“No, no. I never could. Too many people behind him.”
Rae had come up next to Lucas. “Neither did I. I never had a clean shot. I’m going to jog around the mall, see what I can see. Check that parking structure, even if he isn’t there. Maybe I’ll kick him out.” She ran off toward the hallway to the structure.
Lucas called, “Careful, Rae. Careful,” and she waved without looking back at him. Lucas looked around, didn’t see anybody who looked like a paramedic, and said, “Somebody must’ve called for help by now.”
Bob said, “Oh, yeah. I called 911 and they told me everybody was already on the way. They’re coming . . . And I . . . My God! My God!” He walked away, one hand on the top of his head.
* * *
—
HARVEY SAW LUCAS and ran over and shouted, “Jesus Christ, what did you do?”
“None of us ever fired a shot,” Lucas said. He looked up to the mall’s second level. “Deese had a lookout up there. He saw you guys coming, he yelled, and Deese started shooting. At anybody he saw. He must’ve planned that escape route.”
“Ambulances on the way,” Harvey said. He ran a hand through his thinning white hair as he scanned the chaotic scene. People were coming back again, peering at the wounded. “What a mess. What a fuckin’ mess.”
Lucas started stepping between bodies: a man shot in the chest, almost the same place that Lucas had been hit; a woman was shot in the upper leg, the bullet apparently breaking the bone. She was the first one Deese shot, Lucas thought. Nobody dead yet. The woman Tremanty was hovering over had been shot in the cheek, the bullet exiting behind the bone and passing through her ear.
Bob came over and said, “The man who shot at you, I left him with a security guard. He’s some concealed carry guy, thought this was his big chance.” He looked around. “How many dead?”
“None yet.” Lucas looked at his phone. Seven minutes after seven o’clock. “It’s been seven minutes from when the shooting started.”
“Seems like a week,” Bob said. “This is fucked up. Where are the ambulances?”
“We gotta go up, see if anybody saw the guy who yelled,” Lucas said.
“Gotta ask about cameras is what we need to do,” Bob said.
“You do that. I’m going up.”
* * *
—
LUCAS TOOK an escalator to the second level, where people were peering over a railing at the floor below. He called, as loud as he could, “U.S. Marshal! Did anyone see a man shouting about cops? A man shouting about cops? Anyone see . . .”
He had no faith in the possibility of finding a witness, but he unexpectedly did. A woman in a red dress, pushing a baby carriage, which turned out to be full of magazines, raised a hand and called out, “I saw him.”
Lucas went to her. “Tell me.”
She pointed at the atrium’s railing. “He was leaning over it, like he was waiting for somebody. I was sitting right over there.” She pointed to some seating. “I noticed him because, you know, he was nice-looking. Brown hair. Thin. Like an athlete. Anyway, he was standing there for several minutes. Like he was watching. A blond woman walked up to him and said something and walked away again. Then—I wasn’t exactly looking at him—someone yelled, really loudly, ‘Please! Please! Cops!’ I looked up and saw it was him. And then I heard the shots and stood up and started to run. I saw him in front of me, hurrying down the hallway, and the blond woman came up behind him and grabbed his hand and went with him . . . out of sight. I hid in that store over there. And when the shooting was done, I ran here to look over the railing with some other people.”
Lucas got on his phone, called Harvey, said, “I’m right at the top of the escalator, I’ve got a witness who saw the guy who yelled at Deese. You need to send one of your people up here to take a statement.”
“On the way,” Harvey said. Lucas peered over the railing to the first floor and now saw paramedics beginning to move the wounded.
He asked the woman to wait, then called Bob. “Have you found a camera?”
“Yeah. We can see the Chipotle’s, the area above the shooting . . .”
Lucas told him what to look for on the second floor, and Bob went away from the phone for a minute and then came back and said, “Yeah, we see him. We’ll run it back and see if we can spot the blonde. We might be able to follow them down to the parking structure.”
