Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  They heard Deese say, “. . . called Show Boat, it’s a big mall. Seven o’clock, I’ll be at a table inside a Chipotle’s. It’s on the ground floor . . . Nobody’s gonna want to shoot nobody else in that place, they’d never get out with all the people around, the security guards with guns. Okay, well, you tell him . . . And tell him I got a gun, too.”

  * * *

  —

  COX AND COLE slipped back down the hall when they heard the conversation winding up, with threats from Deese’s end, and probably from Smith’s as well.

  Deese came out of the bedroom a minute later and said, “We’re all set. Seven o’clock. We’ll all go in early and scout the place.”

  Cox had dropped onto a couch before Deese got out of the bedroom and now she bounced to her feet and mimed punching Deese. “Now we’re doing something. Now we’re getting there. Nobody gets hurt. And we’re out of Vegas, and fuck all those marshals.”

  Cole said, “Sounds like Smith knew all about what happened.”

  “Yeah, he did,” Deese said. “I gotta think on that. That motherfucker. Maybe get the money and eat his liver anyway.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Tremanty was frustrated. Not angry, exactly, but unhappy, and as he sat next to Rae he was drumming his fingers on the tabletop. He had an overnight bag next to his shoe. His suit was rumpled and he hadn’t shaved. “You’re telling me that they know you’re here.”

  Lucas nodded. “Probably. There are a couple of ways they could know, so we have to believe they do. Even if they don’t, Santos could have scared them off.”

  “They could be most of the way to Idaho by now. Hell, they could already be there.”

  “The Vegas cops might get Santo’s prints off the brass he left at the shooting. If they do, his ass is in a crack,” Bob said.

  “Yeah, yeah, but I’m not holding my breath,” Tremanty said.

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE still talking, arguing, when a call came in for Lucas. He checked his phone and saw that it was from the Marshal Service’s district office. Lucas, Bob, and Rae had checked in with the Vegas marshal on the way into town. He answered, “Yeah? Davenport.”

  “Davenport. This is Carl Young. Listen, we got a call, a woman trying to get ahold of you, and she asked for you by name. She said it’s a matter of life and death. She said I should tell you the name Deese. I understand that’s your cannibal guy. She wants your phone number and will call me back in two minutes. Should I give it to her?”

  “Yes . . . Hell, yes! Tell her to call.”

  Lucas hung up, turned to the others, and said, “A woman called, mentioned ‘Deese.’ She’s gonna call me.”

  Tremanty yanked his phone out of his pocket and pushed a number on speed dial. A moment later he said, “I need to trace a call incoming to Las Vegas. I can give you the receiving phone, it’s on now. We need to know the location of the caller.”

  Lucas showed him the screen on his phone, the number, and Tremanty recited it into his phone, then repeated it. When he hung up, his frustration disappearing like cigarette smoke, he said, “Been here less than an hour and got us a tipster. Am I good or am I good?”

  “We don’t really know that yet, do we?” Rae said. Her tone was enigmatic, and they all looked at her for a moment before deciding not to press her.

  * * *

  —

  TWO OR THREE minutes later, Lucas’s phone rang, an unknown number. “Davenport,” he said again.

  “Is this Marshal Davenport?” A woman’s voice, soprano, but with some whisky in it.

  “Yes. What can I do for you?”

  “Clayton Deese will be in the Chipotle restaurant at the Show Boat mall at exactly seven o’clock. He’ll only be there for five minutes. He has a beard, and he’s wearing a gray shirt, blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a red-and-blue LA Dodgers baseball cap. You can’t call me back because I’m throwing this phone in the toilet.”

  Click.

  Tremanty’s phone buzzed. “Yeah?” He listened, then said, “Well, shit. But, thank you.”

  “Where is it?” Rae asked.

  “On Las Vegas Boulevard north of here. Then it died.”

  “She said she threw it in the toilet,” Lucas said. “And she said Deese is going to be at the Show Boat mall, at a Chipotle restaurant, at seven o’clock.” He glanced at his phone. “We’ve got nineteen minutes to get there, wherever there is.”

