Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(36)

“That’s right.”

“That’s a pretty heavy burden. Thinking for yourself.”

“Yes, it is.”


THEY STOPPED talking about money and spent some time driving around, chatting about the Deese case, and Bob and Rae, and Virgil Flowers and Jenkins and Shrake. When he dropped her off at the condo, he was looking at six hours down to LA.

She kissed him on the cheek, before she got out of the car, and said, “Thanks. I needed the talk.”

“Gimme a last thought.”

“Slocum Haynes said I could call him at home any evening after seven o’clock his time. To chat. I’ll give him a call tonight. See what more he has to say for himself and his job.”


LUCAS SPENT some time thinking about Letty as he drove south through the Central Valley. When she said, “And I forgot to bring my gun with me,” she was joking, but she did have a gun. She kept it stashed in a safe-deposit box, and a cop friend of Lucas’s with the California Bureau of Investigation would take her out to a range a few times a year to burn up some 9mm. Lucas had thought she might aim for the FBI or possibly the CIA, or some other gun-toting law enforcement agency, but her interests had changed at Stanford.

He had no idea where she would wind up but didn’t doubt that it would be interesting.


THE TRIP TO LA was fast: he arrived after rush hour, and the 5 and the 405 fed right into Marina del Rey. He checked back into the Marriott, called Bob and Rae, and met them at the entrance to the bar.

They both looked at him for a long five seconds, then Rae took hold of Lucas’s biceps and said, “You’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” Lucas said.

Bob: “You look like shit. You’re kinda gray. You gotta start eating, man.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Lucas said, pulling away from Rae. “It’ll take a while to get it all back, but I’m right there . . . What are we doing?”

“That English dude comes on at six o’clock at Flower Child’s,” Rae said. “We could have a few beers and go to bed and start tomorrow or we could walk down there right now and jack him up.”

“I don’t need a beer,” Lucas said. “And I got the jack.”





CHAPTER


NINE


Los Angeles had been working its way through a heatwave, with rolling brownouts killing power across the basin. Washington Boulevard wasn’t dark, but it wasn’t as brightly lit as it had been in May.

As they walked toward Flower Child’s, Rae said, “All right, we’re gonna jack him up and you said you got a jack. What’s the jack?”

“I’d rather talk about your love life,” Lucas said. “I can’t believe that it’s taken this long for you to nail Tremanty.”

“She can’t, either,” Bob said. “I told her why, but she’s not buying it.”

“Shut up,” Rae said.

“What’s the reason?” Lucas asked.

Rae said, “Shut up, both of you.”

“Quiet. I’m talking to Bob,” Lucas said.

Bob said, “Well, being a handsome guy with a job, a nice car, expensive threads, and a gun, and being located in downtown New Orleans, with one of the largest known concentrations of redheads, hairdressers, and cocktail waitresses outside of Dallas, I believe Tremanty is well tended to. Rae made the mistake of indicating her interest, which means she’s always there if Tremanty needs a backup, or, you know, feels like going out of town for a long weekend.”

“Big mistake,” Lucas said. “Can’t believe she made an amateurish error like that.”

“I’m heavily armed,” Rae said. “Shut up and tell me about your jack.”

“I could have a word with Tremanty,” Lucas said to Rae. “He’s like a son to me.”

“One more fuckin’ word . . .”

Lucas said to Bob, “She’s not only armed, I think she’s actually suffering, at some level, from heartbreak. We’d best leave it alone.”

“You could be right,” Bob said. “Tell me about the jack.”

They stopped to let a right-turning car nearly run over their toes. “While I was sitting on my ass in St. Paul,” Lucas said, as the car drove on, “I called up an old friend who happens to be a deputy director at the FBI.”

Rae said, “Louis Mallard.”

“That’s correct. Not only a deputy director but a major law enforcement politician. He called up a pal with Scotland Yard—”

“You gotta be shittin’ me,” Bob said. “There really isa Scotland Yard?”

“And asked, politely, for any information about Oliver Haar. They had a file. Haar was the youngest member of a smash-and-grab gang in London. He ran his mouth too much and the London cops busted him. They gave him the old ‘Don’t drop the soap in the showers’ talk, being a nice-looking young kid looking at five years or so. He cut a deal to serve no time and ratted out the rest of the gang.”

“Should have taken his chances with the soap,” Rae said.

“Maybe. The guys he ratted out are a rough bunch. It gets better. The leader of the gang, whose name was George Wilks, and who had a lot of experience, was responsible for fencing the stuff they stole, and he parceled out the money to the gang in weekly payments. He told them he didn’t want them buying Series 7s or anything else that would catch the eyes of the cops. They had enough to live well, buy decent cars and dope, go to Italy or Portugal in the winter, and so on. Anyway, Wilks and the others all went to prison. Not long after they went away, somebody kicked in the door of Wilks’s house while his wife was out, pulled a dummy wall out from behind a toilet, and took out the two hundred thousand pounds that Wilks had stashed there. Haar knew about the stash. That’s just a rumor, but the London cops think it’s probably true. In the meantime, the Brits let Haar keep his passport—wink wink, nudge nudge—and he hasn’t been seen in England since Wilks’s bathroom got robbed.”