Sleepwalker (10 page)

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were worried about me.”

“Good thing you know better, then, isn’t it? The cabin’s down there.” She pointed.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

By the time he disappeared from view, Mick, thinking furiously, had almost forgotten she’d sent him below, or why.

Time was of the essence. If one thing was more certain than anything else, it was that Uncle Nicco’s crew, galvanized by the thought of his reaction to their failure so far, would be giving chase just as quickly as they could get something organized. Ergo, she and the thief needed to get off the lake.

Lake Erie was huge, and the chance of hitting something was small enough for her to risk keeping the lights off as they skimmed along, although the potential for catastrophe was there. Right now, the water was so cold that death by hypothermia within just a few minutes was a given if something should happen to the boat and they had to go into the water. Fortunately, the
Playtime
was entirely seaworthy—and anyway, her plan was to put in at the first available dock. That dock nevertheless had to be far enough away to make it unlikely that the spot would be found for a while. Although she had to face the near certainty that somebody on Uncle Nicco’s security team would figure out that the
Playtime
had to make landfall sooner or later, and that therefore welcoming committees would be positioned with all speed at various docks along the shore, she thought she could safely count on that taking a little time to arrange. The key was to pick a place that Uncle Nicco’s guys weren’t likely to think of. Her best course of action would be to summon reinforcements from the ranks of her fellows in Precinct Thirteen to be on hand to meet the
Playtime
when she took her in. They could take immediate custody of the thief, which would perform the dual function of serving justice and protecting him from Uncle Nicco’s guys, and if any of Uncle Nicco’s guys showed up, the police could provide her with protection, too, at least temporarily, at least until they had gotten everything she knew from her. But she knew how the system worked: sooner or later she was going to be out there on her own, just swinging in the wind.

Having seen the pictures, the thief could not be expected to keep quiet about what he knew. Maybe he would use them, trading what he knew to make a deal with prosecutors. If he played his cards right, he might even end up with little or no jail time. Although it was possible he would be safer in jail.

Where, if what she and the thief knew made its way to law enforcement, Uncle Nicco and his associates would eventually land.

At which juncture the thief would definitely not be safer in jail.

The tangled web into which she had fallen had endless threads, and Mick was getting a headache trying to work out each and every way things could go. The whole situation was a fiasco, and at the moment she was just too cold to think it through. Her jaw ached from being clenched in an attempt to keep her teeth from chattering. Her fingers were numb, and her nose felt like it had been carved out of ice. One thing she knew for sure was that it was way, way too cold to be out on the lake.

Unfortunately, her problems were big enough so that the cold was the least of them. And that was sad.

“Anything interesting happen while I was below?” The thief emerged from the cabin to drop a bundle of clothing on the mate’s seat beside her. Mick gave a little shiver of anticipation at the sight. The cold might not have been the most important of her problems, but it was miserable. More clothes would definitely help.

“No. So what did you find?” She tried not to sound too eager.

“Stick out your foot.”

“What? Why?” Taken aback, she regarded him with caution. Moonlight allowed her to see him fairly well: as she had observed before, he was handsome. Good looking enough, actually, that she would have noticed him instantly in any kind of social setting. With the hard planes and angles of his face accentuated by moonlight and the merest hint of stubble shadowing his jaw, he had a dark and dangerous look
to him that under other circumstances she definitely would have found appealing. Given the vagaries of the moonlight, she couldn’t determine the color of his eyes, but they glinted at her under thick, straight black brows. The long-sleeved tee he wore was snug-fitting, and it confirmed what she already knew about his build: he was tall and lean, but it was a taut, muscular leanness. His shoulders, chest and arms were sculpted and solid. Even his narrow hips and long legs reinforced the impression she’d gotten of athleticism and strength.

A military background, maybe? With some degree of hand-to-hand combat training, although he wasn’t in her league.

“I’ve got socks.” He held up a pair of white tube socks tantalizingly, and she practically melted in her seat. “So like I said, stick out your foot. Or you could let me take the wheel and put them on yourself.”

