Neon Prey

by John Sandford

“Yeah. And I could crack one of those slot machines for a million bucks.”

  “Drink your shake,” Bob said. “You’ll feel better.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THEY finished eating, they poked around Caesars, hoping to stumble over Santos, because they had nothing better to do.

  Tremanty got there, called from the airport, and they agreed to meet back at the Cheesecake Factory.

  Tremanty and Rae sat close together.

  Tremanty had nothing.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  The second house was a mile from the first, the closest they could get from the agent who managed the Airbnb rentals. Cox, freaking out, almost drove straight to the second house. But not quite straight: she made one ice-cold stop.

  A half mile out of the shooting scene, she pulled into a Shell station, took the cash in the bag she’d taken from Beauchamps’s chest of drawers, counted it—forty-two thousand dollars—and hid it in the spare tire well, along with the pistol and the box of ammo. She’d managed to save three Rolexes, two in the wooden box and the one that came off Beauchamps’s wrist. They went in the tire well, too. Cole had done the same thing with his stash in LA and had lost it all, but she couldn’t think of anything better.

  She left the cash in Beauchamps’s wallet, a few hundred dollars. He had five thousand in the roll in his pocket and she peeled off two and put them in her purse.

  It took only a few minutes and then she was on her way again. Cole had stayed at the second house that afternoon when Deese went out and was waiting for her. The garage was empty, and they put the Cadillac inside to get it off the street.

  Cole asked, “Sure he’s dead?”

  “He’s dead, he’s dead. I managed to save some stuff: his pocket money, his wallet, some of my clothes. We can’t go back there; you couldn’t believe all the noise it made, the shooting. The cops’ll be there.”

  Deese got to the house five minutes after Cox, just as she was finishing telling the story to Cole. The cannibal dropped the garage door and stalked inside and asked, “What the fuck happened? Are you lying? Did you leave him hurt, bitch?”

  Cox, wide-eyed: “Deese! He was dead! Santos shot him like six times in the chest, he was about this far away.” She spread her arms to demonstrate. “I got right down with him when Santos left. I tried to bring him back, but he . . . Deese, he was a mess. I never saw a dead person before, I mean, all the blood . . . Jesus.”

  She suddenly sat down on the floor, really falling, her legs giving way.

  “What did Marion do? Just stand there?”

  “No. Marion . . . Deese, I think Marion started it. He brought a gun out of the bedroom and he pulled it out and he pointed it at Santos but it didn’t go off at first. I think he forgot about the safety thing. Then Santos pulled a gun out, and they both started shooting.”

  She went through the whole scene, once, twice, watching as Deese worked himself into a rage, ripping off his shirt, throwing it in a corner, shouting at her as she sat there on the floor. Cole eventually cornered him, talking quietly. “Deese, it wasn’t Geenie who did it, it was Santos. And probably Smith.”

  “That’s what she says,” Deese shouted at him.

  “Why would she lie? She and Marion were friends.”

  “Because she’s a whore and whores lie about everything.”

  “I’m not a fuckin’ whore,” Cox shouted. “Marion was my friend.”

  Cole eventually managed to get Deese focused on Santos and not Cox. “Do you know what’s going on?” he asked.

  “You sound like you know,” Deese shouted. “So tell me,”

  “Your pal back in New Orleans decided you’re too big a liability. He sent Santos out to kill you.”

  Deese looked at Cox. “You said he had the money?”

  “He said he did. In his car. I never saw it. When he and Marion started shooting, I think Santos tried to stop it. He yelled, ‘Wait!” but Marion had already pulled his gun out. One second before that, they were talking like old friends. It was like a cowboy movie,” Cox cried. “They stood there and shot their guns at each other. And Marion . . . He shot Marion, like, fifteen times, or something.”

  “Fucker,” Deese said. “I’m gonna kill that motherfucker. But a real shooter wouldn’t have done it like that. If he was a real shooter, Marion never would have seen it coming.”

