come to was that Nate had been wrong. The other detectives had been wrong. The medical examiner had been wrong. Everybody who’d signed off on the case had been wrong. Being wrong on such a public case could hurt their careers. The resulting media firestorm would make both them and the department look bad. The backlash could hurt her career, too, because the brass in the Detroit PD had long memories. If she caused the department embarrassment, some of them would hold it against her forever. Nate might very well hold it against her forever. Not that she cared about that.

Handing over the pictures would more than embarrass Uncle Nicco. From the look of it, at the very least he would be arrested and charged as an accessory to murder. Depending on how things shook out, he could be facing charges of Murder One.

Uncle Nicco was as close to family as it was possible to get without actually being blood kin. Aunt Hope, Angela, his other children—they were practically family, too. She loved them. They loved her.

At the thought of the pain she would inflict on them all, Mick felt heartsick. Tossing the pictures and keeping quiet about what she’d seen was an option, but she already knew that it probably wasn’t one she was going to be able to live with. That would amount to turning a blind eye to murder, multiple murder of an entire family to boot, and, aside from the fact that she was a cop who had sworn to uphold the law, that she just couldn’t do. Besides, it would be dangerous. Unless the pictures lied, Uncle Nicco clearly had been involved in the Lightfoots’ deaths. She now knew it, and he knew, or soon would know, she knew it. The easiest, smartest thing for him to do would be to kill the witness,
namely her. Would he do it, or, rather, order it done? Even though he loved her like family?

The conclusion Mick came to was that waiting to find out would be just plain dumb.

Given that, then, the first thing to do was call her supervisor, Stan Curci. Tell him she had an armed robber in custody and needed backup at the Deer Ridge Park boat ramp like yesterday. Everything else she wanted to impart to him face-to-face.

A slight hiccup to the plan was that she didn’t have access to a phone. Of course, the thief had one, but unless she managed to wrestle it away from him, she didn’t see him letting her use it, especially if he suspected she was calling for backup. Probably she could get him to do something like call a cab when they docked, if, that is, a cab could be persuaded to come that far outside the city at this time of night. Alternatively, there was an open-all-night liquor store about a mile from the Deer Ridge dock that they could walk to if necessary. Even in the early hours of New Year’s Day an establishment like that should be open, and they would have a phone she could use. Problem was, once there she’d have to shake the thief to make the call she wanted to make. Well, probably he’d want to use the men’s room, or something, and she could sneak in a call. Or, alternatively, she could end the bullshit, take him down, cuff him, place him under arrest, and then make the call. She wasn’t eager to revisit the fight they’d had before, but she would if she had to. Then she remembered something: she had the next best thing to a phone right at her fingertips. Looking at it, she smiled.

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.

“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.”