Sleepwalker (30 page)

Rossi folded the pictures very deliberately and stuck them in his overcoat pocket. No longer breathing, Mick was still tracking the progress of the hand that had been holding the pictures when it emerged, gripping a Smith and Wesson automatic instead.

Snapping it up, no hesitation at all, Rossi shot Favara point-blank in the face. Reeling with disbelief, Mick registered the flash of orange exploding from the muzzle and smelled the burning scent of gunpowder and felt her heart slam into her rib cage like it was trying to escape from her chest all in the same terrible instant.

Bang.
Even before the sound hit her eardrums, Iacono had dropped her arm.

Then,
bang
again: the double tap.

In the microsecond that it took for Favara’s brain to explode out the back of his head, Mick realized that the only reason Iacono would have let her go was to reach for his own weapon. To use on her? Cold sweat broke over her in a wave. Her life passed before her eyes.
I’m going to die, right here, right now
was the thought that ran with crystal clarity through her mind. It was followed by a fast, determined,
No!
Then,
God
,
help me, please.

Her eyes flashed to her Glock, still lying with Jason’s Sig on the cruiser’s hood. With her hands cuffed behind her, it might as well have been on Mars.

Bang.

Hit the dirt.
Instinct kicked in. She dropped like a rock.

“What the hell?” someone—she thought it was Friedman—yelled over a scream that reverberated like a siren off the metal walls. It was loud and shrill enough to penetrate even the roaring in her ears.

Expecting to catch a bullet at any instant, Mick saw that Iacono had his weapon in hand even as she fell toward the ground. In the whisker of time that it took her to hit, all hell broke loose. Shouts and curses and scuffling movements and running footsteps underlay more gunfire
and that nerve-shattering scream. Favara’s body hadn’t even hit the floor before Rossi shot Otis, who clearly saw it coming. Otis dropped the suitcase to throw up a protective arm and backpedal, not that it did him any good. To the sound of more bullets exploding to her left—Iacono had his weapon out and was firing, too, his target being the cops on the other side of the cruiser, who were shooting back, she thought—Mick watched Otis’s eyes widen and his mouth open in a cry that never fully emerged. Then she smacked down onto the concrete, hard because with her hands cuffed she had no way to buffer her landing. The screaming cut off abruptly. Mick only realized that the sound had been tearing out of her own throat when it stopped because she crash-landed and had no more breath. For a flash-frozen moment she was aware of little more than her own pain. With the wind semi-knocked out of her, grunting from the agony that shot through her already injured shoulder, Mick watched half-dazed as a bullet caught Otis dead between the eyes, instant black dot, and he folded downward like a collapsed house of cards.

My God, it’s a massacre. They’re killing everybody.

Adrenaline blew through her veins. A lightning glance around showed her that Otis and Favara were dead; their bodies lay in rapidly growing pools of bright scarlet blood. She couldn’t really see Friedman and his partner because the cruiser was in the way, but they were yelling and bullets were whizzing past in both directions overhead. Looking underneath the vehicle, she saw feet dancing around each other on its other side: two sets of cop shoes and a pair of boots.

The sight of the boots electrified her: Jason!

He was alive, on his feet, on the move.

She screamed his name.

The instant she did she heard a
thud
like a fist connecting with flesh and saw Friedman fall heavily to his knees on the other side of the cruiser.

“Mick!” Jason bellowed. “Where the hell are you?”

“Here,” Mick cried back. Then something grabbed her hair.

Her head was yanked painfully back. Eyes watering, she found herself looking up, staring into the mouth of a snub-nosed Smith and Wesson aimed right between her eyes. Iacono was holding it. He had his fist bunched in her hair. He was going to shoot her in the face …

No. No!

Her heart raced. Her pulse pounded. A vinegary taste rose in her mouth. She recognized it as mortal fear.

I don’t want to die,
a voice shrieked inside her head even as the fear-induced fog left her brain in this moment of extremis and her thought processes suddenly became icy clear.

