Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  When they went into Wrights’ house, it had all gone smoothly, like old times. The robbery went well, Deese taking Nast’s place as the frightener, but much of the take was in jewelry that would be hard to sell. They’d talked to their new fence about it and he suggested they not move more than a single piece of the Loloma, or two, each year.

  “That Loloma stuff—it’s all unique, it’s all documented with photographs, quite a bit of it is in books that all the Indian traders will have,” the fence told them. “That’s gonna be tough.” He said that if he bought it, he might eventually make two hundred thousand dollars, but that could take ten years and with serious risk involved. He’d offer them twenty thousand—take it or leave it. After some grumbling, they took it.

  They got ninety thousand for the rest of the jewelry: the diamonds and the pieces made by Belperron. The diamonds were no problem at all—they were excellent, and anonymous, stones. The Belperron would be resold to a fence in France, who’d move it in Europe, but that meant the take was further reduced because there’d be two fences involved.

  The bottom line: the raid was a success but the take, including the cash, amounted to less than forty thousand dollars for each of the men.

  Cole, on his own, lying low in Omaha, might stretch forty thousand dollars out over five or six months, but Deese and Beauchamps, with heavy casino and cocaine expenses, could cover a couple of months at best. Each of them gave Cox, as the driver, two thousand, which she thought was ridiculously stingy. She talked Cole out of another five thousand when they were alone, which meant that he wasn’t covered for more than three or four months. And Cox knew that with her cocaine and casino expenditures the same as Deese’s and Beauchamps’s, she’d be lucky if her money lasted a month.

  * * *

  —

  THEY NEEDED more money but were hesitant to hit another house too soon. Would the marshals and the LA cops hear about the Wright raid and figure out where they were? They waited for any sign that the cops were looking for them but saw nothing.

  They began to relax and to talk about a second raid, one that would get them out of Vegas. There was also the tempting prospect of a huge score—five million—but the information was funky. It involved a gambler named Harrelson.

  And Deese, behind the backs of the others, had spoken to Ricardo Santos and Roger Smith about a payment that would allow him to truly get lost. Smith was at three hundred thousand, Deese wanted a million. Then came the call from Beauchamps’s friend at the trailer park: the marshals had tracked them to Vegas.

  “There’s only one way they could get to the park and that’s by tracking the phones. Either Haar sold us out or the feds are doing something we don’t know about, some high-tech shit. We’ve got to get rid of the phones, like, tonight. We all have to change numbers,” Cole said. “We have to think about going somewhere else.”

  Beauchamps: “Like where?”

  “Miami, Seattle, Boston . . . Well, not Boston, too fuckin’ cold . . . Maybe Houston. Someplace not in California or Nevada,” Cole said. “We should split up. Do one last job, like the Harrelson thing, and retire for a few years. If it’s what Larry thinks it is—five million, all cash—we should be able to do that. I could go to Omaha or Sioux City with my cut, a million and a half, and live there for eight to ten years in style.”

  “I’ll believe the five million figure when I see it. But I sure as hell ain’t going to Sioux City,” Deese said. “I agree that we should split up. I need to get somewhere out of the way and lay low for a long time, like maybe forever. If I get picked up by anybody and they pull my prints, I’m dead.”

  “You gonna need money to do that,” Beauchamps said. “Cole and I can go talk to Larry right now, tonight, and see if Harrelson and his old lady have gotten home.”

  “Gonna be dangerous, Harrelson is. The guy will be tough, he’s gonna have guns, probably a heavy-duty security system,” Deese said. He decided he’d call Santos again that night, maybe come down to eight hundred thousand. That’d have to be his minimum.

  * * *

  —

  DEESE WAS SITTING on a couch in a T-shirt and a pair of Jockey boxer shorts, wrapping a new bandage around his calf. Ten months earlier, he’d been hurt by a man named Howell Paine, but inefficiently, he admitted: there’d been a fight, and Paine had bitten a chunk of meat out of his calf. That had led to his arrest and the chain of events that had led to his secret graveyard and the cannibalized bodies.

