Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  “Hate that word ‘feeb,’” Tremanty said.

  “That’s why real cops call you that,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  HARRELSON WAS outside the doors at five minutes to nine, carrying a cloth shoulder bag. They let him stand there in the sun until exactly nine o’clock, when a security guard opened the doors and Harrelson walked in.

  Lucas didn’t think they much resembled each other, except in size and coloring; Harrelson also had a bit of a gut, but that wouldn’t be hard to fake. He also had white gauze bandages on his forehead and cheek, which the feebs hadn’t thought about, but they rounded up the bank’s first aid kit and stuck some gauze on Lucas.

  Lucas doubted that the Deese or his crew would risk getting close enough to see the differences. Harrelson had parked in the bank’s parking lot in the Yellow Cab Porsche and asked Lucas if he’d ever driven one.

  “I’ve had 911s for twenty years, but I’ve never driven a Cayenne.”

  “I’ve had both, it’s the same thing, you’ll be fine,” Harrelson said, as he handed over the car’s keys. “You can fake using the fob to unlock it, but I left it unlocked.”

  He gave Lucas the golf hat and his cell phone and took a pile of clothes out of the shoulder bag—Harrelson would change into black slacks and a black shirt, with a straw hat, when he eventually left the bank.

  Tremanty came up with a box full of bricks of cash and a black box the size of a cell phone—the GPS tracker. He loaded them into the bag, with the tracker at the bottom. The money looked good at a glance, but if anyone riffled them they’d immediately see the one-dollar bills under the hundreds. “Forty grand,” he said. “From Mr. Harrelson.”

  “Don’t worry about taking care of it,” Harrelson told Lucas. “I wouldn’t mind getting it back. But if it gets away, I got more. Do what you have to do.”

  Lucas nodded. “I’ve met a couple of relatives of kidnap victims. I’ve never seen anyone as cool as you are.”

  “I make a lot of money as a gambler,” Harrelson replied. “You make money that way by dealing with the reality you actually get, not what you wish you’d get. I’m freaking out, though, I’m just not showing it. I’m trying to deal with the reality.”

  “We’ll get her back,” Tremanty offered.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Harrelson said. His face revealed nothing.

  Tremanty looked at his watch. “You’ve been in here for fifteen minutes.” To Lucas: “Time to go. Get lucky.”

  “Take it from me: luck won’t have anything to do with this,” Harrelson said.

  Lucas pulled down the golf hat low and headed for the door.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  The last two miles of the trip north had been over dirt roads, out into the desert, the Lexus occasionally dragging bottom. The last leg took them up a steep rocky track until the headlights caught a silvery reflection below a south-facing bluff.

  Cox: “This is it?”

  From the backseat, Deese said, “Yeah, this is it. You think anybody’s gonna find us out here?”

  “I don’t even know where I am myself,” Cole said.

  They were looking at an old Airstream trailer, sitting up on concrete blocks. It looked like it’d been rolled and somebody had tried to fix it with a bumping hammer. There were lights at both ends of the trailer, but nothing moved until they popped the doors on the Lexus, and a corroded man’s voice said, “Hold it right there, motherfuckers, or you gonna die.”

  Deese yelled, “Ralph! It’s me! Clay! . . . Deese!”

  A man wobbled around the end of the Airstream, carrying a pump shotgun. He might have been anything between forty and sixty, heavily bearded, and wore denim overalls over a T-shirt. A hole was ripped through one knee, like Cox had seen everywhere in West Hollywood, but this hole had nothing to do with fashion. “What do you want?”

  “Place to bag out,” Deese said. “One night.” To the others he said, “Ralph’s a miner.”

  “Whyn’t you go to a motel?” Ralph asked.

  “Had trouble with the cops.”

  “I hope to hell you didn’t go leadin’ ’em up here,” Ralph said.

  “No, no, we’re clean,” Deese said.

  “Well, shit. You might as well come in and tell me about it.”

  * * *

  —

  DEESE HAD a heavy hold on one of Gloria Harrelson’s arms and he dragged her toward the Airstream and she started weeping again, and Ralph asked, “What’s wrong with her?”

