Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(58)

They all got stopped at Harmon Avenue, Santos a half dozen cars behind Bob and Rae, Lucas another half dozen cars behind Santos. They went through Flamingo together, then Bob said, “Shit, he pulled into the valet parking at Caesars. You’re on your own, Lucas. We’ll be back as soon as we can turn around.”


LUCAS DROVE SLOWLY toward the valet stand, stalled a bit despite a valet waving to him, waited until Santos was on the steps going inside, then drove to the valet, grabbed the phone and his bag, hopped out of the car, shoved his ID in the valet’s face, and said, “Keep the car close, right out here, I’m working, I’m running, give me the ticket.”

The valet passed him the parking stub and Lucas grabbed it and hurried up the steps through the door where Santos had disappeared. He stepped inside and scanned the crowd: there were several straw hats in the lobby, but he didn’t see Santos at first, until he glanced toward the concierge desk and saw him talking to the woman behind the desk. She pointed across the lobby, and Lucas turned away and stepped back outside, where he watched through the glass doors as Santos walked across. He wished he had a hat like Santos’s, anything that would disguise his appearance since Santos had seen him in New Orleans.

Rae jogged up. “Where is he?”

“Walking across the lobby.”

Bob came up. “I dumped the car with the valet, goddamn near killed an old lady doing a U-turn on the boulevard. Where is he?”

Rae had stepped inside, waved them in beside her. “See his hat?”

They moved up behind him, the three of them spreading out across the lobby, and then into the gambling area. He was easy to follow through the various craps and roulette tables, but he disappeared into slot machines on the far side of the tables. Some of the machines were seven or eight feet tall, and the pale straw hat vanished amid their crazy flashing lights.


SANTOS WAS WALKING fast through the slots, the three marshals a hundred feet behind him. Gamblers wandered back and forth between the machines while bad rock music pounding down from the ceiling contributed to the sensory overload.

When Santos disappeared, Rae ran after him, the fastest-moving person in the place, lots of eyes tracking her. She got through the first area of slots, then stopped, looked back at Lucas, shook her head.

Lucas hurried into the slots, which were arranged in what amounted to a maze—short aisles leading into blocking banks of more slots—like they didn’t want you to get out.

He called to Bob. “See him?”

Bob said, “No, I lost him. Where is he?”

He took a call from Rae. “You got him? Where?”

Then Bob came up. “We lost him. He’s gotta be right here,” and Lucas heard him say to Rae on the phone, “Did he go in there?”

“Don’t think so . . .”

They’d lost him.


WHEN LUCAS was sure that Santos was gone, he told Bob, “Go back to the valet stand and make sure he doesn’t get the car back. Rae, let’s find the closest taxi stand. I saw one when we were here the other day.”

They looked for half an hour but didn’t see him again.

When they got back together, Bob said, “I think I know why they were making those calls from here—it’s impossible to track somebody. Too many people moving in too many directions. Santos might never have seen us, but he scraped us off because he knew he could do it and not take a chance that hemight be tracked.”

Lucas said, “That hints he’s up to something. That he’s here to meet with Deese.”

Rae: “We know where his car is. We could stick a GPS tracker on it in case he decided to use it—but we’d need a warrant.”

“Why would anyone give us a warrant?” Bob asked. “As far as we know, Santos doesn’t even have a criminal record.”

Lucas said, “Ahh . . . shit.”


THEY SPLIT UP AGAIN again and wandered around the casino, and eventually into the Forum shopping center, in case Santos turned up again. The Forum was an absurd place, gigantic statues of big-breasted nude Roman women and Greek gods with fountains spraying water over them. Tourists wandered around, taking selfies and eating crap. After a while, it became apparent that they wouldn’t find Santos by just wandering. They located the hotel manager, who checked for him in the reservations and failed to find his name.

“Maybe he’s like us: he’s in this hotel for a reason but checked in somewhere else,” Bob said.

“If he’s checked in at all,” Lucas said. “He comes here, shoots Deese or gives him a bag of money—or whatever he’s doing—goes out to the airport and gets on a plane. He might not even need a hotel.”

“Doesn’t have a gun unless he got one here,” Rae said. “Probably doesn’t have a bag of money, either. They would have seen that at security and would have asked questions.”

“There are ways to handle all of that if you need to: you wire a million bucks to a casino and cash it in here,” Bob said. “I mean, maybe not a million, but a lot. After that, a gun is a matter of knowing the right guy. Roger Smith would.”

“You almost sound like you know what you’re talking about,” Rae said.

“I read about it in a book,” Bob said. “Books are always accurate.”


LUCAS GAVE UP on Santos. He could be anywhere in Las Vegas. “We need to work the streets, out on the end of the airport flight path,” he said. “It’s gonna be tiresome, but what else can we do?”