Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  The 15 at San Bernardino ran parallel to, and very close to— eventually crossing—the San Andreas Fault. Lucas had read in a magazine article that if the Fault slipped a disk, the 15 would wind up in the bottom of a canyon. Two months later, the story said, there’d be tumbleweeds blowing down a Las Vegas Strip that was cut off from the Los Angeles high rollers.

  He didn’t necessarily believe that, because there was always the 405, but the 405 also crossed the Fault, so it might also be discombobulated by the Big One.

  As a dedicated resident of Minnesota, he didn’t much care about all of that as long as the Big One didn’t pop open the earth as he was driving over the Fault.

  Rae had ridden with Bob for the first part of the trip, but switched over to ride with Lucas at Victorville because Lucas wanted to talk through some ideas and to make some phone calls, which he didn’t want to do while he was driving.

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRST CALL went to Investigative Services Division on the Las Vegas Metro Police. Rae got through to the relevant lieutenant, identified herself, and asked for help on recent home invasions in the Vegas area and for DMV auto transfers for any Cadillac Escalade or Ford F-150 around the first of June. The cop said he’d get the information and an investigator named Bart Mallow would meet them at the snack bar at the Bellagio. “Call when you get close. I’ll give you his direct line.”

  They made it into Vegas, with a couple of stops, before four o’clock on an afternoon so hot that the waves of heat coming off the concrete made the Louisiana waves look like amateurs. They turned into the Bellagio, past a shirtless man wearing a red Speedo, red-striped toe socks, and lipstick, with glitter sprinkled on his cheeks and a plastic olive wreath atop his purple hair; he was rocking out to the street music. Three seminude fat women with glittery stars pasted on their nipples were digging his act.

  As they checked into the hotel, Bob said, “Guess what they got over in the Caesars shopping mall?”

  “Does it have something to do with food?” Rae asked.

  “A Cheesecake Factory. We never got to go to the one in Marina del Rey.”

  “Tomorrow maybe,” Lucas said, “though I can already hear my arteries seizing up. Let’s find this snack bar place and see what Mallow has to say for himself.”

  * * *

  —

  MALLOW WAS a fortyish fireplug, something like Bob, but with more bounce and less muscle. He wore his hair in a neatly oiled blond flattop and had a nose that had been broken a few times. He had a white bandage on one side of it, sticking out like a chicken’s beak. “Mohs surgery for one of those cancer dealies. My looks are gone,” he said, as they introduced themselves.

  “This’s gotta be ground zero for skin cancer,” Bob said. “I think I caught some on the drive up here.”

  “You’re right, it is,” Mallow said. “On the other hand, I don’t get frostbite anymore. I was raised up in Rochester, New York.”

  “Fair trade,” Rae said. And, “You got anything for us?”

  Mallow nodded. “I do. If you want to get something to eat . . .”

  They went through the line, for burgers and fries and pizza and Cokes, and settled back down to look at Mallow’s paper.

  “I looked you up on the internet and saw that stuff about the fight back in May.” He looked at Lucas. “You seem to be doing okay.”

  “I am now. Felt bad at the time.”

  “Lucky you’re not completely dead,” Mallow said. “I got shot once, but it was a .22. Got hit in the foot. Not life-threatening, or anything, but it hurt like hell for a year. And still hurts sometimes . . . Anyway, I looked you up, I read all that stuff about the home invasion guys, this Beauchamps and Cole, and the cannibal guy, and I guess there’s some woman running with them, maybe. A month ago, early July, here in Vegas, up at the Kensington Gardens, three guys in masks went into a house at eleven o’clock at night, scared the living shit out of this casino exec and his wife, and got out with a half million in cash and valuables. That doesn’t happen here. We didn’t make the connection with the LA gang until you called this afternoon. They sound like the guys you’re looking for. The descriptions we have fit Beauchamps, Cole, and Deese well enough. The MO is the same as the LA robberies, the battering ram, going after the wife, threatening rape—all that. I talked to your robbery sergeant down in LA, Rocha, about an hour ago, and she agrees. She’s interested. And she says hello, says you’re not as bad a bunch as you might be.”

