Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT PITCH was a slight uphill that continued on for most of a half mile. The footing was good, a layer of sand over a harder crust. They crossed an arroyo, with a deeper sandy floor, saw a motor track closer to the mountain they were skirting and moved onto it. “Looks like it’s going toward the trailer. We’re getting close,” Rae said.

  They crossed a rocky hump, still on the track, down into another arroyo, and up a higher hump and around the heel of a bluff, and the trailer was there, four hundred yards away. They backed off, behind a clump of brush, where they could see the trailer without being seen.

  “Old Airstream,” Tremanty said, looking at the trailer with his binoculars. “Pretty beat up, like a salvage job.”

  A dark sedan was parked outside the side door. Tremanty put the binoculars on the car and said, “Yes! That’s Gloria Harrelson’s Lexus.”

  “Told’ja,” Rae said.

  Bob said, “If they’re watching, they’ll see us if we try to get closer on the track.”

  Lucas: “Why don’t we backtrack, get a drink, and come up behind that ridge.”

  He pointed downhill to a ridge that would cover an approach from the south side of the trailer. They wouldn’t be able to get all the way in, but they’d get closer.

  * * *

  —

  THEY ALL TOOK long drinks after fishing the bottles out of Lucas’s backpack, and Lucas took a final look through the binoculars. Not much to see: everything around the trailer was deathly still, although, after a moment, he became aware of a vibration. He slid the glasses sideways, saw the silver oval of a propane tank. There was a surface pipe leading to the trailer. And there was another snaking away from the tank and up the hill and out of sight.

  “Okay. There’s a propane tank, probably for heat in the winter, but you feel that vibration? I think he’s got a generator back there, behind the tank. He’d want it away from the trailer so he wouldn’t be breathing the fumes.”

  “Does that help us?” Rae asked.

  Bob was looking at the trailer through his scope and said, “It could. It’s gotta be running the AC. If we could slide around the trailer, we could kill the generator, and somebody would either have to come out and see what the problem was or die of heatstroke.”

  They passed the binoculars around and speculated about the Lexus. Had the gang driven the car to Las Vegas? Were they already back? They’d seen a pickup on the satellite image and it was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the motorbike.

  “He had to have taken the truck,” Lucas said. “That’s how he got the bike to Vegas.”

  “Then he’s not back yet,” Tremanty said.

  * * *

  —

  BOB SAID, “If we get down below that ridge and keep going right, you see that hump? We could low-crawl across there and get behind those bushes or trees, or whatever they are, and get back to the generator without being seen.”

  “One of us could,” Lucas said. He looked at Rae. “You.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because if we drive somebody out of the trailer, we’ll need the sniper out front. I’ll call the shot, Sandro will talk to me about it. And if we get spotted, we’d want the machine gun up high and behind the trailer to pick off runners coming out the back.”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY BACKED OFF their vantage point, screwed the caps on their bottles of water, talked about the plan, and headed downhill and around behind the ridge that would block the view from the Airstream.

  Five minutes later, they were walking back up the ridge, only four hundred yards to the right. Rae took Tremanty’s backpack with a handset and a bottle of water and slid even farther to the right, crouching as she approached the track to the Airstream, eventually going to her knees. She waved once and was out of sight, crossing the track, before heading up the hill to the generator.

  Lucas, Tremanty, and Bob crept up the ridge and lay in the skimpy shade provided by a circle of shadscale bushes. They could no longer see Rae, and nothing was moving around the trailer.

  Then Rae called: “You were right, Lucas. There’s a generator back here and it’s running. It’s got a lockdown cover on the switch, but I can get at it with a stick. Want me to throw it?”

  Lucas looked at Tremanty and Bob. They both nodded. “Throw it,” Lucas said.

  A moment later, the vibration stopped, and Rae said, “Done.”

  * * *

  —

  NOTHING HAPPENED for a minute or two, then a door opened and a blond woman looked out and then stepped outside. She looked around for a moment, shaded her eyes, looked down the approach track, went back inside the trailer, came out a moment later and went to the Lexus, got inside and started it, got back out, leaving it running, went back to the trailer, came back a minute later with what looked like a six-pack of beer or soda, and got back in the car.

  “I can take out the tires if we need to,” Bob said.

  “She is not going anywhere,” Lucas said. “She’s waiting for Deese and the others. They’re all down in Vegas. She’s in the car for the air-conditioning.”

  Tremanty: “What do you suggest?”

  Lucas said, “I suggest we wait.”

  “There’s probably nobody else inside—we could take the trailer,” Tremanty said.

  “Too late,” Bob said. They turned toward him and he pointed. A cloud of dust was rising from the track far away, but not too far away, a few miles at most. “If she has a way to call them . . .”

  “Okay,” Tremanty said. “We wait. Need to get tight under the bushes.”

  Rae called: “You see them?”

  “We do. Sit tight.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  Deese didn’t feel even mildly bad about Cole, but he felt something. He couldn’t put his finger on it, exactly, but loneliness might have come closest. There was no longer a single person in the world he could talk to. His half brother was dead. He’d shot a man with whom he’d shared a kidnapping and a home invasion. His uncle was a crazy old coot who lived in a shithole shack in a shithole place to whom he could talk to for, like, maybe ten seconds before wanting to shoot his ass, which he planned to do just as soon as he got back. And, finally, his former boss wanted to shoot him.

