Sleepwalker (29 page)

Bollocks to that. Not if she could help it. At least, if she was going down, she was going down fighting for her life.

“I never saw them before in my life,” Mick lied. Fear roiled her stomach, dried her mouth. That line of defense was not going to help, at least not ultimately, and not where Uncle Nicco was concerned: even if she hadn’t seen the pictures before, she had definitely seen them now. But her objective was to persuade these guys that she remained a trustworthy member of team Marino. It was still not completely outside the realm of possibility that she could convince them to let her go. Otis kept giving her sorrowful looks. Maybe if she could get him alone …

“They were in your goddamn pocket,” Favara roared, turning to shove them in front of Otis. “You know anything about these?”

Otis looked, blanched, and shook his head. “N-no. No.”

Mick saw that Otis’s gun hand shook a little. Clearly he recognized the pictures’ deadly import, too.

“So where’d they come from?” Favara’s eyes swung back to Mick. She was thankful suddenly for the tangled mess of her hair, which presumably hid the telltale beads of moisture around her hairline. “You know what’s good for you, you better start talking.”

“Fuck you, Favara,” Mick said, holding his gaze.

Favara’s face tightened. His hand clenched on the edge of the pictures, crumpling them a little. “Why, you—”

“Uh—that’s not Mick’s coat,” Otis interjected hurriedly. Mick got the impression that he was trying to protect her. They weren’t friends, exactly, but they went way back, which made him the closest thing to an ally she had in this hostile group. He was her best hope, the potential escape route she needed to concentrate on. “She wasn’t wearing one. I think maybe that burglar she was with was wearing it.”

“Oh, yeah?” Favara looked at Friedman. “You got the guy?” When Freidman nodded, Favara said, “Where?”

“Back of the car.” Friedman jerked his head toward the cruiser.

“Get him out here.”

“Oh, what, you’re finally getting around to leaning on the burglar
instead of the cop who captured him?” Mick jeered even as she experienced a tingling rush of relief at this irrefutable proof that Jason was alive. Thinking about what kind of shape he might be in or what might be getting ready to happen to him now was counterproductive, so she tried not to. The key here was to keep up the pretense that she didn’t give a flip what happened to him because she and Jason were not on the same side. “Is it just me, or are you geniuses going about this thing totally ass-backwards?”

“You know, you got a big mouth,” Favara told her, his eyes narrowing with anger.

Before Mick could reply, the garage door gave an ominous clank. It started to rise. The noise was enough to attract everyone’s attention. Through the rapidly widening opening, Mick caught a glimpse of a snowy yard and chain-link fence and, beyond that, a run-down, industrial street that looked deserted in the cold gray early morning light, before her attention riveted on the black SUV rolling into the warehouse. It pulled up on the passenger side of the cruiser, braking maybe ten feet away from her. Even before it stopped, even before the garage door, having reached its apex with a clang, started to rumble closed again, she had recognized the men in the front seat. Iacono was driving. Beside him, in the passenger seat, was the man standing with Uncle Nicco in the pictures.

Chapter
19

Mick’s heart jackhammered. Her breathing suspended. Her mouth went dry. A sideways glance confirmed it: Favara was still holding the pictures, partly crumpled in his fist. God in heaven, if the guy with Iacono saw them, saw his own prominent placement in them—and she would have to have been the luckiest person on the planet for him not to—she was going to die. Jason was going to die. Probably right there and then.

Of course Favara was going to hand the pictures over. He was on Uncle Nicco’s payroll. Her only possible hope was that Favara might not identify the new arrival as one of the men in the picture, and thus see no need to pass them on to him. He’d only glimpsed the pictures briefly, after all.

But even if he didn’t recognize the guy, he would probably hand the pictures over anyway because Uncle Nicco was in them.

If not to this guy, then to Uncle Nicco himself, who was almost certainly in the backseat of the SUV.

Mick experienced a sudden, acute attack of vertigo and had to lean against the cruiser to steady herself.

The SUV’s engine shut off. The doors opened. The two men in front got out.

