Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  “What are you doing?” Harrelson shrieked. She shrank away, as far as she could with the chains. “What are you doing? What are you . . .”

  Cox thought, Shit, and pulled hard on the shotgun’s forestock, popped an empty shell out of the chamber and new one in. She again aimed the gun at Harrelson’s heart, as the woman tried to push away from her, and this time when Cox pulled the trigger the shotgun bucked, the blast deafened her, and Harrelson died, a bloody red hole in her chest.

  Cox rubbed her face and thought, Done.

  Now, in this entire world, there were only two men left who knew what had happened on this long, horrid trip: Deese and Cole.

  * * *

  —

  SHE REMEMBERED from somewhere—a movie, she thought—that the cops did tests on people’s hands and arms to see if they’d fired a gun. That could be a problem. She managed to prop open the small bedroom window, get the shotgun muzzle an inch or two outside, with Ralph Deese’s dead hand wrapped around the stock of the weapon, his face near it. She pulled the trigger with his dead finger and left the gun on the floor next to his body.

  Now what? Her mind felt cold—or cool anyway. If she had been kidnapped and mistreated, if the gang hadn’t allowed her to leave . . .

  Harrelson had been chained to the bed, but there were several feet left over. Cox crossed the bedroom, not worrying too much about the blood spattering the floor and walls, and got a length of the chain and wrapped it around her waist, then yanked it back and forth to bruise herself. She didn’t want fresh blood, just bruises, and a lot of them, from below her breasts to her hips.

  The process hurt, but she kept it up, until the whole area between her breasts and hips were crossed with bruises and vividly reddened flesh. When she was satisfied, she put the chain down, went to the kitchen area, found a plastic bag, filled it with ice from the refrigerator, and wrapped that around her waist.

  Done right and given time, she thought, the bruises would look old.

  * * *

  —

  AND WHAT ELSE?

  * * *

  —

  WELL, there was the jewelry and cash. She went out to the car and got it, took it inside, found a garbage bag, put the jewelry and all the cash, except for a couple of thousand dollars, in the bag, cinched it tight. She carried the bag outside, into the sun. When the men had taken the pickup, they’d thrown some tools out of the back, including a shovel.

  She carried the shovel to a lonely, stunted tree on the edge of an arroyo, a hundred yards from the trailer, paced off six feet from the tree, dug a hole through the sand down into the crusty subsoil, put the bag in the hole, covered it with a couple shovelfuls of sand, smoothed the sand with her foot, erasing all signs of the hole. She walked a short distance up the slope, found a bluish rock the size of a dinner plate, brought it back, placed it on the cache site, and brushed some sand over it.

  Nothing more to do now . . . Except kill Clayton Deese.

  She could do that, if he didn’t see it coming.

  Cole, she’d have to think about. She really did like him. But a girl had to take care of herself.

  She went back in the trailer and washed her hands and arms again, then took off her blouse and washed her entire upper body. Put her blouse on again. Washed her hands and arms again . . .

  * * *

  —

  DEESE WAS an hour north of Vegas when he realized that the gas gauge hadn’t moved off full. When he and Cole got in the truck, he’d checked and assumed they had a whole tankful. But now he had no idea how much gas he had left. He really didn’t need to run out, not with two million in cash in the truck and his face all over television screens.

  He was trying to decide whether to go back for gas or risk going ahead when he saw a sign for a gas station and convenience store. Two miles later, he slid up next to a row of gas pumps. He pulled his hat down, went inside, paid twenty dollars for gas, and a few dollars for two cold Pepsis and a candy bar, went back out, and pumped the whole twenty into the tank.

  He was well out in the desert, not a lot around. One other car was parked at a second row of pumps when he pulled in, but the woman driver finished filling her tank before he was done and drove off.

  When he put the nozzle back on the pump, he checked again to make sure he was alone, then opened the back door on the truck, looked in the money bag, giving himself a minute to reassure himself of its being there and to enjoy it for a minute. He took a stack of bills in his hand and riffled through them and . . . what?