  “I know where it is,” Bob said. “You can check a map on your phone, but I saw it right up the boulevard. North of here—where that phone was. Maybe three minutes away.” They were all hustling along behind Bob. “Not counting how long it takes to get to the self-parking.”

  They ran, weaving through the slot machines on Caesars main floor, setting off whirlpools of unhappy gamblers.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE CAR, Tremanty asked, “Call the Vegas cops?”

  Lucas: “What do you think? If we have a bunch of cops flooding the place, we’ll never see him. He’ll see them first and be outta there.”

  Bob said, “We’ll really stink up the place if we don’t tell them at all. We gotta tell somebody or we’ll have major diplomatic problems.”

  “You’re right,” Lucas said. And Tremanty nodded.

  Lucas, in the passenger seat while Bob drove, took out his wallet and found a card for Tom Harvey, the homicide cop they’d met over Beauchamps’s dead body. Harvey had scribbled his personal cell number on the back. Lucas punched it into his phone as Bob ran a red light turning north onto Las Vegas Boulevard.

  Rae was looking at her iPad, with a map of the mall’s interior on it; she spotted the Chipotle’s.

  Harvey answered, and Lucas identified himself and told him what was happening. Harvey said, “Jesus, Davenport, we gotta have somebody on the scene. Let me round up all the plainclothes guys I got—”

  “If the tip’s right, he’ll be there for only five minutes, starting at seven o’clock,” Lucas said. “We’re on our way, with an FBI agent, and will be there in three or four minutes, but we’ve got to park and then find the Chipotle’s. So it’s now fourteen minutes, no, thirteen minutes to seven, so do what you gotta do, but we can’t have a bunch of uniforms running through the place, waving their guns around.”

  “I’m on the way,” Harvey said, and he hung up.

  Lucas said, “I’m dialing up the conference call,” and all their phones started ringing. They checked to make sure they were all talking to one another, then tucked the phones away still turned on.

  * * *

  —

  A MINUTE LATER, Bob made a wild left turn, and Rae directed him to the parking structure. Parked, looking at Rae’s iPad map of the mall, Lucas and Tremanty worked through how they’d make the approach as Bob and Rae pulled on compact bulletproof vests.

  They locked the truck and, outside the mall’s entrance, stopped to catch their breaths, and Lucas said, “She said he’ll be in the Chipotle’s for five minutes. It must be a meet. I bet he’s meeting with Santos, or maybe even Roger Smith. Deese, Smith, and Santos know me and Sandro. We gotta hang back. Rae and Bob, you lead. When you see him, move, and we’ll come running.”

  Rae: “Time’s up. We gotta go.”

  Everybody nodded, and Lucas said, “Inside and to your right,” and they went through the doors into the mall. A few seconds later, Lucas grabbed Rae’s arm, as she led the way in, and said, “Wait, wait. Jesus, the place is jammed.” He turned to Bob and Rae. “You gotta get right on top of him. We can’t have a firefight in here, everybody will panic, we’ll kill ten people.”

  “Got it,” Bob said. To Rae: “We keep people between us and him until we go through the door and then we’ve gotta be fast. Real fast.”

  Rae, tense, focused: “Yes. Watch his hands, Bob. Watch his hands.”


  * * *

  —

  LUCAS AND TREMANTY held back as Bob and Rae led the way.

  Tremanty: “My God, there are a lot of people. Must be a special event.”

  There were forty or fifty people within a few dozen feet of them, strolling through the mall, drinking soda from plastic cups, some of them dragging kids along, dressed in T-shirts and shorts and athletic shoes and baseball caps.

  “This is bad,” Lucas said. He could feel the anxiety crawling up the back of his neck. People in the mall were looking at Bob and Rae and their bulletproof vests. He saw Rae talking to a blond woman in a cowboy suit, who, shaking her head, turned and hurried off into the crowd. And then Bob lifted his phone to his face and said, “I can see inside the Chipotle’s and he’s not in there.”

  “Then back off,” Lucas said. “Get all the way across to the other side of the mall, like you’re going somewhere else. That crowd doesn’t like the looks of you.”

