Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  “Even in the LA shoot-out, they took stuff,” Bob said.

  “It’s weird that they’d be out, wandering around town, with everybody and his brother looking for them, and with those videos on television,” Tremanty said.

  “They’re up to something,” Bob said.

  Rae: “Yes.”

  After a moment, Lucas said, “It’s a snake hunt now. There’s nothing for us. Unless something changes.”

  “What’re you saying?” Tremanty asked.

  “I’m saying we go back to the hotel and bag out,” Lucas said. “Play some blackjack. Bob could pick up a little weed at one of the stores on the Strip, get mellow. Rae . . . I don’t know what Rae might do. Read an art book. We can take the handset to stay in touch with what’s going on here.”

  Rae: “Really?”

  “Ah, fuck it,” Tremanty said. He looked around the parking lot, the cop cars stacked up around them. “You’re right. We’re out of it.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  Cox, Cole, and Deese left the house a few minutes before eight. Cox wasn’t talking much, after an argument with Deese. Deese, she’d said to his face, was dragging all of them down. “All of my life, I haven’t done nothing really bad, and you’re dragging me down. The cops are looking for me. And maybe for murder. Why’d you have to go and shoot all those people?”

  Deese had smiled at her, his yellow teeth dull under the overhead LED lights. He was eating Cheetos, his lips orange with the cheese. “You’re in it now, bitch,” he said. “You’re a genuine outlaw. They gonna put you on a table and stick a needle into your arm, unless you disappear.”

  Cox had started to cry, and Cole said, “Stop that. We’ll figure this out. Who’s gonna do what tonight?”

  Deese: “What’s there to figure out? We almost did it already.”

  Cole said, “Man, I’m doing my best to get you out of this mess. Marion and I ran our LA ring for three years and never had a speck of trouble until you showed up. But we’re doing a raid tonight, and that’s what I do best. We got to get organized—the chains and padlocks. Gotta look at some maps and satellite pictures. There’s lots of shit to do.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY GOT the backpacks ready, and the guns and chains and padlocks and masks, and looked at satellite pictures. Cox turned on the TV and found a news station. All the talk was about the shootings at the mall, with some memories of the Las Vegas music festival massacre in 2017, which killed fifty-eight people and left more than eight hundred injured.

  “Shit, we’re small-timers,” Deese said.

  They ate mac-and-cheese microwave dinners, hauled their gear out to the Cadillac, and took off. Cox found another news station. They were halfway to Tina’s Wayside when the woman newscaster said, “We’re getting word of a SWAT team raid believed connected to the shootings at the Show Boat mall. Our reporter, Jennette English, is with Metro police on Windmill Lane.”

  Cox flinched. “Oh my God, they got the house.”

  Deese: “What?”

  “That’s where we were,” she said. “We were on the first street off Windmill Lane. We can’t go back. They’ve got all our clothes, everything. My shoes.”

  Cole: “Jesus, we got lucky. They couldn’t have come in more than a few minutes after we left.”

  “Fuckin’ cameras, I bet,” Deese growled. “When I was in London, they could track people all over town, step by step, with their cameras. Bet they’ve got them here, too.”

  “What do we do?” Cox asked.

  “If they were tracking us, they know the cars,” Cole said. “This car. And the truck. They’ll be checking everything that looks like us. We need to get out of sight right quick.”

  Cox started to cry again. “I want to go home.”

  “We really need to get out of sight,” Cole said.

  “It’s a Cadillac,” Cox wailed. “You can’t park a Cadillac in the woods without somebody looking at it.”

  “No, but you can hide it . . . Turn left at the next light.”

  * * *

  —

  COLE TOOK THEM to a Cadillac dealership five minutes way. The place was closed, but there were rows of parked Cadillacs facing the street, with a few empty slots. “What if there’s a guard?” Cox asked, as she backed into one of the vacant spaces.

  “I’ll handle it,” Deese said.

  “Aw, jeez, you’re gonna kill a security guard?”

  Deese didn’t say no. Instead, he looked around the crowded lot, then asked Cole, “How’d you know about this place? This is pretty fuckin’ smart.”

