Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(74)

All he needed was a five-second head start.

He walked out to his truck, drove around to the loading dock, and parked as close as he could—thirty yards away—in an employee parking area. He’d smeared some mud on the plates before he left the house and had suggested that Cox and Cole do the same with the Cadillac.

He called them now.

“I’ve been thinking—”

“Somebody should,” Cox said.

“Shut up. I’ve been thinking it’s possible that Santos is a shooter and he’ll try to kill me. If he’s going to do that, he won’t show up at the Chipotle’s. He’ll try to spot me when I’m walking up to the place and take me out with a quick shot and get away in the crowd. That’s one possibility. But if they’re really going to try to pull something, I think it’ll be a contract job, maybe with a guy right here in Vegas. You gotta watch for Santos and see if he’s with somebody else, talking to somebody. If he comes alone, then they’re probably going to pay. But if it looks like somebody’s scouting me . . .”


BEFORE DEESE had left for the mall, Cox had confessed that she’d grabbed a bag of cocaine from Beauchamps’s dresser drawer just before bolting from the house. She and Deese had done a couple of lines—Cole didn’t use drugs—and Deese had taken the remainder after they’d snorted up those first cuts.

Now, outside the mall, in the parking lot, he did another line in the truck, then sat back, letting it light up his brain as he watched the cars come and go. A security car turned around the corner of the building a hundred yards away, and he sank down slowly in the seat until he was below the window. The car continued by without slowing.

And he waited.

The coke worked on him like a tape recorder stuck on repeat, playing the same scene again and again. Santos and he would meet at the restaurant, he’d take the money. He’d tell Santos to go right and he’d go left, down the hallway and out to the car. Again: he’d meet Santos, he’d take the money, he’d tell Santos to go right and he’d go left . . .

He ran it over and over.

And then the darker stuff: the looming cop, and he’d pull his gun and shoot his way free, shoot anything moving, causing a riot, his only way out if the cops showed.

He checked his watch: 6:45.

He unrolled the baggie, used a long thumbnail to cut some lines on the face of his cell phone. Had the iPhone designers been coke freaks? Hell of a coincidence, if they hadn’t, because it was the absolutely perfect cocaine slab.

He snorted up two lines, waited for them to hit, snorted up two more, rolled up the small bit of powder that remained, pushed it into his back pocket, got out of the truck, checked his weapon, pulled his shirt over it, and walked into the mall.

Into what would become a shooting gallery.


COX CALLED. “We’re right up above the Chipotle’s. We don’t see anybody who looks like anything. Bunch of fat tourists in shorts.”

Deese looked at his phone as he walked up to the Apple Store: one minute to seven. He could see the Chipotle sign ahead. Nobody in the crowd to worry him, not so far. No sign of Santos.

He took a seat at the front of the restaurant, next to a group of college assholes. Customers were walking by with fine-smelling black beans and rice. His mouth started to water and he looked toward the kitchen, but there wasn’t enough time. No time, in fact.

He crossed his hands and his feet. And then, suddenly there was Cole.

“Deese! Deese! Cops!”

Deese uncrossed his feet and was standing up and pulling out his gun, which got hung it up on his shirttail for an instant, but no more than that, when he saw a big guy coming toward him, his eyes locked on Deese’s, with tabs on his shoulders, the kind of tabs you see on a bulletproof vest, and he saw a woman starting to cross in front of them. Deese shot at the cop but hit the woman instead and she went down. Then he was running and shooting, and panic erupted in the crowd, and just as he was breaking away from the crowd he saw Santos, with his green bag, and shot at him, the motherfucker, but missed, and Santos lurched away, maybe looking for a place to hide, and Deese shot him in the back. And then Deese thought, Wait, is that the money in the bag?

He turned to look behind and saw there was a guy coming at him with a gun. Deese ran, and somebody shot at him, and his foot twisted violently sideways, but the injury wasn’t crippling, and he was now at the hallway, then down it and through the door. He locked the door, ran behind the dumpster, then down the outside wall of the mall. Ten seconds later, he was in his truck and firing that mother up.

His foot . . . His foot didn’t feel like anything. As he drove toward an exit to the street, he reached down between his legs and ran his hand up his wounded ankle: no blood.

He turned onto the street, kicked off his left shoe, ran his hand over his ankle. Nothing. He picked up his shoe and looked at it and found a wide groove in the heel. He laughed. Some motherfucker had shot the heel of his shoe but not him.

He was halfway home before his ankle began to throb and suddenly the fear climbed on him. He turned down a side street, then another smaller one, into a residential area, pulled to the curb, got out of his truck, and puked his guts out. He’d killed a lot of people, he guessed, and he didn’t mind that so much, but he might have been killed himself.

He got back in the house, the taste of vomit in his mouth, the sweat streaming down his face. He could smell his own fear in the sweat, a corrupt odor, like a rat rotting after it died under the stove.