Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(19)

Inside, a central bar divided a front room from a room in back. The bar was wrapped with thin lighted tubes in pastel pink, green, and yellow that made it look like a vintage jukebox. The front room had open tables of various sizes and was brightly lit, with customers reading newspapers as they ate. The back room was darker and lined with booths, about a third of them occupied.

They took a booth in the very back, Bob on one side of the table, Lucas and Rae on the other. A waitress came over and said, “The burgers are great . . . What do you want to drink?” She was wearing turquoise eye shadow, a tube top, and short shorts, and had a collection of rings piercing the lip of her navel. A tattoo of a boa constrictor started at the nape of her neck, ran down her back beneath the tube top, reappeared below it, and followed her spine down into her shorts. She was chewing gum.

“Nice ink,” Bob said.

“Thanks. An old boyfriend did it for me. It goes all the way down between my cheeks.”

“That’s a lotta fine information,” Rae said.

“Well, you know . . .” she said, rolling her eyes. “Whatever . . .”

They all got burgers and fries, and Lucas got a Diet Coke and Bob and Rae ordered Dos Equis. A song that sounded vaguely familiar to Lucas was playing through the sound system but he couldn’t quite place it. Bob identified it as “Plastic Fantastic Lover” by Jefferson Airplane, “which is about right for this place.”

When the waitress came back with the Coke and beers, she told them that a flower child tribute band played in the back room in the evenings: “Mamas and Papas, Lovin’ Spoonful—that kinda shit. I get outta here before it comes on, to tell the truth. I’m afraid it’ll suck the brain right outta my ear.”

“Is the owner a flower child?” Lucas asked.

She snorted. “No. He’s whatever he thinks the bar should be. It used to be called Hang Eleven, because he thought he might get the wannabe surfers. Before that, it was called Duder’s, because of that movie. And, before that, it was called Shredder’s. The name changes, nothing else does. We even use the same ‘Under New Management’ sign. Tourists and locals during the day, middle-aged meat rack at night. Guys with gold chains.”

“Guys still do that?” Rae asked.

“They do here.” She checked out Lucas, then Bob. “If you two’re looking for love, you’d do okay.” And to Rae: “You’re more upscale.”

Made them laugh, and when she went to get the burgers Bob said, “She’s workin’ us for tips.”

“Probably gonna get ’em, too,” Rae said.


THE BURGERS were great, like the waitress said, the fries hot, salty, greasy, like they should be. They were halfway through the meal when a couple of uniformed LA cops came in, pulled off their sunglasses, and looked around. They picked a booth in the back, and both of them looked long and hard at the three marshals as they went by. The waitress knew the two, called them by their first names.

After they ordered, they were still looking at Lucas and Rae— they couldn’t see Bob from where they were sitting—and Rae muttered, “The cops made us.”

“Yeah, I think.” He fished his ID out of his pocket and said, “Be right back.”

With the waitress nowhere in sight, he slid out of the booth, walked over to the cops, and laid the ID on the table. “Appreciate it if you could keep quiet about this,” Lucas said.

“Something happening here?” one of the cops asked.

“We’re looking for a guy who might come in here sometimes,” Lucas said. “You know the owner?”

“Tommy? Yeah. He’s okay,” one of the cops said, “mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“He used to sell a little cocaine and weed, to make ends meet. Not so much the last couple of years, though. Too much competition.”

“You think he’d talk to us?”

“Oh, sure. He’s friendly enough. He likes to have cops come by—keeps the riffraff down. He’s got an office upstairs, the stairway’s back by the restrooms. Name’s Tommy Saito. He’s usually up there afternoons and evenings, if he’s not down here.”

Lucas rapped his knuckles on the table. “Thanks.”


WHEN THEY’D finished the meal and paid and over-tipped, they wandered down the hallway in back, past the restrooms, then up a flight of wide wooden stairs to the office suite. A door with a tall glass window had a sign that said “Come In,” so they went in, where they found a heavyset woman sitting behind a wooden desk, going through what looked like charge slips and pounding on a dictionary-sized calculator.

She looked up and said, “Not guilty!”

“Tommy around?” Lucas asked.

She turned to a door recessed into a short hallway and shouted, “Hey, Tommy. There are some cops looking for you. Might be federal.”

Tommy Saito poked his head out of his office, looked at the three of them, and said, “Federal? Well, come in, I guess. What can I do for you? I pay all my taxes on time.”

“Ahead of time,” the woman corrected.

Saito held his office door open. Lucas led Bob and Rae in, where they found another wooden desk, sitting on a burnt-orange shag rug, with three visitors’ chairs facing the desk. Saito, a short, balding Asian American, maybe sixty years old, dropped into the chair behind the desk. The wall behind him was covered with framed photos, snapshots of the same woman and three children at a variety of ages, and some shots of other kids, even younger, who might be grandchildren.