Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  “No sweat,” he said. “Soon as I call, you run down there with the money and yank it open.”

  Cole said, “It’s after eight. We need to find a place for me to sit. And we need to get the bike off the truck and get you down in that ditch at the Hard Rock.”

  Deese grinned at him. “You nervous?”

  “Fuck, yeah. I always get nervous. But I’m always there.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY FOUND A SPOT in a parking lot across a street from the bank’s lot. The bank’s was ringed by fifty-foot-tall pine trees, but it was easy enough to see between them. And there’d be cars coming and going from the lot where Cole would be. “I can watch him only until he gets in the truck,” Cole said. “Then I gotta go, if I’m gonna get back to the Ferris wheel.”

  “Yeah, but you’ll see him when he gets there and gets out of the truck and make sure it’s him and not some cop. When you call me after you see him come back out of the bank, I’ll wait three or four minutes before I call him. That’ll get you on your way to the Ferris wheel. It’ll take him another five minutes to get to me. You’ll have plenty of time.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “You getting spooked?”

  “A lot of timing’s gotta be right. When we were hitting those houses, we knew exactly what we were doing,” Cole said. “We knew who was inside the house, what we’d get, where the cops were. This is a crapshoot.”

  “Just take it easy when you drive out of here. A goddamn fender bender and I’m dead and you won’t get a nickel,” Deese said.

  * * *

  —

  THEY DROVE BACK to the drainage channel, unloaded the bike, lifted it over a fence, and Deese rolled it down the slope to the sandy bottom and pushed it under the narrow bridge. A few street people were sitting outside the tunnel entrance, watching them, but made no move to come over to the bridge. “What are you going to do if one of the bums grabs the bag?” Cole asked.

  Deese said, “Won’t happen. If it does, I’ll handle it. You better go.”

  “We could still walk away,” Cole said.

  “Go! Go!”

  Cole went.

  * * *

  —

  HE WAS IN his surveillance spot early, ten minutes before nine. Five minutes later, he saw the Yellow Cab Porsche turn into the bank’s parking lot. He saw Harrelson get out of the car—pink shirt, khakis, sunglasses, bandages on his face. He reached back into the car, got a floppy-brimmed golf hat, pulled it on. No question that it was him. Reached back into the car again and pulled out what looked like an empty green shopping bag. He walked toward the bank. Cole punched his burner, calling Deese, and said, “We’re on. He’s waiting outside the bank.”

  Deese clicked off without a reply.

  Cole waited for what seemed like a long time. He supposed Harrelson would have to get back into the bank vault, count out the money. Cole once had a safe-deposit box and whenever he took out the box, bank people escorted him to a private room to load or unload it. That would suck up some time.

  People came and went from the bank. Fifteen minutes later, Harrelson came back out, climbed into the Porsche . . . and waited. Cole thumbed the power button on the burner, and when Deese came up he said, “He’s in the car. I’m outta here.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY’D DECIDED Deese would make the call, so that Cole wouldn’t have to do it while he was driving. Cole rolled out of the parking lot, up to Sands, took a left, and headed for the Strip. By the time he got there, Harrelson should be getting close to the Hard Rock. He worked his way to the back of the LINQ parking garage; a security car was parked in one of the spaces he was planning to use, but there was nobody in it.

  His phone rang, and Deese shouted, “On the way.” Cole hopped out of the car, got the two metal cash boxes from the backseat, crossed the fence, and ran down into the drainage channel to the metal grates blocking the tunnel entrance.

  He yanked the grate bar to one side, stepped through, ran twenty or thirty yards down the tunnel, far enough that a GPS wouldn’t work, and opened the metal boxes; the boxes would act as a Faraday cage if there was a GPS tracker in with the cash. The concept for such a cage had come out of the research he’d done with Beauchamps and the gang in LA. They’d worked hard on that, he thought now. Beauchamps had been a smart guy, and he, Cole, was also a smart guy. How they’d ever gotten a dumbass like Deese hung around their necks . . .

