Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  “It’ll be more than tiresome, it’ll be pointless,” Rae said. “There’s gotta be thousands of houses down there. Are we gonna knock on every door?”

  Lucas shook his head. “There aren’t thousands of houses. I looked at the satellite photo. Maybe a few hundred under the path, where the airplane noise was loud enough to keep him awake. We know they’re probably driving a pickup and an Escalade. So, we go down there and look for people on the street and ask if they’ve seen newcomers, renters, in a pickup or an Escalade. We have a chance.”

  “I vote we get something to eat, take a nap, and go out in the evening,” Bob said. “There won’t be people walking around in the streets when it’s 105 degrees outside. We’ll see more of them when it cools off a bit.”

  He was impatient to get going, but it was too hot, so Lucas agreed: they’d eat, go up to their rooms, nap or see if the internet might turn up anything—real estate searches, house rental agencies, meaningful maps—and reconvene in the late afternoon, move out to the streets.

  “I hate it that we lost Santos,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, I hate it. He’s going to meet Deese. He would have led us right to him.”

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  As Roger Smith’s familiar spirit, Santos assumed that he was being watched by the FBI, either through his known cell phone or physically. Or, he thought, there might be a tracker on his car. Trackers were now small enough that it was unlikely that he could find it, considering everything else that was under the hood of a modern car.

  When he left for Vegas, he thought the feds could be looking for a rental. He made two reservations, one at Avis and one at the Hertz desk at Caesars, under different names, each with its own credit card number. He’d been to Vegas any number of times and had some ideas about how to scrape off a trail: a fast pass through Caesars slots would shake anyone. He’d wind up at the Hertz desk, which was down a barren hallway, and any tracker would have to show himself, if he’d managed to follow that far.

  He wouldn’t have to identify himself; Santos could smell a cop.

  * * *

  —

  HE’D PULLED the battery out of his known cell phone on the plane so that couldn’t be tracked. He hadn’t seen anyone following on the drive in from the airport, but he hadn’t expected to, because the feds were better than that.

  Fifteen minutes after entering the hotel, he was in the new Hertz car and out on Las Vegas Boulevard. A mile south of Caesars, he pulled into a FedEx store, showed receipts for five boxes being held for him there, got the boxes with a minimum of fuss and carried them out to the car.

  When the air conditioner had cooled the interior of the car again, he opened the heaviest of the boxes, which contained five metal foil envelopes that he’d devised himself from thin sheets of copper.

  The copper was soft enough that he could unfold the envelopes with his fingers and take out the contents—a slide and barrel, a frame, a trigger assembly with its single pin, and finally the magazine, in the first four—for a 9mm Sig P365, all separately wrapped. He didn’t know if FedEx used an X-ray on suspicious packages, checking for contraband, but, if they did, they’d see nothing that looked like a gun. The final envelope, long and thin, contained the screw-on suppressor.

  He assembled the gun without the suppressor—that took a minute or so—and shoved it under the front seat. The suppressor, which didn’t look like much, went into the back of the glove compartment, where it was barely visible. He didn’t have ammo for the gun, but that wasn’t a problem in Las Vegas. There was a gun shop three blocks away, and he picked up a box of Federal Premium Hydra-Shok.

  The remaining four boxes each contained a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in used hundred-dollar bills, wrapped in crumpled sheets of newspaper so the stacks of currency wouldn’t shift around. The bills made two stacks, each a little more than three inches high, which fit nicely, and with plenty of room, in a standard FedEx box. They’d wanted the boxes to be lightweight, because they’d seem less worth stealing; and they’d broken the money into four boxes so, in case of theft, they wouldn’t lose it all at once. All four came through fine.

  * * *

  —

  THE DAY BEFORE Santos left New Orleans, he and Smith had gone for a walk in Audubon Park, across the pond from the golf course. The day was humid, but they were used to it, and the bees were out on the flowers and interesting to watch as they went about their work.