  “Saw it when we were out driving around,” Cole said. “We still gotta get down to Tina’s without being spotted to see if Harrelson’s there. That’s not for an hour yet. We need to wipe the dirt off the license plates—at this point, it’s a giveaway.”

  They did that, then settled in to wait.

  A foil sack rustled in the backseat. “Anyone want some Cheetos?” Deese asked.

  * * *

  —

  THEY ARRIVED at Tina’s Wayside at ten minutes after nine o’clock, in full darkness, and immediately spotted Harrelson’s Yellow Cab–colored Porsche Cayenne sitting under a light in the parking lot. “Aw, man,” Cole said. “He’s here.”

  “I hate sitting around in this Cadillac,” Deese said. “Find a place we can wedge it in, where you can’t see it.”

  They drove once around the parking lot, decided on a spot in the street that ran parallel to the backside of the lot, between two other SUVs, from where they could still see Harrelson’s truck. More waiting. The last time, Harrelson had left at ten o’clock. And he did on this night, as well.

  One difference: there was a short, round-headed man with him. They both got into the Cayenne and Deese said to Cox, who was driving, “Gotta go! Gotta go fast! Fast! Go! Go!”

  She threw the Cadillac into gear, yanked the SUV out of the parking space, and hit the gas. “Not too fast,” Cole said, “We don’t want some cop stopping us.”

  “Gotta take the chance,” Deese said. “Fast! Fast! Go! Go!”

  Cox knew the route from the first attempt. They didn’t see any cops—“I bet they got every spare car covering the house,” Cole said—and they made it to the wall across the street from Harrelson’s with three or four minutes to spare.

  Cole and Deese had pulled the ski masks over their heads, checked their guns. Before they left the house, Cole had unscrewed two wooden legs from a coffee table. These made satisfactory clubs, each two feet long, with sharp, ninety-degree corners at the top end. Cole handed one to Deese and said, “Your leg. Don’t kill anybody.”

  Deese hefted it and said, “Maybe I shoulda worked with you guys instead of working for fuckin’ Smith, that miserable piece of shit. I used to have this walking stick . . .”

  “Right,” Cole said.

  Cox would find a place to ditch the Cadillac not too far away. If something went wrong, they’d call and she’d come in a hurry. If all went well, they’d take one of Harrelson’s cars and leave town in that. As they came up to the wall, she slowed, and Deese said to her, “Don’t you run off. Don’t you run off to the cops. If you run off and leave us here, after I get out of prison, I’ll find you and cut you open and eat your liver right in front of your eyes.”

  “Jesus, Deese,” Cole said. And to Cox: “You’ll be okay. Stay in the game.”

  They were at the wall, and Deese and Cole, now in complete darkness, were quickly out of the SUV and over it.

  * * *

  —

  AS WAS THE CASE with their first attempt, the subdivision seemed dead: no cars on the streets, nobody outside, no voices or music or people in swimming pools. The flicker of television screens danced behind a few curtains, but as part of Las Vegas, with its all-night reputation to live up to, the place was a failure.


  Deese and Cole squatted behind a shrub across the street from Harrelson’s house, which was dark except for one yellow-bulbed lantern by the front door. When Deese tried to brush the shrub a bit to the side, he got a handful of thorns and spent the next two minutes pulling them out of his palm and cursing in a stage whisper.

  Those two minutes were well used, it turns out, as they scanned the street for trouble. Cox called, “Harrelson just went past, two people in the car . . . He’s turning into the gate right now . . . He’s inside the gate.”

  “Go,” Cole said. “Walk, don’t run.”

  They walked across the street, up to Harrelson’s garage, then around the corner and behind another shrub that matched exactly the one they’d left the moment before.

  Cole asked, “Ready? Got your table leg?”

  “Yeah, yeah, if you got your gun. This mask keeps sticking to my tongue.”

  “Quiet. This is them.”

  * * *

  —

  LIGHTS ON the street now, a car moving slowly. Then the garage door’s lifting mechanism engaging, the overhead light coming on, the door starting up. Cole said, “Not until you hear the garage door starting to come down or a car door slam. We don’t want him inside the truck with his keys. Step high when you cross into the garage, you don’t want to trigger the safety laser beam and reverse the door, getting it going back up again.”

  “I got it, I got it, you told me a million times.”