* * *
—
WHEN HARVEY’S COP arrived, Lucas turned the witness over to him, then went back down the escalator. Mall security guards had roped off the area of the shooting, and Rae, who’d come back after looking for Deese, said, “I didn’t find him. People are streaming out of the place, it’s a traffic jam out there. They’re closing the mall.”
“No hope?” Lucas asked.
“Nope. He’s not hiding, he’s gone.”
He told her about the man and woman upstairs, and she said, “It’s Cole and the woman who was in Altadena, the same one who was with Beauchamps.”
Lucas nodded. “Probably.”
“But then they must be the ones who tipped us off. If they are, why did they warn Deese?”
“You want the snaky reason?” Lucas asked. “Because they wanted us to kill him. They were working with Roger Smith and they wanted us to kill him.”
“Then why was Santos—”
“Because he didn’t know,” Lucas said. “Smith didn’t tell him. If the cops kill Deese, Smith is in the clear. If Santos pays Deese, Smith is in the clear. Either way works.”
“You’re making Smith sound like an asswipe,” Rae said.
“There you go.”
* * *
—
ACROSS THE MALL, Tremanty, covered in blood, was facing Harvey. They were arguing. Lucas headed that way, trailed by Rae.
Lucas heard Harvey saying, “. . . taking the blame for this mess. If you’d waited, we could have gotten a SWAT team here.”
“That’s bullshit. We were told he was staying for five minutes, and we had reason to believe the tip came from someone who knew what she was talking about. He’s a serial killer, and a cannibal, and we couldn’t wait,” Tremanty said heatedly. He jabbed an index finger at Harvey without actually poking him. “It wasn’t us who set this off, it was you guys. You came running down the mall, and I never saw anybody looking more like cops than you did. Deese’s lookout saw you and yelled to him. If you’d walked down here separately, if you let us do it, it’d all be over with and we’d have Deese in custody. Lucas told you to stay away, told you we didn’t need a bunch of cops—”
Lucas’s phone rang just then and he turned away from the argument, and Bob said, “We tracked them to the parking structure, we got a silvery-golden Cadillac Escalade. And, guess what? There was mud splattered on the plates. Everything else was clean except the plates. Don’t have a number, though.”
“Goddamnit.”
“It’s not all bad,” Bob said. “There’s a Vegas cop here, says they have traffic cameras at the major intersections and we might be able to track the Caddy that way. To wherever they’re going.”
Lucas told him about the hallway and the loading dock, asked if there were cameras covering that. Bob went away for minute, came back and said, “Yes, there are. We’ll look now.”
“About that traffic camera video,” Lucas said. “Get going on that, too. And keep me up on what you find out.”
“Gotcha,” Bob said.
* * *
—
RAE HAD WALKED away when Lucas was on the phone and came back with a handful of paper towels from a restroom, half of them soaked with water, and began toweling off Tremanty’s face. He let her do it, holding on to one of her elbows to steady himself, and took a towel from her to wipe his hands. Then she dried his face, and said, “You saved that woman’s life. She was bleeding out.”
“B
ut Deese is gone,” Tremanty said. “We might not ever find him again.”
Lucas said, “He might not have gone that far.” He took the green bag off his shoulder, pulled it open, peeled back the flaps of all four FedEx boxes, showing off the money. “Smith was paying him, but we got the money. I don’t know how much, but it could be a million.”
Tremanty showed a flicker of a smile. “Santos is hurt, he’s got a pile of money with him, and he’s meeting up with the fuckin’ Louisiana cannibal. That gives me something to work with. Deese won’t be getting any more money from Smith, I can promise you that.”
Harvey came over. “The sheriff is here, along with every reporter in Vegas. We’ve contained the press outside, we think, at least for now. We need to meet to talk about the story.”
