Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(29)

“If I could,” Cole said, “I guess. I don’t know what I could do. I lost a lot of money in this deal. I kept it in my car, down below. Cops got it now.”

“Oh my God.”

“No kiddin’.”

“Something bad is going to happen,” Cox said. “Marty’s not a guy to keep his head down. You seem more responsible that way. I know he and Deese are going to start gambling up in Vegas because . . . because that’s what they do.”

“That’ll get them caught. They got cameras, tight security, and smart cops up there,” Cole said. “We need to lay low until we can get a little cash together.”

“If we worked on this husband-and-wife stuff, like Marty said, we’d have a better chance to get away. Couples up in Vegas are invisible. People look at single guys and single girls, but not couples, because they aren’t . . . available. There are millions of them, all over. Nobody even looks.”

“But what’s to work on? Being a couple? You just go around together, right?”

“People who are couples act different than other people,” she said. “You can tell.”

“Tell what?”

“That they’re together,” she said. “You know, that they’re intimate with each other.”

“You mean, sleeping together?”

She shrugged. “Or whatever. Intimate.” Long silence, the two of them looking out at the overheated desert, which definitely wasn’t as picturesque as the one in Tucson. “Listen . . . you wanna blow job?”

Cole scratched his head, looked at her, checking to see if she was serious. She seemed to be, her eyes flat and not wise. Finally: “Sure, if you think Marty won’t mind.”

“I don’t plan on telling him,” she said. And, “You know his real name is Marion?”

“Yeah, but he wanted everybody to call him Marty because he’s had legal problems with the Marion name.”

Neither said anything for another minute, then Cox said, “You probably ought to slide the seat all the way back.”

“Oh. Sure. Let me get rid of the smoke first. It ispretty boring out here.”





CHAPTER


SEVEN


They had driven Bob’s Malibu around the block and parked it, leaving the driveway empty. Rocha left in the minivan and came back an hour later with two sheriff’s deputies to help with the surveillance. They brought more groceries.

The Jaguar came back late in the afternoon, followed a few minutes later by the BMW. One of the deputies took photos with a telephoto lens.

As they waited through the afternoon for Rocha to coordinate the raid with the three different departments involved, Lake hooked a laptop into an industrial-strength hotspot and brought up all kinds of official documents regarding the target house—building permits, tax assessor’s reports, plat maps, aerial views. The original permits, thirty-five years old, showed the house as having three modestly sized bedrooms, but a later permit hinted at extensive internal remodeling but didn’t include detailed plans.

“We don’t really know what it’s like in there,” Rocha said. “The building permits are mostly about new HVAC, but those are old-style family bedrooms, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d combined some of them into one-or two-bedroom suites. We can’t count on the doors and bedroom access being where the plans say they are.”

“But there are at least four people using the place,” Rae said.

“First-floor family room could have been converted into another bedroom suite,” Lake said. “Maybe even two.”

“We don’t know, though,” Rae said. “I’m thinking we go in really hard, flashbangs through exposed windows, hit the door with a ram. There’s CBS construction up to waist height; that’ll be a problem for lighter weapons if there’s a fight.”

All the overhead views of the house were obscured by the heavy year-round foliage. “There’ll either be a fence or a hedge to separate it from the house behind it,” Rocha said. “We’ll have SWAT guys coming in from the backyard and they’ll have to cross that before we hit the front of the house.”

“We need all the tactical people copied in on this and that includes Bob and Rae,” Rocha said to Lucas. “You’re not tactical, so you stay behind. Mac isn’t tactical, either, so he stays. Lake is technical, and I’m the boss, so we gotta be there for the meeting. You guys get to sleep in.”

“I’d like to be involved.”

“Well, you’ll be here. But not running around in the street—we’ll have ten or twelve guys with rifles and vests and helmets and we don’t need some guy in a suit confusing things. I won’t be out there, I’ll be in a truck with Lake.”

Lucas gave in. “But I’ll be there as soon as it’s over.”

“That’s fine. You’re invited.” She patted him on the back and he didn’t like it.


BOB AND RAE went to bed early because they’d be meeting with the SWAT team at the Altadena Sheriff’s Station, which was only a few blocks from the target house, before dawn the next morning. They took the two beds, while Lucas read into the night and sheriff’s deputies watched the target.

The BMW, and, presumably, Beauchamps, returned to the house at eight, although they didn’t see him, and the Jaguar showed up at ten. The Navigator didn’t return until almost midnight. It was then that Lucas and MacIntosh laid eyes on Nast for the first time. He stood under the garage light, arms akimbo, shaking his head, and, a moment later, rolled the garbage can out to the curb. He went back inside and dropped the door.