Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(38)

“There’s a guy who used to hang out here a lot. He said he was on the run from his wife, he said he owed a couple hundred grand in alimony and child support and he told me he’d give me fifty bucks a call if I’d be his switchboard,” Haar said. He shrugged. “All I had to do is take two steps down the hall to answer the phone, so I said yes. Then another guy came along. My name was passed along by these chaps. I don’t know who any of them were or what they did. I just passed numbers. After a bit, I began to realize that some of them were . . . bad people. Two of them, maybe three, made the Los Angeles Times, and the Timesdoesn’t write about anyone unless they’ve done something noticeable.”

“What was your relationship with Sherman?”

“I passed numbers to him. Most of these people I never met. Sherman—I actually knew him as Keller—came in to see what was what. I knew right away that he was the wrong type. But he liked this place, he liked the women. He’d come in, like anyone else. Rougher but not crazy. A certain kind of woman definitely had a taste for what he was selling.”

“Give me the phone number you’re calling,” Lucas said.

Haar dug in his pant pocket, took out a black address book the size of a credit card and an eighth of an inch thick. He read out the number and said, “I hope you’ll use it with care. It’s possible that nobody calls that number except me, so if you call it, they’d know who gave it to you.”

“We’ll be careful,” Lucas said.

“I’m surprised you don’t use a smartphone for the numbers, maybe with some encryption,” Rae said.

Haar smiled for the first time, a brief flash of white teeth, and said, “You know the best encryption? Two pieces of paper wadded up and swallowed.”

“All right,” Lucas said. He took a card out of his wallet, wrote his phone number on the back, and said, “If Sherman calls, give me a ring. Don’t forget. When we get him—and we will—we’ll look at his phone to see who he’s been calling . . . And who’s been calling him.”

Haar looked at the card, then at the reverse side, and said, “I need to get some cards like this.”

Rae asked, “Like what?”

Haar showed it to her: the card was blank on both sides, except for the handwritten phone number. Rae looked at Lucas and said, “Explain.”

Lucas said, “Sometimes assholes don’t want to carry a cop’s card around with them.” And to Haar: “Not saying you’re an asshole, or anything.”

“I’m actually a pretty decent bloke,” Haar said. “With some quirks.”

After some more talk, and more warnings about the consequences if he spoke to anyone about their visit, they let Haar go back to his reception desk.


RAE CALLED TREMANTY from the sidewalk outside the bar. “I’m with Lucas and Bob. We have a phone number, but we need to be careful.”

Tremanty called her back as they were walking into the hotel. He’d talked to the FBI’s overnight phone guy, who was named Earl.

“Earl didn’t do anything that might trip any wires. He looked at records and nothing else,” Tremanty said. “The phone’s a burner, and there have been four calls to and from. It’s in Vegas. I told them to email you a map of where the phone was when the calls were made. That could take a few hours.”

“You know what we’re talking about here,” Lucas said. “We want to get on them before they take off again.”

“I’m pushing Earl.”


LUCAS, BOB, AND RAE were all on the same floor at the hotel. They went up in the elevator and walked down the hall to Lucas’s room to figure out what to do next.

“I’d rather stay here. This is hot, Vegas is gonna be a goddamn furnace,” Bob said. He was looking at the weather app on his phone. “It’s 108, 110, 111, respectively, for the next three days. If we have to work outside . . .”

“Rae’s right,” Lucas said. “We’ll need new wardrobes. Maybe pick up some stuff tomorrow. I’ll call Forte tomorrow morning and get plane tickets . . . Or we could drive.”

Bob went to his mapping app. “We gotta get to the airport three hours ahead of the flight because of our gear, the guns, and it’s a half hour to the airport. Plus, LAX is a world-class shithole. Flight time is an hour, then we’d have to collect the gear and rent cars at the other end. Total, probably five and a half hours. Or, we could drive, get there in five hours or less, and we wouldn’t have to mess with checking in the guns and renting cars. And we could leave here anytime we want.”

“Drive,” Rae said.

“Shop, then drive,” Lucas agreed. “We ought to have the phone maps later tonight or tomorrow morning for sure.”

“Meet at breakfast,” Bob said.

“Nine o’clock,” Lucas said.


LUCAS WAS UP at eight, cleaned up, and checked for the overnight email from the FBI. The phone number they’d gotten from Haar showed four calls, three going out, one coming in. All three outgoing calls had been made from the Forum Shops at Caesars, a mall attached to the hotel and casino.

“Probably because it’s all crowded and confused with a lot of traffic and you could never find a guy in there,” Rae said.

More interesting was the single incoming call, which had been taken at a trailer park west of Caesars.