It was now six armed individuals to one unarmed one—or two, again depending on the state Jason was in. The odds made her want to puke. A quick glance located Friedman. Instead of getting Jason out of the car, he’d
stopped on the other side of the cruiser’s hood to watch what was going on.

Which meant the odds remained six to one.

There was nothing to do but deal. She took a deep breath and straightened away from the cruiser. The time was at hand: fight or die. And she wasn’t about to just give up and die.

Focus,
she ordered herself fiercely.
First things first: I need to get the handcuffs off.

“About damn time,” Mick greeted Iacono as he walked toward her, operating on the theory that the only way to play this was aggressive. What she was aiming for was to behave just as she would have if she’d never seen the pictures and Jason really had kidnapped her. As the head of Uncle Nicco’s everyday security staff, Iacono was someone who’d been on the periphery of her world for years. Not a friend, but someone she knew. “You want to get over here and get these cuffs off me? I mean, I assume
you’ve
got the authority, right?”

Despite her brave front, Mick practically vibrated with tension as she watched the men approach—and waited for the SUV’s back door to open, too, and Uncle Nicco to step out.

It didn’t happen. No one else got out of the SUV. Mick felt the tiniest lessening of tension as she realized that Uncle Nicco wasn’t present—yet. But there were still the damn pictures to deal with, as well as one of the men they incriminated in the flesh. She prayed Favara would forget that he was holding them.

“Boss ain’t happy with you,” Iacono said. “Come to that, I ain’t happy with you.”

Stopping just a few feet in front of her, Iacono fixed her with a hard stare. In his early forties, he was tall and thin, with a weathered, but still good-looking, face and long black hair slicked back to curl up around the collar of his gray wool car coat. When they were teens, Angie had thought he was kind of hot. Mick hadn’t. As she’d told Angie
at the time, old greasers weren’t her type. The man with him—the man from the pictures—stopped beside him, his gaze just touching on Mick before assessing the area, as if in those few seconds he would memorize everyone and everything in it. Looking a few years older than Iacono, he exuded menace. At least, Mick thought, he did to her, but perhaps some of that was due to her guilty knowledge of what was in the pictures Favara still clutched just about an arm’s length away. This guy’s eyes were brown and cold. His mouth was thin and tight. In between was a long blade of a nose. A beefy man maybe six feet tall, he wore a suit and tie beneath a long black overcoat. A salt-and-pepper pompadour made his Mediterranean complexion look even darker.

Knowing what she knew, just being in his presence made her stomach cramp. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Otis’s face had gone utterly white. Had he recognized the guy from the pictures, too? Or was he just getting freaked out by the atmosphere, which she couldn’t have been the only one to think crackled with peril?

“Uncle Nicco’s not going to be happy with a lot of people when I tell him what’s been happening here,” she told Iacono with what she considered a praiseworthy assumption of assurance. “Including you. And just for the record, I don’t give a crap who you’re not happy with. Uncle Nicco hired me to guard the house. I did my job. Now I want these handcuffs off. For starters.”

“We found two of our guys in the woods tied to trees. Both of them say you did it and you’re in cahoots with the robbers,” Iacono said.

“They’re lying.” Her denial was fierce. Probably, she thought as soon as she said it, she should have tried to spin a story about why she had pretended to be working with the robber (singular) when she really hadn’t been (which actually had the advantage of being kind of/sort of true), but she was so terrified by what was coming that she could hardly think straight.

“Now why would they do that?”

She was so on edge that she was even starting to find Iacono’s usual fishy stare unnerving.

“How would I know?”

Iacono smiled at her. It was, she thought, a wolfish smile. “Guess we’ll have to let the boss sort it out. He’s back in town. Pissed because
somebody
ruined his holiday. You’re coming with us to see him.” Taking hold of her arm, he looked at Favara, while Mick, momentarily left speechless, felt her blood run cold. “Where’s the money?”

“In the suitcase.” Favara nodded toward where it still rested on the hood of the cruiser. “Half a million, supposed to be.”

“That’s a million short.”

Favara shrugged. “We’re working on it. Your cop friend there won’t talk.”

Battling past the mind-fogging effects of rising terror, Mick found her tongue. “The only person I’m talking to is Uncle Nicco.”

