Sleepwalker (5 page)

Not good. In fact, real bad.

And that was before you factored in the odds that the goon squad, having gotten an eyeful of what was actually going down in Marino’s office, was already hotfooting it their way.

“Camera,” he said to Jelly by way of a warning. He could feel adrenaline surging like some kind of turbo-fuel through his veins. This, the first cock-up in as pretty a series of robberies as anyone could ever have planned, might well also be the last.

“Busted,” the cop gloated. Balanced on the balls of her unmistakably feminine feet, her slender hands flexing, her tits as delectable as ever in that thin white top and the rest of her plenty sexy, too, she gave off Mike Tyson vibes, if Iron Mike was pissed and spoiling for a fight. “If you’re smart you’ll surrender to me now, ’cause you’re going down. The security guys aren’t cops like me. They don’t give a crap about your rights or the law.”

“Shut up.” Jelly scowled at the camera, then looked at Jason. “What do we do?”

“Keep her covered.”

Jelly’s gun snapped up to point at the cop again while Jason replaced the foil in a quick move on the hope that the security team had somehow
missed what was happening within range of this particular camera. He then snatched up his ski mask from the floor and stuffed it in his pocket. DNA and all that, although he didn’t suppose it mattered now. Who needed DNA when you had video and an eyewitness?

“Get the money,” he said to Jelly, who nodded.

“You really think that’s going to help?” the cop taunted Jason as, careful to keep her gun aimed squarely at her because he’d seen what she was capable of in the way of surprise moves, he rejoined her. Actually, he was hoping that replacing the foil would help. It was New Year’s Eve, after all, and Marino’s security force tended more toward street punks than trained professionals. It was entirely possible that no one had been watching the monitor for the few minutes the veil had been lifted. Still, counting on it would be stupid. Time to clean up the mess to the extent possible and get out while the getting was good.

“Turn around and walk toward the safe,” Jason ordered her. “Hurry up.”

“You’re just digging yourself in deeper with every stupid thing you do,” she said.

Jelly looked up from where he was scooping up the scattered cash. “Only thing to do is shoot her, you realize. You can’t bring yourself, I will.”

“No.” Jason’s voice was firm. Of course, forbidding Jelly to kill her had its drawbacks. The cop could hear him, too. “We only shoot her if we have to.”

Jelly grunted, clearly unimpressed. The cop seemed unimpressed, too. When she didn’t move despite the fact that he was now looming over her threateningly, Jason, wary of any countermoves, started to grab her arm to spin her around and facilitate the process of getting her underway. The rattling of the handcuff still dangling from his left wrist distracted him before he touched her. Reminded of its presence, glancing down at it in disgust, he discovered that his glove—both gloves—
were missing, probably ripped to shreds and lost in the fight. Not that fingerprints were much of a concern any longer: both the camera and the cop had gotten real good looks at his face. The whole anonymous robbery thing was out the window, at least as far as he was concerned.

Shit
.

Their eyes met.

“Unlock the cuff,” he ordered her. This was taking too long, and her intransigence wasn’t helping. Of course, it was probably deliberate: anything to slow them down. Cutting their losses and running with the remaining two suitcases was an option, but the cop had to be dealt with or she’d be screaming for backup and chasing after them before they got ten feet. Anyway, for both him and Jelly, a cool five hundred grand was a lot to just leave lying on the floor. In fact, he wasn’t prepared to do it.

“Now,” he added, meaning it.

Pursing her lips, the cop complied.

“She can ID you,” Jelly pointed out.

“Yeah, well. I’ll take my chances.” Jason pocketed the handcuffs and made a gesture that ordered the cop to start walking. “Head for the safe.”

His voice brooked no opposition. She did as he told her, moving as slowly as she dared.

He’d been meaning to tie her up with whatever restraints he could come up with and leave her there, but the handcuffs were actually going to work in his favor, he realized now that he thought about it: he would cuff her to one of the metal shelf supports inside the safe and stick his cap in her mouth by way of a gag. She wouldn’t be going anywhere, or yelling out for help, anytime soon.

“Make things easy on yourself. Surrender to me now, and I’ll protect you from the security guards,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder at him.

