Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(71)

Rae and Bob both had their guns out, but there was a virtual wall of humanity on the far side of Deese, as he, running, turned to his left. He would be running past Tremanty and Lucas and they both drew their weapons and moved to block him, but Deese saw Tremanty and snapped off a shot and Tremanty and Lucas both juked, and Deese deliberately shot the woman right in front of Tremanty, her blood spraying from the side of her head onto Tremanty’s face.

Lucas still couldn’t take a shot without a crowd in the background, and the mall had erupted into chaos by then, with shoppers and children running in all directions, screaming. The Vegas cops were thirty yards away in the wrong direction, so they couldn’t stop Deese. A short man ran directly into Lucas’s chest, sending Lucas staggering backwards, trying to keep his balance, as Deese went by fifteen feet away, past a Johnny Rockets. Then Deese saw Santos and he shot at him, missing. Santos reeled away, and Deese closed in on him, shot him in the back, then kept going.

Lucas ran after Deese after he shot Santos, but a woman toppled in front of Lucas and he tripped and went down. He scrambled back to his feet and saw Tremanty, with his hand pressed to the shot woman’s face, looking wildly at him. Lucas ran after Deese again. He collided with another man, bounced off.

He could still see Deese, who turned and fired a shot at Lucas. There was another man closer to Deese who pulled a gun from his pocket and shot at Deese, who stumbled but continued on, and, looking over his shoulder, saw Lucas coming after him. The shooter looked at Lucas, who shouted, “No!” but the man shot at him, and somebody screamed behind Lucas, and he shouted, “Police! Police!”

The man held his gun upright, and then Bob was there, in his vest that said “U.S. Marshal,” and he slapped the man in the face with his own weapon and the man went down. Rae sprinted past Lucas to where they’d last seen Deese, disappearing down a hallway to the left, and when they got there . . . Deese was gone.

“Where? Where’d he go?” Rae shouted.

They looked down the empty hallway, which ended with an exit door leading to the parking structure. They ran that way, past a short utility hallway to the left, and outside to the structure.

Where nothing was moving.

“Hiding between cars?” Rae said.

“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “He scouted the place, he had lookouts. He’d know he couldn’t get a car out of there.”

They both looked back inside at the utility hallway and jogged to it. There were several doors down the hall, all of them metal, all of them locked. Lucas turned and saw a security guard in the main hall, where the shooting had taken place.

“U.S. Marshal,” Lucas shouted. “Key! Need a key!”

The security guard ran toward them. One of the doors opened into an equipment closet, the second led to a storage area, the third to a loading dock with a dumpster. Lucas and Rae checked behind the dumpster and then inside it.

“He’s gone,” Lucas said to Rae. He looked back out into the main corridor. “But we’ve got shot people and we’ve gotta help if we can.”

Lucas asked the security guards to watch the doors in the utility and the exit from the parking structure, and then he and Rae ran back to the corridor. Lucas checked Santos: two FedEx boxes were lying next to the green shopping bag he’d been carrying, and Lucas could see two more inside. Santos, on his stomach, his head turned, looked glassy-eyed up at Lucas and said, “Shot.”

“Got help on the way,” Lucas said. “Let me roll you over.”

Santos had been shot on the left side of his spine, from the back, and the front exit wound was pumping blood. Lucas couldn’t see an artery, but he’d seen an arterial wound once before and thought this might be one.

Lucas said, “This is gonna hurt,” and he pulled Santos’s shirt loose and pressed it into the wound as far as he could, packing the cotton in to nearly the full depth of his index finger. Santos groaned, again said, “Shot.”

Lucas shouted, “Get me some help. Get me some help over here.”

A moment later, a woman hurried up, said, “Nurse,” and looked at the wound, then said, in what seemed to be an unnaturally calm voice, “You did what you could. I don’t think there’s anything else to do here until we have paramedics.”

“Stay with him, would you?” Lucas asked, and the nurse nodded.


SANTOS SEEMED to have passed out. Lucas picked up the green shopping bag, put the two FedEx boxes in with the other two, looked around, turned away from the nurse, pulled his own shirt loose, wrapped a finger in the fabric so he wouldn’t leave prints, and ripped one of the boxes open.

Money. Lots of it.

The nurse was holding Santos’s hand, and Lucas stepped over to Bob, who’d cuffed the man who’d shot at Deese and then Lucas. The man was bubbling blood from his nose. Bob had propped him up against the wall, and the man kept saying, “Active shooter . . . active shooter . . .” Bob said, “Yeah, but you shot the wrong guy.”

To Lucas Bob said, “This guy shot that guy when he tried to shoot you.” Bob pointed across hall. “I thought he might have been backing up Santos, so I swatted him.”

Lucas turned to see a man leaning against the wall with two women working on him in a professional way, maybe doctors or nurses. Down the length of the mall, most of the people had cleared out, but small groups had gathered around the three other people lying on the floor in puddles of blood. One of the cops who’d come with Harvey was crouched over the first woman Deese had shot, Tremanty was still applying pressure to the facial wound of the woman who’d been standing next to him, his face, hands, and shirt splattered with purple blood.