“You’re getting ready to get the chance,” Iacono promised before his attention shifted back to Favara. “You count what’s there?”

“Just getting ready to,” Favara said. He was fanning the pictures back and forth kind of absently now, and Mick felt a fresh spike of panic as she realized that instead of the white backside of the paper being uppermost, the images themselves were visible. The way he was holding them made it difficult to tell what they were, but not, she thought, impossible. So even if Favara did forget about them, it was entirely possible that overcoat guy would spot them anyway.

Her heart pounded. Dread formed a hard knot in her chest.

“We’ll count it when we get where we’re going. Put it in the SUV,” Iacono directed Otis, who nodded and moved away to do as he was told.

“You want me to go on and get the guy out?” Friedman asked from the other side of the cruiser. Mick didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry at the idea that Jason might be joining their little party. The idea
of having him where she could see him, of knowing he was there and she wasn’t alone and he had her back, was tremendously comforting. On the other hand, the fact that she’d neither seen nor heard anything out of him boded poorly for the state he was in. Whatever happened, she couldn’t just leave him behind, but she didn’t know whether or not she was going to be able to save him. Hell, she thought despairingly, she didn’t know whether or not she was going to be able to save herself.

Think.

“Yeah,” Iacono replied. With a nod at his partner to join him, Friedman headed on around the cruiser to get Jason. Iacono’s glance flicked toward Favara. “Find out where the rest of the money is. Then deal with him.”

“Will do.” Favara’s tone made it clear that he was looking forward to it. Knowing that Jason faced being tortured until he talked and then executed, and that her fate might well be something similar, Mick felt her clasped palms grow damp.

“Come on,” Iacono said to Mick, tightening his grip on her arm. “Let’s go see the boss.”

Once she got in that car she had no chance of helping Jason, and her own prospects for survival grew even dimmer.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she improvised desperately, with the object of getting one of them off by himself, which would happen if someone had to take her to the bathroom. Even handcuffed, one on one she had a chance of getting away from Iacono—or Otis. Or any of them. “Bad.”

Iacono frowned down at her, impatience coupled with a flicker of purely masculine unease in his eyes. Before he could reply, though, Favara fanned the pictures out again and looked down at them as if he’d forgotten all about them until that moment.

“Hey,” Favara said as Mick’s heart catapulted into her throat. Every tiny hair on her body stood upright. “You probably ought to give these to the boss.”
Favara handed the pictures to Iacono, and her breathing suspended. Favara’s gaze flicked over Mick. “I don’t know where she got them, but I found them in her coat pocket. I can tell you, what’s in here is nothing that needs to be in the wind.”

“Oh yeah?” Iacono glanced down at the pictures, a purely casual gesture. Mick could feel it as he took in what they showed, who was in them. His eyes widened, and he went suddenly completely still, except for his hand, which tightened hard on her arm. His expression seemed to freeze. His head came up, swiveled toward overcoat man beside him. Mick went cold all over. She could hear her pulse roaring in her ears. “Yo, Rossi, take a look at this.”

The floor seemed to tilt beneath Mick’s feet as Rossi—overcoat guy—took the pictures and glanced down at them. Her heartbeat, her breathing, every single thing in and around her seemed to slow way down in this moment, which felt like it was stretching out into eternity. The others were talking, but their words came so slowly they made no sense. The very dust motes floating in the air suspended in space. On the opposite side of the cruiser, Friedman and his partner had reached the rear passenger door behind which Jason presumably was located. Friedman was in the act of opening it. His movements registered on her as if she’d been viewing them from underwater. Having retrieved the suitcase from the cruiser’s hood, Otis was halfway to the SUV. At Iacono’s words, he glanced back over his shoulder. To Mick, his action and the suddenly frightened expression that accompanied it occurred in fits and starts, like a stop motion film. Standing no more than a few feet in front of her, Favara was just beginning to frown when her attention shifted back to Rossi, who whistled under his breath.

Rossi’s eyes came up. He and Iacono exchanged glances. Rossi nodded, a quick, curt nod.

Oh, no.
Terror rose like bile in Mick’s throat. The sudden tension vibrating in the air felt as tangible as an electric current.