  “We had some trouble with a guy who owes us money. Lots of money. This is his wife. We took her as security.”

  “How much money?”

  “Two million,” Deese said.

  “Holy shit,” Ralph said. “You’re gonna throw me a piece of that? Rent?”

  “Yeah, yeah, we’ll take care of you,” Deese said.

  They trailed behind him to the Airstream. The trailer seemed solid enough, when they climbed the steps. Cox could hear a chugging sound from outside, and when she asked Ralph told her that it was the diesel generator on the other side of the hill.

  The inside of the Airstream was like the inside of a pill capsule—much of the original finishes had been ripped out, except a café-type table with couch-like seats on either side. A bed was visible in a room at the far end of the capsule, with an added real-house-type door for privacy. “I don’t got much to eat except frozen pizzas and some canned Boy-are-dee,” Ralph said.

  “We’re okay,” Cole said.

  “Exactly what kind of trouble you in?” Ralph asked Deese.

  “Hard to explain,” Deese said.

  “Deese ate some people back in Louisiana,” Cox said. “And tonight he killed a man.”

  She was obviously serious, and Ralph laughed. “If somebody asked me, that’s what I would’ve guessed. How’d them people taste?”

  “Okay,” Deese mumbled.

  “You barbecue them?”

  “Man . . .” Deese said.

  “Love me some barbecue, like your daddy used to make,” Ralph said. “How’d you ever come to do that anyway?”

  Deese, now exasperated, said, “Look. Remember when we’d all go deer hunting and haul them carcasses out of the woods? All that meat? I’d hauled some of these deadasses back to my place to bury them and carry them back there, behind the house, but it was just . . . meat. I got to thinking about it. And so one day . . .”

  Cox: “Yuck! That’s disgusting. That’s probably why you smell.”

  “What?”

  “Let it go,” Cole said. “What are we doing?”

  Deese shook his head and turned back to Ralph. “I want a place to sleep for a while and then we’ll get out of here. You still got that old green motorcycle?”

  Cox said, “He shot a whole bunch of people in a mall down in Las Vegas. Then he kidnapped Gloria here.”

  “Jesus Christ, Clay, you leave anything out?” Ralph asked.

  “Hey . . .”

  Ralph glanced at Cox with a teasing grin on his face. “Is there a reward for him?”

  “Not as far as I know,” she said, still serious. “He was being chased by the FBI and the U.S. Marshals, and then the Los Angeles cops, and now the Vegas cops.” She glanced at Cole. “Did I miss anybody?”

  “The Louisiana cops,” Cole said.

  “Oh, yeah, them too,” Cox said.

  “Well, shit happens,” Ralph said. “We gotta figure out where we’re all gonna sleep. I could spoon up with this one here.” He nodded at Cox.

  Cox said, “Fuck that, you old monster.”

  * * *

  —

  “WE GOTTA lot of talking to do before morning,” Deese said to Ralph. “You still cook up some meth?”

  “From time to time,” Ralph said. “Getting tougher, though.”

&n
bsp; “Probably gonna need a few hits to stay awake tomorrow,” Deese said. “How about that old motorcycle? You still got it? Still work?”

  “Works fine. It’s the only way I can get up to the mine.”

  “We’re gonna need to take it with us. And your truck,” Deese said. “Anyway, we’ll talk later, tell you about it. Right now I’m gonna take Gloria in the back room for a few minutes.”

  Gloria had been snuffling all the time they were in the trailer and now Deese pushed her toward the bedroom.

  “Don’t let him do this, don’t let him do this,” she pleaded with them, looking mostly at Cox. “Don’t let him . . . You know what he’s going to do.”

  Then the two were in the bedroom and the door slammed.

  Ralph asked Cole, “How much do you want for this one?” and nodded at Cox.

  “What’s wrong with you people?” Cox asked. To Ralph: “Fuck you.” And to Cole: “We gotta get out of here. You got the car keys.”