  Though the wound was almost a year old, Deese had self-treated it and it had never properly healed. Instead of a skin-covered scar, he had a gnarled reddish-and-bluish lump of flesh that had become infected two or three different times.

  He’d continued to self-treat the wound. A few days after they moved into the house, he’d gone out to the hot tub, where he’d scraped the wound open again on a drain cover. A pocket of pus had drained down his leg, and Beauchamps had told him he needed to go to the emergency room. Deese had resisted, but the wound had smelled bad enough that he’d eventually given in.

  The wound had been opened and cleaned by an on-call surgeon at the medical center and he’d put Deese on antibiotics and told him to change the bandage daily until the new surgical wound had healed.

  “We can handle Harrelson,” Beauchamps told him.

  “That’s what we do,” Cole added. “But first things first. We gotta get rid of all our phones. Now. Tonight.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY GOT RID of the phones.

  Deese wanted to break them up with a hammer, but Cole argued against it. Instead, he and Beauchamps took them to a tough neighborhood beneath the Stratosphere Tower and left them on a concrete-block wall, from where he’d expect them to disappear in a minute or so.

  “Better to have them walk around than to suddenly go quiet. That could pull the feds off our asses, at least for a few days,” he told the others.

  They agreed. “But then what?” Cox asked.

  “Then we go talk to Larry about Harrelson,” Beauchamps said.

  “And we get a whole bunch of new phones,” Cole added

  * * *

  —

  LARRY O’CONNER was a short man with dull-brown hair, a skimpy brown mustache, and a serious potbelly. He dressed in double knits from head to toe because they didn’t need ironing. He and Beauchamps had met years before at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New Orleans. They’d both been sent to AA after convictions on minor burglary charges as part of court deals to avoid serving time. They’d both realized that neither of them was likely to stop drinking or go straight.

  O’Conner had migrated to Las Vegas, where he made a living betting on sports and horse racing but had barely been getting by. Beauchamps had used him to connect with Las Vegas fences and had given him a small cut of the money that came out of those deals. That had led to O’Conner spotting Jim Harrelson, a golf hustler and poker player.

  * * *

  —

  HARRELSON WAS good at gambling, much better than O’Conner. So good, he wasn’t really gambling. He had a golf partner who everybody called Dopey, who carried a 9 golf handicap and could play six strokes better than that when he had to. Dopey, like O’Conner, was a drinker, and one night in a bar had bragged to O’Conner that Harrelson kept five million in cash on hand for his high-stakes poker games with LA whales and for his golf.

  “The buy-in for some of those poker games can be a quarter million just to sit at the table,” Dopey said.

  And he and Harrelson had once taken more than a million dollars off two Phoenix financial guys who thought they were scratch golfers, Dopey told O’Conner, but they’d failed to prove it over a dozen rounds. All the bets were in cash, and Harrelson had fronted the money for their side of the bets.

  “He took a banker’s box of hundred-dollar bills out of the trunk of his car like it was chump change,” Dopey said. “You k
now how much he keeps around? Five million. All the time. Said he wouldn’t want to be caught short.”

  O’Conner filed the information away for possible later use.

  Later had arrived.

  * * *

  —

  THE MORNING AFTER they’d ditched the phones, and with new burners in hand, Beauchamps and Cole found O’Conner in a motel downtown. He’d been drinking for several days but wasn’t too drunk to drive, he said. The night before, he’d gone to Tina’s Wayside and had seen Harrelson’s custom-yellow Porsche Cayenne in the parking lot.

  “They’re back. When he’s here, he usually goes over to Tina’s at night to hang out and figure out who’s in town, where the big game is. His wife doesn’t go with him, it’s business,” O’Conner said. “He usually heads back home by ten o’clock or so, especially in the summer. If you’re gonna play golf in the summer in Vegas, you’ve got to be out there by six or you’ll die.”