  “Thank her for that,” Lucas said. “What about the cars?”

  “Yeah. A lot of cars go through here, and there were a couple of dozen used F-150s re-registered around the first of June. Most popular single vehicle in America. Three Escalades, which wasn’t so much of a problem, so I checked those and none of them sounds likely. I talked to all the sellers and they were all legitimately registered here in Nevada.”

  “This is good stuff, Bart,” Lucas said. “Confirms what we thought: they’re here.”

  “We’d love to catch them—we don’t like people messing with casino execs,” Mallow said. “I’ll give you any help I can.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY TALKED for a while longer, and Mallow left them with the paper on the home invasion. Lucas told Mallow that he might want to talk to the victims and Mallow said he would fix it. “It’s clear that they had been researched and watched, but they never felt a thing, never had a clue that somebody was watching them,” Mallow said.

  When Mallow was gone, Lucas, Bob, and Rae went up to their rooms, changed into cargo shorts and loose short-sleeved shirts, to cover their pistols. Lucas hadn’t been able to avoid the shorts because of all the crap cops carry around in them, like badge cases and extra magazines. He checked himself in the full-length mirror before he left the room and shook his head. He didn’t often see his knees in the sunshine. Not his look.

  They met in the lobby, walked through a mass of slot machines and up and down some escalators and stairs and out into the incredible heat and into the front of Caesars. The Forum shopping mall was on the far side of what looked like two hundred yards of slot machines, most of them unoccupied, and Bob said, “I could drop ten bucks while we’re here. Maybe twelve.”

  “Don’t burn out your bank account all at once,” Rae said. To Lucas: “Your legs are so white, they’re transparent. Look at that, Bob. You can see right through them.”

  “Gimme a break,” Lucas said. “I hate shorts. I feel like a fuckin’ golfer.”

  They were coming up to the entrance to the Forum when a man in a black suit wearing a brass name tag caught up to them and touched Lucas’s shoulder and said, “Excuse me . . .”

  There were two other men with black suits with him, and the lead man asked, “Law enforcement?”

  Lucas said, “Federal marshals.” And, “I know, we’re wearing shorts, but it’s hot outside.”

  The three men looked like ex–heavy-duty cops of some kind, maybe FBI or ATF, all in shape, with carefully greased-back black hair and bright neckties. They’d spotted the weapons that the marshals were carrying. Lucas, Bob, and Rae took their IDs out of their pockets and the three men checked them. And the leader asked, “Do you have something going on here?”

  “We’re not sure,” Lucas said. “We’re tracking some people who made phone calls from the Forum. We’re checking out the territory.”

  “All right. Be aware of how crowded it is.”

  Lucas smiled and said, “We won’t shoot anyone. Promise.”

  The man didn’t smile back, but said, “Okay . . . Try real hard.”

  Lucas said, “If you give me an email, I’ll send you some mug shots of the people we’re looking for. Maybe you’ve seen them.”

  “What’d they do?”

  “Hard-core stickup guys,” Bob said. “Part of a gang that shot a couple cops in LA last May. Home invasion. T
hey probably took down a casino exec from Cyril’s, and the guy’s wife, here in Vegas a few weeks ago.”

  “Toni and Cal? The night robbery?”

  “That’s the one,” Lucas said.

  “That was ugly,” the lead man said. “I heard Toni is still messed up about it. Hope you get them . . . though it took you a while to get here.”

  “Yeah, well, I was one of the guys they shot,” Lucas said.

  The security men glanced at one another, and the leader said, “Ouch,” and another one said, “Bet that smarted,” and the leader took a card from his pocket and wrote an email address on the back.

  “Send me those mug shots. I’ll have all our security personnel look around.”

  Lucas nodded and handed a card of his own to him. “Call me about anything.”

