Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(42)

A small red arrow-shaped sign on the street opposite the guardhouse said “Manager, 300 Dodgers.” The streets, it turned out, were named after baseball teams. “Dodgers” was the street leading away from the entrance and they followed it to number 300, which turned out to be an aging and thoroughly immobile mobile home surrounded by sunburnt zinnias and marigolds.

They parked and Lucas led the way to the door; they knocked and a woman in pink hair curlers opened it, looked at them, frowned, and asked, “Who are you?”

“U.S. Marshals,” Lucas said, showing her his badge.

“You better come in. It’s so goddamn hot out there, you could boil water on the sidewalk.”

They crowded into the trailer, which smelled like cream of mushroom soup and Gerber’s baby food—pureed peas, Lucas thought, an odor he wouldn’t easily forget, either going in or coming out of a kid—and the woman said, “Gotta be quiet. I just put the baby down.”

Lucas showed her mug shots of Deese, Beauchamps, and Cole. After a moment, she tapped the picture of Beauchamps and said, “He used to be here. Over on . . . Astros. 712. Haven’t seen him in a couple of months.”

“Who’s living there now?”

“College student. Kelly something. Has a black-and-white dog; you see her walking the dog at night. I tell her, ‘Listen, if you’re at school and the air-conditioning goes out here, the power goes off, that pooch will die in there.’ So then a couple days later she told me she made arrangements with the woman who lives across the way to make sure the dog is okay if there’s a power problem. Nice girl.”

“Is she related to this guy?” Lucas held up the Beauchamps picture. “A girlfriend, anything like that?”

“Don’t know, don’t keep track of that kind of thing. But I don’t think so. I believe she rented it from them. This guy”—she nodded at the photo in Lucas’s hand—“told me he was going to Alaska and he didn’t know when he’d be back, exactly. He left me fifteen hundred bucks for repairs and said if it was more than that, I should kick out the renter and lock it up until he did get back.”

“How do you know she rented it?” Rae asked. “How do you know they’re not related?”

The woman shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what I think.”

Lucas said to Bob and Rae, “Let’s go look.”





CHAPTER


TEN


A multi-dented Subaru Outback with lefty bumper sticker—“That’s Ms. Liberal, Pro-Choice, Tree-Hugging, Vegan Hippie Freak to You, Asshole”—was parked outside the target trailer, which showed lights in all the windows even though it wasn’t dark yet. Over the hum of the air-conditioning they could hear Taylor Swift singing “Teardrops on My Guitar.”

Lucas said, “College student. Not a problem.”

Bob hooked his arm. “What happened the last time you stuck out your face in front of a house, Lucas? We’ll do this—it’s what we do. You can go around and watch the back. There’ll be a door or fire exit there.”

Rae had already popped the hatch on the Tahoe and was pulling on a “U.S. Marshal” shirt and a vest. Bob joined her. When they were armored up, Lucas walked to the back of the trailer, where he could see the door, while Rae peeked through the window of the front door, then the window beside it, and then Bob took up a spot at an angle to the door and hid his Glock in his hand behind his hip, ready to go.

Rae knocked and a moment later the door popped open, and Lucas heard Rae say, “We’re U.S. Marshals. Could you step outside, please?”

A dog started barking inside, and then Lucas heard a woman’s voice: “Be quiet, Willa. Shhh.”


NOTHING WAS MOVING at the back door, so Lucas walked back around to the front. A short, stocky brown-haired woman was standing on the stoop. Rae held up her ID and badge and asked her if there was anyone else in the trailer and the woman said, “No,” and Rae asked her if it was okay if they took a look.

“I really have a problem with law people pushing into my house,” the woman said.

“We’re not pushing,” Rae said. “We’re asking permission. If you say no, we won’t. But we will get a warrant, which means we’ll all be standing here for two or three hours, in the heat, until we do. And then if there’s nobody in there, it’ll all have been an annoying waste of time.”

Bob added, “We’re looking for some very dangerous people—the people you are renting from. There’s a murder warrant out for one of them and armed robbery warrants out for all of them.”

The woman: “What!”

Rae: “You see why we can’t take a chance that you’re hiding someone. The last time we went after them, they shot two law enforcement officers.”

“What!”

Bob said, “We don’t want to look at any of your personal papers or other possessions, we want to make sure we don’t get shot in the back. That’s the truth. So . . .”

The woman let them in, said her name was Kerry Black, not Kelly, as the manager had said. Bob and Rae cleared the place. That done, all five of them, plus the black-and-white border collie, Willa, crowded into the kitchen.

Black said she’d rented the trailer from a blond woman after seeing an advertisement on the Las Vegas Craigslist. “She said she wanted somebody reliable who wouldn’t wreck the place and said Willa was okay. They wanted only three hundred a month, which was great for me. I couldn’t even believe it.”