  Fifteen seconds later, he heard the distant motor grind of the dirt bike and saw a tiny dot of light, its headlight, getting closer.

  Thirty seconds later, Deese was rolling to a stop. He tossed the money bag at Cole and said, “Dump the money, dump the money.”

  Cole began transferring the money from the bag to one of the metal boxes, all they’d need. As he was transferring the last few bricks of cash, he found the GPS transmitter.

  “Transmitter,” he shouted at Deese, who’d killed the bike and dumped it on its side. He turned and threw the transmitter farther down the tunnel, then looked up at Deese, who was pointing a pistol at his head.

  He barely had time to flinch.

  * * *

  —

  COLE THREW the transmitter down the tunnel and turned back, and Deese pulled his gun out of his belt and shot Cole in the forehead. Cole sagged over the empty metal box. The muzzle blast had been deafening in the tunnel, but Deese took a second to shoot Cole again in the head, then picked up the money. He patted Cole’s jeans pockets, found the truck keys, jogged to the end of the tunnel, squeezed through the gate, pushed the bar back in place.

  He was back in the truck in thirty seconds.

  He had one more stop to make; he’d be back at Ralph’s in two hours for the cleanup. Too bad about Ralph. The old fucker had to go, along with Cox and Gloria Harrelson. At that point, he’d be well into the wind, running free, with two million bucks and a high-powered Lexus.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The FBI SWAT team was sent home, on standby, and Bob and Rae showed up at Lucas’s hotel room, where Tremanty was working the phones, with various federal agencies, trying to find out who serviced mining claims.

  Another agent was trying to work through Nevada state agencies to see if any of them tracked turquoise mining, while Lucas called a variety of raw stone dealers asking about a prospector named Deese. In the meantime, the Ney County Sheriff’s Department was interviewing people around Beatty, Nevada, in an attempt to find someone who knew where Ralph Deese had gone after being run out of town.

  They got a break: the Bureau of Land Management showed Deese had a current claim southwest of Beatty, apparently within a few hundred yards of the California border. The BLM provided a GPS location, and a federal satellite image showed them a silver oval—a trailer—parked on the site, which was in a mountainous area well off a lonely dirt road.

  The image’s resolution was high enough that they could make out a pickup truck and what might have been a motorcycle parked next to the trailer. The image wasn’t current: it had been taken four months earlier.

  “Four months ago, but it was still active then,” Lucas said. “If this Ralph Deese guy would be willing to take them, it’d be a perfect hideout.” He tapped that screen. “And there’s that motorcycle.”

  “There’s some possibility that they’re still in Las Vegas. Or they’ve headed north,” Tremanty told the agent in charge. “You need to keep people here in case there’s a break. I’m going to take my team, including the three marshals, north to the Deese claim. We’ll need the chopper quick as you can get it for us.”

  The AIC agreed: the chopper would be waiting at a commercial heliport south on Las Vegas Boulevard, near the airport.

  “Get us some handsets. I don’t think cell phones will work out there,” Tremanty said.

  The AIC said he’d send four handsets, al
l of which could be used to talk to the helicopter, and the chopper was equipped with a satellite phone for longer-distanced calls.

  “We’ll take the Tahoe—we’re all gunned up and it’s right downstairs,” Bob said to Tremanty. “It’s gonna be hot out there. We’re talking Death Valley a few miles away. We’re gonna need lots of water, and you and Lucas have to change clothes. You need boots or sneaks and long-sleeved shirts and hats. Rae and I already have our gear. We’ll get the water and meet you at the car.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY MADE IT back to the hotel to change. Lucas and Tremanty both had cross-training shoes and jeans; they both wore long-sleeved dress shirts, because they had nothing better and no time to go shopping. Lucas still had Harrelson’s golf hat, and Tremanty bought a hat at a casino convenience store on the way to the car. At the car, they found Bob and Rae loading two-liter bottles of water into two lightweight Osprey Talon backpacks. They were both dressed in light combat camo shirts and pants, with camo boonie hats.