  He pulled a bill out. A dollar bill. Near panic, he pulled out another stack: same thing, a hundred-dollar bill top and bottom, nothing but dollar bills between. That fuckin’ Harrelson had ripped him off. He was gonna . . . What was he gonna do? One thing, he was gonna cut Gloria Harrelson’s head off and leave it on the highway where somebody would find it and return it to Harrelson.

  Consumed with the fury of the moment, he got in the truck and drove off, the pedal to the floor, until the old vehicle began to scream and a speed limit sign that read 80 flashed by and he realized he could blow it all right there. He backed off, from 97 to 70, his head almost down to the steering wheel, fantasizing about catching up with Harrelson and skinning him alive.

  “Honest to God, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna catch that motherfucker and skin him alive,” he shouted into the steering wheel.

  An hour later, still fuming, and defeated by his attempts to figure out how much money he actually had—he thought maybe thirty thousand, mostly in ones, so how the hell do you spend thirty thousand dollars’ worth of one-dollar bills?—he turned off the highway and onto the dirt road that would take him to Ralph’s place.

  * * *

  —

  COX saw him coming. Gun was ready, safety off.

  She had to get close.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When the dust from the oncoming truck appeared below them, still a couple of miles away, Tremanty said, “We want to take Deese alive, if we can. Any way we can. If we can get him alive, I can bring down Roger Smith’s whole gang. The rest of them . . . You know, whatever’s necessary.”

  “Is that the same thing as not givin’ a shit?” Bob asked.

  “In that direction,” Tremanty said.

  “That could be a problem,” Bob said. He’d propped his scope on Lucas’s backpack and was watching the approaching truck. “The woman’s been in the car ever since Rae cut the power. Nothing else is moving, and the trailer door is wide open. It’s gotta be a furnace inside. I don’t think there’s anybody in there. Nobody alive anyway.”

  “Then where are they?” Tremanty asked.

  “I can’t answer that question,” Bob said. “But I don’t think they’re in the trailer.”

  “He and Cole could have taken Mrs. Harrelson down to Las Vegas,” Tremanty said.

  “If they did, nobody knows where she is or we would have heard,” Lucas said. “My personal feeling is, she’s probably in a hole up here. Deese had no reason to turn her loose. Not after what you guys found in Louisiana.”

  “Yeah, well, I still want him alive,” Tremanty said, “if we can get him that way.”

  “You know, it’s my call,” Lucas said. He wiped sweat out of his eyes, blinked against the glare. “All due respect to the FBI, I’m the one in charge of chasing him down. If we can get him alive, we’ll do it. If we have to seriously risk somebody else’s neck, I won’t do it. I’ll green-light Bob.”

  “I won’t have any trouble pulling the trigger,” Bob said. “Not after looking at all those people in the holes, including some that he ate.”

  “Goddamnit, Lucas . . .”

  “Lucas is right, Sandro,” Bob said, lifting his face away from the scope. “But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. From here, I could punch a bullet through one of those rivets in the trailer. Or a kneecap. I might p
ossibly be able to knock him down without killing him. I can’t think of why we’d do that, what the circumstances might be, but we can keep it in mind.”

  Lucas said, “Give me a handset.”

  The truck was still a mile out—they couldn’t see all the twists and turns in the approach track—and maybe as much as five minutes, given the rough approach road. Lucas called Rae and told her what they’d been talking about.

  She agreed. Take him alive, if possible. Shoot him if he looked like he might kill somebody else. Tremanty was on the handset to the helicopter, who relayed his questions to the FBI office in Las Vegas, and, after a moment, he looked at Lucas and shook his head. He listened for another minute, then said into the handset, “We think Deese is coming in now. I gotta go.”

  He clicked off, and said to Lucas and Bob, “No sign of Gloria Harrelson. And the body in the hole? They printed the guy and put a rush on it. It’s Cole.”

