Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  “We need all the tactical people copied in on this and that includes Bob and Rae,” Rocha said to Lucas. “You’re not tactical, so you stay behind. Mac isn’t tactical, either, so he stays. Lake is technical, and I’m the boss, so we gotta be there for the meeting. You guys get to sleep in.”

  “I’d like to be involved.”

  “Well, you’ll be here. But not running around in the street—we’ll have ten or twelve guys with rifles and vests and helmets and we don’t need some guy in a suit confusing things. I won’t be out there, I’ll be in a truck with Lake.”

  Lucas gave in. “But I’ll be there as soon as it’s over.”

  “That’s fine. You’re invited.” She patted him on the back and he didn’t like it.

  * * *

  —

  BOB AND RAE went to bed early because they’d be meeting with the SWAT team at the Altadena Sheriff’s Station, which was only a few blocks from the target house, before dawn the next morning. They took the two beds, while Lucas read into the night and sheriff’s deputies watched the target.

  The BMW, and, presumably, Beauchamps, returned to the house at eight, although they didn’t see him, and the Jaguar showed up at ten. The Navigator didn’t return until almost midnight. It was then that Lucas and MacIntosh laid eyes on Nast for the first time. He stood under the garage light, arms akimbo, shaking his head, and, a moment later, rolled the garbage can out to the curb. He went back inside and dropped the door.

  Rocha had gone home to get some sleep but said she’d be up late, and MacIntosh called her: “We got him, Lu. Rae was right on. I got a close-up of his face in the garage light and it’s Nast. We got all three of them in the house. And maybe four, if that BMW was two guys in it like when Bob was trailing it . . .”

  A half hour later, with no more movement at the target, Lucas pulled the cushions off the couches in the family room, threw them on the floor, and stretched out.

  The raid was complicated, he thought as he slipped into sleep. Three different agencies were involved—LA city cops, LA County sheriff’s deputies, and the Marshals Service.

  He, Bob, and Rae had tracked down the LA suspects, who were wanted by the City of Los Angeles and a couple of other jurisdictions, but not by any of the cities covered by the sheriff’s department or by the Marshals Service. The one suspect wanted by the marshals, Clayton Deese, wasn’t wanted by any of the local agencies and might or might not be in the house.

  Whatever the outcome of the raid, the legal entanglements would be intense. Which was why there were about a billion lawyers out there, he supposed . . . It was almost like they deliberately tangled the laws to keep themselves in fees. But, nah. Too cynical. He smiled into the darkness and went to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WAS sleeping soundly when one of the sheriff’s deputies shook him awake. “It’s quarter ’til six, if you want to brush your teeth. They’re saying they’re gonna hit the place about quarter after. It’s already getting light outside.”

  Lucas rolled off the cushions, feeling stiff. Bob and Rae had gone an hour earlier to rodeo with the other agencies at the sheriff’s station. He brushed his teeth, looked at his phone to check the time, decided to shower and shave, and got down to the living room in time to hear Rocha say, on the radio, “Saddle up. You all know what you’re doing. Let’s do it.”

  * * *

  —

  THE SWAT TEAM, including Bob and Rae, would be traveling in several different vehicles and would come at the house both from the front and from the back through the yard of the house behind the target. The team coming in from the front would freeze fifty yards out, where they couldn’t be seen from the target, while the team in the back would cross whatever barriers were between them and the target—most likely, a low fence or a hedge.

  When they were in the backyard, they’d alert the team in front, and designated members would heave flashbangs through the windows believed to be bedrooms at the same instant a battering ram took down the front door.

  Everything would be done silently until the flashbangs went off: no screeching tires, no cops running in the street.

  “These guys do it all the time,” MacIntosh said. “When they hit it, I’m not going to sit here and watch. I’m going over there.”

  “I think you ought to stay,” Lucas said. “You’re not tactical.”

  “Fuck that,” MacIntosh said. “What are you gonna do?”

  “I’m going,” Lucas said.

  “Attaboy!”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS HAD HAD an interest in poetry since taking a class at the University of Minnesota. The class was taught by an aging professor who was also an avid hockey fan. Lucas, a first-line defenseman, had been plugged into her class to make sure his grade point average stayed high enough to keep him on the ice. As it happened, he got an A. Poetry, he thought, was a hell of a lot more interesting than Minnesota history, which was also taught by a hockey fan and had been the other option.

  In any case, when the SWAT team came creeping in, he thought momentarily of Carl Sandburg’s “The fog comes on little cat feet . . .”

  The SWAT vehicles had stopped well down the street, and the armored cops, in their green tactical uniforms and helmets, were nearly invisible in the early-morning light against the heavy foliage as they closed in on the target house.

  “I’m going out the back,” MacIntosh whispered, even though they were still inside the surveillance house with the doors and windows closed.

  “Don’t freak anyone out,” Lucas said. “Stay clear and let them work.”

  “Got it,” MacIntosh said. “You coming?”

  “Right ahead of you,” Lucas said, heading for the door.

  They went out the back door and down the side of the house, along the hedge Lucas and Bob had cut the holes in. Looking through one of the holes, Lucas saw the SWAT guys settling in at the neighboring houses. And then, at some command they couldn’t hear, two cops suddenly ran onto the lawn of the target house.