  Ralph took a couple of steps back and lifted his shotgun. “Can’t let you do that. I’m gonna need some of that money Clayton’s after. Sit down and take it easy and we’ll talk to Clayton when he gets done.”

  Gloria Harrelson cried out from the bedroom, and Cox said, “You know what he’s doing back there.”

  Ralph took another couple of steps back and sank into a rickety wooden chair, the gun still up, and said, “Well, hell. That’s what women’re for. Always has been, always will be. Might rip off a piece myself, if Clay says okay. Been a while since I been down to Vegas.”

  “If you do that, you’ll have to kill her so she doesn’t come back on you,” Cole said. “That’d be cold-blooded murder.”

  Ralph pulled at the top of one ear, then said, “Well . . . yeah, I guess. That seems to be baked in the cake anyway.”

  They could hear sex sounds from the bedroom, and Cole asked, “You got any music here?”

  “I got a radio,” he said. “It’s behind you. The right knob turns it on. It’s old rock and roll.”

  Cole turned, saw the old brown Bakelite box, turned the right knob, and Led Zeppelin came up with “Whole Lotta Love.”

  “I hate that old shit,” Cox said. They heard another cry from Gloria Harrelson. “Turn it up louder.”

  * * *

  —

  DEESE SPENT forty-five minutes in the bedroom, then came out, pulling up his pants, and said to Ralph, “I used some of that baling wire to tie up her leg to the bed. You can’t get them windows open, can you?”

  “Not without a crowbar,” Ralph said.

  Deese glanced at Cox. “What?”

  “That was awful,” Cox said.

  “Really, it was pretty good,” Deese said with his yellow grin. “I had to whack her a time or two to get her started, but after that it was okay.”

  “Aw, Jesus,” Cox said, looking away from him. They could hear Harrelson sobbing again from the bedroom.

  Deese said, “About tomorrow. Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

  “Whatever it is, it won’t work,” Cole said. “It’s about ten to one that Harrelson’s called the cops. You can’t never do the money exchange and get away with it. What we really need to do is get out of here, get north. We could go up to Seattle or Portland, I’d school you in the home invasion business, we could pick up a couple million in a few months.”

  “You know why people don’t get away with the money?” Deese asked. “Because they don’t do the exchange in Vegas.”

  He turned to Ralph. “Remember that time I came out here and called you and you said you’d busted out at the MGM and were temporarily homeless? You were living down below?”

  Ralph smiled. “Really? That’s how you’re gonna do it?” And a second later: “The motorcycle and the truck! You’re smarter than you look.”

  * * *

  —

  DEESE LAID OUT his plan and, when he finished, said, “That’s why we had to come up to see old Ralph here. The truck and the bike. Cole drives the truck up and back, no reason for anybody to look at him. I take all the risk on the bike. I don’t make it, you’re no worse off. If I make it, we got two million dollars. I believe we’ll make it.”

  Cole bobbed his head. “That’s not a bad plan. It all depends on the truck and the bike, though. I’m looking around this place”—he waved a hand around the interior of the Airstream—“and I’m not impressed with the maintenance. If the bike blows up, everything blows up.”

  “The bike’s fine,” Ralph said. “I ride it every day, and I keep it up. But even if you had to get off and run, it’s only a few blocks.”

  They talked for a while longer, and Deese said, finally, “We leave here by six, we get down to Vegas by eight. I make the call to Harrelson at nine. It’ll be all over, one way or the other, in fifteen minutes.”

  “What about Gloria?” Cox asked.

  “We’ll figure her out tomorrow,” Deese said.

  “They might want to talk to her, to know that she’s still alive,” Cole said.

  “Well, tough shit. That’s what I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them I got her stashed in a house, that I know all about tracking cell phones and so they’re not going to talk to her. And if they don’t pay up, I’ll cut her throat, dump her in the desert.” He hesitated, thinking about it, then said, “And they’ll believe me. Because it’s true.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THEY were done talking, Deese went back to the bedroom, and the crying and beating and sex sounds started again, and Ralph said, “I got a hard-on like a telephone pole. Almost like being there.”

