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move, he pushed her toward the safe.
“Go.”
    “If that’s true—” She took a quick breath and turned those big brown eyes on him. “Do you have any idea what you’ve stumbled into here?” Her shaken-sounding question was fierce.
    “Shut up and keep moving.” The truth was, he didn’t want to think about it. He shoved her past the damning pictures even as they lodged themselves indelibly in his brain. An uneasy feeling already churned in his gut. Jesus H. Christ. Marino was involved in the death of Edward Lightfoot? This was knowledge he didn’t want to have. Dangerous knowledge. The kind of knowledge that got people killed.
    And the fact that he possibly had that knowledge had been recorded for posterity by that thrice-damned security camera, and sooner or later somebody was going to find the footage.
    Shit
.
    “Good to go,” Jelly announced to the snap of a suitcase lock. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
    Thud. Crash.
    The sounds came from about half a house away—which, considering the size of the house, was fortunately a fairly good distance. Freezing on the threshold of the safe, his hand tightening on the cop’s arm, Jason felt his pulse quicken. The goons in the guardhouse not only weren’t missing in action but they had also arrived faster than he’d expected. Luckily, they didn’t have the smarts to try to sneak up on them. Instead they had obviously burst in through the front door and were charging this way at full throttle.
    Time had officially run out.
    “Grab that other suitcase,” Jason ordered Jelly. The distant, muffled shouts and the pounding of approaching feet had Jelly hauling the one he’d just filled toward the door. Jelly shot Jason a look. Jason said, “Do it.
Go
.
”
    With the sound of pursuit closing in, Jelly wasn’t arguing. Detouringto snatch up the second case, bearing up manfully under what was pretty much his own weight, Jelly sprinted away.
    “You don’t want to shoot her, knock her out,” Jelly threw over his shoulder as he ran out the door. “Just do it and come on.”
    Then he was gone.
    “Hand me my bag and get that one. Quick.” All too aware that the difference between escape and capture was now down to about a minute or less, Jason gave the cop a meant-to-be-intimidating, don’t-mess-with-me look. She glared balefully back. He’d swung her around, had her by the arm with her gun pointed at her, and still she didn’t appear particularly impressed. But to his surprise she didn’t give him grief, instead picking up first his tool bag, which she thrust at him, and then the suitcase. Clearly she found it heavy: her mouth tightened, and the muscles in her arm and shoulder tensed. But he couldn’t carry it and take her with him, too, and suddenly taking her with him seemed the right thing to do. A hostage in the hand was worth two in the safe, and all that. And he was starting to have the feeling that they might need a hostage.
    Besides, she’d seen those pictures, too.
    “
Move
. Down the hall and to the left. Fast.”
    With his tool bag now slung over his shoulder, he hauled her, she hauled the suitcase, and in an awkward tandem run they followed Jelly along the preplanned escape route.
    “You call the cops?” The shout came from one of their pursuers. They weren’t in sight yet—Marino’s faux Greek Revival mansion was
huge
—but they were close enough now that Jason could understand the words they were yelling at each other. If he hadn’t gone into ice-cold mode, as he naturally did when situations got hairy, such proximity would have gotten his nerves jumping.
    “Hell, no! No cops! Don’t you know nothing?”
    “Yeah, but … Mick’s a cop.”
    “Mick don’t count. I called Iacono, okay?”
    “Faster.”
Jason’s fingers tightened around her arm. He didn’t know who Mick or Iacono were, but then, he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to know anything at all. All he wanted was to get out of there with his money. Slip-sliding a