  * * *

  —

  “GOOD SECURITY,” Rae said, as they moved on.

  “You know how you can tell they’re not ex-marshals?” Bob asked. “They’re too skinny.”

  “Keen observation,” Lucas said.

  “Bunch of sissies,” Bob muttered.

  They walked into the Forum, an indoor shopping center with domed ceilings painted blue, orange, and white to look like a partly cloudy evening sky in the desert. The various hallways were punctuated by intersections that featured oversized tableaus of fake Roman sculpture—gods, goddesses, emperors, gladiators.

  “Man, Roman women had really great tits,” Bob said, taking them in. “I mean ‘breasts.’”

  Rae: “You know why? They all died when they were twenty-six.”

  “I’m not saying this place is cheesy . . .” Lucas said.

  “I’ll say it,” Rae said. “It’s cheesy. But not uninteresting. It’s like its own art form. Vegas cheddar. I kinda like it. Remind me to write something about it and use the phrase ‘Vegas cheddar.’ It’s both accurate and snarky.”

  A security guard went rolling by on a Segway; another wandered past, wearing an old-fashioned brimmed hat, like the Stetson Open Road hats once worn by the Texas Highway Patrol. He eye-checked the three of them, nodded, and moved on. A few minutes later, another one went past. And then another.

  Rae said, “They must not like shoplifters.”

  “I get that impression,” Lucas said.

  From where they were standing, Lucas could see the shops: Dior, Zegna, Armani, Tiffany, Louis Vuitton, Ferragamo, Versace, Cartier. Dozens of people were gawking at a fountain like they’d never seen water before, some of them stopping to take selfies with it as the backdrop.

  “Fountain makes me want to pee,” Bob said.

  “I’m not sure you’re the demographic the designers were looking for,” Rae said.

  Lucas said, “You know what? Walking around here won’t get us anywhere. Too many people. Even if they were here, we wouldn’t see them.”

  “We could break up, make a sweep,” Rae said.

  “We could try that,” Lucas said. “Give it a half hour.”

  * * *

  —

  AS THEY WERE doing that, one of the security guards took a slip of paper out of his wallet, called the number written on it, and said, “You asked me to look for a face. He walked past me just now.”

  “Is he staying there?” A woman’s voice, which he hadn’t expected.

  “I don’t know,” the guard said. “I’m just standing here like I’m looking for shoplifters. He was shopping, I think, so he could be staying anywhere.”

  After a moment of silence, the woman on the other end said, “Probably there, I bet. It’s too hot to be walking outside to get to a shopping center. Not at five o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe at nine or ten.”

  “Dunno. Anyway, I was told there’d be a hundred bucks in it for me, if I remember correctly.”

  “Yes. We’ll catch you the next time we come through.”

  Click.

  The guard had the sudden feeling that the hundred bucks might not be coming through anytime soon. Fuckin’ hoodlums.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WAS IN a Canali store, eying the ties, when his phone burped. A call from Russell Forte in Washington.

  “You’re interrupting my shopping trip,” Lucas said. And, “What time is it? Are you calling from home?”

  “Yeah. I’m watching HBO and eating popcorn. It’s after eight here. You wouldn’t be in the Forum Shops at Caesars, would you?” Forte asked.

  Lucas frowned at his phone. “How’d you know that? You put a tracker on my phone?”

  “No, I got a call from Earl the phone guy. An alert popped up on his screen. Somebody called the phone you’re watching. The call came from the Forum Shops. About six minutes ago.”

  “You mean, like, somebody spotted me?”

  “Or Bob or Rae. But probably you,” Forte said. “After you got shot, your name was in the papers in LA, so they may know who’s looking for them. There are about a million photos of you online, going back twenty years, in Minnesota.”

  “Goddamnit. Where was the phone when it got answered?”

  “Same place it got answered before, near that trailer park. I’ll bet they burn the phone after this call. They could already be moving.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS CALLED Bob and Rae. “Back to the cars. Hurry.”

