Sleepwalker (25 page)

Mick heard the weird, whispery sounds that seemed to originate from somewhere behind her, but in those first few split seconds she couldn’t think what they could have been. Then the follow-up sounds—unmistakable, as they always made her think of a hand slapping flesh—clued her in in a hurry. They were taking fire from weapons equipped with silencers. The follow-up smacks were bullets crashing into trees.

Yee-ow! I think they know it’s us.

“Holy Christ,” Jason yelled, his voice whipped away by the wind as he apparently made the same connection. Mick sucked in enough cold air to make her lungs ache as a bullet whizzed so close to her cheek that she could feel the tickle of its passing.

“
Hit it
.” Jason’s urgent order in her ear was unnecessary.

“Hang on.” Leaning low over the handlebars, Mick gunned the throttle, giving the engine every last little bit of juice she could. The snowmobile bucked like a frisky colt, then shot up the hill through the trees. She drove like a NASCAR driver jockeying for the lead, dodging in and out among what felt like thousands of obstacles, accelerating until they were barely touching the ground. Arm clamped around her waist, Jason hung on, his big body curled around her, either
to protect her or to get low himself, she didn’t know. She could feel his chest moving against her back. He was either breathing hard or cursing steadily. Probably both.

Pfft
.
Pfft
.
Pfft
.
Pfft
.

The bullets kept coming, terrifying in their near silence. How close they came to finding their target was impossible to mistake as they crashed into branches just inches overhead and sent nearby tufts of snow exploding upward like feathers flung into the air. Teeth clenched, cringing at every too-close call, Mick drove like a bat out of hell, zigzagging in and out through the trees, going airborne over moguls, sliding sideways on one ski in lightning changes of direction in hopes of making at least one of their pursuers crash, all the while charging up toward the road, because at least that was the way out.

“Hold steady a minute,” Jason yelled.

Hold steady? Not possible.

“Yeah, right.” She dodged a huge oak, skidded around a stand of hollies and plunged between two shaggy pines. A glance in her rearview mirror showed her that she had gained some ground with her maneuvers, but not enough: the other snowmobilers still raced after them. The passengers on both vehicles were firing at will. Mick faced the hard truth: there was nowhere to go to elude them, and outrunning them wasn’t going to work, either. The vehicles all operated at approximately the same speed.

What do I do now?

A jolt that felt kind of like she had just taken a knee to her spine made her think at first that she had been hit in the back. Panic clutched at her throat.

Crack
.
Crack
.

That sound was unmistakable: gunfire sans silencer. It was so close at hand that she jumped. A glance in her mirrors confirmed it: Jason had his Sig out and was shooting back.

All became clear in an instant: the knee to the spine she’d felt had been him wedging the suitcase in between their bodies so it wouldn’t fall off, thus freeing his right arm to shoot. Exasperation was too mild a word to describe what she felt when she realized that he had found a way to secure the suitcase rather than drop it even under such dire conditions as these.

Pft. Pft. Pft. Pft.

Bullets came thick and fast. She couldn’t keep dodging successfully forever: the men behind them were bound to get off a lucky shot sooner or later. A glance in her rearview mirror showed her that their pursuers were still right on their tail. Even as she watched, a tiny spurt of orange exploded from the mouth of one of the pistols aimed at them. By the time she saw it, of course, the bullet had already whizzed past, but that didn’t help her instinctive response: steer hard left.

“Jesus Marie, watch that ditch!” Jason shrieked.

Mick looked forward just in time to see that there was, indeed, a ditch yawning directly in front of them. It was maybe ten feet wide and just as deep, with steep, rocky sides and ice forming a silver ribbon along its bottom: a creek, not a ditch. Nose-diving into it would severely injure, if not kill, them, she was sure. Realizing in that split second of awful recognition that there was no way to brake in time, no possibility of turning or avoiding it, Mick did the only thing she could: went at it full throttle.

