Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(45)

Rae: “You’ve got a good eye.”

“There’s a major medical center out here,” Calvin Wright said. “If he’s out here on the west side and he got bit by a dog, or something, he might have gone to their emergency room.”

Bob said to Lucas, “He probably would have paid cash.”


LUCAS: “ESPECIALLY if he got a prescription.” They left the Wrights and ended the evening at the Forum’s Cheesecake Factory. The air had cooled dramatically by midnight and had become light and pleasant. They’d walked over from the Bellagio. And since the casinos never closed, there were still people on the streets. Bob, who’d led the way, ordered a Very Cherry Ghirardelli Chocolate Cheesecake, Rae went with the Lemoncello Cream Torte, while Lucas chose the Hot Fudge Sundae. Lucas had asked the waitress if the sundae was decent and she said, “It’s fabulous. I gotta tell you, if it was me, I’d be sticking my feet in that ice cream. I’ve been standing up for fourteen hours straight.”

“Not in this one job, for God’s sakes?” Bob said.

“Two jobs,” the waitress said. “This one pays the rent, the other feeds the slots.”


WHEN THE DESSERT came, Lucas summed up: “We know they’re here. The bad thing is, they probably know that we’re here. They could go on the run again. We only found them because we got lucky with the phone. If they figure that out, and they probably will, they’ll stop using Haar and throw the phone away. If we’re going to find them, we’ve got to do it quick or we’ll have to start over.”

“Then what’s next?” Bob asked.

“You guys check the hospitals tomorrow morning, see if you can find the guy with the hole in his leg. I’ll get back with Mallow and see who’s fencing what around town and what places handle high-end Indian jewelry.”

“Sounds like legwork,” Bob said.

“Yes. In 105-degree heat.”

“We should feel honored,” Rae said to Bob. “We’ll be doing actual detective-like things.”

Bob sang, “I wanna be an airborne Ranger, fight and fuck and live in danger . . .”

“Think your partner is suffering from heatstroke already,” Lucas said to Rae. And, “I’m going to bed.”





CHAPTER


ELEVEN


The police raid on the Altadena house had spooked Beauchamps and Cole. Everything had been going so smoothly and had ended so cataclysmically, with both Nast and Vincent shot to death by the cops.

Cox wasn’t an idiot but seemed oddly unaffected by the raid. She thought Nast was a jerk and had gotten what he deserved and didn’t seem to register the fact that they’d been outrageously lucky to ride away untouched—that what had happened to Nast and Vincent could as easily have happened to her.

Her answer: “Well, it didn’t, so why sweat it?” The three men looked at her, simultaneously shook their heads, and Cox went back to brushing her shoes.


IN VEGAS, they’d stayed five nights at the trailer park, all four of them. Cox slept in the bedroom with Beauchamps, but during the day Deese and Beauchamps went out, both men with beards now, wearing sunglasses and hats. When they were gone, Cox and Cole would test their new relationship, watching porn on the trailer’s television and then trying out what they’d learned. Beauchamps seemed oblivious to their budding relationship; Deese watched them suspiciously.

Cox had gotten in touch with the Airbnb agent the first full day they were in town and by the sixth day the woman got them into two separate houses, cheap but fully furnished.

And they started talking about a house invasion: they needed cash and they needed it soon.

They’d lost the van in the raid and decided to go to two vehicles. They’d leave Deese’s truck a few hundred yards from the target house and go in in Beauchamps’s Cadillac. On the way out, after the robbery, Beauchamps and Deese would be dropped at the truck. There were a lot of surveillance cameras in Las Vegas, and cops looking for three men in a vehicle, in the area of the home invasion, would see only two in the truck and a man and a woman in the Cadillac.

That was all right with Cox—she was willing to be a getaway driver as long as she could pretend that she believed nobody would get hurt. The truth was, other people’s pain didn’t bother her much. Not being as dumb a bunny as the men thought she was, she also knew that if people got hurt, the criminal penalties increased and the cops got more interested.

So Beauchamps and Cole did the basic research, scanning local magazines that took pictures at charity events, the women all in jewelry and their hottest dresses. When they had a list, they went to the cheapest all-cash motel they could find that had WiFi and used Cole’s laptop to research the people.

When they’d whittled the list down to four candidates, they checked the houses on Google Earth, spotting getaway routes and possible security problems. They eliminated a condo right away and finally settled on the Wrights.

Deese picked up some current-looking license plates from a junkyard—five hundred bucks, no questions asked. They bought a railroad tie at a nursery, the kind used for landscaping, and two door handles at a Home Depot to affix to the tie, to make a battering ram.

When they went into Wrights’ house, it had all gone smoothly, like old times. The robbery went well, Deese taking Nast’s place as the frightener, but much of the take was in jewelry that would be hard to sell. They’d talked to their new fence about it and he suggested they not move more than a single piece of the Loloma, or two, each year.