Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(102)

“Where’s Mrs. Harrelson?”

“Ralph . . . Ralph raped her. And then . . . he had this shotgun—that shotgun, the one Deese has—and after he finished with her, he shot her. Right in the chest. I had that gun, but I was so scared. But I knew he was going to kill me next. So when he came out of the bedroom, I shot him first.”

She began weeping again, gasping for breath. “I was so scared . . .”

Lucas wasn’t entirely buying it, but he still had a Deese problem. He left Tremanty to take care of Cox and scuttled across the ridge back to Bob.

“He’s under there, all right, I saw him. But I didn’t have a shot,” Bob said. “I’ll tell you, he’ll bleed to death if we don’t get him out of there soon.”


ALL DEESE WANTED was one more shot, one more shot. He was sure he’d missed with the first one; he’d pulled around too quickly. The machine gun had scared him. He hadn’t been hurt, but he knew he couldn’t move backwards. He inched sideways, very light-headed now. There was a bunch of crap under the trailer, a pile of four-by-four timbers, each about five or six feet long, that smelled of creosote, an old pot with the bottom rusted out, some baling wire, a pile of narrow boards that might have been a wooden floor.

He slid one of the boards out of the pile to prop up the gun barrel.

One more shot, he thought. Was that too much to ask?

He moved another board to get it out of his line of sight and looked straight into the cold black eyes of a Crotalus scutulatus, the Mojave green rattlesnake, North America’s most poisonous rattler. It struck him in the face and he panicked, jerked away, slapped at it, missed, and it struck him again, in the nose, and again in the cheek, and he screamed and rolled away, crawling blindly out into the sun, his fear of the snake greater than the fear of a bullet.

Bob and Lucas saw him crawl out, and Lucas said, “Wait! No gun. I don’t see the shotgun.”

Lucas yelled at Tremanty, who was still talking to Cox. When Tremanty looked up, Lucas pointed, and Tremanty looked that way, and Lucas said to Bob, “Let’s go. But let’s be careful.”

“He screamed,” Bob said. “What was that?”

“Dunno,” Lucas said. He shouted, “Rae. Rae. Come down, be careful. He’s out in front.” To their right, Tremanty and Cox were walking carefully toward the body in the dirt but were still fifty yards way. As Bob and Lucas got close, Rae turned the corner of the trailer and put her machine gun on Deese.

Bob called, “Is he dead?”

Lucas moved up, Bob now pointing his handgun at Deese’s body, Rae her rifle. Lucas knelt and said, “Still breathing. A little anyway.”

Deese twitched, or shuddered. He tried to push up, failed, got his face turned out of the dirt, looked at Lucas with sightless eyes and said, “Sssnna . . . Sssnna . . .”

“What?”

Bob backed a couple of feet away. “I think he was trying to say ‘snake.’ Jesus, look at his face.”

Lucas looked, six holes pocking Deese’s face, around his nose, already turning blue. “Oh, shit!” Lucas lurched away from the trailer, stood well back to try to look under it. Saw nothing but a pile of dusty lumber and an old rusted pot.

Rae waved Tremanty and Cox up. The helicopter had landed on a piece of desert hardpan and sat there, waiting for customers.

“Is he dead?” Cox asked.

“No, he . . .” Bob began. He looked again. “Well. Maybe now.”

Cox said, “Good,” and spit on the body.





CHAPTER


TWENTY-EIGHT


They left all the bodies where they lay and called in an FBI crime scene team. The team arrived, by helicopter, with generators and lights, at three o’clock. Backup ground crews arrived two hours later, along with a couple of cars from the local sheriff’s office.

Cox at first seemed willing to talk. Rae went up the hill and turned the generator back on, and when the air-conditioning came up they sat in the trailer in one end, trying to ignore the bodies at the other end, and she gave a partial statement.

She had originally gone with Beauchamps, not knowing exactly what he did for a living, she said, knowing only that he liked to dance and spend money.

When she found out what he did, she said she wanted to leave but they wouldn’t let her. When Beauchamps and the others left on a job, they chained her to a bed but left her with a TV remote and a pile of magazines.

She pulled up her blouse to show off her bruises. “See? You can see the chain links, like, right here.”

The gang wasn’t cruel, but she couldn’t leave. Later, she said, Beauchamps told her that Cole also wanted sexual privileges and she’d begun sleeping with both of them. She’d refused to sleep with Nast, but wouldn’t say why. When Rae asked if it was because Nast was black, she said, “Well, yeah, I guess . . . No offense.”

She also said that Vincent hadn’t wanted to sleep with her because he was “different.”

“Not gay. He just, I dunno . . . Sex didn’t do anything for him.”

She refused to sleep with Deese because he smelled bad and ate people and was evil and called her a whore, which she insisted she most certainly wasn’t. When Tremanty and Lucas began picking apart her story, she began to cry, said, “You’re being mean.” And then she said, “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything except I wanted to party. They picked me up and kept me.”