Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(4)

“Best of luck with that, then,” Rae said. “You know the gentleman that lives down at the end of this road?”

“No, no, I don’t, ma’am. I been here three days, off and on, and never seen nobody comin’ or goin’, except one colored lady who goes down there every morning. She down there now.”

Another marshal got out of the trailing truck. He was wearing a tan marshal’s T-shirt and green tactical pants, razor-type sunglasses, a baseball hat with a black-and-white American flag on the front, and boots. A second man got out of the passenger side, tall, dark-haired and blue-eyed, with an olive complexion, who would have fit neatly into the local Cajun population. He was wearing pressed khaki slacks and a blue long-sleeved dress shirt, a “New Orleans Saints” ball cap, and high-polished cordovan loafers. He had a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses in his hand, which he put on as he climbed out onto the dirt track. They came up and the man in the dress shirt asked, “What are we doing?”

“This gentleman has been here for three days, off and on, and hasn’t seen anybody coming or going except one black woman,” Rae said. “So . . . let’s get it on.”

The third marshal said, “Oorah!” like they might have once done in the Big Army, and maybe still did, but he was a former Ranger and said it with a sarcastic overtone and trekked back to his truck and popped the back lid.

Rae did the same, and she and Bob and the other marshal pulled on heavy bulletproof vests and helmets with chinstraps. The man in the dress shirt got back in the trailing truck and closed the door, where he had some air-conditioning. Two of the marshals armed themselves with semiauto M15-style rifles, while Rae had a fully automatic M4. They went through a nearly unconscious series of checks—everybody loaded up and ready to go—and the man in the F-150 asked, tentatively, “You got a bad guy down there?”

“Pretty bad,” Rae said. “You stay here, you’ll be okay. Or you might want to drive out a ways.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” the man said.

As they pulled away from the turnoff, Rae saw the F-150 do a U-turn and head out to the blacktop road in a hurry. She said, “The oll man’s going out.”

Bob was contemplating his cell phone and muttered, “We pick up Deese’s ass, right? Or maybe he’s run and we don’t pick up Deese’s ass. Either way, we go on down to New Orleans and drop off Tremanty and then get outside some crawfish boil. Should be perfect right now. Mmm-mmm.”

Tremanty was the man in the blue dress shirt, an FBI agent who’d originally arrested Clayton Deese on charges of assault with a deadly weapon in aid of racketeering activities. The “in aid of racketeering activities” made it a federal crime. That is, Clayton Deese had beaten the living shit out of Howell Paine. When Deese had finished with him, Paine had been howling with pain indeed, the bones of his hands broken into pieces that, on an X-ray, looked like a sock full of golf tees.

Paine had owed a few thousand dollars to a loan shark named Roger (“Rog”) Smith and had been unwilling to pay it back, even when he could. He’d been known to say in public that Smith could suck on it. A lesson had to be taught, and was, and now Paine, seriously worse for the wear, was in the Marshals Service Witness Protection Program until Deese’s trial. Tremanty didn’t want Deese all that bad; the one he really wanted was Smith, and Deese could give him up. Nothing like looking at fifteen years in the federal prison system to loosen a man’s tongue.

Unfortunately, Deese, who was out on a bond, had failed to show for trial, and his ankle monitor had gone dead three days earlier. They would have gotten to him sooner, except . . . bureaucracy.

On the way down to Deese’s house, with Bob driving now because Rae was holding the machine gun, Rae said, “Three days. Deese could be in Australia by now. Up in the mountains.”

“They got mountains in Australia?” Bob asked.

“Must have. They got skiers in the Olympics.”

“Could be dead,” Bob said. “Deese—not the skiers.”

“Could be,” Rae said. “But Tremanty says he’s the baddest guy that Roger Smith has available. He thinks Smith would want to keep him available if he can. Smith thinks Deese might beat the rap—the judge isn’t known as ‘Cash’ McConnell for nothing.”

“Tremanty says? You been going out for cups of coffee with the FBI? Meetin’ Agent Tremanty for a little tit-à-tit?”

“It’s pronounced tête-à-tête, not tit-à-tit, you ignorant Oakie,” Rae said. She always got tight on a job like this. Her M4 had a sling, and she was clinking the sling’s swivel against the handguard and it went dink-dink-dink as they talked.

“It’s pronounced tête-à-tête if you mean a face-to-face meeting,” Bob said. “It’s pronounced tit-à-tit if you mean . . .”

“Off my back, dumbass,” Rae interrupted. “Here we go.”


DEESE’S HOME was a low, rambling building clad with wide, unpainted pine weatherboards gone dark with the sun and wind. The house looked old, nineteenth-century, but wasn’t; it had been built in 1999 on a concrete slab, according to the parish assessor’s office.

A narrow porch stretched down the length of the structure, a foot above ground level, with a door opening off the middle of the porch. Two green metal patio chairs on the porch, their paint faded by sunlight and rain. The third marshal popped out of his truck and ran toward the back of the house, while Bob and Rae went straight in from the front, watching the windows for movement, their rifles already up, safeties off, fingers hovering over the triggers.