“Move,” Iacono roared, hauling on her hair, trying to pull her to her feet. Mick didn’t dare openly resist, not with a gun in her face, but she floundered on her stomach, as if getting to her feet with her hands cuffed behind her back was impossibly hard.
So maybe he’s not going to kill me right here. Maybe he’s still going to take me to Uncle Nicco, and
then
somebody will kill me
was the thought that flashed through her mind while Iacono yelled over her head, about whom she couldn’t be sure, although he was certainly addressing Rossi, “Shoot him!”

Rossi snapped off a couple of rounds, aiming across the roof of the cruiser. The booms bounced off her eardrums, made them throb. From the other side of the car someone screamed, obviously hit.
Jason?
she wondered frantically, while Rossi hunkered down not far away, beside the cruiser’s front fender.

“Move,”
Iacono repeated, yanking on her hair so hard that it hurt her neck. The gun aimed at her face quivered terrifyingly.

“You don’t want to shoot a cop, Iacono,” she warned. Her suddenly dry mouth made it hard to get the words out. Jittery darts of panic shot through her veins like speed.

Iacono’s mouth twisted. “Remember those assholes over there?”
He gave a jerk of his head to indicate the other side of the cruiser. “I just did.”

“Forget it. Finish her,” Rossi shouted over his shoulder.

“The boss …”

“Do it!”

Galvanized, Mick moved, all right, but not in the way Iacono intended. Unable to free her hair from his hold, taking advantage of the split second in which Iacono’s eyes flashed toward Rossi, she used that point as a fulcrum for a ground-based, full-body spin. Iacono’s eyes slashed back toward her just as her legs slammed into his ankles.

“Bitch!” Iacono screamed, and went down like an oak.

His gun banged. The bullet shattered the floor inches from her face. Her ears rang at the force of the sound. Blowback concrete splinters seared her left cheek. She was still crying out in pain when he hit the floor so hard that he lost his grip on his gun, which skittered next to Mick. She would have snatched it up and used it to blow him to hell except she couldn’t snatch up anything.

Instead, she kicked it under the cruiser, then rolled that way herself, meaning to take refuge there.

Iacono lay flat on his back, groaning. His eyes found her as she moved.

“Rossi! Grab her,” he wheezed, turning with obvious difficulty onto his side.

Rossi jumped between her and the cruiser, snapping off shots over the car’s roof at the same time.

Looking up at him, way, way up, it seemed, she saw that he was careful to keep his head below the roofline of the cruiser, presumably to avoid whoever was returning fire from the other side. His face twisted savagely as he aimed his gun down at her. He meant to shoot to kill. She could read his intention in his eyes.

“No!” she screamed, her muscles bunching for another desperate
kick, then flinched as she heard a gun bang. But it was Rossi who was hit, Rossi who dropped his gun and reached up to claw at his chest and stagger backward, Rossi who cried out in pain.

At the same instant Jason darted around the trunk of the cruiser, crouched low, a gun in his hand, having clearly been the one who had just shot Rossi. He looked big and tough and formidable, and she had never been so glad to see anybody in her life.

Chapter
20

“Mick!”

“Jason!” As he raced toward her, she rolled onto her knees. Iacono was already diving for Rossi’s dropped gun. She couldn’t point, but she gestured frantically with her head. “Over there! Him! Shoot him! Quick!”

“Get up,” Jason yelled to her, gripping his gun and looking toward Iacono as if he meant business but making no move to fire. Seeing her struggle—it really was unexpectedly hard to get from a kneeling position to a standing one without the use of her hands—he hooked his free arm around her waist the moment he reached her. Jerking her upright, he took her with him in a flat-out sprint back the way he had come.

“Perfect timing,” she gasped out as she ran like she expected to take a bullet in the back at any moment, which she did.

“What the hell just happened?”

“The pictures. They saw the pictures.”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“Goddamn bitch,” Iacono roared behind them. Glancing back, Mick saw that he now had Rossi’s dropped gun in his hand. If she’d been able, if she’d had her hands free and her gun on her, she would have turned and shot him dead. But she didn’t.

“Behind us! You need to shoot him
now
!” Mick screamed an alert at Jason, who glanced back, too, but didn’t even slow down. She was once
again referring to Iacono, who had leaped to his feet and was training the gun on them at that very second. Rossi, meanwhile, she saw in the same glance, crouched near Otis’s body with blood oozing through the fingers he had pressed to his chest. Wounded, but not slain.