Mick wasn’t about to surrender control of the boat, but she wasn’t turning her back on those wonderful socks, either. Making a quick choice, she stuck out her left foot. Grasping her ankle, he leaned back against the console for balance, rested her heel against his thigh, then worked the sock on over her toes, with the quick competence of a man who’d done such a thing before. The soft cotton felt so wonderfully, blessedly warm as it rolled over her foot that she was immediately distracted from the electric tingle that raced over her skin in the wake of his hands, and how firm and muscular his thigh felt beneath her heel.

“You shouldn’t run around barefoot. It’s cold out.” Pushing her pants leg out of the way, he pulled the sock up her bare calf almost to her knee, his fingers trailing heat wherever they touched. The shiver of awareness she felt at the contact was her body’s automatic and instinctive response to his sheer masculine good looks, she told herself, and was easily dismissed when she remembered who he was and how she had come to be in his company in the first place.

Their eyes met. Mick was suddenly glad of the darkness. At least if she couldn’t read what was in his, he couldn’t read what was in hers.

“I’m barefoot because I’m dressed for bed,” she responded tartly. “Which is where I would be right now if some crook hadn’t decided to rob the house I was sleeping in.”

He smiled. “Give me your other foot.”

He nudged her now sock-clad foot off his leg.

Mick complied, plopping her foot on his thigh while keeping a precautionary watch on the black expanse of water in front of them. She cast glances full of greedy anticipation at what he was doing as he rolled the second sock over her frostbitten toes and eased the stretchy cotton past her heel. Her pulse-quickening reaction to his touch didn’t abate, but she managed to ignore it by concentrating on the wonderful comfort of the sock.

“That feels so good,” she sighed as he pulled the sock all the way up her calf.

As soon as she heard her own words, Mick could have bitten her tongue. Though she hadn’t meant it that way, the remark had sounded sexual, sexy. Their eyes collided, and Mick realized that a certain type of man might take her involuntary expression of pleasure for a come-on and respond accordingly. Well, correcting any mistaken impression this guy might have gotten would be easy enough by, say, flattening him with something like a half hip throw if he tried anything. But still, she really didn’t want to go there. The situation was already complicated enough.

“Cold feet, warm heart,” was all he said as he finished the task with brisk efficiency, then dropped her foot. Mick was relieved to realize that apparently he wasn’t that type of man. “At least, that’s what they say. You’ll have to tell me if it’s true.”

“Definitely not,” she assured him.

“Why is that not a surprise?” His tone was sardonic.

Her feet were already going all pins and needles as they slowly began to thaw. Despite the slight discomfort, it was good to feel them beginning to warm up. At least she wasn’t going to lose any toes.

“Mittens,” he announced, holding up a pair of fuzzy pink ankle socks that he had retrieved from the pile. The boat was skipping through the water now,
bump
-
bump
-
bump
-
bump
, and he had to rest back against the console for balance again.

Judging that they were now far enough away so that she didn’t have to risk pushing the engine to the max anymore, Mick eased back on the throttles enough to where the ride smoothed out a little, then she peered through the darkness at what he was holding up to be sure she was seeing what she thought she was.

“Those look like socks to me.”

“That’s because you have no imagination. Here, give me your hand.”

She made a face at him, then, operating on the theory that socks on the hands were better than nothing in this cold, she held out her left hand. He took it, his bare hand warm and strong as he gripped her fingers. Pulling the sock down over them, he said, “Stick your thumb out,” and she did, thus discovering that he’d made a slit for her thumb.

Like he’d said, mittens.

“Good thought.” Holding out her other hand, letting him put the other sock on it, she relished the comfort he’d provided. Considering that he was her soon-to-be prisoner, she felt the tiniest pang of conscience at the thought that at the end of the night she was going to be putting him in handcuffs. Making mittens for her and putting socks on her cold feet was really way above and beyond any usual perp-cop interaction, and, like a stirring sexual attraction, it was the kind of thing that could potentially cloud her judgment, she realized, if she was the kind of cop that let it. Which she wasn’t. It helped to keep in mind, too, that he probably didn’t yet realize that she meant to haul him off to jail as soon as she possibly could. If he did, he’d probably be trying to lock her in the head, or worse.