  As they walked, Smith told Santos he was writing off the money. “It’s a lot,” he said with a shrug. “But we can always go out and get more. Anyway, what you do with it is up to you. Give the money to Deese and tell him to get lost and never come back to New Orleans. Or, if you can get away with it, shoot him and keep the money. I don’t care one way or the other because, for me, when you walk out the door, the money is gone.”

  Santos: “Really?”

  “Yeah, really,” Smith said. He stopped to sniff a rose, frowned, said it didn’t smell like anything. “What the fuck kind of rose is that?”

  “I’m not a rose connoisseur,” Santos said.

  Smith nodded, and they moved on, picking up the conversation. “From my point of view, I’d rather you get rid of Deese permanently,” Smith said. “He’s never going to do me any good, not now, not with all the murders and the fuckin’ cannibalism. The feds could use that to turn him. Against me. And you, too, maybe. So, it’s either his money to get lost with or your money to make his disappearance permanent.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Santos said.

  “Think about this, too. He’s a killer. You don’t want to falter, because if you do, he’ll kill you. And even worse, he’ll probably try to kill me, and I’d have to jump through my rectum to keep that from happening.”

  “I’ll think about that, too,” Santos said.

  “Lot to think about,” Smith said. They passed another rosebush and, after checking for park cops, Smith reached out and plucked a blossom and twiddled it in his fingers as he walked, every few steps sniffing it. “Now I’ve got a rose. And it smells like something,” he said.

  Santos said, “You know what you sound like, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Smith said, with a tight, toothless grin. “This business is full of macho assholes. They think you’re a fag, they relax. They believe it right up to the time you pull the church key out of your pocket and carve out an eyeball.”

  They walked on.

  “You have to think about Deese’s brother,” Smith said. “I never really understood that relationship because they are so very different. At the same time, in their own psychopathic way, they seem to care for each other. Maybe because their father repeatedly beat the shit out of them when they were children.”

  “Shared experience.”

  “Exactly. Shared trauma,” Smith said. “So if you kill Deese, you might have to do something about Beauchamps. That is, if he knew you were responsible for Deese’s death.”

  “Okay. How about the others?”

  “Don’t care. They don’t know about me, so I don’t care what happens to them. If they see you kill Deese, if they’re witnesses, then you might care. But I don’t.”

  “That’s all very clear,” Santos said.

  “You see any problems?”

  “Not really. Well, maybe one: Davenport.”

  “Don’t touch him,” Smith said. “I don’t doubt that you could take him, but the bigger problem is, he’s part of a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy never stops. It keeps coming. If it takes years to pull you down, doesn’t matter to them, they’ll take the time. To them, you’re just an active file in a computer and the computer keeps looking. That’s why I hate to be crosswise with that fuckin’ Tremanty. So far, he’s made it a personal mission. If we went after him, though, and knocked him down, the whole FBI would be on our case. And they’d get us, too. Stay away from Davenport. Stay away from
Tremanty. Fix our problem however you can, but don’t go blowing over any cops, federal or otherwise.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER PICKING UP the box of ammo, Santos continued south on Las Vegas Boulevard, then turned west on Warm Springs Road. A jetliner roared overhead as he made the turn, climbing straight into the hot blue sky to the southwest, on its way to Los Angeles.

  He followed the car’s navigation system to a neighborhood of dun-colored concrete-block walls and gated housing developments, turned down a street that opened up a bit, with shabbier houses under palm trees that had never been pruned. The nav system brought him to the address that Smith had given him, another dirt-colored house with a tile roof, with a circular drive in front. He drove on past, stopped at the end of the block, took the Sig out from under the car seat, screwed on the suppressor, and shoved it under his belt at the small of his back. He did a U-turn and went back to the house.

  The driveway was empty, but when he pulled in and killed the engine he saw the curtain twitch in the window next to the front door. He got carefully out of the car, the gun poking him in the back, and rang the doorbell; a moment later, the door cracked open and a blonde looked out at him.