  “Holy shit,” Bob said. “The guy’s a—”

  “He’s a cannibal. And now he’s eating his own,” Lucas said. “Whoever that woman is, I think she’s in trouble. She’s got the keys to the car. She should have taken off.”

  “Unless she’s working with Deese,” Tremanty said. “Maybe we should have run down and grabbed her.”

  “He’s thirty seconds out,” Bob said.

  The truck came over a low rise, and the woman got out of the car. They were looking at her right side and back, and Tremanty, with the binoculars, said, “She’s got a pistol in her back pocket.”

  “I see it,” Bob said. “What the heck is going on? Is she gonna shoot Deese?”

  * * *

  —

  DEESE, in the truck, first saw the door open on the Lexus, then Cox climbing out, carefully facing him. Probably wondering where Cole was. And he noticed the trailer’s open door, and that wasn’t right. Every time somebody left the door open for even a second, Ralph would yell at him. And it was just hanging there, wide open, a dark rectangle against the blast of reflected sunlight that was the aluminum capsule. He came up to Cox and the Lexus, but he didn’t stop. Instead he circled her, drove back to the trailer, stopped outside the door.

  * * *

  —

  BELOW THEM, ninety or a hundred yards away, Deese got out of the truck, turned toward the open door, paused—a perfect target—and Bob asked, “Lucas?”

  Tremanty, hissing: “No.”

  Lucas: “Not yet.”

  Deese went into the trailer.

  * * *

  —

  DEESE BLINKED, in reaction to the heat and the darkness. No lights on, few windows, it took a minute for his eyes to adjust, and he first made out Ralph’s body as being something like a lumpy pile of clothes outside the bedroom door. Then, when he realized it was a body, the thought popped into his mind that Ralph had killed Gloria Harrelson. But no . . .

  “Ralph?”

  Nothing. He glanced back at the door, to make sure Cox wasn’t about to shoot him in the back, then walked up to the body. “Ralph?”

  It was Ralph all right, lying in a stinking puddle of blood with a hole in his chest. Flies buzzing around, more crawling around the edge of the puddle. What the hell had happened? Must have been Cox, there wasn’t anyone else.

  He looked past Ralph’s body to the bedroom and saw a naked leg with a few links of chain wrapped around it. He stepped over Ralph and saw Harrelson, sprawled naked on the bed, with a plum-sized hole in her chest. Not much visible blood; it probably soaked into the mattress beneath her. A shotgun lay on the floor, its butt overlapping the bloody puddle from Ralph. He picked it up, wiped it off on the sheet tangled under Gloria Harrelson’s legs.

  Looked back at Ralph, back at Harrelson. From the look of both of them—Harrelson’s pussy and Ralph’s cock—Ralph had taken advantage of the situation.

  Deese said to Ralph, as he swung his foot over him, “At least you came before you went, you old asshole.” Ralph, he thought, would have liked that.

  He cackled at the line, lost track of what he was doing, and when his foot hit the blood on the far side of Ralph’s body it slipped and he lost his balance, fell on Ralph’s bare chest, one hand went down in the puddle.

  “Ah, shit. Shit.” He got up, went to the sink, but only a thin trickle of water came out; the pump wasn’t working, the power was out. How’d that happened? Another mystery. He popped open the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water, opened it, washed his hand, dried it on his jeans.

  He picked up the shotgun again, a cheap Mossberg that had seen better days, the barrel hot enough to iron with. He shucked a couple of shells into the sink, his hands now slippery with sweat, fished them out. Two shots. He looked around, saw a green-and-yellow box sitting on a windowsill, took out four more shells, shoved in five, pumped once to get a shell into the chamber, and shoved another into the magazine.

  Buckshot. Bless you, Ralph, you dead motherfucker.

  Planning to kill both them bitches anyway.