“Holy shit!” Jason grabbed onto her with both hands as they went airborne. Mick’s heart leaped into her throat as the snowmobile shot through space. For a few terrible seconds the chasm yawned dark and deadly beneath them. Then they hit the ground again,
swoosh,
and just like that they were speeding away. Mick felt a spine-tingling rush of adrenaline.

Then she saw the other snowmobiles make the jump, too. One right behind the other.

]
That worked
.
Not.

Instead of being over, the chase was on again. More bullets whizzed past. Jason, cursing steadily, returned fire, but judiciously. As Mick ducked and drove, praying under her breath, the snowmobile dodged and slid and careened wildly, on the theory that a moving target was hard to hit, and a crazily moving target was even harder. Her heart pounded. Her pulse raced. Her throat closed up. The truth was terrifying: this gun battle was a fight they couldn’t win.

They needed a plan, fast. Something that would give them at least a chance at getting away. A distraction …

What did they want most, besides Jason and herself? The money, of course. If Jason were to throw the suitcase to them …

“Throw the suitcase,” she screamed over her shoulder. The wind pelting her snatched the words from her mouth, whirling them away so she couldn’t even be sure he’d heard.

Pfft
.
Pfft
.

Bang
.

“Throw the suitcase,” she screamed again, desperately driving up a steep bank thick with shaggy evergreens. The foliage would provide some cover, and when they popped over the ridge, they would at least be out of range for a few seconds.

“What? No,” he shouted back.

Mick got mad. “It’s my damn life, too, you greedy lunatic. You …”

The snowmobile flew over the ridge just at that moment, and what she saw as it landed and her bottom smacked back down on the seat completely wiped the rest of what she had been going to say from her mind. The road was right in front of them. On it, heading their way at a leisurely pace that told her the driver had no clue that anything out of the ordinary was going down, was a police cruiser.

Oh, my God: saved.
Mick could have sworn she heard a heavenly chorus of hosannas going off in her brain.

“Look there! We’re safe,” she shouted triumphantly to Jason, barreling toward the blue and white at full throttle. Running through a strip of cleared ground on the crest of a hill with forest about ten feet away on both sides, the road was a narrow, two-lane blacktop, already cleared and salted. Drifts where the plow had come through were piled high on either side, but beyond the drifts were twin lanes of pristine snow. The gray morning light was still iffy enough that the cruiser had its headlights on, although overhead dawn spun streaks of orange and pink and magenta through the rapidly lightening sky. Flashing her lights to attract attention, she ran the snowmobile down the west snow lane parallel to the road, expecting at any minute to see their pursuers cresting the ridge.

“Wait. No. No fucking cops!” Jason’s reaction might not have been all she had been hoping for, but it wasn’t a surprise, and anyway, Mick didn’t care. Help was at hand, and she wasn’t about to let it just pass them on by because her passenger had an issue with the legal system. The thought of having to arrest Jason bothered her more than it should have, but it was the right thing to do, the thing she had meant to do all along, and anyway circumstances didn’t seem to be giving her a whole lot of choice. The only other options were to just keep on running from the goons on snowmobiles until she and Jason either got shot or captured or somehow managed to escape—which had been looking less and less likely before this cop car had shown up—or to let Jason go. If he handed over the money, she might be persuaded to do exactly that, except for the fact that now it wasn’t looking like they were going to make it without an armed, official police escort out of there. She had to report the Lightfoots’ deaths as murders and hand over the pictures as evidence. The obvious question would then be how she had come by her information, and she was going to have to tell the truth. Doing anything else would compromise the reopened investigation, and, later, the prosecution of those responsible. But the good news was that she, as Jason’s
arresting officer, could make sure he was well treated. She could also persuade the DA’s office to cut Jason a deal if he agreed to cooperate with the Lightfoot murder investigation, and then persuade him to cooperate in turn. If she could do that, which, once he was in jail, she figured she probably could, he might even actually escape prosecution himself.

He could easily get off without any jail time. The only thing he would lose was the stolen money, which she wasn’t about to shed a tear over.

“We need them,” she yelled back at Jason.

“Will you listen a minute? No!”