  “What?”

  “I’m Santos.”

  “You’re way early,” she said. “We didn’t think you’d get here until tonight.”

  “Yeah, well, I got the last seat on a direct flight. So here I am. I feel like a boudin noir out here. Are you going to let me in or should I come back later?”

  The blonde turned away from the door, and a man’s voice said, “Let him in.”

  Santos reached back under his sport coat, as though tucking in his shirt, and touched the butt of the diminutive pistol. The blonde pulled the door fully open and said, “Come on in,” and turned away and let him push the door shut.

  The house was compact and poorly furnished—it came with the place, Santos thought, and smelled like carpet cleaner. Beauchamps was standing behind a breakfast bar to his left; the blonde was wandering into the living room to his right. Santos asked, “Where’s Clayton?”

  “Up in town. He likes them slot machines,” Beauchamps said.

  “That’s crazy,” Santos said. “He knows there’s three marshals up there looking for him and that probably every cop in Vegas has a picture of his face?”

  “Got a beard now, and he stays in the cheap places, goes to dive bars,” Beauchamps said. “And, yeah, he’s crazy.”

  The blonde asked, “Did you bring the money?”

  “Yes, it’s in the trunk of my car,” Santos said. “But, it’s for Clayton.”

  She smiled at him. “Don’t suppose if we promised to give it to him . . .”

  Santos smiled back. “No. That wouldn’t be good enough.”

  Beauchamps asked, “What’s this boudin noir you were talking about? You don’t look like no coonass.”

  “My parents were Cuban,” Santos said. “I’ve been in New Orleans long enough to dig the food. We Cubans have moranga. It’s all blood sausage, though I gotta say a real boudin noir is better than any moranga my old lady ever bought.”

  “You’re making my mouth water,” Beauchamps said, flashing a smile. “Listen, you wanna bring the money in, or what?”

  “Maybe come back later,” Santos said.

  “Let me go in the bedroom, get my phone, call Clayton and see where he is, if he can come quick.”

  “Okay.” Santos looked at the blonde and said, “You’re a beautiful woman. What’s your name?”

  “Thank you,” she said, with a real smile. “It’s Geenie. You’re a pretty man yourself.”

  * * *

  —

  BEAUCHAMPS TOOK his phone into a bedroom as Santos was laying a shine on Cox. He closed the door, dialed Deese’s new burner. When Deese came up, Beauchamps said, “The money is here.”

  “You got it?”

  “No, Santos says it’s out in the car.”

  After a long silence, Deese said, “Listen, I had to think about it when Rog said he’d send the money with Santos. I mean, why Santos? I know how they move money. FedEx lets you call up and tell them to hold your delivery so you can pick it up there. They could have sent it direct to us and we could have picked it up just as easily as Santos.”

  Beauchamps: “What are you talking about?”

  “When Santos went to work for Rog a few years back, I asked around. There are some people who think he does the same thing I do, but he’s not so . . . out there,” Deese said.

  “Not so much of a fuckup,” Beauchamps said, to clarify.

  “Not so out there,” Deese insisted. “Everybody kinda knew who I was. Rog used me to scare people. Nobody knows who Santos is. He’s supposedly a smart guy. Went to college. A guy told me that Rog used Santos when he didn’t want to scare anybody but somebody needed to be gone. To disappear. There was a guy named Appel, German, and he disappeared, and everybody—everybody—heard he’d gone on to New York. Nobody heard from him after that. He fuckin’ vanished.”

  Beauchamps looked at the bedroom door. “What’re you saying?”

  “What I’m saying is, you could have a problem. I can be there in twenty minutes, but if I was you I might put a gun in my pocket before I talk to him anymore. In case Santos has decided he’d like to keep the money.”