  “We’re backing off,” Bob said.

  Lucas looked at the time. “Three minutes of seven. He’s got to be inside if he plans to be there right at seven. Watch for his face, you have the description. But try to stay out of sight, and don’t make another approach until after seven.”

  “Hope it’s not some bullshit scam,” Rae said, her voice sounding scratchy through the phone’s speaker.

  “It’d be weird, if it was. That woman knew me, knew Deese, knew we were here, and how to get ahold of me,” Lucas said. “It’s gotta be something.”

  * * *

  —

  BOB AND RAE went to a side hall that led down to a Nordstrom’s. There were several circles of easy chairs in the hall, and they could slump down in a couple of chairs and still see into the Chipotle’s. A woman sitting in the same circle asked Bob, “What’s going on?”

  “Waiting for somebody,” Rae said.

  The woman looked at Bob, then back to Rae, got her shopping bag and walked away.

  Lucas and Tremanty joined them a minute later, sliding down into the seats of two other chairs, so low that nothing was sticking up but their eyes beneath the bills of their caps. Lucas said, “Six fifty-nine.”

  Thirty seconds passed, and then Bob muttered, “Hold it, hold it. On the left, the wall in front of the Apple Store, walking toward us, a guy with a beard.”

  “That’s him,” Rae said.

  “Let him get inside and then wait for a minute,” Lucas said, quietly. “Let’s see who else shows up.”

  Deese went inside the Chipotle’s and instead of getting in the food line stepped behind the front window and sat on a toadstool-like chair. A few seconds later, Tremanty said, “Holy shit, here we go . . .”

  They all looked the other way, toward the opposite end of the mall, and Lucas said, “Santos. See him?”

  “I see his hat,” Rae said. “Never actually seen his face.”

  And Bob said, “Oh no. No!”

  Lucas looked back to where Bob was looking and saw Harvey and two other men jogging down the center of the mall. They looked exactly like cops and not like anybody else in the mall. Lucas said to Bob, “Go! Go!”

  Bob and Rae started across the mall, weaving fast through the crowd, toward the Chipotle’s. They were halfway there when a man shouted down from the second level, “Deese! Deese! Cops! Cops! Cops!”

  * * *

  —

  DEESE HAD TAKEN a window seat in the restaurant, next to a crowded table of jocko-looking guys eating plates of black beans and rice and doing high fives every ten seconds and calling each other bro.

  When Cole screamed his warning, Deese exploded off the seat. A gun appeared in his right hand, and Bob shouted, “Deese! Stop!” and the jocks all went to the floor. A heartbeat later, Deese shot a woman out in the mall’s center corridor, who went down, and then shot a man, and Rae screamed, “Stop!” and Lucas and Tremanty ran toward them, Lucas glancing sideways as he did and saw Santos, frozen, in the corridor.

  Rae and Bob both had their guns out, but there was a virtual wall of humanity on the far side of Deese, as he, running, turned to his left. He would be running past Tremanty and Lucas and they both drew their weapons and moved to block him, but Deese saw Tremanty and snapped off a shot and Tremanty and Lucas both juked, and Deese deliberately shot the woman right in front of Tremanty, her blood spraying from the side of her head onto Tremanty’s face.

  Lucas still couldn’t take a shot without a crowd in the background, and the mall had erupted into chaos by then, with shoppers and children running in all directions, screaming. The Vegas cops were thirty yards away in the wrong direction, so they couldn’t stop Deese. A short man ran directly into Lucas’s chest, sending Lucas staggering backwards, trying to keep his balance, as Deese went by fifteen feet away, past a Johnny Rockets. Then Deese saw Santos and he shot at him, missing. Santos reeled away, and Deese closed in on him, shot him in the back, then kept going.

  Lucas ran after Deese after he shot Santos, but a woman toppled in front of Lucas and he tripped and went down. He scrambled back to his feet and saw Tremanty, with his hand pressed to the shot woman’s face, looking wildly at him. Lucas ran after Deese again. He collided with another man, bounced off.