  “We’re gonna need the gear bag,” Bob said. “We’ve got two rifles, one semiauto and one fully auto, and a sniper rifle. We should be able to handle anything they throw at us.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were crossing the tarmac to the waiting FBI helicopter, a commercial version of the military Black Hawk. The pilots had already filed a flight plan. They lifted off, circled over a golf course, and were gone.

  * * *

  —

  THE PILOTS had given Tremanty a headset so they could talk. On the way to Deese’s mining claim, Lucas, Tremanty, Bob, and Rae pored over the satellite images of the site that Rae had downloaded to her iPad. Bob had experience looking down at deserts from Black Hawk helicopters and tapped the road that came closest to the mining claim and the dimly visible track going into it.

  “If we try to go in with a sheriff’s convoy, they’ll see us coming before we even get to the approach road. Let’s see . . .” He checked the scale at the corner of the image. “They’re up on a ridge, the car would have to come around this mountain. That’s fifteen miles away. If they’re watching, it’s perfectly possible that they’d see us at fifteen. And it looks like there are parts of those roads where we wouldn’t be able to drive more than fifteen miles an hour, even in a Jeep, and maybe less in spots. On the approach road, depending on whether he cleared it with a bulldozer or just wore it down by driving over it, we could be down to three or four miles an hour.”

  Lucas: “And?”

  Bob tapped the screen again. “If the pilots are willing to do it, we could land over here, behind this mountain—that’s, what, two miles, or a little more? They wouldn’t hear us. This isn’t sand dunes out there, it’ll be hard soil with sparse vegetation and some sand at the surface, so the walking will be fairly easy. Walking—hurrying—we could do it in a half hour, and they wouldn’t see us coming.”

  Rae, who’d been quiet for most of the trip, said, “One problem: will the pilots put us in there? I know from experience that they don’t like—uh, what do they call it?—informal landings. Especially in a desert. They don’t know what they’re going to kick up. Dust and dirt, and all that.”

  Tremanty: “If that’s the way to go in, I’ll talk to them. Give me the iPad.”

  The helicopter was fitted with nine decent but not luxurious passenger seats, the front three facing the back of the pilots’ seats. Tremanty more or less duckwalked out of the back, around to one of the front-facing seats, put on the headset, and tapped the copilot on the shoulder. The rest of them couldn’t hear the conversation, but it went on for a while. And then Tremanty duckwalked back.

  “They’re willing to take a look. We’ll swing around and come in from the southwest, fairly low, from fifteen miles out, so the trailer will be in the sound shadow of the mountain. If the image is correct, there’s a hard-packed spot where they think we can put down, but they’ll have to eyeball it first,” Tremanty said.

  The flight out took forty minutes—the pilots told Tremanty that they were pushing 200 miles an hour. At one point, well outside of Las Vegas, they crossed an enormous suburban subdivision.

  Rae: “What are those people doing out here?”

  “Cooking their brains out if they don’t have AC,” Bob said. “You really, really wouldn’t want to have a power outage here.”

  * * *

  —

  THE LAST PART of the flight hugged the gray-and-tan desert terrain; at one point, they flew over a dozen huge, perfect green circles created by center-pivoting irrigation systems over some kind of crops, but what the crops were, none of them knew.

  The pilots said something to Tremanty and he pulled the headset back on and asked for a repeat, then said to the others, “We just crossed the California line. We’ll be coming around for the approach.”

  Bob had a heavily padded plastic case in his arms containing a bolt-action .300 Winchester Magnum sniper rifle. He’d taken it to a Las Vegas shooting range that morning, prior to joining the FBI SWAT team, to make sure it was still sighted in. He’d been satisfied then, but even with the padding he was worried about what the helicopter’s vibration might do to the heavy telescopic sight. He’d carried it cradled in his arms for the entire flight to give it further protection.