  Cole: “Whatever. We gotta get out of here. The cops know who we are. The best thing we can do is get the hell out.”

  Deese asked, “How much cash you got?”

  “What we got from the raid, plus maybe ten K. So less than fifty,” Cole said. “How about you?”

  “Two. I was borrowing from Marion. I had a bad run of luck.”

  They both looked at Cox, who shrugged and lied. “I got Marion’s billfold and his pocket roll. I haven’t counted it, but it’s not a lot,” she said.

  “Let’s see it,” Deese said.

  Beauchamps’s roll added up to three thousand dollars, and he’d carried six hundred in his wallet.

  “What we got would just about get us to Ohio,” Deese said. He took a turn around the room, breathing hard again, the anger and frustration climbing all over him. “That won’t work.”

  “Farther than Ohio. Between us, we got almost sixty thousand,” Cole said to Deese. “Let’s split it. You take twenty, twenty-five. Geenie and I get the rest, because there are two of us. And most of it was mine to begin with anyway. You got a late-model truck you can sell it down in Miami, or somewhere, probably get another fifteen and go hide out in Puerto Rico until things cool off. You can live a long time down there on forty K.”

  “Maybe you can, but I can’t,” Deese said. “We got something else going for us: we know where there’s five million dollars in cash. Harrelson’s.”

  “No. We know where there’s a rumor of five million dollars cash,” Cole said.

  “There’ll be something, with him being a big-time gambler, and we need it now,” Deese said. “There are too many cops around for us to hide here and work out another plan. Even if we get out of Harrelson’s with a few hundred thousand, we’re way ahead of where we are now. I agree with you on one thing: we gotta get out of here. Get out of Vegas.”

  Cole looked at Cox. “What do you think?”

  “You’re the criminals, not me,” she said. Then to Cole: “If you and me had thirty-five or forty thousand dollars, even back where you come from if we had to rent a house or an apartment, it’d only get us six months. We do need more money.”

  Cole looked at Deese. “All right. Lay low until it’s time to go, hit Harrelson tonight, and run.”

  “What if Harrelson isn’t there tonight?” Cox asked.

  “If we stay cool, if we don’t leave the house, then I don’t know how they’d find us. We’ve hardly seen any of the neighbors around here,” Cole said. “We could hunker down for a day or two.”

  “What about that Joan chick?” Deese asked. Joan was the agent who rented them the houses.

  “She’s only seen me and Cole,” Cox said. “Her husband’s a poker dealer here in town. Even if she suspected something, they’re the kind of people who know when they should be looking the other way.”

  Cole bobbed his head. “Okay. We take the risk.” He looked at his watch. “We’ll go at nine. I’m going to watch the news, see if we’re on it.”

  “I’m going to call back to New Orleans, see if I can figure out what the fuck is going on,” Deese said.

  “Another risk, the cops are all over the phones now,” Cole said.

  “The phone’s clean, a throwaway,” Deese said. “And I need to know.”

  * * *

  —

  DEESE WENT into the back bedroom to make the call and Cole and Cox drifted down the hallway to stand outside the door and listen, which they could easily do beca
use Deese spent most of his time shouting.

  The call went to a burner phone owned by a man named Larry Buck, who handed the phone to Roger Smith, who was standing next to him, because Buck was always standing next to him when Smith was out on the town. They didn’t use names on the phone.

  “It’s the goddamn truth and you know it! You must have talked to that motherfucker. He wouldn’t walk around the block without checking with you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. I don’t. I haven’t heard a word. I sent him there with four boxes of money. Six hundred K. He must’ve decided to keep it, unless . . . Hey, ask that chick, whatever her name is, who pulled the gun first? I don’t think our guy would, he was just a deliveryman, he only had a gun because he was carrying all that cash, he’s not a shooter.”

