Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(46)

“That Loloma stuff—it’s all unique, it’s all documented with photographs, quite a bit of it is in books that all the Indian traders will have,” the fence told them. “That’s gonna be tough.” He said that if he bought it, he might eventually make two hundred thousand dollars, but that could take ten years and with serious risk involved. He’d offer them twenty thousand—take it or leave it. After some grumbling, they took it.

They got ninety thousand for the rest of the jewelry: the diamonds and the pieces made by Belperron. The diamonds were no problem at all—they were excellent, and anonymous, stones. The Belperron would be resold to a fence in France, who’d move it in Europe, but that meant the take was further reduced because there’d be two fences involved.

The bottom line: the raid was a success but the take, including the cash, amounted to less than forty thousand dollars for each of the men.

Cole, on his own, lying low in Omaha, might stretch forty thousand dollars out over five or six months, but Deese and Beauchamps, with heavy casino and cocaine expenses, could cover a couple of months at best. Each of them gave Cox, as the driver, two thousand, which she thought was ridiculously stingy. She talked Cole out of another five thousand when they were alone, which meant that he wasn’t covered for more than three or four months. And Cox knew that with her cocaine and casino expenditures the same as Deese’s and Beauchamps’s, she’d be lucky if her money lasted a month.


THEY NEEDED more money but were hesitant to hit another house too soon. Would the marshals and the LA cops hear about the Wright raid and figure out where they were? They waited for any sign that the cops were looking for them but saw nothing.

They began to relax and to talk about a second raid, one that would get them out of Vegas. There was also the tempting prospect of a huge score—five million—but the information was funky. It involved a gambler named Harrelson.

And Deese, behind the backs of the others, had spoken to Ricardo Santos and Roger Smith about a payment that would allow him to truly get lost. Smith was at three hundred thousand, Deese wanted a million. Then came the call from Beauchamps’s friend at the trailer park: the marshals had tracked them to Vegas.

“There’s only one way they could get to the park and that’s by tracking the phones. Either Haar sold us out or the feds are doing something we don’t know about, some high-tech shit. We’ve got to get rid of the phones, like, tonight. We all have to change numbers,” Cole said. “We have to think about going somewhere else.”

Beauchamps: “Like where?”

“Miami, Seattle, Boston . . . Well, not Boston, too fuckin’ cold . . . Maybe Houston. Someplace not in California or Nevada,” Cole said. “We should split up. Do one last job, like the Harrelson thing, and retire for a few years. If it’s what Larry thinks it is—five million, all cash—we should be able to do that. I could go to Omaha or Sioux City with my cut, a million and a half, and live there for eight to ten years in style.”

“I’ll believe the five million figure when I see it. But I sure as hell ain’t going to Sioux City,” Deese said. “I agree that we should split up. I need to get somewhere out of the way and lay low for a long time, like maybe forever. If I get picked up by anybody and they pull my prints, I’m dead.”

“You gonna need money to do that,” Beauchamps said. “Cole and I can go talk to Larry right now, tonight, and see if Harrelson and his old lady have gotten home.”

“Gonna be dangerous, Harrelson is. The guy will be tough, he’s gonna have guns, probably a heavy-duty security system,” Deese said. He decided he’d call Santos again that night, maybe come down to eight hundred thousand. That’d have to be his minimum.


DEESE WAS SITTING on a couch in a T-shirt and a pair of Jockey boxer shorts, wrapping a new bandage around his calf. Ten months earlier, he’d been hurt by a man named Howell Paine, but inefficiently, he admitted: there’d been a fight, and Paine had bitten a chunk of meat out of his calf. That had led to his arrest and the chain of events that had led to his secret graveyard and the cannibalized bodies.

Though the wound was almost a year old, Deese had self-treated it and it had never properly healed. Instead of a skin-covered scar, he had a gnarled reddish-and-bluish lump of flesh that had become infected two or three different times.

He’d continued to self-treat the wound. A few days after they moved into the house, he’d gone out to the hot tub, where he’d scraped the wound open again on a drain cover. A pocket of pus had drained down his leg, and Beauchamps had told him he needed to go to the emergency room. Deese had resisted, but the wound had smelled bad enough that he’d eventually given in.

The wound had been opened and cleaned by an on-call surgeon at the medical center and he’d put Deese on antibiotics and told him to change the bandage daily until the new surgical wound had healed.

“We can handle Harrelson,” Beauchamps told him.

“That’s what we do,” Cole added. “But first things first. We gotta get rid of all our phones. Now. Tonight.”


THEY GOT RID of the phones.

Deese wanted to break them up with a hammer, but Cole argued against it. Instead, he and Beauchamps took them to a tough neighborhood beneath the Stratosphere Tower and left them on a concrete-block wall, from where he’d expect them to disappear in a minute or so.