  “Flashbangs,” MacIntosh muttered.

  It all went to hell in an instant.

  * * *

  —

  A FULLY AUTOMATIC weapon opened up from a corner window of the house, and the two approaching officers fled, one falling, and Lucas called, “Shit, he’s hit,” and there was immediate returned fire from other SWAT team members.

  “It’s a fuckin’ war!” MacIntosh shouted. He’d drawn his weapon and started down the hedge toward the street, and Lucas hooked his arm and said, “The SWATs will only see a man with a gun.”

  MacIntosh hesitated as the machine gun went silent. Fire continued to riddle the front of the house, and the man who’d gone down, and who Lucas thought had been hit, got to his hands and knees and scrambled off the lawn, apparently unhurt. Then shooting erupted at the back, and then there was more shooting from the front of the house, the muzzle flashes blinking from one window and then the next, a pistol pecking away at the hedges where the SWAT team was digging for cover.

  “Fuck it, I’m going,” MacIntosh said, and he scrambled in a deep crouch down the length of the hedge. Though Lucas knew better, he followed. At the end of the hedge, MacIntosh shouted to someone across the street and then ran there, with Lucas behind him, out of sight of the windows of the target.

  A couple of SWAT team members had taken cover behind the six-foot-thick trunk of a camphor tree, and one of them shouted, “Stay the fuck down and out of the way.”

  A SWAT guy dashed in from the side, close enough to put a couple flashbangs through a side window, then a couple more through a back window, and when the flashbangs went off it was like standing next to a lightning bolt.

  Then silence.

  Then somebody called out, “They down?” and other cops were shouting from the back and sides of the house.

  Then R
ocha’s soprano voice shouting, “Everybody sit tight . . . Everybody sit tight . . . Sit tight.”

  One of the SWAT team guys with Lucas and MacIntosh stood up and eased his weapon around the tree, aiming at the front windows. The second guy did the same after a couple of seconds, but around the other side of the tree trunk.

  Lucas couldn’t see anything with the heavily armored cops hanging over him; neither could MacIntosh, who was sitting on his ass with his gun in his hand, who said, “I can’t see a fuckin’ thing.”

  Lucas stood, tentatively, and eased out from behind the SWAT guy to get a look. Laser dots played over the side of the target, focusing on the front door and the windows.

  The SWAT guy said, “They gotta be down. We put five hundred rounds in there and that ain’t no bullshit.”

  MacIntosh said, “Hope none of our guys got hit, that was a fuckin’ machine gun in there.”

  “Probably oughta enter from the back,” Lucas said. “I wouldn’t want to be the one who runs up that driveway.”

  “That ain’t gonna happen,” the SWAT guy said. And, “Who are you anyway?”

  “Marshal,” Lucas said.

  “Pleased to meet you. Bob and Rae seemed like nice folks.”

  “They are,” Lucas said. “That was a hell of a thing there. Hope nobody got hurt.”

  He edged farther out from behind the SWAT guy, trying for a better view.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE BLINK of an eye, the automatic weapon opened up from the nearest window, powdering the camphor tree where they stood. A slug hit Lucas in the chest and he went down. And he heard MacIntosh screaming and felt somebody pulling on his ankles, dragging him farther behind the tree. He was then looking up at the underside of a tree, heard more hundreds of rounds pounding the house, and then everything started going weird, not a lot of pain but somehow a lot of hurt, and he thought, “Hope I’m not dying,” and then, “Maybe I am.”

  Somebody was screaming, “Get it down here, get it rolling, get the fuck over here,” and he felt himself picked up like a rag doll and put on a gurney, which felt comfortable and soft around his head and ears, and then he was in an ambulance and he heard the ambulance tech shouting, “You gotta roll, man, you gotta hurry,” and the siren was going and everything got dimmer, and farther away, and even dimmer.

  Then it all went dark.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  When he thought about it later, the darkness was the worst of it, worse than the pain. Sleep isn’t dark, it’s not black. There’s something in your brain that’s always awake, so when the sabre-toothed tiger comes to the cave, your brain wakes you up and tells you to get the family spear.

  The dark that Lucas fell into wasn’t like that. No part of his brain was awake. Then, at some moments, he floated into the still-living gray sleep state, only to fall back into the dark. Going back down was like dying all over again, every time it happened.

  * * *

  —

  HOT AUGUST NIGHT, streetlights vibrating with humidity rings along Mississippi River Boulevard. Lucas pulled his T-shirt over his head and ran shirtless and sweating for the last two blocks to his house and up the driveway. He wasn’t moving as fast as he had in the spring, before he’d been shot. When he got to the garage door, he bent over, hands on knees, gasping for breath.

  The bullet hole in his chest and the exit wound in his back showed as pink knots of new skin and scar tissue. A wave of nausea swept over him and he gagged, pushed it back, and finally stood up, sweat rolling down his chest.

  His back ached, and maybe always would. The slug had hit him below the collarbone, punched through a corner of his pectoral muscle, knocked a hole in his shoulder blade, clipped the top of a lung, barely missed his deltoid, and exited through something called the infraspinatus.

