Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  “Now I sit and wait,” Lucas said. “I don’t see anyone on the street coming my way.”

  “They’ll make you drive,” Tremanty said.

  He sat there for three minutes and then the phone rang. He put it on speaker, held it next to the handset, and Deese asked, “When was the last time you and Gloria got it on?”

  “Saturday . . . No, Sunday night,” Harrelson said in his ear.

  Lucas said, “Ah, let me see, Saturday . . . No, wait, Sunday night. Sunday night.”

  “All right. Go on out to Howard Hughes and turn right. We’re watching you. Better not be anybody following you.”

  “There’s nobody. I got your money. Gimme Gloria. Where do I get Gloria?”

  “You get Gloria after we get the money.”

  “That’s fucked up,” Lucas said. “This is a lot of money for nothing. Don’t hurt her. Remember, I’m a witness, I can identify you as well as she can, so don’t hurt her. There’s no need to hurt her.”

  Deese: “Keep driving.”

  Tremanty, in the earbud: “That was good, Lucas. That was great.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS DROVE out to Howard Hughes Parkway and turned right. Tremanty said, in his ear, “Okay, the box is rolling, you’re in the box. The Cessna’s up on top of you, thank God for that yellow car. And, yeah, we got you on the GPS.”

  Deese: “Drive on up to Sands. Don’t drive too fast. Don’t go gettin’ stopped by no cop.”

  Lucas: “I want to talk to Gloria.”

  “When we got the money, Gloria will call you from a gas station,” Deese said. “We’ll turn her loose three blocks from the station.”

  “That doesn’t sound real to me,” Tremanty said in his ear. Lucas couldn’t reply without Deese hearing it. And Tremanty, talking to somebody else, said, “Let’s stretch the box a bit, stretch it out a vertical block on both ends. They’ll do that tricky thing now.”

  Lucas was looking in his rearview mirror. He couldn’t see anybody obviously tracking him.

  Deese: “I don’t know exactly where you’re at now, but you gotta be close to Paradise. Take a right on Paradise.”

  “I’m still on Sands,” Lucas said. “I’ll take a right on Paradise.”

  “Got that,” Tremanty said. Lucas could hear him talking to the FBI agents driving the box.

  He came back to Lucas. “They’re starting to worry me. Nothing tricky yet. But if they take us way out in the desert, we’ll lose the box.”

  Another voice, in the background, maybe the AIC. “Yeah, but they’d never be able to lose the Cessna or the chopper out there. I don’t think that’s it. I think they’ll do the trick here in town.”

  Lucas could see the intersection of Paradise Road coming up. “I’m at Paradise,” he said into the cell.

  Deese said, “Take a right and keep going.”

  “I’m going,” Lucas said. “Where am I going?”

  “You’re going until I tell you to stop.”

  Tremanty: “That road runs down to the airport and stops. Something’s got to happen in the next minute or so.”

  Deese said, “You should be coming up to Harmon Avenue. Take another right. Tell me as soon as you do. The second you make the turn.”

  Lucas came up to Harmon and said, “Taking the right on Harmon.”

  “That’s the Hard Rock Hotel on your right. Go past it, you’ll see some grass and trees, and shit, and you’ll see a bridge with a red balloon tied to one end of the railing. Turn there onto the bridge and stop. Tell me when you have.”

  Tremanty: “Tighten the box. Get tight. This is the tricky part. Cessna says there are some people in a drainage channel, farther down. He can’t see what’s going on.”

  Lucas turned at the red balloon. “I’m on the bridge. I’ve stopped.”

  Deese: “Get out, walk to the bridge railing on the driver’s side, throw the money off the bridge into the ditch. Get back in the car and drive away.”

  “We’re tight on you, around the corner, ten seconds,” Tremanty said in Lucas’s ear.

  Deese: “Throw the money, throw the money, motherfucker. Get out of the car and throw the money in the ditch.”