  “Ah, shit, man. He doesn’t look like a killer, he looks . . . smooth. He looks slick and smooth, like a billiard ball.”

  “Which is one reason that people don’t worry about him. Then, poof,” Deese said.

  “All right.”

  Beauchamps had a big Beretta in the chest of drawers. Big because it was meant to frighten home invasion victims. He hung up, got the gun, carried it into the bathroom, jacked a 9mm shell into the chamber, made sure the safety was on, flushed the toilet, and went back through the bedroom to the living room.

  “He’s on his way,” he said to Santos. “He won’t be too long. I can get you a beer, if you want to wait. Or if you want to go out, find a hotel or something . . .” He went into the kitchen, crab-walking sideways so that Santos wouldn’t see the gun, and sat on a stool at the breakfast bar.

  Santos cocked his head, looked at Cox and then at Beauchamps, and said, “Guess I’ll wait. I’ll take that beer.”

  Santos was thinking that if Deese was actually on the way, with the other man who was with them, it would then be three to one, assuming the blonde wasn’t carrying a gun. By acting before then, the odds would be cut; and he suspected that Beauchamps had gotten a gun from the bedroom, the way he’d backed up to the refrigerator to get the beer.

  Beauchamps was thinking about what Deese had said and how he himself would behave if he were Santos and there were six hundred thousand dollars on the line. He opened the refrigerator with his left hand and took out a beer while his right hand crept around to his back and grasped the Beretta.

  Santos saw it and put up his left hand and said, “Wait,” but Beauchamps saw Santos’s arm going for his back and he pulled the Beretta and thrust it at Santos and pulled the trigger but nothing happened, and, in a flash, thought: safety. He thumbed the safety off and pulled the trigger again, and his hand hopped with the hard recoil as Cox screamed and ran across a coffee table and went down in a crash of cheap glass. And Santos got his gun out and fired at Beauchamps’s face.

  Beauchamps and Santos, five yards apart, both realized that they’d missed with their first shots, though that seemed almost impossible, and they both kept cranking on their triggers until Santos ran out of ammo and Beauchamps went down, firing his last, dying shot into the floor.

  Santos, stunned, freaked out, patted his chest, looking for bullet holes. He found none. Although nearly deafened, he heard a crash in the bedroom and trotted to the door, found it locked, hit it with his shoulder, then tried to kick it in, felt weighted resistance.

 
The blonde had blocked the door with something heavy, and Santos had to get out. He didn’t know how many shots he and Beauchamps had fired at each other, but it was a lot—the house stank of burnt gunpowder—and Beauchamps had not been using a suppressor.

  His own gun, even suppressed, had been loud, and they weren’t more than a mile from the scene of the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, which made him think that the cops might already be on their way.

  He gave the bedroom door one last kick, and the blonde, who’d gone quiet, began screaming again. Santos took a spare magazine out of his pocket, jammed it into the Sig, and sprayed the whole load through the door and the Sheetrock walls. He heard one last crash of breaking glass from the bedroom and then hurried to the front door, to the car, and sped away.

  At the end of the block, he saw a man standing in front of his house, staring at Beauchamps’s house. He turned the corner and was gone.

  * * *

  —

  COX THOUGHT she might have broken a leg when she ran into the coffee table, but it seemed to work all right, and she lay huddled behind the heavy wooden bureau she’d toppled in front of the bedroom door, her feet pushed against it.

  When the shooting stopped and she took her hands away from her ears, somebody—it had to be Santos because Beauchamps would have called to her—tried to kick his way into the bedroom, but she rolled against the bureau and pushed back. Then Santos sprayed the bedroom with bullets, blowing out the only window. She closed her eyes and covered her ears again until the shooting stopped.

  The front door slammed. She crawled to the window and looked out but couldn’t see anything in the street, and she couldn’t hear much at all, her ears still ringing with the muzzle blasts of the two guns, and then she saw Santos’s car speed away, him hunched over the steering wheel.