  “Don’t tell me that, you motherfucker, you sent that fuckin’ island beaner after my ass and he killed my brother. When I get my hands on him, I’m gonna eat his fuckin’ liver with fava beans and Ritz crackers. You got that? You tell him that. Then I’m gonna come after your liver, you pasty-white, lying piece of faggot shit.”

  “Listen, listen, I’ll try to get in touch, find out what happened,” Smith finally shouted back. “If he didn’t leave the money behind, then he’s still got it and you still need it, right? Him giving you the money would prove that I’m telling the truth, right? I wouldn’t have sent the money at all, if he was coming there to shoot you, for Christ’s sakes.”

  “You get me that money, I’ll think about it,” Deese said. “I’m still gonna eat his liver, but get me the money, I’ll let you keep yours.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THEY WERE DONE, Deese walked out of the bedroom and found Cox and Cole, leaning against the wall, advertising the fact that they’d been listening.

  “We’re not going after any money with you,” Cole said. “If you go after that money, they’ll kill your ass. That’s nothing but a setup.”

  “Those fuckers,” Deeds said. He had the burner phone in his hand and threw it at a couch. It bounced once and fell on the floor. “If it ain’t a setup, it’d sure be some easy cash. It’d be the way to go. Better than Harrelson.”

  “Would you give us some of it?” Cox asked.

  “Depends how nice you are to me,” Deese said to her, giving her his nicotine sneer.

  “Oh, fuck that,” Cox said.

  Cole said, “Geenie and I have developed a relationship, so you’re not getting . . .” He tried to think of an appropriate word and wound up with “any.”

  Deese shook his head. “I’m in Vegas and I’m not getting any. How does that happen? If I—”

  “Shut up,” Cole said, in not quite a shout. “Get back on track. If you go after that money . . . Like I said, it’s a setup. You go out there alone, they’re gonna kill you.”

  “What would you do about it?” Deese cocked his eyebrows at Cole and Cox. And with his funny squashed nose and rim of sharp teeth, he looked exactly like a giant weasel, Cox thought.

  “If nothing else, we could be lookouts,” Cole said. “I’d go that far, if you’d kick us out . . . fifty.”

  “Let’s talk about it,” Deese said.

  * * *

  —

  THEY SETTLED into the house to talk and finally agreed that Deese would give them fifteen thousand each to be lookouts. While Deese and Cox were arguing about money, Cole turned on the television to see if they could get any news about the shooting. They couldn’t, and after a while they were watching Let’s Make a Deal, and Deese said, “Look at that guy. If I had to dress up like a fuckin’ cockroach to win a few bucks, I wouldn’t do it.”

  “We could use the money,” Cox said. “You’d be doing us all a favor.”

  “Not if I had to dress up like a fuckin’ cockroach,” Deese said. He pointed at the next contestant. “Look at this chick. What’s she supposed to be, a shrimp? She’d look better as the cockroach. I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick, Cole.”

  After another half hour, during a talk show about the legalization of marijuana and the bad effects it was having on Vegas culture, Deese said, “I can’t stand this shit. I’m going down to the Circle K and get some beer and chips and salsa.”

  “You’ll get us caught,” Cole said. “We agreed to stay inside.”

  “I can’t sit here doing nothing. I need some beer. I got sunglasses and a beard and a hat, nobody will recognize me. I’ll be fifteen minutes.”

  “No goddamn casinos,” Cole said. “They got facial recognition there. They can look right through your disguise. They look at the way you walk and the shape of your shoulders, and all that shit. I read about it.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN HE WAS GONE, Cox cracked the curtains at the front window and watched him rolling away. He’d taken the burner phone, but she had her own cold phone, and Cole agreed that nobody would have it.

  “Let me see your arm,” she said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Listen and learn,” she said. She took her own phone out of her pocket and picked up Deese’s. Deese’s phone had no password protection and she brought up the last call made, and poked the number into her own phone.