  * * *

  —

  THEN COX was at the door of the trailer, or just outside it. She shouted, “What’d you do to Cole, you big fat cocksucker?”

  Deese thought, Fat? and looked down at his gut. He was six feet tall and weighed a hundred and seventy pounds.

  “Cole went away,” Deese shouted back. “You and me got some things to do, sugarpuss.”

  He heard her running away and hurried to the door, but when he got there she was behind the truck bed, looking at him. He stepped outside, the gun hanging from one hand. He grinned at her and said, “No place to run.”

  She asked, “Do I look like I’m running?”

  Her hand came up, and Deese realized that she had a pistol in it and he opened his mouth to shout, or something, and she pulled the trigger and the slug smacked into the door behind him. He dove back through the doorway and rolled away from it as two more shots poked holes through the trailer, both slugs blowing past a couple of inches above his body. He shouted, “Hey, hey, hey!”

  He heard the truck door open, and when he peeked through a window he saw she was inside the truck, not looking at the door—she was looking at the money.

  He eased back over to the door and shouted, “We can work something out.”

  “What’d you do to Cole? Did you kill him?”

  “He was a witness against both of us,” Deese shouted back.

  In the truck, Cox frowned, and thought, Well, that’s true.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE RIDGE, Bob asked, “What’re we doing? Somebody tell me. I can’t think, I’ve got to focus on what I’m doing here.”

  Lucas said, “If it looks like he’s going to kill her, take him.”

  “Wound him. Wound him, for Christ’s sakes,” Tremanty said. “Or let it play out.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS ASKED, “What about the chopper? We could try calling the chopper, tell them what the situation is, see if they’d be willing to hover a few hundred feet up. She couldn’t reach it with that pistol, even if she tried, and he couldn’t with the shotgun.”

  “Something’s going to happen, I don’t think there’s time,” Bob said. “I’m getting really fuckin’ sweaty here. Somebody wipe my forehead, I’m gonna mist up the lens.”

  Tremanty handed a radio to Lucas and said, “Call the chopper.” He produced a handkerchief, and as Lucas thumbed the call button, Tremanty wiped Bob’s forehead. Lucas called the chopper, told them what they needed.

  “Two minutes,” the pilot said.

  * * *

  —

  COX SHOUTED, “It’s mostly one-dollar bills, you big fat chump.”

  Deese: “Take a bunch, run over to the Lexus, and take off. There are license plates there in the truck. Put them on the car, drive up to Reno or back to LA.”

  “You
’ll shoot me.”

  “No I won’t. I promise,” Deese shouted.

  “You liar.”

  The truck was only ten feet from the door of the trailer, and Deese was dying in there. He had to get out, one way or another, and the damned Airstream only had one door. One of the windows had to be an escape hatch, he thought, but he didn’t know which one. And the trailer was so beat up, it might not even open.

  He shook his head, made sure the safety was off on the Mossberg, then rolled into the open door and fired three rounds directly into the driver’s-side door of the truck and then rolled back behind the wall. One second later, a single shot blew past his face. He scrabbled back six feet.

  He’d missed, somehow, and the bitch almost killed him. And even if she hadn’t, he thought, the heat soon would. Had she gotten out of the truck? He risked a peek at the window and, sure enough, saw her looking toward the trailer door, over the top of the truck bed.

  Then she panicked. As he was peeking through the window, he saw her aiming the gun that way and he dove behind the refrigerator as she peppered the trailer with bullets.

  Then they stopped, and he thought, Out of ammo.

  He crawled back toward the door, peeked, saw her running toward the Lexus. He pushed himself up, stepped into the door, and swung the shotgun toward her.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS SAID, “Take him, take him.”

  Tremanty: “Wound him.”

  Bob said, “Fuck!” and pulled the trigger.

  As he pulled the trigger, Deese took a step down to the ground.

  Deese didn’t know what had happened; he didn’t feel any immediate pain, but his leg blew up beneath him.