They were afraid to call him in case the cops had his phone.
“Do you think he’s dead? That one marshal was pushing right through the crowd. He wasn’t but fifteen feet away from Deese,” Cox said. She’d been watching from the end of the atrium railing, thirty feet from Cole.
“I don’t know what happened, everything went crazy and I ran,” Cole said. “There was a lot of shooting.”
“Maybe it’s on the radio.”
They found a couple of local stations, but there was nothing but soft rock. Cox kept twiddling the dials. “It’ll be on TV,” Cole said.
“Sure. But should we go back to the house? If Deese isn’t dead, if he got out somehow, they might be following.”
Cox stumbled over a talk show in which the right-wing host was saying, “God help us, we’ve gotten word of a mass shooting, an active shooter, at the Show Boat mall. We don’t have details yet, but apparently there are several dead and wounded, and the shooter is still at large. Police and ambulances are there, and more are on the way. If you are listening to this in your car, don’t go to the Show Boat mall.”
“Ah, Christ, now we are fucked,” Cole said. “We’re in it for murder now. Both of us.”
“Maybe not, maybe not. Maybe if we get far enough away . . .”
“We gotta pack up and go,” Cole said. “We’ll clean the house out and head for the highway. We can be in Nebraska by noon tomorrow. People won’t be able to see the car so well after dark . . . How much gas we got now?”
Cox thought running was the best idea, right up until they pulled back into the rented house’s driveway, activated the door to the garage, and found Deese’s truck inside.
“Holy shit,” Cole said. “He got out.”
* * *
—
DEESE WASN’T HURT. And nobody had been killed at the mall. Five people had been wounded, but nobody had yet died. Deese was standing in front of the television, which was tuned to a channel showing a helicopter hovering to the west of the mall, cameras aiming down at the squadrons of cop cars.
“They got pictures of all three of us,” Deese said.
“What?”
“Watch for a minute, they’ll show them again. They’ll go from the helicopter, to the anchor lady, to the video cameras. Then they’ll talk about who’s to blame. I mean, which cops are to blame for this whole fuckup.”
One minute later, the station cut from the helicopter feed to the anchorwoman, who introduced the video from the mall. Cox, Deese, and Cole had worn hats and sunglasses, so the videos weren’t great. The most recognizable shot was of Cox, who’d looked up at a camera as they’d run down the hall. “I didn’t mean to look up. I wasn’t looking for a camera.”
Cole said, “We need to cut your hair and get you in a dress. Everybody will be taking a look at a blonde with long hair. We need to punk you out. After we cut it, we’ll go red. We can buy some hair stuff on the way out of town, dye your hair at a motel.”
“We got Harrelson,” Deese said. “He’s still got that money.”
Cox: “What? We’re not doing that. Are you crazy?”
“Why not? The cops don’t know where we’re at. We hit him tonight, an hour from now, get the money, and take off,” Deese said. “The time between that and taking off is only about an hour, in the middle of the night. We could pack up and not need to even come back here.”
They thought about it for a minute, then Cole said to Cox, “We need the cash. That hasn’t changed. We’re still in the game.”
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Bob called Lucas from the mall’s video monitoring station. “Get the guys out to the car. The lookouts and Deese came in separate cars and we’ve spotted both of them. Vegas has stoplight cameras. We ought to be able to track them for a while. We might not get right on top of them, but the Vegas operations guys could get us close.”
“I’ll get them down there,” Lucas said. “See you at the car.”
Rae was still working with Tremanty, who now seemed dazed.
Lucas had once been tracking an assassin named Clara Rinker and, with the cooperation of the FBI, had managed to con her into making a call to an organized crime figure who had betrayed her.
Or so they thought.
In actuality, Rinker knew exactly what was happening. She’d sent a burner phone to the target, saying that she didn’t want to give him her real number in advance because she was afraid he could track it. She would call him on the burner.
