Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(50)
They headed back to Harrelson’s house. The perimeter road didn’t have much traffic after dark. They waited until there was a gap, then Cox pulled behind Harrelson’s house. The three men, all dressed in dark clothing and wearing driving gloves, scrambled out and squatted behind a screen of eucalyptus trees. They carried with them a black backpack with guns in it, duct tape, ski masks, Geenie’s bookmarking butcher knife, a fifteen-foot chain with four padlocks, and three flashlights. They wouldn’t need the battering ram because they wouldn’t be knocking down a door.
They waited in the trees for five minutes, and then, during another carless interval, they crossed the five-foot wall. They landed in more generic landscaped brush on the far side of the wall, waited there for an alarm, a motion light to go on, a dog’s bark, a questioning voice, and, when there was nothing, made their way slowly between the houses, with Harrelson’s to the left. There were lights on in the house, but Harrelson’s wife was apparently deep inside and they never saw her or even a shadow behind a curtain. They stopped behind a clump of decorative grasses next to Harrelson’s garage door. Beauchamps opened the pack and passed out the ski masks and the guns and zipped the case back up.
O’Conner had told them that Harrelson usually had an early golf game in the summer and wouldn’t linger at Tina’s. He was correct.
Beauchamps’s phone buzzed at nine forty-five. Cox was on the other end, and she said, “He’s on his way. He’ll be there in five or six minutes, if he doesn’t stop.”
“Stay way back behind him, don’t try to get close,” Beauchamps told her.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I’m not dumb.”
FIVE MINUTES LATER, she called again. “He’s turning in at the gate. He’s only a minute away.”
Cole said to Deese and Beauchamps, “Get ready, he’s here.”
Beauchamps: “I’ll lead. Clayton, you follow. Cole, you know the routine: you watch behind us, me’n Clayton will take him.”
“But easy,” Cole said, for Deese’s benefit.
“LIGHTS,” Beauchamps muttered. “Here he comes.”
They saw the Cayenne pass under a streetlight. The yellow finish was unmistakable. The car slowed, and Beauchamps said, “Ready?”
Then Cole asked, “What the fuck is this?”
They watched, dumbfounded, as the garage door of the house across the street went up. The Cayenne pulled in and the door started down again. No chance they could get there in time to confront Harrelson.
“That fuckin’ O’Conner got the address wrong,” Deese said. “I’m gonna cut his fuckin’ nose off.”
“Not fuckin’ O’Conner, fuckin’ Google,” Cole whispered. “I saw the map and they marked this house. You gonna cut Google’s nose off?”
“We gotta get out of here,” Beauchamps said. “Jesus H. Christ. We gotta get out of here.”
THEY GOT BACK to the house without incident, fuming but sometimes laughing about it. Deese had thought it over and finally told Beauchamps that he was dealing with Roger Smith on a possible payoff that would see him out of the country.
“I’m telling you but not them other ones. If I get the cash, I’ll give you enough to get you anywhere you need to go and get set up again.”
Beauchamps shook his head. “Cole is my friend. I’ll take you up on the offer, but I’m going to tell him it might be coming.”
“Well, shit . . .”
Beauchamps said, “Clayton, something you never learned—being a killer instead of a robber—that to be successful, you sometimes have to trust people. I trust Cole.”
Beauchamps told Cole and Cox about the possibility of getting money from Smith and that they’d get a cut, if only a small one, and Cole bobbed his head, said, “Terrific,” and Cox said to Deese, “That’s nice of you,” the insincerity clear in her voice.
Later that night, when they were all in their separate rooms, Deese got a call on his burner. Roger Smith. He spoke low, and pool balls clicking in the background told Deese exactly where Smith was. Deese rarely yearned for anything other than money, cocaine, and sex, but he was suddenly overcome with yearning to be back in his old haunts in Louisiana, the green-baize pool tables, the smell of chalk, the squeak when twisting it on the tip of a cue. He pushed the yearning away, and asked, “You get my message?”
“Yes. I’m gonna do this, but I want to make a point plain. It’s a lot of money. If you take it and don’t hold up your end of the bargain, to leave the country, I’ll find the best talent I can and hire them to kill you. You understand?”
“Man . . .”
“You understand?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Don’t be bullshitting me, bon ami,” Smith said. “New Orleans is now off-limits for you. If you get the idea in your head of coming back here to put me down, you won’t get two feet inside the city before I know it. We won’t set no dumbass Lugnuts on you. So take the money and run and have a happy life.”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
As the Gang of Four was doing reconnaissance and making the aborted run at Harrelson, Lucas, Bob, and Rae were pulling together what they’d learned in Las Vegas.