Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(68)

LARRY BUCK answered, and Cox asked, “Is this the guy in New Orleans that the other guy called from Las Vegas?”

“Who is this?”

“This is the blonde who is with the other guy in Vegas.”

“One minute.”

Larry Buck covered his phone’s microphone, and Cox couldn’t hear what was being said. Then another voice: “This is the person the man in Las Vegas called.”

Cox asked, “Did you really send money?”

“Yes.”

“How bad do you want it back?” she asked.

“Depends on where else it might go,” Smith said.

“What if the man in Las Vegas fell down the stairs and broke his neck?”

“I could see that happening,” Smith said. “He’s a careless walker. Where is he now?”

“He’s out getting beer.”

“Well, if something happened to him . . . I wouldn’t get the money back anyway. So I wouldn’t care who got it.”

“If he somehow broke his neck . . . then this other guy who you sent here . . . why wouldn’t he keep it?” Cox asked.

“Because I’d tell him to give it to you, no questions asked.”

“Okay. We’ll think about this. Tell your friend to stay here in Vegas. I’ll need his phone number. If something happens to Dee—To, you know . . . We’ll set up the payment. But I’m telling you, he has told us all about you. One person will make the pickup, probably me. If anything happens to me, that other guy will come to New Orleans and kill you. Since you don’t know who we are, you’d never see it coming. We’ve done a lot of work in LA, and you probably know about that. We’re not afraid of hurting people.”

“Neither am I.”

“We totally believe that,” Cox said. “We’re scared of you. But you should be scared of us. The money smooths it all out. If the other guy—the guy you’re worried about—goes away, you should be happy with that.”

“Let me get you the phone number for the delivery.”

Cox wrote the number on the inside of her arm.

“Call me and tell me what happened,” Smith said. “It’s sort of like a soap opera, and I like soaps.”

“Yeah? We were just watching The Bold and the Beautiful,” Cox said.

“I caught that myself. We were probably watching at the same time,” Smith said. And, “Good-bye.”

When Cox hung up, Cole looked at her, chewing his lower lip, and when she asked, “What?” he said, “You know you’re talking about murder.”

“Not necessarily.”

“That’s what the New Orleans guy thought you meant,” Cole said.

“That’s his problem,” Cox said.

“What are you thinking?”

“This lawyer I was friends with once told me that when a guy gets shot, it’s not necessarily murder. If a cop shoots him while he’s doing a crime, that’s not murder. If the guy shoots himself in the head, that’s not murder. Murder’s, like, a legal thing. Whether or not it’s murder depends on who’s doing the shooting.”

“So . . . who’d do the shooting?”

“Not us. Remember how Deese keeps saying the cops won’t take him alive? I believe him.”


DEESE GOT BACK an hour later, carrying two twelve-packs of Coors and a couple of sacks of blue corn chips.

Cox asked, “Where in the heck were you? We were getting worried, we almost took off. And two twelve-packs?”

“No sweat,” Deese said. “Rog called me. He wanted me to meet Santos at Circus Circus to give me the money. I said, ‘Fuck that, I’m not meeting that asshole anywhere hewants to meet me.’ So I went to find a place, and I did. And the two twelve-packs are so we don’t have to stop if we need to get out of town.”

“Where’s the meeting?” Cole asked.

Deese squinted at him, and Cole said, “Come on, Deese, we already agreed. Santos might be set up to shoot you in the back. We’ll watch out for you.”

Deese popped a can of beer out of a twelve-pack, put the rest in the refrigerator, looking from Cox to Cole, then said, “All right. The Show Boat mall. Hundreds of people wandering around. He won’t take a chance of shooting me in there. We’ll tell him what time, we’ll meet in a Chipotle’s, won’t wait any more than five minutes, he can come in any entrance he wants, so he’ll know we won’t ambush him.”

Cole nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

“I gotta call Rog and tell him,” Deese said. He went back to the bedroom to make the call. As they had before, Cox and Cole slipped down the hall and listened outside the bedroom door.

They heard Deese say, “. . . called Show Boat, it’s a big mall. Seven o’clock, I’ll be at a table inside a Chipotle’s. It’s on the ground floor . . . Nobody’s gonna want to shoot nobody else in that place, they’d never get out with all the people around, the security guards with guns. Okay, well, you tell him . . . And tell him I got a gun, too.”


COX AND COLE slipped back down the hall when they heard the conversation winding up, with threats from Deese’s end, and probably from Smith’s as well.

Deese came out of the bedroom a minute later and said, “We’re all set. Seven o’clock. We’ll all go in early and scout the place.”