A friend of hers, an Army ordnance sergeant, had put a pea-sized wad of C4 inside the phone, triggered by pressing a cell phone button. Lucas and the feds, eager to listen to the call, had gathered around the mafioso as the call came in, with FBI technical people waiting to trace it. Instead, Rinker had triggered the tiny bomb. The mafioso’s head had been mostly blown off and his brains hit Lucas square in the face.
Lucas had freaked. “Get it off me, get it off me . . .”
* * *
—
HE REMEMBERED that moment as he looked at Tremanty, still covered in the woman’s blood, from a bullet meant for the FBI man.
Lucas said to Rae, “We might be able to track them. Get Sandro back to his hotel. We can talk to you on a phone and you can catch us with a cab or a cop car. I think our boy needs to chill for a while.”
“I’m okay,” Tremanty said, but the glazed looked never left his eyes.
“No, you’re not,” Lucas said. “I’ve been where you’re at and it’ll take time to get straight. So go get straight. Run in place, do some pushups, take a shower.”
To Rae he said, “Take him. Get a cop car back to the hotel. Bob and I are going. Catch us when you can.”
She nodded, and to Tremanty said, “Come on, Ess-Tee. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Tremanty yawned—the result of shock—then said, “My clothes . . . my bag . . . still in the car.”
“Damnit,” Lucas said. He looked at his watch. “C’mon, we’re three minutes from the hotel. We’ll take you.”
* * *
—
BOB WAS WAITING at the truck, and as they left the parking structure he hit the lights and siren. “They’ve tracked them both south on Las Vegas Boulevard, down to the end of the Strip, now they’re looking for them farther south,” he said, talking a mile a minute. “The problem is, the cameras are mostly along the busier intersections. If they turn off into a residential area, we’ll lose them.”
“So we work the street, like we planned,” Lucas said. “With all those people shot at the mall, we’ll get all the help we need.”
Bob’s phone dinged and he answered, listened for a moment, said, “Keep me up,” hung up, and said to Lucas, “Still on the boulevard, but farther south. Down toward the house where Beauchamps got killed.”
“Of course,” Lucas said. “The backup safe house. It was bound to be close.”
Tremanty asked, “This isn’t live, is it? You’re not actually seeing live video?”
“No, it’s all recorded,” Bob said. “We’re a half hour late.”
* * *
—
THEY DROPPED Tremanty and Rae at the Bellagio, and as Rae led Tremanty away Bob said, “He looks pretty shaky.”
“I could tell you about that,” Lucas said.
Bob’s phone dinged. He answered, listened, and hung up.
“Gotta get more south. They were headed right for the Beauchamps site. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Sun’s below the horizon,” Lucas said. “Gonna start getting dark. Damn, I wish we had another hour of light.”
“It is what it is,” Bob said.
They were rolling fast down the boulevard, siren squawking at the red lights, trying to catch up with a couple of Vegas cop cars that were leading that way. Bob’s phone dinged again. He listened, hung up, and said, “They go
t them at Sunset, still heading south. But there’s no camera at Warm Springs, so if they turned there—”
“Bet they did,” Lucas said. “We’re gonnna need a map, and maybe twenty or thirty cops knocking on doors.”
The phone yet again. Bob listened, hung up, said, “You would have lost your bet. They went on south past Warm Springs, because they picked them up at Blue Diamond, where there is a camera. They turned east there. We won’t see them again, we’re outta cameras, unless there are some in storefronts. We need a map of the residential areas east of Blue Diamond.”
Lucas got Rae’s iPad from the back, called up a map, studied it for a moment. “Maybe . . . two square miles of houses. That’s where they’ll be, if they didn’t see the cameras and are trying to dodge them. Let’s find out how many cops we can get in there. If we can get enough cops, we’ll spot them tonight.”
“Assuming they hang around,” Bob said.