  Harrelson lived in an upscale neighborhood south of the airport, O’Conner said. That was also different than the situation in LA. In Beverly Hills, the houses were gated but not the streets. In Vegas, the streets were gated but not the houses—and, in Harrelson’s case, the gates had guards instead of electronic remotes. But there was a simple way around it if Harrelson went home after dark.

  His house backed up to a street that was outside the walls. And the walls were only chest-high and easily climbable. They could follow Harrelson home, and when he went on to the nearest gate Cox could drop them behind his house. They’d cross the wall and wait for Harrelson to pull into his garage and take him there.

  If whatever they took from the house was too large to carry, they could always use one of Harrelson’s cars to get themselves back out of the complex. The gates on the outbound lane opened automatically as a car approached.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THEY left O’Conner, Beauchamps asked Cole, “Tell me the truth: what do you think?”

  “What I think is, these marshals are all over us. It makes me nervous that I’m not already on my way out of town. Way out of town. But—”

  “You need the money after losing your stash in LA. And my idiot brother, the cannibal, is already hinting that he might need a loan. Geenie . . . Geenie doesn’t have anything and never has.”

  “Cocaine,” Cole said. “Blow and hookers and casinos. They’ll get you every time.”

  “Not hookers. Dancers. But a lot of them,” Beauchamps admitted. “And the blow. But what are we going to do? None of us could work a straight job. Maybe Geenie could get a sales clerk job, but she wouldn’t.”

  “If we’re going to hit Harrelson, I say we go tonight,” Cole said. “We know he keeps a bundle on hand. Even if we don’t get the five mil, we could get enough that we could all run somewhere else. We need to fly.”

  “I wish we had more time for the research.”

  “This isn’t LA, where we had to do the research, checking out his old lady and all that. We already know who we’re targeting and where he lives,” Cole said. “We don’t need any gate codes. We cross the wall, put a gun in his face, and take the cash. End of story.”

  “Aw, God.” Beauchamps rubbed his forehead, up and down, then started the Cadillac and said, “You’re right. Let’s talk to Deese. See if Geenie thinks she can handle the driving and the timing again. I hate to be in a hurry. I hate it. But with the marshals here . . . As far as we know, every cop in town has our pictures.”

  * * *

  —

  THE TWO Airbnb houses were a mile apart. They’d wanted two houses here for the same reason they’d had two in LA: if the cops found the one, the other could fast become a refuge. They’d hoped to get two closer together, but the ones they got were the ones the Airbnb lady could get in a hurry and they hadn’t wanted to do any house hunting personally. Even at a mile apart, in a suburb without traffic lights, they could drive between the houses in two minutes or walk it in fifteen.

  When Cole and Beauchamps got back, they found Deese watching a cable TV hunting channel while Cox was sitting on a couch, pouting, as she flipped through a copy of Women’s Health. She was using a butcher knife as a bookmark. Beauchamps asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Your fuckin’ brother, is what’s wrong with me. What an asshole,” she said, standing up and pointing the knife at Deese.

  “What’d he do?” Cole asked.

  “The usual. Trying to fuck me behind Marion’s back,” Cox said. She’d started calling Beauchamps Marion because the TV news stories about the gang usually referred to him as Martin. “He said he’d give me fifty dollars, for Christ’s sakes. Fifty dollars?”

  “Shut up, you fuckin’ whore,” Deese said, not bothering to turn his head away from the TV.

  Cox, with her fists on her hips: “See?”

  Beauchamps said to Deese, “I told you: keep your hands off her, goddamnit.” To Cole, he said, “You’re right. I don’t see this working long-term. We go tonight, we split the money, we get out of here.”

  “I’m not going with the asshole,” Cox said. “If you’re going with him, I’ll ride with Cole.”

  “She’s fuckin’ Cole,” Deese said, still not looking away from the TV.

  “Oh, horseshit,” Cole said at the same time Cox said, “I am not,” and Cole said, to Deese, “We had a pretty goddamn solid thing going until you showed up. We all got along.”

