Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(100)

“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.