Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(101)

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.


AS DEESE FELL, the woman got to the Lexus, which was still running, jammed it into gear, and hit the gas. Lucas said, “Tires.”

Bob took his time, fired once, and the front tire went expensively flat. Not explosively flat, but with a genteel release of air pressure. Cox kept going, throwing a ton of dust in the air.

“Run-flats,” Bob said in disgust.

“Take another one,” Tremanty said.

Bang! And the rear tire was gone, but the car rolled on. Bang! And an off-side tire went. They were so preoccupied that they never heard the helicopter until it passed overhead, got in front of Cox, and slowly lowered itself until it was hovering fifteen feet above the road and directly in front of her, a menacing dragonfly to her bug. The Lexus stopped and a moment later the driver’s-side window dropped and a hand poked out and waved. She’d quit.

“What happened to Deese?” Bob asked.

They all looked back to the trailer. Deese had vanished.

“I hit him hard. Maybe too hard,” Bob said. “He was stepping down, I was aiming at his knee but hit him in the groin area instead. He’s gonna lose the leg, I think. And if I took out his femoral artery, he’s dead. Shit. He fell right into the slug.”

“Crawled back inside?” Tremanty suggested.

“I think he crawled underneath,” Lucas said. He got on the radio to Rae, told her what had happened.

“He didn’t crawl out here. I can see the whole back of the trailer,” she said. “I could lay a few rounds in there, in the dirt, see if it chases him out.”

“Hold off,” Lucas said. “We should get this woman out of the way. We know Deese’s hurt, he’s not going anywhere.”

“Not to say that he couldn’t kill you with that shotgun,” Bob said. He was watching the trailer through the scope, his finger hovering a quarter inch off the trigger.


DEESE WAS under the trailer, which was, in a way, a relief, cooler than inside. On the other hand, somebody—he had no idea who but probably a cop—had shot him, and the pain was blinding him. He knew he was bleeding bad.

Pretty much a done deal, he thought. He still had a last wish. If only he could get a peek at a cop . . . He still had three shells, he thought, three or four. If he could get a peek at a cop, he’d kill him, a good-bye kiss.

He pushed himself flat, glanced down at his leg, surprised by the amount of blood beneath it. The pain was bad but seemed to be diminishing. The heat must be getting to him, he thought, because he was getting light-headed. If he was going to get a cop, it had to be soon.


BOB STAYED behind the ridge with the rifle still propped on Lucas’s backpack, waiting for some sign of motion inside or underneath the trailer. Tremanty and Lucas slid sideways along the slope until they were beside and slightly below the Lexus, then Lucas raised his rifle, and Tremanty his handgun, and Lucas shouted, “U.S. Marshal! Come out of there. Come out on this side.”

The passenger-side window rolled down, and she shouted, “They raped me. They made me fuck all of them. They chained me up . . . That old man raped and killed Mrs. Harrelson. And he was going to kill me.”

Lucas shouted, “Come out of there.”

Tremanty half stood, loping toward the back of the Lexus, and when Lucas saw him moving he shouted, “Sandro! Get down. Don’t do that. Get—”

Boom!

The shotgun. Tremanty flew away from the car and halfway down the slope. Lucas looked at him in horror. And then Tremanty rolled over, got to his knees, turned to Lucas, and said, “Missed.”

“Jesus. Don’t do that shit. I already did it enough for both of us.” Lucas looked back at the Lexus. “Come out of there.”

Up on the hill, Rae had seen the shot and had seen Tremanty go flying, and she sprayed the ground behind the Airstream with a burst from her M4.

Cox slipped out of the Lexus and down to Lucas and Tremanty. Rae was shouting into her handset, “How’s Sandro? Is he hit?”

Tremanty said into his handset, “No, but my back is full of cactus stickers.”

Rae said, “What were you doing? My God, I’m gonna kick your ass when I get back down there.”

Lucas asked Cox, “How many people in there? In the trailer?”

“None. Well, two, but they’re both dead. This guy Cole was sorta taking care of me toward the end, he left me a gun to keep Ralph off me. But Ralph went back into the bedroom—” She broke off and began to cry.