  * * *

  —

  LARRY BUCK answered, and Cox asked, “Is this the guy in New Orleans that the other guy called from Las Vegas?”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is the blonde who is with the other guy in Vegas.”

  “One minute.”

  Larry Buck covered his phone’s microphone, and Cox couldn’t hear what was being said. Then another voice: “This is the person the man in Las Vegas called.”

  Cox asked, “Did you really send money?”

  “Yes.”

  “How bad do you want it back?” she asked.

  “Depends on where else it might go,” Smith said.

  “What if the man in Las Vegas fell down the stairs and broke his neck?”

  “I could see that happening,” Smith said. “He’s a careless walker. Where is he now?”

  “He’s out getting beer.”

  “Well, if something happened to him . . . I wouldn’t get the money back anyway. So I wouldn’t care who got it.”

  “If he somehow broke his neck . . . then this other guy who you sent here . . . why wouldn’t he keep it?” Cox asked.

  “Because I’d tell him to give it to you, no questions asked.”

  “Okay. We’ll think about this. Tell your friend to stay here in Vegas. I’ll need his phone number. If something happens to Dee—To, you know . . . We’ll set up the payment. But I’m telling you, he has told us all about you. One person will make the pickup, probably me. If anything happens to me, that other guy will come to New Orleans and kill you. Since you don’t know who we are, you’d never see it coming. We’ve done a lot of work in LA, and you probably know about that. We’re not afraid of hurting people.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “We totally believe that,” Cox said. “We’re scared of you. But you should be scared of us. The money smooths it all out. If the other guy—the guy you’re worried about—goes away, you should be happy with that.”

  “Let me get you the phone number for the delivery.”

  Cox wrote the number on the inside of her arm.

  “Call me and tell me what happened,” Smith said. “It’s sort of like a soap opera, and I like soaps.”

  “Yeah? We were just watching The Bold and the Beautiful,” Cox said.

  “I caught that myself. We were probably watching at the same time,” Smith said. And, “Good-bye.”

  When Cox hung up, Cole looked at her, chewing his lower lip, and when she asked, “What?” he said, “You know you’re talking about murder.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “That’s wha
t the New Orleans guy thought you meant,” Cole said.

  “That’s his problem,” Cox said.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “This lawyer I was friends with once told me that when a guy gets shot, it’s not necessarily murder. If a cop shoots him while he’s doing a crime, that’s not murder. If the guy shoots himself in the head, that’s not murder. Murder’s, like, a legal thing. Whether or not it’s murder depends on who’s doing the shooting.”

  “So . . . who’d do the shooting?”

  “Not us. Remember how Deese keeps saying the cops won’t take him alive? I believe him.”

  * * *

  —

  DEESE GOT BACK an hour later, carrying two twelve-packs of Coors and a couple of sacks of blue corn chips.

  Cox asked, “Where in the heck were you? We were getting worried, we almost took off. And two twelve-packs?”

  “No sweat,” Deese said. “Rog called me. He wanted me to meet Santos at Circus Circus to give me the money. I said, ‘Fuck that, I’m not meeting that asshole anywhere he wants to meet me.’ So I went to find a place, and I did. And the two twelve-packs are so we don’t have to stop if we need to get out of town.”

  “Where’s the meeting?” Cole asked.

  Deese squinted at him, and Cole said, “Come on, Deese, we already agreed. Santos might be set up to shoot you in the back. We’ll watch out for you.”

  Deese popped a can of beer out of a twelve-pack, put the rest in the refrigerator, looking from Cox to Cole, then said, “All right. The Show Boat mall. Hundreds of people wandering around. He won’t take a chance of shooting me in there. We’ll tell him what time, we’ll meet in a Chipotle’s, won’t wait any more than five minutes, he can come in any entrance he wants, so he’ll know we won’t ambush him.”

  Cole nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

  “I gotta call Rog and tell him,” Deese said. He went back to the bedroom to make the call. As they had before, Cox and Cole slipped down the hall and listened outside the bedroom door.