“Keep your mouth shut and I’ll protect
you
from my partner. Maybe.” Put her in the safe, grab the money, go. As a Plan B it sucked, but it was pretty much all they had. The property was eleven acres, the guardhouse was clear out by the road, and the goons manning it—who might very well be asleep or inattentive or drunk off their asses, because it
was
New Year’s Eve, after all—would be on foot if they were coming. And there was a hell of a lot of snow to plow through, plus gates and locked doors and a whole slew of other obstacles to navigate. Even if somebody had been watching the monitor during the brief time they’d been visible, all that would slow them down. Still, either way, time wasn’t on his and Jelly’s side.

“She’s going to be a problem,” Jelly warned.

“Damn right I am. Your asses are going
down
.
”

“You just don’t know when to shut up, do you?” Jason said to the cop. It was becoming increasingly obvious that she was the type to hunt them down to the ends of the earth. If she’d been holding a gun on him instead of the other way around, he would have been getting nervous about now, knowing that the smartest thing she could do was kill him. But she—she hadn’t turned a hair as far as he could tell. Either she had
cojones
of steel, or she had guessed that he had a weak spot where women were concerned.

“
You
just don’t know when somebody’s trying to do you a favor,” she retorted.

“A favor.” Jason’s tone was skeptical.

The door to the safe was only a couple of steps away. He’d blown the lock to gain access, but the opening itself was unimpeded. Take care of her, grab the suitcases, and he and Jelly were out of there. Thirty seconds to get out of the house, another minute and a half to get to the van, which was parked out behind the pool house, Garza’s Snow Removal emblazoned on its plain white side. Floor it down the delivery driveway, which Tina on the small rent-a-tractor, posing as scheduled
maintenance after a snowfall, would have cleared by now, out through the side gates before the goons could summon the brainpower to lock it down, then onto the expressway and away.

With one and a half million dollars in untraceable cash. Worth it? Absolutely.

“Yeah, a favor. Doing ten to twenty beats being shot in the head,” the cop replied, echoing his own guess as to the time he was facing if the legal system got involved. “These guys don’t mess around.”

“Get in the safe.”

“You know you’re not going to get away with this.” She stumbled, supposedly on the ruffle of loose papers littering the floor, which, since they hadn’t been there before, had to have spilled from the burst suitcase, and “fell” to her knees maybe a foot shy of the threshold. A delaying tactic, which wasn’t going to work.

“Get up.” His tone was deliberately brutal. There hadn’t been anything in the advance work that would have indicated something might have been in the suitcases besides cash, but it didn’t really matter: whatever else Marino might be sitting on, Jason, Jelly and Tina had no interest.

“I don’t believe it.” She was still on her knees, her voice scarcely louder than a whisper.

“What?” When she didn’t move, but instead started spreading out the papers and really looking at them, he took a proactive role in speeding up the process by bending down and catching her by the elbow, with the intention of hauling her upright. Her arm felt almost fragile, which, when he remembered the fight she had put up, surprised him. She was very slender, her taut physique more that of a ballet dancer than an athlete. Maybe a hundred fifteen pounds soaking wet. Which was embarrassing, when he thought about it.

“It was a lie,” she said.

Even as he hauled her upright, she was still looking down.

“What was?”

A little unsettled by her attitude, he automatically glanced down, too, just to see what she was looking at so fixedly. The papers on the floor were pictures, he saw, eight- by-ten-inch photographs on ordinary typing paper that looked like they had been printed from a computer. He wouldn’t have spared them another thought if one of the faces hadn’t immediately leaped out at him: Edward Lightfoot, the city councilman who had shot his wife and two teenage daughters in their home just before Christmas, then turned the gun on himself. The story had been all over the news, a grim reminder of the holiday season’s dark side. But these pictures, even in the quick glance he allotted them, they told an entirely different tale. They showed a badly beaten Lightfoot tied to a chair in what looked like a basement. A gun was being held to his head. Jason didn’t recognize the gunman, who had been only partially captured by the camera, but he sure as hell recognized one of the men in the background: Nicco Marino. Another shot showed Lightfoot’s eyes closed and his brains exploding out through the back of his head: it clearly had been taken just as the gunman had pulled the trigger. A third was of Lightfoot after the deed had been done: slumped in the chair, a bullet hole—no, make that two bullet holes—in his forehead.