  He hadn’t seen them because of the crowds in the casinos until they were headed back to the Bellagio. They all got in the Volvo, Rae in the back since she was the only one of them who’d fit there. Bob called up the mapping app on his phone and two minutes later they were out on the boulevard and around the block heading west.

  Not much traffic. Wide streets, flat desert-colored houses with tile roofs. They arrived at the Jacaranda Estates Mobile Home Community fifteen minutes after they ran out of the Forum Shops, and a few minutes more than that since the phone call was made.

  The community was a perfect square, a quarter mile on each side, wrapped by a six-foot-tall concrete wall with flaking white paint. The guardhouse at the entrance was empty.

  A small red arrow-shaped sign on the street opposite the guardhouse said “Manager, 300 Dodgers.” The streets, it turned out, were named after baseball teams. “Dodgers” was the street leading away from the entrance and they followed it to number 300, which turned out to be an aging and thoroughly immobile mobile home surrounded by sunburnt zinnias and marigolds.

  They parked and Lucas led the way to the door; they knocked and a woman in pink hair curlers opened it, looked at them, frowned, and asked, “Who are you?”

  “U.S. Marshals,” Lucas said, showing her his badge.

  “You better come in. It’s so goddamn hot out there, you could boil water on the sidewalk.”

  They crowded into the trailer, which smelled like cream of mushroom soup and Gerber’s baby food—pureed peas, Lucas thought, an odor he wouldn’t easily forget, either going in or coming out of a kid—and the woman said, “Gotta be quiet. I just put the baby down.”

  Lucas showed her mug shots of Deese, Beauchamps, and Cole. After a moment, she tapped the picture of Beauchamps and said, “He used to be here. Over on . . . Astros. 712. Haven’t seen him in a couple of months.”

  “Who’s living there now?”

  “College student. Kelly something. Has a black-and-white dog; you see her walking the dog at night. I tell her, ‘Listen, if you’re at school and the air-conditioning goes out here, the power goes off, that pooch will die in there.’ So then a couple days later she told me she made arrangements with the woman who lives across the way to make sure the dog is okay if there’s a power problem. Nice girl.”

  “Is she related to this guy?” Lucas held up the Beauchamps picture. “A girlfriend, anything like that?”

  “Don’t know, don’t keep track of that kind of thing. But I don’t think so. I believe she rented it f
rom them. This guy”—she nodded at the photo in Lucas’s hand—“told me he was going to Alaska and he didn’t know when he’d be back, exactly. He left me fifteen hundred bucks for repairs and said if it was more than that, I should kick out the renter and lock it up until he did get back.”

  “How do you know she rented it?” Rae asked. “How do you know they’re not related?”

  The woman shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what I think.”

  Lucas said to Bob and Rae, “Let’s go look.”

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  A multi-dented Subaru Outback with lefty bumper sticker—“That’s Ms. Liberal, Pro-Choice, Tree-Hugging, Vegan Hippie Freak to You, Asshole”—was parked outside the target trailer, which showed lights in all the windows even though it wasn’t dark yet. Over the hum of the air-conditioning they could hear Taylor Swift singing “Teardrops on My Guitar.”

  Lucas said, “College student. Not a problem.”

  Bob hooked his arm. “What happened the last time you stuck out your face in front of a house, Lucas? We’ll do this—it’s what we do. You can go around and watch the back. There’ll be a door or fire exit there.”

  Rae had already popped the hatch on the Tahoe and was pulling on a “U.S. Marshal” shirt and a vest. Bob joined her. When they were armored up, Lucas walked to the back of the trailer, where he could see the door, while Rae peeked through the window of the front door, then the window beside it, and then Bob took up a spot at an angle to the door and hid his Glock in his hand behind his hip, ready to go.

  Rae knocked and a moment later the door popped open, and Lucas heard Rae say, “We’re U.S. Marshals. Could you step outside, please?”