Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(61)

Beauchamps asked, “What’s this boudin noir you were talking about? You don’t look like no coonass.”

“My parents were Cuban,” Santos said. “I’ve been in New Orleans long enough to dig the food. We Cubans have moranga. It’s all blood sausage, though I gotta say a real boudin noiris better than any morangamy old lady ever bought.”

“You’re making my mouth water,” Beauchamps said, flashing a smile. “Listen, you wanna bring the money in, or what?”

“Maybe come back later,” Santos said.

“Let me go in the bedroom, get my phone, call Clayton and see where he is, if he can come quick.”

“Okay.” Santos looked at the blonde and said, “You’re a beautiful woman. What’s your name?”

“Thank you,” she said, with a real smile. “It’s Geenie. You’re a pretty man yourself.”


BEAUCHAMPS TOOK his phone into a bedroom as Santos was laying a shine on Cox. He closed the door, dialed Deese’s new burner. When Deese came up, Beauchamps said, “The money is here.”

“You got it?”

“No, Santos says it’s out in the car.”

After a long silence, Deese said, “Listen, I had to think about it when Rog said he’d send the money with Santos. I mean, why Santos? I know how they move money. FedEx lets you call up and tell them to hold your delivery so you can pick it up there. They could have sent it direct to us and we could have picked it up just as easily as Santos.”

Beauchamps: “What are you talking about?”

“When Santos went to work for Rog a few years back, I asked around. There are some people who think he does the same thing I do, but he’s not so . . . out there,” Deese said.

“Not so much of a fuckup,” Beauchamps said, to clarify.

“Not so out there,” Deese insisted. “Everybody kinda knew who I was. Rog used me to scare people. Nobody knows who Santos is. He’s supposedly a smart guy. Went to college. A guy told me that Rog used Santos when he didn’t want to scare anybody but somebody needed to be gone. To disappear. There was a guy named Appel, German, and he disappeared, and everybody—everybody—heard he’d gone on to New York. Nobody heard from him after that. He fuckin’ vanished.”

Beauchamps looked at the bedroom door. “What’re you saying?”

“What I’m saying is, you could have a problem. I can be there in twenty minutes, but if I was you I might put a gun in my pocket before I talk to him anymore. In case Santos has decided he’d like to keep the money.”

“Ah, shit, man. He doesn’t look like a killer, he looks . . . smooth. He looks slick and smooth, like a billiard ball.”

“Which is one reason that people don’t worry about him. Then, poof,” Deese said.

“All right.”

Beauchamps had a big Beretta in the chest of drawers. Big because it was meant to frighten home invasion victims. He hung up, got the gun, carried it into the bathroom, jacked a 9mm shell into the chamber, made sure the safety was on, flushed the toilet, and went back through the bedroom to the living room.

“He’s on his way,” he said to Santos. “He won’t be too long. I can get you a beer, if you want to wait. Or if you want to go out, find a hotel or something . . .” He went into the kitchen, crab-walking sideways so that Santos wouldn’t see the gun, and sat on a stool at the breakfast bar.

Santos cocked his head, looked at Cox and then at Beauchamps, and said, “Guess I’ll wait. I’ll take that beer.”

Santos was thinking that if Deese was actually on the way, with the other man who was with them, it would then be three to one, assuming the blonde wasn’t carrying a gun. By acting before then, the odds would be cut; and he suspected that Beauchamps had gotten a gun from the bedroom, the way he’d backed up to the refrigerator to get the beer.

Beauchamps was thinking about what Deese had said and how he himself would behave if he were Santos and there were six hundred thousand dollars on the line. He opened the refrigerator with his left hand and took out a beer while his right hand crept around to his back and grasped the Beretta.

Santos saw it and put up his left hand and said, “Wait,” but Beauchamps saw Santos’s arm going for his back and he pulled the Beretta and thrust it at Santos and pulled the trigger but nothing happened, and, in a flash, thought: safety. He thumbed the safety off and pulled the trigger again, and his hand hopped with the hard recoil as Cox screamed and ran across a coffee table and went down in a crash of cheap glass. And Santos got his gun out and fired at Beauchamps’s face.

Beauchamps and Santos, five yards apart, both realized that they’d missed with their first shots, though that seemed almost impossible, and they both kept cranking on their triggers until Santos ran out of ammo and Beauchamps went down, firing his last, dying shot into the floor.

Santos, stunned, freaked out, patted his chest, looking for bullet holes. He found none. Although nearly deafened, he heard a crash in the bedroom and trotted to the door, found it locked, hit it with his shoulder, then tried to kick it in, felt weighted resistance.

The blonde had blocked the door with something heavy, and Santos had to get out. He didn’t know how many shots he and Beauchamps had fired at each other, but it was a lot—the house stank of burnt gunpowder—and Beauchamps had not been using a suppressor.