Sleepwalker by Karen Robards Page B

the ones she and both thieves had been fleeing.
    “Stop them,” Snider screamed. Tall and thin, with a watch cap pulled down over his head to his eyebrows, he snapped his gun into firing position as he ran. “Iacono said hold them. He’s on his way!”
    Behind him, Petrino’s eyes locked with hers as he, too, ran with his weapon at the ready.
    “Stay back,” the thief yelled, dragging her farther along the path. Just a short distance more and …
    “Yo, look out, he’s got Mick,” Otis shouted at the newcomers, as if they couldn’t see that for themselves.
    “I’ll kill her,” the thief roared, and Mick was once again supremely conscious of the gun held to her head.
    Snider slid to a halt. Petrino had already frozen in place a few paces back. Weapons at the ready, they looked from Mick and the thief to the gang of their colleagues, clearly undecided.
    “He’s got Mick,” Petrino repeated, staring at them. Petrino was one of the reasons Mick hadn’t called the security staff for backup in the first place. Good-looking if you liked guys who looked like they belonged on Jersey Shore, he’d been coming on to her for years. The fact that she’d been more or less serious with Nate for the last six months hadn’t even slowed him down.
    “I’ll let her go when I’m out of here,” the thief yelled, picking up on what she’d told him earlier. He was already in the act of dragging her around the corner of the pool house. As she was moving backward, she didn’t have a view of where they were going. But she knew the property well: to her right were the tennis courts, and all the way around behind the pool house were an overflow parking area and a service driveway. She presumed the parking area and driveway were his goal, as the sidewalkthey were on led directly there. Hopefully the getaway vehicle—she was assuming there was a getaway vehicle—waited there.
    “Hurt her and—” Petrino’s threat, uttered as Mick was pulled around the corner of the pool house out of the guys’ sight, was drowned out by a sudden explosion of gunfire that made Mick jump and sent her heart leaping into her throat.
    Crack. Crack. Crack. Shots fired in rapid succession were accompanied by shouts and a flurry of movement. But they didn’t come from Otis’s crew, or from Snider and Petrino. They came from the opposite direction.
    “Sonuvabitch,” the thief said, stopping dead as Mick, eyes swiveling toward the sounds, sucked in air. The suitcase dropped with a thud, but this time neither of them paid the least attention. The firefight, because that’s what it obviously was, was taking place behind the pool house, where the getaway vehicle should have presumably been waiting. Blocked from their view by the pool house’s marble wall and yet another eight-foot-tall hedge, the action was impossible to see.
    “Halt!”
    “Shoot ’em!”
    “They’re getting away!”
    The shouts from behind the pool house were punctuated by squealing tires and more gunshots.
    “Fuck. That’s it. The van’s gone,” the thief said.
    The arm around her neck slackened noticeably. Mick could almost read his thoughts, could almost feel the calculations running through his brain. The quickening of his breathing, coupled with his sudden, turned-to-stone stillness, provided confirmation of the obvious: his escape plan had just been blown to hell. Mick thought she had a fairly good handle on what had happened: Iacono and crew had arrived via the property’s second and only other entrance besides the main one, surprising the getaway vehicle. In consequence, the thief’s ride out hadjust left without him—and her. Dodging bullets and peeling rubber all the way.
    He now found himself, literally, left out in the cold. The problem with that was, so was she.
    And the guys with the guns were closing in.
    “Come on!” It was Otis’s voice, sounding nearer than ever and breathless. He was running, Mick realized. Her stomach knotted as she heard and