“Yeah. That,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
BOB TOOK another call and was told Las Vegas Metro cops were moving into the area, rendezvousing at a CVS pharmacy on what turned out to be Windmill Lane, if you were going east, Blue Diamond if you went west. When they got there, nine Metro cop cars were already in the parking lot, with more coming in behind. They parked and found an improvised command post run out of a van by an assistant sheriff named Deborah Case.
Lucas introduced himself and Bob to Case, told her they’d been at the mall, and she asked, “You have anything for us?”
Lucas shook his head. “Nope. Looks like you’re doing what we’d be doing. Give us a few blocks to cover, we both have experience doing that.”
“You have a vest?”
“Yes.”
“All right.” She pointed at another cop. “That’s Lenny. Lenny’ll tell you where to go.”
Lenny had a large-scale map that he’d broken down into quadrants and then smaller squares. He assigned Lucas and Bob to a square on the edge of a densely packed subdivision.
“We’re looking for a white Ford F-150 SuperCab—that’s the model with the smaller doors in back, the back-hinged kind. And we’re looking for a silver or maybe champagne Cadillac Escalade,” Lenny said. “Both have mud on the plates, and there aren’t a hell of a lot of mud puddles around here at this time of year so if you see muddy plates, that’s them. Both plates are white, we think California and Louisiana. Nevada plates are light blue with a yellow or orangish scene at the top or bottom.”
“We’re thinking a couple doors per block,” Lucas said.
“We’re saying two doors per side of each block. There are a lot of houses per block out here, and you get some of those curved streets and you can’t see very far along them. Use your best judgment,” Lenny said. “We’re telling people to look for houses with vehicles parked outside that have Nevada plates and aren’t the target vehicles. You wouldn’t want to knock on the door and have the fuckin’ cannibal open it on you.”
“We’d probably try to avoid that,” Bob agreed.
“I don’t have any extra radio chest packs for you guys. I do have a handset you can use,” Lenny said.
Bob took eight seconds to figure out the handset, and he and Lucas headed for their square. Rae called a few minutes later and said, “Where are you? I want to get in on this.”
“How’s Sandro?” Lucas asked.
“He wants to come, too. He’s shaking it off, I think, now that he’s got the blood out of his eyes and mouth.”
Lucas told her about the rendezvous site at the CVS. “You guys might as well get your own assignment. But stay in touch.”
Lucas and Bob had drawn a roughly rectangular area. On Rae’s iPad, Lucas counted a hundred and twenty-four houses arranged in fourteen adjoining blocks of differing sizes. He and Bob conferred over the iPad, agreed that they should probably try to hit about forty houses to be sure of covering the area.
They parked the Tahoe and locked it and started walking through the warm, lingering twilight. Lucas had never been in a subdivision quite like it: the houses were large but only a few feet apart. Some had no lawn at all, nothing but a concrete slab right up to the front doors. Others had postage-stamp lawns, gravel, and a few desert shrubs. One startling lawn, hard green under the streetlight, turned out to have plastic grass. All the houses had three-car garages, usually a double-door and a single-. Most were white, though the neighborhood was sprinkled with pastels, green, beige, tan. The streets were empty.
Bob worked one side, Lucas the other, looking at the houses with their lights on. Only a few had both the lights on and vehicles outside, and they chose those. The people inside were cautious. One man shouted at Lucas, after Lucas rang the doorbell, “I’m calling the police!” Another yelled, “We don’t want any!”
They’d been knocking on doors for an hour, into darkness, when Bob got a call on the handset. “This is Lenny. Marshal?”
“Yeah, this is Bob Matees.”
“We got them. We’re sure. We’re setting up the SWAT to go in. There are lights on in the house but no visible vehicles. But, then, there wouldn’t be, huh? Anyway, we’re informing you. If you want to come back to the CVS, we’ll lead you down to the house and you can watch it go down . . . If you want . . . I understand you got shot the last time you did this.”