“Can’t … let them … get away,” Rossi gasped. Jason abruptly pulled her even closer to his side and curved his shoulder and upper body around her as they ran, a protective action that she understood a split second later. A gun spat—Iacono, firing Rossi’s weapon—and Mick cringed instinctively as the bullet ricocheted with a whiny screech off the cruiser’s trunk just inches away. Then, with Jason’s hard-muscled arm still tight around her, they dodged around the back of the cruiser. Bent almost double, they made it all the way around the end of the car even as a deafening fusillade of bullets whizzed overhead, slamming into walls and floor and wooden pallets and God knew what else. A glance as she bolted past them found Friedman and his partner on the ground near the cruiser. Friedman sprawled motionless on his stomach, an oily-looking stain that she knew was blood growing between the shoulder blades of his blue uniform. Badly wounded or dead, she thought. His partner lay on his back, gasping and moving. She couldn’t see where he was hit, but he was clearly alive.

“In the car.”
Jason snatched open the driver’s door as they reached it and practically flung her through the opening even as she leaped inside. Diving headlong for the passenger seat, Mick saw through the window that Rossi was on his feet now, too. He held a weapon, presumably the one Otis had dropped, and was firing at them. Skidding across the slick vinyl like a baseball player sliding for home and crashing sideways into the door when she couldn’t stop in time, feeling Jason bounce into the driver’s seat beside her, Mick felt her stomach clench like a fist with horrible anticipation. An instant later, sure enough, a bullet shattered the passenger window just above her head, and little balls of glass rained down on her like hail.

“Ahh!”
Mick scrunched up in as tight a ball as she could curl herself into as another bullet followed the path of the first. Fortunately she was slender enough that she could fit beneath the edge of the window. She would have covered her head with her arms except her hands were cuffed.

“Stay down!” Slamming the door, ducking as low as possible and jamming the key into the ignition all at the same time, Jason glanced her way as the engine roared to life and he jammed the gear shift into drive. “You hit?”

“No!”

“Your face is bleeding.”

She would have wiped the blood away if she could have. “It’s nothing! Drive!”

“Hang on.” Putting the pedal to the metal, he twisted the wheel hard right. The cruiser torpedoed forward, flinging her back against the seat. His Sig and her Glock, forgotten on the hood, skittered toward the windshield and flew off, useless. Mick felt a spurt of regret at losing her gun, then forgot all about it as she noticed that he gripped the wheel with both hands. She spotted the gun he had been using lying on the seat between them, and her eyes widened.

“You know I can’t shoot, right?” she yelled, peeping over the dashboard just long enough to discover that the car was aimed straight for Iacono and Rossi and closing like a heat-seeking missile. “Remember the handcuffs?”

“I remember.” Seen in profile, his face was a study in grim intent. Clearly he meant to run Iacono and Rossi down. Both were on their feet, holding their ground, weapons up, firing away as the cruiser torpedoed toward them.

“You have a key that unlocks them?”

“Nope.”

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

The windshield exploded. Pellets of safety glass peppered them like shrapnel. Mick yelped and ducked.

“Then I’m out. So grab the damn gun and shoot the fuck back,” she shouted as Jason sent the car hurtling toward Iacono and Rossi like it was the only weapon they had.

“Can’t.”

At the last possible second, Rossi and Iacono leaped out of the way.

“Why not?” Mick screamed, then got thrown from the seat as Jason slammed on the brakes. Shaken from smacking into the dashboard and then sliding partway down into the footwell, Mick was blinking to reorient herself when she heard the driver’s door open.

As her gaze slewed sideways toward the sound, her reaction was pure, unadulterated fear.

Rossi? Iacono? Some other hideous threat?
were the possibilities that reeled through her mind.

She was shocked to see the suitcase crash onto the seat between her and Jason. For a moment, as it tipped onto its side and he slammed the door, reversed, and hit the gas like he meant to shove his foot through the floor, she was too dumbfounded to say anything.

“Are you kidding me?” she yelled at him a split second later, having recovered the power of speech. She chose to stay down where she had fallen as the car rocketed backward and bullets smacked into it. “You stopped for that damn suitcase?”