Sleepwalker by Karen Robards Page B

of night. Alternatively, there was an open-all-night liquor store about a mile from the Deer Ridge dock that they could walk to if necessary. Even in the early hours of New Year’s Day an establishment like that should be open, and they would have a phone she could use. Problem was, once there she’d have to shake the thief to make the call she wanted to make. Well, probably he’d want to use the men’s room, or something, and she could sneak in a call. Or, alternatively, she could end the bullshit, take him down, cuff him, place him under arrest, and then make the call. She wasn’t eager to revisit the fight they’d had before, but she would if she had to. Then she remembered something: she had the next best thing to a phone right at her fingertips. Looking at it, she smiled.
    Keeping one eye on the water as she tried to calculate how much farther it was to Deer Ridge Park, Mick reached out to the ship-to-shore radio on the console in front of her and turned it on. The resulting loud burst of static made her grimace: keeping this on the down-low until it was done was imperative. Trying to remember the frequencyof the channel the police monitored, she twirled the dial to silence the static and picked up the microphone.
    And had it promptly snatched from her hand.
    Glancing around, she met the thief’s eyes.
    “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

Chapter
7
    “Checking the radio to see if there’s anything about the
Playtime
out there on the airwaves,” Mick lied, so promptly and plausibly that she impressed herself.
    He looked at her for a moment. His expression was hard to read in the dark, but she got the impression he was less than convinced.
    “Good idea.” His tone was bland. He glanced down at the microphone he now held. The curly gray cord that attached it to the radio stretched past Mick’s shoulder. “You planning to talk to somebody?”
    She shrugged. “Picking up the microphone is kind of automatic when you use the radio.” To demonstrate, she turned the dial again, honing in on some harmless chatter between, she gleaned from the tenor of the conversation, two barge crews. “Under different circumstances, I might ask them if they could recommend a good place to get pizza, for instance.”
    “See, the thing is, I have to assume that whoever is looking for us is going to be monitoring radio transmissions coming off the lake. In their place, I would be.”
    “You know what? You’re probably right,” Mick said, sounding so disingenuous that she mentally applauded herself.
    “Never thought of that?” His inquiry was affable in the extreme. The next moment he reached past her and yanked the radio off the console. Then, as her jaw dropped in surprise, he walked to the rail and dropped the radio overboard.
    “What the hell was
that
?” Mick demanded, incensed over the sound of the splash as her best link to her department sank into the deep. She was so irate that she practically came off her seat. Not that decking him would have brought the radio back, but she was tempted.
    “Watch the water.” His command was sharp: she guessed the encounter with the log remained fresh in his mind. Then his voice turned bland again as he added, “Anyway, I figure the thing probably had a tracking device built into it. You know, like a cell phone or a car GPS.”
    “That radio was as old as the boat!”
    “Was it? Well, then, my bad.” He retraced his steps until he was standing beside her, then smiled gently down at her. “So who were you planning to call?”
    Mick met his gaze, which wasn’t nearly as gentle as his smile, head-on, and once again lied through her teeth. The last thing she wanted to do was alert him to the fact that she was going to have a couple of police cruisers waiting for them if she could possibly arrange it. That would clearly make docking where she chose problematic, as he would certainly resist. No point in getting physical unless she had to.
    “Uncle Nicco’s security