Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(47)

“Better to have them walk around than to suddenly go quiet. That could pull the feds off our asses, at least for a few days,” he told the others.

They agreed. “But then what?” Cox asked.

“Then we go talk to Larry about Harrelson,” Beauchamps said.

“And we get a whole bunch of new phones,” Cole added


LARRY O’CONNER was a short man with dull-brown hair, a skimpy brown mustache, and a serious potbelly. He dressed in double knits from head to toe because they didn’t need ironing. He and Beauchamps had met years before at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New Orleans. They’d both been sent to AA after convictions on minor burglary charges as part of court deals to avoid serving time. They’d both realized that neither of them was likely to stop drinking or go straight.

O’Conner had migrated to Las Vegas, where he made a living betting on sports and horse racing but had barely been getting by. Beauchamps had used him to connect with Las Vegas fences and had given him a small cut of the money that came out of those deals. That had led to O’Conner spotting Jim Harrelson, a golf hustler and poker player.


HARRELSON WAS good at gambling, much better than O’Conner. So good, he wasn’t really gambling. He had a golf partner who everybody called Dopey, who carried a 9 golf handicap and could play six strokes better than that when he had to. Dopey, like O’Conner, was a drinker, and one night in a bar had bragged to O’Conner that Harrelson kept five million in cash on hand for his high-stakes poker games with LA whales and for his golf.

“The buy-in for some of those poker games can be a quarter million just to sit at the table,” Dopey said.

And he and Harrelson had once taken more than a million dollars off two Phoenix financial guys who thought they were scratch golfers, Dopey told O’Conner, but they’d failed to prove it over a dozen rounds. All the bets were in cash, and Harrelson had fronted the money for their side of the bets.

“He took a banker’s box of hundred-dollar bills out of the trunk of his car like it was chump change,” Dopey said. “You know how much he keeps around? Five million. All the time. Said he wouldn’t want to be caught short.”

O’Conner filed the information away for possible later use.

Later had arrived.


THE MORNING AFTER they’d ditched the phones, and with new burners in hand, Beauchamps and Cole found O’Conner in a motel downtown. He’d been drinking for several days but wasn’t too drunk to drive, he said. The night before, he’d gone to Tina’s Wayside and had seen Harrelson’s custom-yellow Porsche Cayenne in the parking lot.

“They’re back. When he’s here, he usually goes over to Tina’s at night to hang out and figure out who’s in town, where the big game is. His wife doesn’t go with him, it’s business,” O’Conner said. “He usually heads back home by ten o’clock or so, especially in the summer. If you’re gonna play golf in the summer in Vegas, you’ve got to be out there by six or you’ll die.”

Harrelson lived in an upscale neighborhood south of the airport, O’Conner said. That was also different than the situation in LA. In Beverly Hills, the houses were gated but not the streets. In Vegas, the streets were gated but not the houses—and, in Harrelson’s case, the gates had guards instead of electronic remotes. But there was a simple way around it if Harrelson went home after dark.

His house backed up to a street that was outside the walls. And the walls were only chest-high and easily climbable. They could follow Harrelson home, and when he went on to the nearest gate Cox could drop them behind his house. They’d cross the wall and wait for Harrelson to pull into his garage and take him there.

If whatever they took from the house was too large to carry, they could always use one of Harrelson’s cars to get themselves back out of the complex. The gates on the outbound lane opened automatically as a car approached.


WHEN THEY left O’Conner, Beauchamps asked Cole, “Tell me the truth: what do you think?”

“What I think is, these marshals are all over us. It makes me nervous that I’m not already on my way out of town. Way out of town. But—”

“You need the money after losing your stash in LA. And my idiot brother, the cannibal, is already hinting that he might need a loan. Geenie . . . Geenie doesn’t have anything and never has.”

“Cocaine,” Cole said. “Blow and hookers and casinos. They’ll get you every time.”

“Not hookers. Dancers. But a lot of them,” Beauchamps admitted. “And the blow. But what are we going to do? None of us could work a straight job. Maybe Geenie could get a sales clerk job, but she wouldn’t.”

“If we’re going to hit Harrelson, I say we go tonight,” Cole said. “We know he keeps a bundle on hand. Even if we don’t get the five mil, we could get enough that we could all run somewhere else. We need to fly.”

“I wish we had more time for the research.”

“This isn’t LA, where we had to do the research, checking out his old lady and all that. We already know who we’re targeting and where he lives,” Cole said. “We don’t need any gate codes. We cross the wall, put a gun in his face, and take the cash. End of story.”

“Aw, God.” Beauchamps rubbed his forehead, up and down, then started the Cadillac and said, “You’re right. Let’s talk to Deese. See if Geenie thinks she can handle the driving and the timing again. I hate to be in a hurry. I hate it. But with the marshals here . . . As far as we know, every cop in town has our pictures.”