  He could still see Deese, who turned and fired a shot at Lucas. There was another man closer to Deese who pulled a gun from his pocket and shot at Deese, who stumbled but continued on, and, looking over his shoulder, saw Lucas coming after him. The shooter looked at Lucas, who shouted, “No!” but the man shot at him, and somebody screamed behind Lucas, and he shouted, “Police! Police!”

  The man held his gun upright, and then Bob was there, in his vest that said “U.S. Marshal,” and he slapped the man in the face with his own weapon and the man went down. Rae sprinted past Lucas to where they’d last seen Deese, disappearing down a hallway to the left, and when they got there . . . Deese was gone.

  “Where? Where’d he go?” Rae shouted.

  They looked down the empty hallway, which ended with an exit door leading to the parking structure. They ran that way, past a short utility hallway to the left, and outside to the structure.

  Where nothing was moving.

  “Hiding between cars?” Rae said.

  “I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “He scouted the place, he had lookouts. He’d know he couldn’t get a car out of there.”

  They both looked back inside at the utility hallway and jogged to it. There were several doors down the hall, all of them metal, all of them locked. Lucas turned and saw a security guard in the main hall, where the shooting had taken place.

  “U.S. Marshal,” Lucas shouted. “Key! Need a key!”

  The security guard ran toward them. One of the doors opened into an equipment closet, the second led to a storage area, the third to a loading dock with a dumpster. Lucas and Rae checked behind the dumpster and then inside it.

  “He’s gone,” Lucas said to Rae. He looked back out into the main corridor. “But we’ve got shot people and we’ve gotta help if we can.”

  Lucas asked the security guards to watch the doors in the utility and the exit from the parking structure, and then he and Rae ran back to the corridor. Lucas checked Santos: two FedEx boxes were lying next to the green shopping bag he’d been carrying, and Lucas could see two more inside. Santos, on his stomach, his head turned, looked glassy-eyed up at Lucas and said, “Shot.”

  “Got help on the way,” Lucas said. “Let me roll you over.”

  Santos had been shot on the left side of his spine, from the back, and the front exit wound was pumping blood. Lucas couldn’t see an artery, but he’d seen an arterial wound once before and thought this might be one.

  Lucas said, “This is gonna hurt,” and he pulled Santos’s shirt loose and pressed it into the wound as far as he could, packing the cotton in to nearly the full depth of his index finger. Santos groaned, again said, “Shot.”<
br />
  Lucas shouted, “Get me some help. Get me some help over here.”

  A moment later, a woman hurried up, said, “Nurse,” and looked at the wound, then said, in what seemed to be an unnaturally calm voice, “You did what you could. I don’t think there’s anything else to do here until we have paramedics.”

  “Stay with him, would you?” Lucas asked, and the nurse nodded.

  * * *

  —

  SANTOS SEEMED TO have passed out. Lucas picked up the green shopping bag, put the two FedEx boxes in with the other two, looked around, turned away from the nurse, pulled his own shirt loose, wrapped a finger in the fabric so he wouldn’t leave prints, and ripped one of the boxes open.

  Money. Lots of it.

  The nurse was holding Santos’s hand, and Lucas stepped over to Bob, who’d cuffed the man who’d shot at Deese and then Lucas. The man was bubbling blood from his nose. Bob had propped him up against the wall, and the man kept saying, “Active shooter . . . active shooter . . .” Bob said, “Yeah, but you shot the wrong guy.”

  To Lucas Bob said, “This guy shot that guy when he tried to shoot you.” Bob pointed across hall. “I thought he might have been backing up Santos, so I swatted him.”

  Lucas turned to see a man leaning against the wall with two women working on him in a professional way, maybe doctors or nurses. Down the length of the mall, most of the people had cleared out, but small groups had gathered around the three other people lying on the floor in puddles of blood. One of the cops who’d come with Harvey was crouched over the first woman Deese had shot, Tremanty was still applying pressure to the facial wound of the woman who’d been standing next to him, his face, hands, and shirt splattered with purple blood.

  Lucas asked Bob, “Did you fire your weapon?”