  Lucas got out, carrying the bag. He looked down to the drainage channel, could see people a hundred yards away to his left. It looked like there was a homeless camp under the bridge—piles of trash, wrecked shopping carts, plastic sheets rigged as tents.

  “Throw the money, motherfucker, then get back in the truck. We’re watching, Gloria’s got the gun in her mouth right now.”

  Lucas threw the bag down into the channel and stepped back to the car but didn’t get in. A second later, he heard a harsh buzzing coming from under the bridge, and then an Army-green dirt bike rolled out from under it and buzzed up to the bag. The rider was wearing a helmet with a blacked-out faceplate. He glanced up at Lucas, snagged the bag with one hand, and roared off down the channel toward the homeless camp.

  And then the bike and rider disappeared under the bridge.

  Tremanty was in his ear. “Where’d it go? Where’d it go?”

  “I’m going down to the bridge,” Lucas shouted into the phone.

  He left the Porsche on the bridge, ran around the end of it and down a slanting retaining wall into the channel and toward the second bridge as another car came in from the left and two FBI agents jumped out and looked down at him. Lucas shouted, “He went under the bridge.”

  Tremanty, in his ear: “That’s not a bridge, there’s no bridge there. Where’d he go?”

  Lucas ran toward the camp and around a tent there made of a blue plastic tarp . . . and found himself looking into a tunnel.

  An emaciated bearded man said, “Hey, man . . .”

  “Where’d he go?” Lucas shouted. “Where’d the bike go?”

  “What’d he do, man?” the thin man asked.

  “Where’d the fuck he go?” Lucas shouted again, grabbing the man by his shirt and pulling him up on his tiptoes.

  The man pointed a finger and said, “You can see those tracks? Almost ran over my ass.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS LET HIM GO and ran in the direction he’d pointed, found the motorcycle tracks where they disappeared into the tunnel. There were sparks of light in the darkness, and Lucas turned to one of the FBI agents who was coming up behind and shouted, “Get on the radio and tell them where he went and which tunnel it is. See if they can figure where it comes out. You don’t have a flashlight, do you?”

  “In the car.”

  “Get it and throw it down to me. I’m heading into the tunnel.”

  The agent broke away, and Lucas stepped into the darkness, which wasn’t quite absolute. As his eyes adjusted, he could see there were more people inside, spots of illumination from flashlights and from kerosene lanterns—old-timey glass-and-metal vessels that put out a golden glow stronger than many of the other sources.

  Behind him, the agent ran down the sloping embankment and shouted, “I’m coming with you.”

  He handed Lucas the flashlight from his car and had one of his own. The two of them ran into the tunnel, following the track of the motorbike.

  The tunnel was dotted with lights and each one signified another camp. The floor of the tunnel was covered with sand, ankle-deep in spots, with the freestanding tents/tarps fastened to the walls. There was crap all over the place: food wrappers, McDonald’s cartons, old discarded blankets clogged with damp sand. The series of lights ended with a single kerosene lantern a hundred yards in and the heavyset woman who sat next to it with two shopping carts draped with a blue plastic tarp as a tent.

  “You cops?”

  Lucas grunted as he went by.

  And she called out after him, “I think he shot somebody. I heard a shot. I think.”

  * * *


  —

  LUCAS AND THE AGENT continued running down the tunnel; it had smelled bad from the beginning, but the stink got heavier as they ran. The agent pulled the tail of his jacket up over his mouth and nose, and called, “I think this is their toilet,” and Lucas nodded and pulled his shirt up over his nose. He took it down once, to see if he could talk to Tremanty on the handset, but the handset was dead.

  Lucas had lost track of time, but thought they must have been running for five or six minutes, when they saw a light ahead. They ran on for another minute, to the end of the tunnel, where seven-foot-tall grates blocked it top to bottom. One side of the grate had been pried open far enough for a man to squeeze through.

  A body lay by the grate, a man’s, with a bullet hole in the head. And beside the body, the green motorcycle and the money bag, empty except for the GPS tracker. The bike had no license plate.

  The agent, who looked like a teenager, said, “Murdered somebody,” and then he gagged from the smell of the tunnel. And maybe the sight of the body.