  The Yellow Cab Porsche was at the curb, then in the driveway, pausing to let the garage door go all the way up and disappear. A second later, the door started down again, and Cole said, “Go!”

  They scrambled around the prickly shrub and the corner of the garage, high-stepped over the beam, and stooped behind a black Lexus sedan. The Porsche was on the other side of the sedan, and, beyond that, behind the single-bay garage door, was a tan Jeep Sahara. A door slammed on the Porsche, then another, and as Cole and Deese peered through the back window of the Lexus, and out the other side, they saw the short, pumpkin-headed man walk between the Lexus and the Porsche and turn away from them, toward the door to the interior of the house.

  Cole said, “Now,” and stood and stepped around the end of the Lexus behind Pumpkin Head, who didn’t see him, and then Harrelson emerged from behind the Porsche, and he did see him and tried to reverse his course but Cole pointed his gun at Harrelson’s head and screamed, “Freeze! Freeze or I’ll kill you, motherfucker.”

  Pumpkin Head lurched, surprised and in shock, and turned. Deese, coming up behind and to the side of Cole, hit him on the forehead with the table leg with a resounding crack that sounded like a dead branch being broken.

  Cole said, “Jesus,” as Pumpkin Head went down flat but somehow kept the muzzle of his weapon on Harrelson. “On the wall, on the wall, motherfucker. Put your hands up on the wall. Put them up.”

  Pumpkin Head struggled to his hands and knees, groaning—“Ow! Ow! Ow!”—and Deese kicked him in the ribs. And when Pumpkin Head went down again, Deese stepped over his body and said to Harrelson, “Don’t make me beat you to death. Open the fuckin’ trunk on the Porsche.”

  Harrelson, red-faced and angry, but not obviously frightened, said, “I gotta get my keys outta my pocket. We’re not gonna fight you. And don’t hurt Dopey no more.”

  “I’ll fuckin’ kill him if I fuckin’ feel like it, fuckin’ Dopey,” Deese said.

  Harrelson took a key fob out of his pocket, pushed a button, and the back hatch of the Porsche opened up to reveal a set of golf clubs and a gym bag. The bag was full of golf shirts, two pair of golf shoes, and a plastic bag full of dirty shirts. Deese pulled up the floor mat: nothing there but a spare tire and tools.

  “I’m gonna ask you only once,” Deese said. “Where’s the money?”

  Dopey/Pumpkin Head was still on the floor, still groaning, but now it was “Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!” Deese kicked him again and he yelped, and Harrelson said, “I’ve got a roll in my pocket, and Dopey has a thousand, probably.”

  Deese lashed out with the table leg and hit Harrelson on the side of the face, opening a gash across his cheekbone and knocking him against the garage wall and then down on his butt. A rake hanging on the wall fell on top of him.

  Deese said, “Get the fuck up or I’ll break your fuckin’ kneecaps.”

  Cole said, “Easy, we don’t want to kill him. We won’t get the money if we kill him.”

  “I’m not gonna kill him, but if he doesn’t tell me about the money I’m gonna cripple everything but his mouth.” Harrelson was struggling to get up, and Deese kicked him in the thigh and he went down again, and Deese asked, “You wanna play golf in a wheelchair?”

  “There’s more money in the house . . . Maybe a few thousand.”

  Harrelson had dropped the fob when Deese hit him, and now Cole scooped it up and said, “Get him in the house. When we go through the door, you might hear an alarm pad start to beep. We’ll give him ten seconds to disarm it. If he doesn’t, we gotta run. Stand back, because I’ll put a bullet in his brain for our trouble and then one in Dopey’s. You don’t want to get the blood on you because of that DNA shit.” Cole doing his fright bit.

  “Got it,” Deese said.

  “Alarm’s turned off,” Harrelson muttered. “Don’t hurt us and I’ll get the cash. The cash we’ve got.”

  * * *

  —

  THE DOOR to the house opened, and a blond woman with big Texas hair stuck her head in the garage and said, in her Texan drawl, “What the f—” before Deese hit her in the face and knocked her on her ass and back into the house. Harrelson shouted,”Hey!” and Cole stuck the gun in his face.