  “Shut up, old man,” Cox said.

  Cole said, “I’m not going to listen to this. Let’s go sit in the Lexus. Maybe we can lay the seats down and sleep there.”

  Ralph twitched the shotgun at them. “You can do that, but why don’t you use that key thing to open it up from the doorway here and then leave it with me. You act like you might want to leave us and we can’t have that.”

  Cole looked at Cox, then at Ralph and the shotgun, and nodded. “Come with us. We’ll need the key for the seats.”

  * * *

  —

  OUTSIDE, in the Lexus, they got in the back, with the seats reclined, and when they’d made themselves as comfortable as they could for sleeping Ralph said, “Sleep tight,” and went back inside. Cox asked, “What do we do?”

  “I think . . . we try for the money,” Cole said. “Deese’s plan will work. If we pull it off, we go up north, somewhere in the Midwest, get jobs, rent an apartment, and lie low.”

  “I don’t wanna—”

  “I know what you wanna. You want Southern California or Miami, or something like that. But we need to put some time between us and this mess. The more, the better. They got our fingerprints and DNA, and all that, and if they ever pick us up we’re done. We need to be careful little kids until we can work out better IDs and get out of the country. If we get a half million dollars from this deal, we can make it down to Panama and live for ten to fifteen years on it. By then, nobody will care about all this.”

  “I don’t believe that. People got shot. People are dead. Gloria’s been raped and she’s a witness. And both of us are part of what she saw.”

  “Gloria’s good as dead.”

  “No.”

  “Oh yes. There’s a logic to this. Like Ralph said: it’s baked in the cake,” Cole said. “Doing what Deese’s done, there can’t be any witnesses. They’ll kill her and haul her out to some old mine, or something, and bury her and nobody’ll ever find her. That’s the way it is. We gotta take care of ourselves. So Gloria’s dead.”

  “Still . . .”

  “Listen. They’ll catch Deese or kill him, the FBI will. After that, nobody’ll really care about the rest of us. And ten to fifteen years from now, they’ll care even less. I’ve been to Panama. It’s
a real decent place. A girl like you, even if you don’t want to be with me . . . There are all kinds of American expats down there, guys looking for women to hang with. You’ll hook up with some guy . . .”

  “I’ll hang with you, at least for now,” Cox said.

  “Well, that’s fine. I do like you. We got to be careful, though, when Deese and I get back tomorrow,” Cole said. “We need a piece of that money and he might want to keep all of it. I’ve got my pistol, but he knows that. So we’ll have to be really careful.”

  He reached into his back pocket, pulled out the Panther pin he’d palmed when they raided the Harrelsons’ safe. “Didn’t tell Deese about this—I saved it for you. I looked at it, it’s a Cartier. That’s a jeweler, top-end. It’s got some diamonds, and shit. I thought you’d like it.”

  Cox took the pin, turned it in her hand. “Oooh. It’s so beautiful, John. That’s the best gift I ever got. So . . . It sparkles, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. That’s why I grabbed it.”

  Cox pulled herself forward, pulled a bag out from under the front passenger seat, groped inside it, and produced Beauchamps’s 9mm. “Deese doesn’t know about this, either.”

  “You know how to use it?”

  “Oh, yeah, I shot guns like this a few times.” She pulled back the slide, let it snap forward. “All cocked and ready to shoot. All I have to do is push this safety thingy forward. Marion told me that if I ever have to shoot somebody to get as close as I can and then keep pulling the trigger until the gun stops shooting.”

  “You can do that?” Cole asked.

  “With Deese? Yeah.”

  “This time tomorrow, we could be in Denver.”

  “Or dead,” Cox said. She didn’t mention the money in the bag.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  Lucas shouldered the bag of money, pulled open the bank door, trotted around to the Porsche, pushing his gut out as he went, waved the key fob at the car, and climbed inside. Everything looked just like the inside of his 911. The earbud was in his right ear, the passenger side, already wired into the handset. Tremanty said in his ear, “Okay, you looked right. I would have bought it, if I were Deese.”