  Then there was Cox. Deese had plans for Cox when she got back to the shithole, plans she wouldn’t survive any more than Gloria Harrelson would. The Nevada desert was the final resting place for hundreds of murdered men, women, and children at least, the unmarked graves stretching out from Las Vegas in both directions along I-15, and they’d simply be filling two more. No problem.

  He didn’t dwell on all this, being too busy driving and planning, and he didn’t have a soul for such concerns to cloud over, but the clouds were out there somewhere. Time and cocaine should clear things up.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER KILLING COLE, he’d driven the pickup, following a zigzag route, out to Las Vegas Boulevard, then to the Wynn Las Vegas, where he’d stayed a couple of dozen times and where he was familiar with the self-parking option. He drove into the garage, cruised along for a few minute looking for a specific car. He found it and parked in the first empty space closest to it, which was three down.

  There was nobody around and he just sat there for a couple of minutes more, then got the screwdriver he’d brought with him, crawled from his car to the next one over and unscrewed its front license plate, which was from California, then crawled along to the next car with California plates and unscrewed its front plate. He then crawled to the car he’d spotted when he drove in, which also had California plates, replaced first the front plate and then, nervously, because he was more visible, the back.

  He’d heard on the burglar/car theft hotline that nobody really knew what their
license plate number was; people hardly ever looked unless there was something radically different, like a Kansas plate replacing one from Nevada. Stealing the plates from a Lexus and replacing them with other California plates, the owner probably wouldn’t notice.

  And stealing the front plates from cars that were parked nose in, the owners likely wouldn’t know they were gone until they’d parked elsewhere, maybe not until they’d driven several other places. They wouldn’t know when or where the plates were taken and not be looking for them at the Wynn.

  He’d put the stolen plates on the Harrelsons’ Lexus. A routine check by the Highway Patrol would show that the plates on the dark gray Lexus were current. Ralph’s crappy old pickup wasn’t going to get him to Miami, but the Harrelsons’ Lexus would—in comfort.

  * * *

  —

  HE CRAWLED BACK to the pickup with the plates, put them in the cab, pulled his hat down, walked to the lobby, paid his parking fee, and drove out of the garage to the boulevard and headed north. When he’d left Las Vegas behind, he reached into the backseat and pulled the money bag up to the passenger seat. He reached inside the bag, pulled out a banded stack of bills.

  It was a half inch thick, all hundreds. He riffled the stack with his thumb, put it back in the bag, and attempted to tally the number of stacks in his head while driving. He knew the number he came up with wasn’t entirely accurate, but when he realized he was well past a hundred he was happy. He had the money, he was loose.

  He would have whistled a happy tune if he’d known one.

  * * *

  —

  EARLIER THAT MORNING, after Deese and Cole had left for Vegas, Cox sat on the couch, watching Ralph Deese slopping his way through an oversized bowl of Raisin Bran.

  “Supposed to be good for my heart. That’s what the lady at the store said,” Deese told her, a white rim of milk on his mustache. His nose was virtually in the bowl. “Problem is, it makes me fart. Which I guess you’re gonna have to live with. Unless you go outside, which I don’t recommend. Even the lizards don’t go out in this heat.”

  Cox looked out the window, over which Deese had put some self-stick reflective film to cut the glare. Still, it looked like a scene from hell out there. Yellow, like the world was on fire. Cox was a beach girl and had spent much of her life looking at the Pacific Ocean, the biggest body of water on the planet. If she went out the door and spit, she thought, that’d be the wettest place within fifteen miles.

  She and Ralph mostly communicated in grunts. When he’d finished with his Raisin Bran, they exchanged a few grunts, from which she understood that he was going up the hill to “take a dump,” as he put it.

  “The toilet doesn’t work?”

  “This ain’t no hotel,” Ralph said. “You wanna take a shit, you’ll find a trench up the hill in the shade of the bluff. There’s a shovel there, you throw dirt on the turds. Wanna pee? Do that anywhere out there. I usually pee off the porch.”

  Now she grunted. “Whatever . . .” And he went out, carrying his shotgun. She’d already peed once, behind a bush, because there’d been no door on the toilet, no privacy. That wouldn’t have bothered Ralph.

  A moment later, Gloria Harrelson called from the bedroom: “Help me!”

  Cox sat there for a moment, undecided, then finally got up and walked in and took a look. Harrelson had initially been bound with wire to the bed, but the wires had cut into her leg, so wire had been replaced with chain they hadn’t used at the Harrelsons’ house. It had been looped around an ankle and a wrist and padlocked, holding the woman on her back. Deese had the keys.

  Both the ankle and wrist were chafed and red with still-drying blood. Purplish dried blood from a bloodied lip covered her chin, and a cut on her cheekbone had trickled blood down into her ear. She had a black eye, the eyebrow crusty with yet more blood. And the room was infused with the smell of urine. Harrelson was naked, her clothes strewn on the floor. She’d managed to partly cover herself with a tattered cotton blanket.