  Lucas said, “Nothing we can do now. We gotta go up.”

  They went up and found themselves standing under an enormous ultra-modern Ferris wheel. To the left, they saw a parking garage for the LINQ, a casino.

  The agent said, “Jesus, we’re right on the Strip.”

  Lucas lifted the handset and called Tremanty. “You there?”

  “Lucas? Where the hell are you?”

  “We’re at the exit of the drainage tunnel, right behind the LINQ, under that Ferris wheel—that white Ferris wheel. We’ve got a body, a motorcycle without a license plate, an empty money bag, and a GPS tracker.”

  “Be there in two or three.”

  * * *

  —

  TREMANTY ARRIVED in two, or three, with a squadron of other FBI cars. He walked up to Lucas and said, “We’re screwed.”

  “Gloria Harrelson’s screwed, when they take a close look at that money,” Lucas said. “The guy in the airplane didn’t see anything?”

  “No. He wasn’t looking here. We were a half mile away. Any ID on the dead guy?”

  “Didn’t have a chance to look.”

  Lucas turned to the agent who’d run the tunnel with him. “Go down there and see if there’s a VIN on that motorcycle. I don’t know where you’d find it. But . . . Here, I’ll come with you.”

  One of the other agents, a slender man who looked like anything but a biker, said, “The VIN’s usually on the steering column. Let me go down. Gimme a flashlight.”

  Tremanty walked a few steps away and got on his phone. “We’re gonna need the name and address that goes with a VIN we’re about to get and we need it right now. Right now. We’ll have it in a minute.”

  And a minute later the agent in the tunnel shouted, “Yamaha,” then called out the vehicle identification number. Lucas wrote it down, and Tremanty relayed it to whoever he was speaking with on the phone. He listened and a moment later said to Lucas, “Jesus, it’s a ’96.”

  And after another moment said, “It goes to a Ralph Deese . . . in Beatty, Nevada.”

  “Where’s that?” Lucas asked.

  Tremanty shrugged and spoke into the phone: “Find out where Beatty is. See if they have a police force.”

  He listened for a while longer, as Lucas paced around him, and then said, “Get me that number.”

  He hung up and said, “No police force, but they’ve got a sheriff’s substation. I hope somebody’s home.”

  Somebody was.

  Tremanty put his phone on speaker, and Lucas and the other agents gathered around him as he spoke to a sheriff’s deputy. The deputy said, “Yeah, I’ve heard of Ralph. I think he lives up in the hills somewhere, but I don’t know where exactly. That’s what I heard anyway. I can’t guarantee that it’s right. The people here pretty much ran him out of town. Must’ve been four or five years back, before I got here.”

  “Why was that?” Lucas asked. “Why’d they run him out?”

  “Everybody said he was a bad man. People think he raped a girl up here, but she couldn’t ID him. And he must’ve been wearing a condom, or something, because the guy before me ran her down to the hospital and got a rape kit done that came up negative on DNA. There’s rumors around that he might have killed a guy out in the desert, an ex-partner of his. He’s supposedly a prospector, but he never came up with any gold, far as I know.”

  The bottom line was that Ralph Deese no longer lived where the motorcycle put him and nobody knew where he currently was, though the deputy said he’d ask around.

  Tremanty hung up and said to Lucas, “Asking around is going to be too late.”

  Lucas said, “Listen. When I was talking to Roger Smith back in New Orleans, he said that the Deese brothers had an uncle out here. That’s got to be who this is. He said the uncle was a miner, that he looked for turquoise. I remember because that seemed like a weird thing, to mine. You think there’d be some kind of claim, or whatever they do out here. Something with a location and a name.”

  “I dunno, but I can find out,” Tremanty said. “Give me one more minute.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The gang’s day began at five in the morning with an argument: Ralph wouldn’t be going to Las Vegas because they were taking his truck and they only had room for two. Cox argued that they should take both vehicles, the truck and the Lexus, and abandon the Lexus when they released Gloria.