  “Don’t want to shoot from more than two hundred yards out, if I have to shoot,” he said. “I hate this fuckin’ vibration.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE SLOWING, then slowing dramatically, then dropping. There was lots of dust thrown up that blocked the view, and the chopper eased back up and sideways for several hundred feet. Tremanty was wearing the headset again and said, “They see a rock. It’s flat and wide enough to land on. We’re going that way. Still well behind the hill.”

  Rae was unzipping the equipment bag and pulling out a scoped M15 and then an unscoped M4. She handed the M15 to Lucas along with a thirty-round mag, slapped another mag into her own weapon, and asked Tremanty, “Do they see any snakes?”

  Lucas took the rifle and said, “Not that funny.”

  “Just askin’.”

  They hovered over the reddish brown flat rock, a space some fifty yards across with a few desert plants pushing up out of the cracks. They settled, tipped a bit, settled some more, and were down.

  Lucas got on his knees and unlatched and pulled back the side door and was hit by a wave of heat. He climbed out, followed by Tremanty, Bob, and Rae, all looking like an Outside magazine combat team in fashion-approved desert wear.

  * * *

  —

  TREMANTY was carrying a backpack with the iPad, two bottles of water, and a pair of binoculars; he had a Sig P226 in .40-caliber on his hip. Lucas had the other pack with four bottles of water, plus his pistol and the M15. Both Bob and Rae had sidearms, and Bob broke the sniper rifle out of its heavy carrying case and slung it over his shoulder. Rae carried the M4 and a ton of ammo.

  The copilot spotted their exact location on the satellite image and oriented them, pointing them toward the Deese mining claim, which was on the far side of a low mountain ridge.

  “We’re all gonna feel like jackasses if they left there ten years ago,” Bob said.

  Rae: “They didn’t. I got ten bucks says we’ll find them all right there. Deese and Uncle Deese and Cole, this blond chick, and Gloria.”

  “Nobody take the bet,” Bob said. “It’d be bad luck.”

  Lucas was pulling the chest straps tight on his pack. “Let’s stop bullshittin’ and start walkin’.”

  Tremanty pointed, “That way,” and asked, “How come everybody’s got a machine gun except me?”

  “Only one machine gun, and I got it,” Rae said. “Because I look hot with it. I might get a job modeling them.”

  Tremanty said, “Hmm.”

  Lucas nodded and said, “You could do that. Make the big bucks, too. Camo bikini, machine
gun, hip-hop hair . . .”

  Tremanty, again: “Hmm.”

  Rae said to Tremanty, “That’s tension talk, the way Davenport goes on, being a wiseass. He always does that when we get close to the shit hittin’ the fan. Ignore him.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS LED OFF, followed by Bob and Rae, with Tremanty trailing. The first mile had both uphill and downhill pitches, nothing severe, but not quite as easy as Bob had suggested. There were scattered rocks, like in the pictures taken by the Mars rover, and plants that bit. The heat was ferocious, the kind that burned the sweat off your face before you even got damp; it felt like a bad fever. They crossed two vehicle tracks, invisible on the satellite photos, apparently sworn in by three-wheelers. Rae saw a fist-sized spider, which she claimed was a tarantula and “can kill you as fast as a rattler.”

  From the back, Tremanty said, “Untrue. In fact, they’re barely poisonous. They can bite, but the bite’s not venomous.”

  Rae: “Killjoy.”

  Lucas: “I think I’ll fuck with one to find out for sure.” He looked at the mountain, licked his lips, and said, “Sooner or later, we’ll have to start climbing. That’s when it’ll get hot.”

  A half hour out of the chopper, they passed a low red rock bluff that threw a shadow out onto the desert. Bob pointed at the shadow and said, “Water stop. Two minutes.”

  Lucas checked his watch. “If Deese left Las Vegas the minute he got the money and made no stops, and didn’t drive more than five miles an hour over the speed limit, he’ll be getting here about now.”

  “Except for the bad road coming in,” Tremanty said. “That’ll slow him down. But we oughta trot this next part.”