  He’d bled, Bob told him, like a stuck pig.

  The docs told him it’d be a year before he’d be all the way back. He refused to accept that. And even when Weather pleaded with him to ease up, he couldn’t. He couldn’t because he was afraid of the darkness—the death—that had come over him over and over again.

  And he was afraid of the weakness, that his body was betraying him. When he began going out, to the supermarket, to the drugstore, he sometimes had to put a hand on a shelf to steady himself. That hadn’t happened before. Ever. The docs said the shakiness would go away but it would take some time.

  He suspected he had more gray hair two months after being shot than he’d had before, more lines in his face. He’d always thought that stories of hair turning gray overnight was an old wives’ tale, but he was no longer sure of that.

  * * *

  —

  THE LAST THING he remembered, before waking up in the hospital, wearing a respirator mask and with an arm full of intravenous needles, was the ambulance attendant shouting for the driver to go faster. He’d been taken to a Level 2 trauma center at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena and had spent eleven days there. Bob and Rae arrived a few minutes after he did. His adopted daughter, Letty, a student at Stanford University, had arrived at the hospital at noon, and Weather in the late afternoon.

  When Letty walked in, she put both fists on her hips and said, “You better get well. I’m not putting up with some blanket-covered invalid shit.” He heard her say that, then dropped into a drug-induced hole, remembering it when he came back up.

  A doc told Weather that Lucas had apparently been hit by a full metal jacket round, which left a cleaner wound than a jacketed hollow-point would have. Rae confirmed that a day later, after the shooting site had been worked over, saying, “One of the SWAT guys said some of the hard-core assholes use full metal jackets because they think they’ll punch through vest plates.”

  And that was what Weather talked about. The technical stuff. She cried occasionally, looking at him, even when he was smiling at her, and the rest of the time she went all technical with the docs, looking at videos of the MRIs and other electronic probes and talking SWAT tactics with Rae and how it should have been done.

  Lucas’s back muscles now contained tiny bone splinters that would always be there; a surgeon would do more damage taking them out than if they were left alone. He also had a carbon fiber patch over the hole in his shoulder blade, held in place with screws, to stabilize the bone, which had cracks radiating from the bullet hole. The cracks would eventually heal, but the patch would remain.

  Letty had said, three days after the shooting, “You’ve actually got a hole in your back. I mean, like a hole. I could stick my thumb into it.”

  “Don’t do that,” Lucas said. “It already hurts a lot.”

  By June, with the help of the skin grafts, the hole was gone.

  * * *

  —

  NAST AND A MAN named Randy Vincent had been killed in the raid. Nast had been firing the full-auto .223 that had taken Lucas down. Nast had been riddled with bullets—he’d probably been hit three or four times before he fired the last burst that hit Lucas, and maybe ten times afterward. Vincent, who’d been firing a 9mm pistol, had been hit once in the eye and killed. He was the man who owned the car registered to Jacob Barber.

  The fourth man, who owned the BMW and was the one seen at the breakfast place by Bob, was identified by his fingerprints as John Rogers Cole, who’d done seven years in prison in Nebraska for robbing a credit union.

  He’d gotten a heavier than normal sentence because a pre-sentencing investigation by the Nebraska authorities suggested that he’d probably done at least eight other credit unions in Nebraska and in Kansas. He showed one other arrest in Omaha, when he was eighteen, for peeping. That charge had been nol-prossed and he walked. The file didn’t say whether the charge had been sexual or likely the prelude to a burglary.

  “We should have done more research,” Rae said. She and Bob were sitting next to Lucas’s bed, two days after the fight. �
��These guys had been living there for three years. We thought it was strange that they’d all be in there like a dormitory. They weren’t.”

  “They weren’t?” Lucas’s voice sounded like a rusty gate.

  Bob shook his head. “Nope. They also owned the house behind the one we were watching and they’d planted a double hedge between the two. You couldn’t see it, and we didn’t see it until we’d been there for an hour and had been all over the yard. The two hedges ran parallel to each other, two feet apart, at the edge of the backyard, up a slope to the house behind. You could go from one house to the other without ever being seen. They set it up that way in case there was trouble at one house, they could make it to the other.”

  Rae said, “They couldn’t deal with a full-out raid with cops coming from both front and back, though, so they shot it out. We don’t know for sure when Beauchamps left the front house, but probably the night before. He could have actually snuck back, between the two hedges, while the fight was going on, right past the SWAT guys, but there was a bed in the second house that was apparently his and it had been slept in.”

  “Then why did they all park at the target?” Lucas asked.

  “We’re not sure, but I think I can guess,” Bob said. “The garage at the target house looked like a two-car, but it had been remodeled years ago to take four. We’d already seen that, which made us think that all four guys were there. We’d seen four coming and going in three different cars. The house in back had only a two-car garage. We think Beauchamps and Cole lived there and Nast and Vincent lived at the front house. Then Deese showed up. We have his prints, Deese was definitely there at some point. I think he moved into the back house with his pickup and Cole started parking that BMW at the target house.”