“It was, wasn’t it? I found some boots. They’re probably a little big for you, but they’re better than nothing.”

Looking where he indicated, Mick saw that he’d brought her a pair of the knee-length black rubber boots they often used when they went ashore on the islands that dotted the lake.

“They’ll work.”

Without a word he reached into the breast pocket of the coat she wore. The action was unexpected enough to cause her to look down in surprise, but before she could say anything or protest in any way he pulled out a wadded fistful of black knit. Mick’s forehead crinkled in puzzlement at first as she looked at it, but even before he shook it out, then pulled it over her head, she realized what it was: the black ski mask he’d been wearing earlier. He carefully turned up the edges so that it formed a cozy black knit cap.

“Your ears looked cold,” he said in response to the glance she shot him.

Once again
thanks
stuck in her throat. “They were.”

Exponentially better off than she had been just a few minutes earlier, Mick quickly tucked her hair behind her ears, then tugged the edges of the cap over them once again. She turned her attention back to driving—and to figuring out what she was going to do next. From the corner of her eye she saw him pull a black Red Wings hoodie over his head and shrug into a dark-colored jacket on top of that, but she wasn’t really paying attention. So lost in thought did she become that when she heard his voice behind her, low as it was, she jumped.

“You guys get away okay?”

He was speaking into a cell phone, she saw with a quick, surprised glance over her shoulder. She was pretty certain that the person on the other end was Jel-whoever, his would-be murderous partner in crime, because who else would he call at a time like this with a question like that? Thinking of her own cell phone, left behind on the nightstand beside her bed, she suffered a brief pang. Well, maybe later she could … ah … borrow his. Having a phone would simplify matters enormously.

“On a boat. Don’t ask.” He paused, presumably to listen.

“Tell him to pick us up,” Mick instructed, inspired. “At, um …”

As she tried to think of a place to designate, he shook his head at her and mouthed,
No
.

“Yup, that’s her,” he said into the phone. “Yeah, I’ll make it. Count on it.” Another pause. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.”

Disconnecting, he met Mick’s gaze. She was feeling indignant at having her instruction ignored, because if she could get a couple of squad cars to the same place at the same time, the entire gang of thieves could be hauled away in one fell swoop, leaving her one less problem to deal with.

“You couldn’t have him pick us up?”

“Nope.” He slipped the phone into his right front pants pocket. Mick noted the location, because she felt that she might need to take possession of it at some point.

“Why not?”

“To begin with, he wants to shoot you. And unless I miss my guess, you want to arrest him—and me, too. So probably it’s in everybody’s best interest if I keep the two of you apart.”

Mick did her best not to let him see the self-consciousness in her expression: so he had her intentions nailed. Nothing she could do about that, but she didn’t have to admit that he was right.

“I take it there was a driver waiting in the van?” she suggested, presuming because he’d asked,
“You guys get away okay?”
As in the plural. “Is it just the two of them now?”

She asked it supercasually in the hope of getting information she could pass on when she handed him off to her fellow cops.

“For all you know, there could be a cast of thousands in that van.” His voice was dry. “Just pay attention to what you’re doing. It’s dark as hell.”

Okay, so he wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t going to fall into the trap
of just blurting out something she didn’t already know. And he made a good point: they were leaving the last of the residential areas behind now, and that source of light was going. Remembering one particular sunken barge and various other obstacles that lurked not too far ahead, Mick steered out into deeper water while still taking care to keep the shore in sight. The running lights would have helped, but she was still afraid to turn them on. Of course, turning on the lights at this point would only be a problem if someone was giving chase, but she dared not assume that they were in the clear. Anyway, at this hour, in this weather, running without lights was safe enough because only commercial vessels were likely to be on the water, and they were required by law to have their lights on. Looking into the inky blackness toward where lake and sky intersected, in fact an inchworm-like string of white lights and a distant, smaller, blinking red light pinpointed the locations of at least two other vessels. To the north, just on the horizon, she could see the glow that was Windsor, Ontario. Heading that way was an option, but it came with its own set of headaches, like the border patrol and the fact that turning around might bring them into head-on contact with any of Uncle Nicco’s guys who’d found a way to get on the water and give chase.