  Harrelson asked, “What? You’re gonna murder me in cold blood?”

  Deese said, “Fuck, yeah, and enjoy the shit out of it,” and pointed the gun at his head.

  Harrelson didn’t flinch, and Cole said to Deese, “Remember the money,” and Deese said, “Okay,” and shot Dopey in the hip, the discharge sounding like a cannon in the enclosed space. Cole jumped, Dopey screamed, and Harrelson shouted, “Stop it, for Christ’s sakes. We’ll give you the money.”

  * * *

  —

  GLORIA HARRELSON was crawling across the kitchen floor, dripping blood from her nose and coughing. Deese wagged his gun at Harrelson and said, “Get in the house,” and Harrelson walked past Cole and into the house and said, “We gotta get an ambulance for Dopey.”

  Deese: “Fuck him, let him die.”

  Dopey’s hair was scraped back into a ponytail, and Deese said to Cole, “Put your gun on this asshole,” meaning Harrelson, and when Cole did Deese backed up to Dopey and grabbed his hair and dragged him, screaming, into the house and dumped him on the floor. Gloria Harrelson was still crawling toward the kitchen, and Deese asked, “Where do you think you’re going?” and kicked her in the ass and she went flat on the floor and began weeping.

  Harrelson said, “One more thing and I’ll be on you like white on rice.”

  “And you’ll be a fuckin’ dead hero,” Deese said.

  “And you won’t get one penny, you piece of shit!” Harrelson shouted.

  Cole said, “We’re gonna need that money. Where is it?”

  “I got my roll, and there’s more money in the safe,” Harrelson said. “Don’t mess with Gloria anymore.”

  “Gimme the roll,” Cole said.

  Harrelson dug in his pocket and pulled out his roll of bills, mostly hundreds, and Cole thumbed them and said, “Maybe three grand.”

  “Not enough, nowhere fuckin’ near enough. I’ll tell you what, we don’t get enough money, I’ll take it out in pussy,” Deese said to Harrelson.

  “Don’t do that,” Gloria wailed from the floor.

  Cole said to Deese, “We’ve been here too long. Cut the bullshit. We want the safe open. And if we don’t have it in a minute and thirt
y seconds, I’m gonna kill them and we’re getting out.”

  “Don’t do that,” Gloria cried. “Safe’s in the family room.”

  Deese kicked Dopey and said, “Gimme your cell phone,” and Dopey groaned and said, “I’m bleeding real bad,” and Deese said, “Give me the fuckin’ phone or I’ll kick you to death.”

  Dopey fumbled the phone out of a blood-soaked pocket and Deese stomped on it. The he waggled his gun at Harrelson and said, “The safe.”

  As Harrelson and Gloria led the way to the family room, Deese leaned close to Cole and said, “I’m pretty fuckin’ good at this.”

  “Man . . .” Cole just shook his head.

  The safe was concealed in the side of a cabinet in the bar. Harrelson pulled open the cupboard-style door to reveal a four-foot-high steel box with a combination dial. He spun the dial a couple of times, then leaned closer and stopped sequentially at four different numbers. He popped the safe open and stepped back. Cole said to Deese, “If he tries to fuck with me, shoot him.”

  Deese pointed his gun at Harrelson, and Cole got down on his knees and began pulling drawers out of the safe. He dumped a lot of jewelry on the floor—gold chains, a couple of diamond necklaces and rings, some emeralds, a sparkly gold Panther brooch by Cartier. Cole slipped the brooch in his pocket. The bottom drawer turned up a stack of cash. Cole fanned the cash out and said to Deese, “Maybe six or eight.”

  Deese pointed the gun at Gloria’s head and said to Harrelson, “Where’s the money, asshole? Where’s the money? We know you got it.”

  “In a safe-deposit box, dummy,” Harrelson said, “Downtown. In the bank.”

  “We know you used to keep it in your car.”

  “Everybody in town knows that and it’s bullshit, and always has been. I was never stupid enough to do that. How much did you hear? Three million? Five million? I bet it was five million, right? Well, think about it. You gonna drive around a town full of assholes with five million in cash? You get rear-ended and there’s a fire? A junkie breaks in? You’re out three million. Or five. Whatever you heard, it’s bullshit.”