  “That ain’t gonna work. Gloria will know about the truck, and we couldn’t outrun a fuckin’ Prius in that thing,” Deese said. “Me’n Cole are going down, that’s all we need. Right now, Gloria doesn’t know where she’s at, and we’ll keep it that way. You and Ralph wait here, watching her.”

  “I gotta stay with Ralph?”

  “Yeah, you gotta stay with Ralph.”

  Cox looked at Cole, who looked at Ralph and said, “You touch her, I’ll beat you to death with a fuckin’ shovel. I ain’t joking.”

  Ralph held up both hands. “She’s safe with me.”

  “That’s the way it’s gonna be,” Deese said.

  Cox and Cole went outside, and Cox said, “Gloria knows who we are. We’re really . . . I don’t know. Ralph is crazy as a bedbug.”

  “Then keep your gun close.”

  They went to the Lexus and retrieved the gun, keeping an eye on the trailer. “Like Marion said, start pulling the trigger, that’s all you gotta do, if Ralph comes after you. Easy as pie.”

  “Easy as pie, but you said you never shot anybody.”

  “Never had to,” Cole said. “But now we’re in a bad spot, Geenie.”

  “Ah, jeez . . .” She took the gun and tucked it into her back waistband, under her blouse. “You gotta be careful, Cole. We’re going to somewhere warm.”

  “Like hell?” He grinned.

  “Panama, like you said.”

  “I’ll be careful. When we get back up here, you slip me that gun,” Cole said. “If Deese is gonna pull something, that’s when it’ll be, when he feels safe.”

  The door of the trailer popped open and Deese stepped out. Cole kissed Cox and said, “We oughta be back by noon. If we’re not back by, say, two o’clock, you get in the Lexus and head north, up to Reno. Dump the car and take a Greyhound back to LA. Like you never heard of us.”

  “Ah, that’s not going to happen,” Deese said. He walked over to Ralph’s motorcycle and said, “Help me get it in the truck.”

  “You’re sure it works?”

  Deese paused, said, “One way to find out.”

  He straddled the bike, fired it up, rode a hundred yards down the track and back, then killed the engine. “Good as the day it was made.”

  He and Cole lifted it into the truck, put the tailgate up, and locked it. “Let’s go.”

  Cole kissed Cox again and she gave him a squeeze and said, “Se
e you,” and a minute later Deese and Cole were rattling down the track toward the highway.

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE in Las Vegas at seven-thirty, and Deese sent Cole into a McDonald’s for Cokes and a sack of Triple Breakfast Stacks Biscuits; they both ate two—in the truck, in the parking lot—and then Cole drove them to the drainage channel and the entrances to the tunnels, with Deese pointing the way.

  “I’ll be hiding under that bridge when he throws the money in and then I’ll ride like a motherfucker right into those tunnels.”

  “Where do they come out?”

  “That’s the important part. If you’re not there, they’ll catch my ass and nobody gets no money. You gotta be there. That’s why you’re driving.”

  Deese pointed the way again, the turns, until they got to a spot under the Ferris wheel that had a couple of parking places for security personnel and was directly above the exit from the tunnels. “Ralph says their cars are hardly ever here. As soon as Harrelson throws the money, I’ll yell into the phone and be here one minute later. One minute. You jump out of the truck with the money box, meet me down there.”

  “There’s bars across the tunnels looks like a jail cell,” Cole said, peering into the drainage channel.

  “They can be pushed open.”

  “Yeah, but if it turns out they can’t be, if somebody locked them since Ralph was here, you’re fucked.”

  Deese nodded. “Okay, you’re right . . . Pull in there.”

  Cole pulled into one of the empty spots, Deese climbed out of the car, crossed a low fence, and ran down into the channel. There was some garbage and paper trash at the tunnel entrance. As Cole watched, Deese grabbed one of the gate bars and yanked it a foot or so outward, almost enough to squeeze through. He yanked again and it moved another foot. Then he pushed it back in place and ran back up to the car.