Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(26)

CHAPTER


SIX


Genesis Cox was sleeping as deeply, and as naked, as a newborn baby, so accustomed was she to the stentorian snoring of her partner that even the rapid-fire wheezes, snorts, and grunts of his dream episodes failed to disturb her.

Cox was a standard big-boobed, bottle-blond, bar menu Long Beach babe, with curly hair like Meg Ryan’s in that movie When Harry Met Sally, which was, like, her way favorite forever. Several other Ryan vehicles were in her top ten, mostly because of the star’s way-amazing hair. Even when Meg was, like, flying a fuckin’ Black Hawk helicopter in some kind of fuckin’ war, or something, her hair was way fuckin’ epic.

Cox knew the guys she was living with were criminals, but really it was more like the redistribution of wealth from Beverly Hills to Long Beach, almost like being a Democrat, so it was hard to see too much wrong with it. And nobody ever died.

She was currently working her way through a self-help book called You Are a Badass—How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life. It was wedged between the pillow and the top of her head, where she’d left it when she turned off the lamp. Cox’s life had not yet reached the awesome peak she was sure was on its way, but it was nothing less than what she deserved. She hadn’t yet made out its substance. Probably something in Hollywood, she hoped. Like fuckin’ a producer. That would be awesome, all right. Though she’d have to be careful: sometimes you thought you were fuckin’ a producer and he turned out to be a writer or something.

Cox slept well, especially after a round of athletic sex, and was proud of her ability to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’.


MARION BEAUCHAMPS, who Cox called Marty, even though when she snuck a look at his real driver’s license one time, which he kept in a chest of drawers, it said Marion. Beauchamps slept in a T-shirt and also workout pants, because his legs got cold when he threw the covers off, which he did every night.

Beauchamps was a criminal, but of the relatively intelligent and thoughtful sort, who believed he could do home invasions in Beverly Hills, Hollywood Hills, Holmby Hills, Cheviot Hills, and any other hills you might have, for as long as he wished, with minimal chance of getting caught as long as nobody got hurt and it didn’t make the front page of the Times.

His ideal target was the early-retirement Silicon Valley exec who’d gotten his monster stock payout and thought that Hollywood was way more glamorous than Nerdville because you get to hang out with movie stars and maybe get a piece of movie star ass from time to time. What was a billion dollars for anyway, if you couldn’t do that?

Beauchamps would never touch a media light of any kind—movie, video, singer, not even one of the talking heads on E!—because the publicity would go on forever. Publicity, he thought, was his biggest enemy and he was careful not to attract any.


IN A SECOND BEDROOM, John Rogers Cole was working his way through Infinite Jestby David Foster Wallace. A morning insomniac, he found Jestusually helped him grab a couple more hours of sleep before he had to start the day.

Cole was a nondescript sort, which was the way he liked it. If you were nondescript, you didn’t have a cop looking in the driver’s-side window at a traffic stop and asking himself, “Say, don’t I know that face?”

Of middle height, he had fine brown hair, worn short, brown eyes, an ordinary nose and chin, and narrow shoulders. He usually wore a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows. The shirt concealed a gym rat’s body: he had biceps like a drywaller and could run three miles in eighteen minutes. His current driver’s license and Visa card said his name was Douglas Moyers, but the gang all called him Cole.

His lack of facial drama didn’t help him with women, who always went for the square-jawed, blunt-nosed, big-shouldered guys like Beauchamps, but he did all right. In Cole’s experience, if you sat around in Starbucks long enough, drinking lattes and reading Jest, something would come along. He dug librarian types, black-rimmed glasses and an overbite.


ALSO SLEEPING ALONE, on a mattress on the floor of the home office, was Beauchamps’s half brother Clayton Deese, the cannibal. He’d been all over the internet since the FBI said he’d eaten some lady, and maybe a couple of guys, which Cox and Cole and even, to some extent, Beauchamps found disturbing.

Not only the eating part but the fact that cannibals tend to attract the eye, and Deese had a distinctive face and those tattoos. He’d always been clean-shaven, right up to the time he left New Orleans. He now wore a reddish beard that qualified him to hunt alligators down in the bayous, but there was something about his eyes that still attracted attention.

He looked like a mean motherfucker, and there was no way to cover it up. When a normal law-abiding citizen looked at Clayton Deese, his first thought was that Deese belonged in jail. Not that Deese ran into many normal citizens.

Deese dreamed in full-color porn; in between erotic dreams, he’d wake and his mind would snap to his problem, which was the same it had been in New Orleans. He had to get away. He was gone, but he hadn’t yet gotten away. He needed a bunch of money for that and he didn’t have it.


THEY WERE all sleeping soundly when, at sunrise, there was a sudden burst of dings from the living room. And then another burst, at a slightly different pitch. Beauchamps quit snoring and launched himself from the bed and went running out of the room, his REM sleep hard-on leading the way like a wobbly flashlight.