Looked like someone on the scene with a cell phone had been busy taking pictures.

“That’s Edward Lightfoot,” he said before he thought.

“They killed him.” The cop sounded like she was barely breathing.

“Marino and his goons do that. So what else is new? Start walking.”

Her head slewed around and she glared at him. “That’s a lie!”

Jason recovered his sense of what was important fast. “Don’t care. I said
start walking
. Get in the safe.”

“Nicco Marino doesn’t murder people.”

“Oh, yeah? Looks like murder to me.” When she still didn’t move, he pushed her toward the safe.
“Go.”

“If that’s true—” She took a quick breath and turned those big brown eyes on him. “Do you have any idea what you’ve stumbled into here?” Her shaken-sounding question was fierce.

“Shut up and keep moving.” The truth was, he didn’t want to think about it. He shoved her past the damning pictures even as they lodged themselves indelibly in his brain. An uneasy feeling already churned in his gut. Jesus H. Christ. Marino was involved in the death of Edward Lightfoot? This was knowledge he didn’t want to have. Dangerous knowledge. The kind of knowledge that got people killed.

And the fact that he possibly had that knowledge had been recorded for posterity by that thrice-damned security camera, and sooner or later somebody was going to find the footage.

Shit
.

“Good to go,” Jelly announced to the snap of a suitcase lock. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Thud. Crash.

The sounds came from about half a house away—which, considering the size of the house, was fortunately a fairly good distance. Freezing on the threshold of the safe, his hand tightening on the cop’s arm, Jason felt his pulse quicken. The goons in the guardhouse not only weren’t missing in action but they had also arrived faster than he’d expected. Luckily, they didn’t have the smarts to try to sneak up on them. Instead they had obviously burst in through the front door and were charging this way at full throttle.

Time had officially run out.

“Grab that other suitcase,” Jason ordered Jelly. The distant, muffled shouts and the pounding of approaching feet had Jelly hauling the one he’d just filled toward the door. Jelly shot Jason a look. Jason said, “Do it.
Go
.
”

With the sound of pursuit closing in, Jelly wasn’t arguing. Detouring
to snatch up the second case, bearing up manfully under what was pretty much his own weight, Jelly sprinted away.

“You don’t want to shoot her, knock her out,” Jelly threw over his shoulder as he ran out the door. “Just do it and come on.”

Then he was gone.

“Hand me my bag and get that one. Quick.” All too aware that the difference between escape and capture was now down to about a minute or less, Jason gave the cop a meant-to-be-intimidating, don’t-mess-with-me look. She glared balefully back. He’d swung her around, had her by the arm with her gun pointed at her, and still she didn’t appear particularly impressed. But to his surprise she didn’t give him grief, instead picking up first his tool bag, which she thrust at him, and then the suitcase. Clearly she found it heavy: her mouth tightened, and the muscles in her arm and shoulder tensed. But he couldn’t carry it and take her with him, too, and suddenly taking her with him seemed the right thing to do. A hostage in the hand was worth two in the safe, and all that. And he was starting to have the feeling that they might need a hostage.

Besides, she’d seen those pictures, too.

“
Move
. Down the hall and to the left. Fast.”

With his tool bag now slung over his shoulder, he hauled her, she hauled the suitcase, and in an awkward tandem run they followed Jelly along the preplanned escape route.

“You call the cops?” The shout came from one of their pursuers. They weren’t in sight yet—Marino’s faux Greek Revival mansion was
huge
—but they were close enough now that Jason could understand the words they were yelling at each other. If he hadn’t gone into ice-cold mode, as he naturally did when situations got hairy, such proximity would have gotten his nerves jumping.

“Hell, no! No cops! Don’t you know nothing?”

“Yeah, but … Mick’s a cop.”

“Mick don’t count. I called Iacono, okay?”

“Faster.”
Jason’s fingers tightened around her arm. He didn’t know who Mick or Iacono were, but then, he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to know anything at all. All he wanted was to get out of there with his money. Slip-sliding a little on the marble, they turned a corner, heading toward the exit. A cold rush of air told him that Jelly had gotten there already, had made it outside and left the door open for him.