Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(59)
“It’ll be more than tiresome, it’ll be pointless,” Rae said. “There’s gotta be thousands of houses down there. Are we gonna knock on every door?”
Lucas shook his head. “There aren’t thousands of houses. I looked at the satellite photo. Maybe a few hundred under the path, where the airplane noise was loud enough to keep him awake. We know they’re probably driving a pickup and an Escalade. So, we go down there and look for people on the street and ask if they’ve seen newcomers, renters, in a pickup or an Escalade. We have a chance.”
“I vote we get something to eat, take a nap, and go out in the evening,” Bob said. “There won’t be people walking around in the streets when it’s 105 degrees outside. We’ll see more of them when it cools off a bit.”
He was impatient to get going, but it was too hot, so Lucas agreed: they’d eat, go up to their rooms, nap or see if the internet might turn up anything—real estate searches, house rental agencies, meaningful maps—and reconvene in the late afternoon, move out to the streets.
“I hate it that we lost Santos,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, I hate it. He’s going to meet Deese. He would have led us right to him.”
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
As Roger Smith’s familiar spirit, Santos assumed that he was being watched by the FBI, either through his known cell phone or physically. Or, he thought, there might be a tracker on his car. Trackers were now small enough that it was unlikely that he could find it, considering everything else that was under the hood of a modern car.
When he left for Vegas, he thought the feds could be looking for a rental. He made two reservations, one at Avis and one at the Hertz desk at Caesars, under different names, each with its own credit card number. He’d been to Vegas any number of times and had some ideas about how to scrape off a trail: a fast pass through Caesars slots would shake anyone. He’d wind up at the Hertz desk, which was down a barren hallway, and any tracker would have to show himself, if he’d managed to follow that far.
He wouldn’t have to identify himself; Santos could smell a cop.
HE’D PULLED the battery out of his known cell phone on the plane so that couldn’t be tracked. He hadn’t seen anyone following on the drive in from the airport, but he hadn’t expected to, because the feds were better than that.
Fifteen minutes after entering the hotel, he was in the new Hertz car and out on Las Vegas Boulevard. A mile south of Caesars, he pulled into a FedEx store, showed receipts for five boxes being held for him there, got the boxes with a minimum of fuss and carried them out to the car.
When the air conditioner had cooled the interior of the car again, he opened the heaviest of the boxes, which contained five metal foil envelopes that he’d devised himself from thin sheets of copper.
The copper was soft enough that he could unfold the envelopes with his fingers and take out the contents—a slide and barrel, a frame, a trigger assembly with its single pin, and finally the magazine, in the first four—for a 9mm Sig P365, all separately wrapped. He didn’t know if FedEx used an X-ray on suspicious packages, checking for contraband, but, if they did, they’d see nothing that looked like a gun. The final envelope, long and thin, contained the screw-on suppressor.
He assembled the gun without the suppressor—that took a minute or so—and shoved it under the front seat. The suppressor, which didn’t look like much, went into the back of the glove compartment, where it was barely visible. He didn’t have ammo for the gun, but that wasn’t a problem in Las Vegas. There was a gun shop three blocks away, and he picked up a box of Federal Premium Hydra-Shok.
The remaining four boxes each contained a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in used hundred-dollar bills, wrapped in crumpled sheets of newspaper so the stacks of currency wouldn’t shift around. The bills made two stacks, each a little more than three inches high, which fit nicely, and with plenty of room, in a standard FedEx box. They’d wanted the boxes to be lightweight, because they’d seem less worth stealing; and they’d broken the money into four boxes so, in case of theft, they wouldn’t lose it all at once. All four came through fine.
THE DAY BEFORE Santos left New Orleans, he and Smith had gone for a walk in Audubon Park, across the pond from the golf course. The day was humid, but they were used to it, and the bees were out on the flowers and interesting to watch as they went about their work.
As they walked, Smith told Santos he was writing off the money. “It’s a lot,” he said with a shrug. “But we can always go out and get more. Anyway, what you do with it is up to you. Give the money to Deese and tell him to get lost and never come back to New Orleans. Or, if you can get away with it, shoot him and keep the money. I don’t care one way or the other because, for me, when you walk out the door, the money is gone.”
Santos: “Really?”
“Yeah, really,” Smith said. He stopped to sniff a rose, frowned, said it didn’t smell like anything. “What the fuck kind of rose is that?”
“I’m not a rose connoisseur,” Santos said.
Smith nodded, and they moved on, picking up the conversation. “From my point of view, I’d rather you get rid of Deese permanently,” Smith said. “He’s never going to do me any good, not now, not with all the murders and the fuckin’ cannibalism. The feds could use that to turn him. Against me. And you, too, maybe. So, it’s either his money to get lost with or your money to make his disappearance permanent.”