  She looked up at Cox and pleaded again, weakly, “Help me . . . Please help me . . .”

  “I can’t,” Cox said. “They’d kill me.”

  Harrelson bit at her lip and started to weep, and then said, “Give me some water? Please give me some water . . .”

  “That I can do,” Cox said.

  She went back to the refrigerator and got out a bottle of Dasani, carried it back to the bedroom, and handed it to Harrelson, who grabbed it with her free hand and drank the entire thing in a half dozen long gulps.

  Cox waited until she was done, but when Harrelson said, “You’ve gotta . . .” Cox shook her head and walked away.

  Harrelson continued calling out from the bedroom, but Cox dropped back on the couch and put her fingers in her ears until the calls stopped.

  * * *

  —

  COX THEN SPENT a few moments contemplating her future. Not a promising one, she concluded. Cole and Deese both could place her at home invasions they had orchestrated, and those two, plus Gloria Harrelson and Ralph Deese, could testify that she was involved in a brutal kidnapping that had involved an even more brutal rape.

  Cole, she thought, would take care of her as far as he could, but what would happen if they were all caught and the police offered to cut a deal with Cole for implicating her? There was a major difference between ten to fifteen years in prison and life, especially when you were Cole’s age, in your early thirties. After ten to fifteen behind bars, he’d still have a shot at a life when he got out.

  Would they get caught? She closed her eyes and thought about it. Probably, she concluded. There were too many people chasing them and those people were smart and there were a lot of them. Deese, the cannibal, was a big deal for the cops. They might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later they’d be cornered. Especially if they stayed on the run with Deese.

  Her mother had told her that she’d have to take care of herself, that nobody else would. And nobody had taken care of her mother, that was for sure. The woman was drinking herself to death while dating men who invariably beat her, an ugly race between liver failure and homicide.

  She could go out and get in the car and take off, Cox thought. She had Beauchamps’s money, plus a few thousand dollars of her own, a little sack of gems, three Rolexes—a grand total of sixty or seventy thousand. Tempting.

  But then there was Ralph with his shotgun. He was not likely to let her walk. She could probably work her way around that.

  Eventually, she decided that running alone wasn’t the ticket. She needed Cole and his connections. With Cole, she could find a fence for the jewelry. And Cole knew how to disappear. She’d have to wait for them to get back.

  When they came back, would Deese really share the money? Or would he try to kill them? That seemed as likely as not. The logic of the situation seemed to point only in one direction if she was going to get out alive.

  * * *

  —

  RALPH DEESE came back, looked at her, said, “They oughta be in Vegas by now.”

  She grunted, he nodded, then his eyes drifted back toward the bedroom. “Well,” he said. “Time for a little morning pussy. If you’ll excuse me . . .”

  Deese headed for the back. He didn’t bother closing the door, and Cox heard him say, “How you doin’, cutie-pie?”

  Through the open door she saw him take off his clothes, his erection bobbling around like a fishing pole below his flabby gut.

  Clayton Deese, Cox thought, as the screams began again from the bedroom, was going to kill her, and then Cole, and then Gloria Harrelson, and probably Ralph as well. Harrelson was driving her crazy. The goddamn woman shouldn’t fight it, she should go with it. Screaming didn’t help. Not with the Deeses.

  Fuck it, she thought. The Deeses didn’t give a shit about anybody—not Cole, not her, probably not each other.

  She reach
ed beneath the couch cushion where she’d been sitting and pulled out Marion Beauchamps’s 9mm. The gun was loaded and cocked, and all she had to do was click the safety off and pull the trigger.

  She clicked the safety off, tiptoed down the length of the Airsteam to just outside the bedroom door, where she could hear Harrelson’s sobs as Ralph’s flab slapped against Harrelson’s flat stomach. Then Ralph grunted, which, in Cox’s experience, meant that he was done. He’d lie on her a minute, resting. Then, if Cox knew men, he’d get up and look for his pants, unless he decided to bring his stupid cock out to show Cox.

  Which is what he did.

  * * *

  —

  COX WAS STANDING outside the bedroom door when Ralph stood up, turned from the bed, and saw Cox standing there. He grinned at her, the Deese family’s yellow teeth on full display, and said, “Hey there, you want some of this?”

  Cox said, “I thought I’d give you some of this instead.”

  She brought the gun around and shot Deese in the chest. The gun bucked hard against her hand and she almost dropped it. The muzzle blast was deafening, and she put her free hand up to an ear, which was ringing like an old-fashioned telephone. Deese took a wide-eyed step backwards, then toppled onto the bed, pinning Gloria Harrelson’s body beneath his suddenly dead bulk.

  Harrelson cried, “Oh, thank God, thank God.”

  Not quite, Cox thought, grimly.

  She stepped over to the door, where Ralph had propped up his shotgun in the corner. When she pushed the safety, a little knob to one side of the trigger, it popped out on the other with a red ring around it. That meant it was ready to fire, she figured.

  She stepped back to the bed and said, “I’m sorry,” and moved the muzzle of the gun to within an inch of Harrelson’s heart and pulled the trigger. It clicked, but nothing happened.