Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(63)

“Let’s tag along and see where they go . . . Maybe this is a high-crime neighborhood,” Lucas said. But it didn’t look high-crime. It looked empty, with hot stretches of tan stucco houses with tile roofs, separated by steaming blacktop, nobody on the street.

The cop who’d been behind them went by, while the cop ahead of them turned a corner. From that corner, they spotted a jam of cop cars outside a single-story house with an open garage door, cops going in and out. Another cop waved them off the turn down to the house. Lucas dropped his window and held his badge out. The cop came over, and Lucas said, “We’re U.S. Marshals tracking fugitives. We think they live around here. We need to take a look in case you guys found them.”

The cop looked at the badge, then turned and pointed down the street and said, “You see that green car down there?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s Lieutenant Harvey. He’s running the scene. Park there and check in with him.”

“How many dead?” Rae called from the Tahoe.

“One, is what I’ve heard,” the cop said. “I haven’t been down there myself.”


THEY DROVE a block down to the scene, to the green car, and parked. On the street, they looked through the driver’s-side window of the green car. The window dropped two inches, and a plainclothes guy in the driver’s seat put a sandwich aside and asked, “Yeah?” chicken salad on his breath.

Lucas showed him his badge and repeated what he’d told the cop at the corner. The guy said, “Tom’s inside. Lieutenant Harvey. Don’t step on anything.”

Lucas nodded, and as he started away, the guy said through the crack in the window, “Nice shorts, Marshal,” and the window went back up. Rae stuck her knuckles in her mouth to keep from laughing, and Lucas looked down at his knees and said, “Best legs in Vegas, outside a gentleman’s club. So fuck him. And all his relatives.”

Another cop stood inside the door, in the shade, and when Lucas badged him he held up a finger and called, “Lieutenant. The feds are here.”

Harvey, a short, fat man with a drinker’s red nose and ratty white hair, walked over a minute later, frowned at Lucas, and asked, “Why are the feds here? Who are you?”

Lucas explained a third time, and Harvey stepped back and crooked a finger. Lucas, Bob, and Rae followed him through the door to where Beauchamps lay faceup on the kitchen floor, his chest dimpled with bullet holes in the middle of a blood-soaked shirt.

“Goddamnit,” Lucas said.

“You know him?” Harvey asked. “Who is he?”

“Marion Beauchamps. He’s got a couple other aliases. He used to run a home invasion gang down in LA. He’s the brother of the Louisiana cannibal, and we think the cannibal—Clayton Deese—was with him,” Lucas said. “There’s a guy who arrived in town a a couple of hours ago, from New Orleans, named Richard, or Ricardo, Santos. You really want to talk to him: this is probably his work. He’s got a car we don’t know about. He could be checked into Caesars. You can get a full bio on Beauchamps from Luanne Rocha, who’s a sergeant in the Robbery Special Section of the LA cops. I’ve got her number for you.”

Harvey wrote down Rocha’s information. Another plainclothes guy, this one in a baby blue golf shirt over lightweight chinos, had come up to listen in and now said, “Shit, Tom, you already cleared the case. There’s nothing left to do. Go down to Caesars and grab the guy.”

Rae: “Let me tell you something. If you start running this thing down and you stumble over Deese, you can’t go in with a sissy baby blue golf shirt. Deese killed a lot of people and ate some of them. He’s got nothing to lose by shooting a few cops in baby blue shirts.”

“I’ll pass the word,” Harvey said. “When I first looked at this boy, I had the feeling it’d get ugly.” He nodded at the body on the floor and the puddle of now purple blood that had seeped out from beneath it.

Bob said, “Lucas here”—he tipped his thumb at Lucas—“was shot by this bunch back in May. Pretty much in the heart. Luckily, he doesn’t have a heart. The thing you need to ask him about is the second house.”

Lucas told Harvey about the double house arrangement in LA and the gunfight that followed.

“You think they got another house around here? And they shot you?”

“A second house wouldn’t surprise us, and it’s probably close by,” Rae said. “These guys are assholes, but not dumb assholes. And they did shoot Lucas. He used to be a lot taller and better-looking.”

Harvey shook his head. “All right. You know anything about a blond woman?”

“They may have a woman with them. Three guys and a woman. Now two guys. We don’t know her exact status,” Lucas said. “Beauchamps liked to chase women, but he didn’t want to have to chase them too hard. Some of the women were okay, but some might have been more than available. They’ve got the blonde’s prints down in LA . . .”

Lucas told him the rest of it—about Deese, Smith, and Santos, about Deese’s brother Beauchamps, and Cole and the home invasions.

“I gotta make some phone calls,” Harvey said, heading for the door. “A lotta phone calls.” To the cop in the baby blue shirt he said, over his shoulder, “You got it, don’t fuck it up. And change that shirt. You look like a target.”