Lucas, Bob, and Rae all looked at Tremanty. After a moment, he nodded. “All right, I’ll take it. We want to avoid a political clusterfuck, if we can. We need Bob’s video of the guy who yelled at Deese. And his girlfriend. And the car. We need all the photos we have of Deese, including any video from the first floor. We talk to the sheriff and then—”
“The fuckin’ press,” Harvey said.
“Nothing wrong with the press,” Lucas said. “It’s the killing that’s the problem.”
They looked down the hall. The place had emptied out, leaving cops, crime scene techs, security guards and shredded bandage packaging scattered around the slowly congealing pools of crimson blood.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Deese had thought hard about how he’d pick up the money.
He’d sat in the bathroom, thinking; lay on the bed, picturing it. On the way across town, from the house to the Show Boat mall, he’d nearly hit a Rolls-Royce, distracted by the images playing through his mind.
What would happen if the marshals or the Vegas cops showed up, if Santos and Smith had betrayed him? If the feds got their hands on him, he was dead. So that wasn’t going to happen. If he got jumped, he’d start shooting. He had his Glock, he had a full magazine, and chaos would be his friend. He could feel the cool pressure of the pistol against his spine.
The mall was right on Las Vegas Boulevard. He didn’t get there fifteen minutes before the meeting, like a moron, to do some hurried, half-assed scouting. No, he got there two hours ahead of time and wandered through the crowd of shoppers, looked down hallways, tried doors, counted security guards. After half an hour of looking around, he found a possible escape route fifty yards from the Chipotle’s.
* * *
—
HE PACED IT OUT.
If he could get a jump on any pursuers, he could make it to the short utility hallway that led to the loading dock with the dumpster sticking out of it. There were three doors in the hallway, but when he walked through another exit he found that he could get onto the loading dock and unlock one of the doors from there. If he could get through the hallway, close the door behind himself, lock it, and get around behind the dumpster, he could run along the mall’s wall. Anyone chasing him would think that he was headed for the parking structure and be looking the wrong way.
All he needed was a five-second head start.
He walked out to his truck, drove around to the loading dock, and parked as close as he could—thirty yards away—in an employee parking area. He’d smeared some mud on the plates before he left the house and had suggested that Cox and Cole do the same with the Cadillac.
He called them now.
“I’ve been thinking—”
“Somebody should,” Cox said.
“Shut up. I’ve been thinking it’s possible that Santos is a shooter and he’ll try to kill me. If he’s going to do that, he won’t show up at the Chipotle’s. He’ll try to spot me when I’m walking up to the place and take me out with a quick shot and get away in the crowd. That’s one possibility. But if they’re really going to try to pull something, I think it’ll be a contract job, maybe with a guy right here in Vegas. You gotta watch for Santos and see if he’s with somebody else, talking to somebody. If he comes alone, then they’re probably going to pay. But if it looks like somebody’s scouting me . . .”
* * *
—
BEFORE DEESE had left for the mall, Cox had confessed that she’d grabbed a bag of cocaine from Beauchamps’s dresser drawer just before bolting from the house. She and Deese had done a couple of lines—Cole didn’t use drugs—and Deese had taken the remainder after they’d snorted up those first cuts.
Now, outside the mall, in the parking lot, he did another line in the truck, then sat back, letting it light up his brain as he watched the cars come and go. A security car turned around the corner of the building a hundred yards away, and he sank down slowly in the seat until he was below the window. The car continued by without slowing.
And he waited.
The coke worked on him like a tape recorder stuck on repeat, playing the same scene again and again. Santos and he would meet at the restaurant, he’d take the money. He’d tell Santos to go right and he’d go left, down the hallway and out to the car. Again: he’d meet Santos, he’d take the money, he’d tell Santos to go right and he’d go left . . .
He ran it over and over.
And then the darker stuff: the looming cop, and he’d pull his gun and shoot his way free, shoot anything moving, causing a riot, his only way out if the cops showed.
He checked his watch: 6:45.