  Now Deese turned to the others and said, “What’s this about tonight? Going?”

  “We’re hitting Harrelson,” Beauchamps said. “We need to tool up and cruise the place. And we need to have our shit together when we do it.”

  “My shit’s always together,” Deese said. “But this is sorta sudden, huh?”

  “We got marshals all over us,” Cole said. “We need to get out.”

  Deese nodded. “Okay.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY CRUISED Harrelson’s place in separate cars. Cox would be the driver that night and she wouldn’t go with Deese. Cole and Deese were snarling at each other because Deese insisted that Cox was sleeping with both Beauchamps and Cole. So Deese and Beauchamps went together, Cox and Cole went in the Cadillac.

  On the way to Harrelson’s, Deese said, “When we’re done with this, we get rid of Geenie. You know goddamn well she’s fuckin’ Cole. And she’s also the weak link. I’ll do it. Take her up north of here, dump her in the desert.”

  “I don’t want to think about it. And so what if she’s the weak link? We could drop her off at a shoe store and not pick her up. Don’t tell her where we’re going. The cops know our names anyway, so what’s she gonna tell them?”

  “You’re not pissed because she’s fuckin’ Cole?”

  “I’m not sure that she is. I don’t like the idea of killing her. I’m not a killer. And she’s a nice girl.”

  “She’s a whore, Marion.”

  “No she’s not. If she was a whore, she’d be fuckin’ you if you’d offered her a reasonable amount of money, which you didn’t. And if she was a whore, she’d have given you a price, which she didn’t. Now shut up and drive.”

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT I’M most worried about is,” Cole told Cox, “that the brothers will decide they don’t need us. That fuckin’ Deese likes killing people, it’s what he does. You read the stories.”

  “He stinks,” Cox said. “You ever smell his breath? It’s like it got bad from eating all those dead people. Smells like he’s got a dead mouse in his mouth.”

  “I don’t care about his breath,” Cole said. “I care about what happens next . . . Say this Harrelson story turns out to be true. He’s got five million dollars in his house and we get it. If we split it four ways, we’ll each get a million two fifty. But they get rid of us, they’d both get twice as much, two and a half mil each.”

 
; “I’m pretty sure I’m not down for a share,” Cox said. “Or, at best, not a full share.”

  “Okay. Say they give you nothin’—”

  “That ain’t fair!”

  “You’re right. But say they give you nothin’. We cut it three ways and we’d each get”—he had to do the numbers in his head—“something like a million six five. That’s still a lot less for the brothers than if they only split it two ways.”

  “You think they’re planning that? To get rid of us?” Cox asked.

  “I don’t know. Finding out that they are, when Deese is standing there with a gun in his hand, then it’d be too late.”

  They drove on for a while, Cox finally saying, “I really want this money. If I don’t get some money, I got nothing.”

  “Well, I want the money, too,” Cole said.

  Another minute, then Cox said, “Joan . . . the woman who fixed us up with the houses . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “She makes all these real estate calls. She goes out to these houses with strange men. Alone. She carries a gun. I saw it, it’s small, but she said it’s powerful. She went to a concealed carry school and she liked it. She told me she’s got four guns now and she goes out to a shooting range. She’s even got two color-coordinated ones, blue and red. I’m wondering . . . maybe I could borrow one?”

  “You know how to shoot?” Cole asked.

  “Sure. I’ve gone shooting with Marion. It’s not rocket science.”

  “It’s not how to work the gun that’s the problem. It’s killing somebody that’s the problem. We had rifles and shotguns on the farms, but the only pistol was this old rusty revolver, a .22. I take a 9mm into the houses with me, but I never have a round in the chamber because I don’t want to have an accident,” Cole said. “Maybe . . . Maybe when you start talking about guns, it’s time to leave. Without the guns. Get in the car and drive away. We could take this car, go together. We could figure out another way to get some money.”