Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(72)

Lucas asked Bob, “Did you fire your weapon?”

“No, no. I never could. Too many people behind him.”

Rae had come up next to Lucas. “Neither did I. I never had a clean shot. I’m going to jog around the mall, see what I can see. Check that parking structure, even if he isn’t there. Maybe I’ll kick him out.” She ran off toward the hallway to the structure.

Lucas called, “Careful, Rae. Careful,” and she waved without looking back at him. Lucas looked around, didn’t see anybody who looked like a paramedic, and said, “Somebody must’ve called for help by now.”

Bob said, “Oh, yeah. I called 911 and they told me everybody was already on the way. They’re coming . . . And I . . . My God! My God!” He walked away, one hand on the top of his head.


HARVEY SAW LUCAS and ran over and shouted, “Jesus Christ, what did you do?”

“None of us ever fired a shot,” Lucas said. He looked up to the mall’s second level. “Deese had a lookout up there. He saw you guys coming, he yelled, and Deese started shooting. At anybody he saw. He must’ve planned that escape route.”

“Ambulances on the way,” Harvey said. He ran a hand through his thinning white hair as he scanned the chaotic scene. People were coming back again, peering at the wounded. “What a mess. What a fuckin’ mess.”

Lucas started stepping between bodies: a man shot in the chest, almost the same place that Lucas had been hit; a woman was shot in the upper leg, the bullet apparently breaking the bone. She was the first one Deese shot, Lucas thought. Nobody dead yet. The woman Tremanty was hovering over had been shot in the cheek, the bullet exiting behind the bone and passing through her ear.

Bob came over and said, “The man who shot at you, I left him with a security guard. He’s some concealed carry guy, thought this was his big chance.” He looked around. “How many dead?”

“None yet.” Lucas looked at his phone. Seven minutes after seven o’clock. “It’s been seven minutes from when the shooting started.”

“Seems like a week,” Bob said. “This is fucked up. Where are the ambulances?”

“We gotta go up, see if anybody saw the guy who yelled,” Lucas said.

“Gotta ask about cameras is what we need to do,” Bob said.

“You do that. I’m going up.”


LUCAS TOOK an escalator to the second level, where people were peering over a railing at the floor below. He called, as loud as he could, “U.S. Marshal! Did anyone see a man shouting about cops? A man shouting about cops? Anyone see . . .”

He had no faith in the possibility of finding a witness, but he unexpectedly did. A woman in a red dress, pushing a baby carriage, which turned out to be full of magazines, raised a hand and called out, “I saw him.”

Lucas went to her. “Tell me.”

She pointed at the atrium’s railing. “He was leaning over it, like he was waiting for somebody. I was sitting right over there.” She pointed to some seating. “I noticed him because, you know, he was nice-looking. Brown hair. Thin. Like an athlete. Anyway, he was standing there for several minutes. Like he was watching. A blond woman walked up to him and said something and walked away again. Then—I wasn’t exactly looking at him—someone yelled, really loudly, ‘Please! Please! Cops!’ I looked up and saw it was him. And then I heard the shots and stood up and started to run. I saw him in front of me, hurrying down the hallway, and the blond woman came up behind him and grabbed his hand and went with him . . . out of sight. I hid in that store over there. And when the shooting was done, I ran here to look over the railing with some other people.”

Lucas got on his phone, called Harvey, said, “I’m right at the top of the escalator, I’ve got a witness who saw the guy who yelled at Deese. You need to send one of your people up here to take a statement.”

“On the way,” Harvey said. Lucas peered over the railing to the first floor and now saw paramedics beginning to move the wounded.

He asked the woman to wait, then called Bob. “Have you found a camera?”

“Yeah. We can see the Chipotle’s, the area above the shooting . . .”

Lucas told him what to look for on the second floor, and Bob went away from the phone for a minute and then came back and said, “Yeah, we see him. We’ll run it back and see if we can spot the blonde. We might be able to follow them down to the parking structure.”


WHEN HARVEY’S COP arrived, Lucas turned the witness over to him, then went back down the escalator. Mall security guards had roped off the area of the shooting, and Rae, who’d come back after looking for Deese, said, “I didn’t find him. People are streaming out of the place, it’s a traffic jam out there. They’re closing the mall.”

“No hope?” Lucas asked.

“Nope. He’s not hiding, he’s gone.”

He told her about the man and woman upstairs, and she said, “It’s Cole and the woman who was in Altadena, the same one who was with Beauchamps.”

Lucas nodded. “Probably.”

“But then they must be the ones who tipped us off. If they are, why did they warn Deese?”

“You want the snaky reason?” Lucas asked. “Because they wanted us to kill him. They were working with Roger Smith and they wanted us to kill him.”