He unrolled the baggie, used a long thumbnail to cut some lines on the face of his cell phone. Had the iPhone designers been coke freaks? Hell of a coincidence, if they hadn’t, because it was the absolutely perfect cocaine slab.
He snorted up two lines, waited for them to hit, snorted up two more, rolled up the small bit of powder that remained, pushed it into his back pocket, got out of the truck, checked his weapon, pulled his shirt over it, and walked into the mall.
Into what would become a shooting gallery.
* * *
—
COX CALLED. “We’re right up above the Chipotle’s. We don’t see anybody who looks like anything. Bunch of fat tourists in shorts.”
Deese looked at his phone as he walked up to the Apple Store: one minute to seven. He could see the Chipotle sign ahead. Nobody in the crowd to worry him, not so far. No sign of Santos.
He took a seat at the front of the restaurant, next to a group of college assholes. Customers were walking by with fine-smelling black beans and rice. His mouth started to water and he looked toward the kitchen, but there wasn’t enough time. No time, in fact.
He crossed his hands and his feet. And then, suddenly there was Cole.
“Deese! Deese! Cops!”
Deese uncrossed his feet and was standing up and pulling out his gun, which got hung it up on his shirttail for an instant, but no more than that, when he saw a big guy coming toward him, his eyes locked on Deese’s, with tabs on his shoulders, the kind of tabs you see on a bulletproof vest, and he saw a woman starting to cross in front of them. Deese shot at the cop but hit the woman instead and she went down. Then he was running and shooting, and panic erupted in the crowd, and just as he was breaking away from the crowd he saw Santos, with his green bag, and shot at him, the motherfucker, but missed, and Santos lurched away, maybe looking for a place to hide, and Deese shot him in the back. And then Deese thought, Wait, is that the money in the bag?
He turned to look behind and saw there was a guy coming at him with a gun. Deese ran, and somebody shot at him, and his foot twisted violently sideways, but the injury wasn’t crippling, and he was now at the hallway, then down it and through the door. He locked the door, ran behind the dumpster, then down the outside wall of the mall. Ten seconds later, he was in his truck and firing that mother up.
His foot . . . His foot didn’t feel like anything. As he drove toward an exit to the street, he reached down between his legs and ran his hand up his wounded ankle: no
blood.
He turned onto the street, kicked off his left shoe, ran his hand over his ankle. Nothing. He picked up his shoe and looked at it and found a wide groove in the heel. He laughed. Some motherfucker had shot the heel of his shoe but not him.
He was halfway home before his ankle began to throb and suddenly the fear climbed on him. He turned down a side street, then another smaller one, into a residential area, pulled to the curb, got out of his truck, and puked his guts out. He’d killed a lot of people, he guessed, and he didn’t mind that so much, but he might have been killed himself.
He got back in the house, the taste of vomit in his mouth, the sweat streaming down his face. He could smell his own fear in the sweat, a corrupt odor, like a rat rotting after it died under the stove.
If he didn’t vanish, he was a dead man.
And he was haunted by one question. That bag that Santos had . . . A red bag? A green bag? . . . Was there money in it? Could he have slowed down enough to grab it? Where did the cops come from? Had one of the security guards spotted him? And that guy with the gun—that was that marshal, Davenport, who’d been shot in Altadena.
Where had their tip come from?
That fuckin’ Smith; that was the only answer he had. Santos told Smith about the meeting location and Smith called the cops, hoping he’d be killed. Maybe hoping both of them would be killed.
* * *
—
COX AND COLE were immediately swept up in a panicked crowd, running down the mall. Maybe one or two of the shoppers had seen Cole screaming at Deese, but they were left behind in seconds. Down the main hall of the mall, down escalators, into the parking structure to the Cadillac, the screaming fading behind them.
They didn’t know what had happened to Deese. Cole had lingered a second or two after he’d screamed the warning and he’d seen Deese come out of the Chipotle’s and fire his gun. He hadn’t seen if anyone had been hit.
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