Even if she had been willing to listen a minute with murderous snowmobilers on their tail, it was too late. Having obviously seen them and correctly deduced that they needed help, the cruiser turned on its lights and siren and sped toward them. A quick glance in her mirrors told Mick that their pursuers had yet to crest the rise. Probably they would turn tail and run now that a siren was practically blasting the snow from the trees.

Still, counting on it would have been just plain stupid. With the cruiser just a few yards away and closing fast, Mick barreled through the drift lining the road, skidded on the blacktop and hit the brakes. The snowmobile slithered to a stop at the same time as the cruiser stopped just a few feet away.

“Goddammit, Mick,” Jason said bitterly as she cut the engine. Throwing her leg over in front instead of behind so as not to have to deal with what she was sure would be his obstructionism, she hopped off the snowmobile, drew her weapon and turned on him.

“You’re under arrest. Give me your gun and get off the snowmobile.” Her voice was her professional one, cool and crisp. Not for an instant did she mean to allow herself to remember how she had kissed him, or the hot magic of the chemistry that had sprung up so unexpectedly
between them. This was the real world again. She was all business, this was all business, and whatever had happened between Mick and Jason had no bearing on this denouement between cop and thief.

He didn’t move, just sat there on the back of that snowmobile with his arms folded on the suitcase in front of him, looking at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Freeze! Police! Put down your weapons and get your hands in the air.” The shout from behind her caused Mick to glance over her shoulder. Two uniforms were out of the car, one on each side. Guns drawn, they were taking no chances, using the cruiser’s open front doors for cover.

“Investigator Micayla Lange, Detroit PD,” she yelled back, pulling off her ski mask so that they could get a good look at her. Her hair tumbled around her face, and she impatiently shook it back. “I am in the process of arresting this man. I was being chased by armed men who are still in the near vicinity, on snowmobiles in the forest here.” She waved her hand toward the section of forest they had just exited. “At least four, probably more. Call for backup
now
.” She switched her attention back to Jason, whose blue eyes, she saw as she met them, had narrowed and hardened. “Get off the snowmobile and give me your gun. And the suitcase.”

“So this is the way you want to play it, huh?”

“Absolutely.”

His Sig was in his hand. Since he wasn’t handing it over, she reached out, took it and pocketed it. He didn’t resist. Not that she had expected him to. With two cops plus herself pointing weapons at him, to say nothing of Uncle Nicco’s crew in the forest behind him more than ready, willing and able to take him out if he even thought about running, he was trapped between the proverbial rock and the hard place.

“Investigator, can you show us your badge?” One of the cops came
up behind her, stopping a cautious few feet away. A quick glance over her shoulder showed her that he was covering her as well as Jason.

“I don’t have it on me. You can call my precinct. Thirteen,” Mick said. The cop yelled the information back to his partner, while she turned her attention back to Jason. “Get off the snowmobile. Do it.”

His lips compressed. “You’re making a mistake,” he said, but he slid off.

When his feet were on the ground, she said, “Turn around,” and he did.

Then she cuffed him, officially making him her prisoner. If she felt a little bad as she snapped the bracelets closed around his strong wrists, she shoved the feeling away with the thought that as the arresting officer she had control over what would be done with him. Far better that it be her rather than any other cop.

Apparently feeling safer now that he saw that Jason was cuffed, the uniform joined her.

“Officer Ben Friedman,” he identified himself. He was probably around twenty-five or so, clearly new to the force. About five foot eleven, average build, average looks. “If you could tell me what’s going on here, I’d appreciate it.”

Having been keeping a wary eye on the forest for any sign of the snowmobilers, who might have run away as far and fast as they could have, but then again might not have, Mick wasn’t comfortable with just standing around talking.

“Let’s get him in the back of the car first and get out of here.” Mick put her hand on Jason’s arm. She could feel his tension in the rigidity of his muscles, but as he still wore the ski mask, it was impossible to see his expression. Still, she had no doubt that she’d fallen way off his favorite person list. “I’ll fill you in on the way.”