“That was the other guy,” Bob said. “See you in five minutes.” He whistled for Lucas, then shouted: “They got ’em!”
They ran back to the truck and took off.
* * *
—
AT THE CVS, Rae jogged over, trailed by Tremanty. He was wearing a fresh short-sleeved shirt, no bloodstains. “It’s them,” Rae said. “A neighbor said they were driving a silver Escalade and a white pickup, that they’d only been there a couple of months—two guys, no blonde—but picked Deese out of a photo display as the driver of the truck.”
“How far from here?” Lucas asked.
“Not a mile. East down Windmill, then over a block. The neighbor said the house was an Airbnb, renters coming and going every week before these two guys showed up. It’s them.”
“When’s the SWAT going in?”
“They were ready, they’re closing in right now. We’re welcome to go down that way, but they want us a few hundred yards out . . . They’ll be doing it in fifteen minutes or so. Not a lot to think about.”
“I thought we’d be doing this,” Lucas said.
Tremanty nodded. “So did I. But I don’t care as long as I get Deese.”
* * *
—
CASE, the assistant sheriff, had set up two rings of pursuit cars around the target house. One ring one block out, the other ring three. If by some weird chance Deese and the others broke past the SWAT squad, the net would collapse on them.
Lucas, Bob, Rae, and Tremanty, all in the Tahoe, moved up to the first ring and parked. Bob asked Tremanty, “How’s the head?”
“Okay. I stood in a shower for ten minutes with cold water in my face. I won’t forget it, but I’m not stumbling around like a clown anymore,” Tremanty said. To Lucas: “What’d you mean when you told me you’d been there?”
Lucas told him about the murder of the mafioso, about clawing at his face and coming away with a handful of brains.
“Aw, Jesus,” Tremanty said. “That’s, uh . . .”
“Yeah.”
* * *
—
BOB’S HANDSET BURPED. “They’re going in,” a voice said. “Everybody locked and loaded?”
“Like John Wayne said,” Bob said.
Lucas rolled a window down. If there was shooting, they’d be close enough to hear it. There was nothing, and a minute later the radio burped again. “The house is empty. Stand down.”
“Goddamnit,” Tremanty said.
Rae said, “We need to look.”
* * *
> —
THEY HAD TO WALK the last block to the house, where they found Case and the SWAT commander running the scene. The house was typical of the neighborhood, with both garage doors up. A white Ford F-150, with mud-smeared license plates, was parked on the single-bay side.
Case, the assistant sheriff, was standing at the front door. Lucas, Tremanty, Bob, and Rae walked across the concrete lawn and looked past her into the house. Lucas could see clothing on the couch and sacks of junk food on a kitchen counter. “They may be coming back. For the truck,” Lucas said to Case. “You should shut down the scene.”
She said, “We’re already there. We’ll leave the outer ring in place—the Cadillac won’t get in here—but it’s probably too late.”
She pointed, and Lucas turned to look. Three blocks away, a group of vans were parked at the side of the street, with a dozen people standing in the street itself, looking down at them. “TV,” Case said. “If they’re paying any attention to the media, they’ll see us.”
“How many guys are you leaving here?” Tremanty asked.
“Eight unmarked cars, parked on side streets, a block out from the house. If they come in, we’ll see them. And we’ll have the manpower to take them down. You can go on in, if you want.”
She went to do something else, and Lucas, Bob, Rae, and Tremanty stepped inside the house, cruised the living room and the two bedrooms. There was high-end clothing in the closets and on the floor, in boxes and bags. “After the mall, they must’ve known there’d be a massive manhunt,” Tremanty said. “They’re on their way out of town.”
“That Lenny guy said the Highway Patrol is all over the roads going out of town,” Bob said.
“I . . . don’t know,” Lucas said. “If they were planning to run straight from the mall, they would have packed a lot of this stuff up. What would it take, five minutes? And why leave the truck? It’s a hell of a lot more anonymous than the Cadillac.”
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