Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(75)

If he didn’t vanish, he was a dead man.

And he was haunted by one question. That bag that Santos had . . . A red bag? A green bag? . . . Was there money in it? Could he have slowed down enough to grab it? Where did the cops come from? Had one of the security guards spotted him? And that guy with the gun—that was that marshal, Davenport, who’d been shot in Altadena.

Where had their tip come from?

That fuckin’ Smith; that was the only answer he had. Santos told Smith about the meeting location and Smith called the cops, hoping he’d be killed. Maybe hoping both of them would be killed.


COX AND COLE were immediately swept up in a panicked crowd, running down the mall. Maybe one or two of the shoppers had seen Cole screaming at Deese, but they were left behind in seconds. Down the main hall of the mall, down escalators, into the parking structure to the Cadillac, the screaming fading behind them.

They didn’t know what had happened to Deese. Cole had lingered a second or two after he’d screamed the warning and he’d seen Deese come out of the Chipotle’s and fire his gun. He hadn’t seen if anyone had been hit.

They were afraid to call him in case the cops had his phone.

“Do you think he’s dead? That one marshal was pushing right through the crowd. He wasn’t but fifteen feet away from Deese,” Cox said. She’d been watching from the end of the atrium railing, thirty feet from Cole.

“I don’t know what happened, everything went crazy and I ran,” Cole said. “There was a lot of shooting.”

“Maybe it’s on the radio.”

They found a couple of local stations, but there was nothing but soft rock. Cox kept twiddling the dials. “It’ll be on TV,” Cole said.

“Sure. But should we go back to the house? If Deese isn’t dead, if he got out somehow, they might be following.”

Cox stumbled over a talk show in which the right-wing host was saying, “God help us, we’ve gotten word of a mass shooting, an active shooter, at the Show Boat mall. We don’t have details yet, but apparently there are several dead and wounded, and the shooter is still at large. Police and ambulances are there, and more are on the way. If you are listening to this in your car, don’t go to the Show Boat mall.”

“Ah, Christ, now we arefucked,” Cole said. “We’re in it for murder now. Both of us.”

“Maybe not, maybe not. Maybe if we get far enough away . . .”

“We gotta pack up and go,” Cole said. “We’ll clean the house out and head for the highway. We can be in Nebraska by noon tomorrow. People won’t be able to see the car so well after dark . . . How much gas we got now?”

Cox thought running was the best idea, right up until they pulled back into the rented house’s driveway, activated the door to the garage, and found Deese’s truck inside.

“Holy shit,” Cole said. “He got out.”


DEESE WASN’T HURT. And nobody had been killed at the mall. Five people had been wounded, but nobody had yet died. Deese was standing in front of the television, which was tuned to a channel showing a helicopter hovering to the west of the mall, cameras aiming down at the squadrons of cop cars.

“They got pictures of all three of us,” Deese said.

“What?”

“Watch for a minute, they’ll show them again. They’ll go from the helicopter, to the anchor lady, to the video cameras. Then they’ll talk about who’s to blame. I mean, which cops are to blame for this whole fuckup.”

One minute later, the station cut from the helicopter feed to the anchorwoman, who introduced the video from the mall. Cox, Deese, and Cole had worn hats and sunglasses, so the videos weren’t great. The most recognizable shot was of Cox, who’d looked up at a camera as they’d run down the hall. “I didn’t mean to look up. I wasn’t looking for a camera.”

Cole said, “We need to cut your hair and get you in a dress. Everybody will be taking a look at a blonde with long hair. We need to punk you out. After we cut it, we’ll go red. We can buy some hair stuff on the way out of town, dye your hair at a motel.”

“We got Harrelson,” Deese said. “He’s still got that money.”

Cox: “What? We’re not doing that. Are you crazy?”

“Why not? The cops don’t know where we’re at. We hit him tonight, an hour from now, get the money, and take off,” Deese said. “The time between that and taking off is only about an hour, in the middle of the night. We could pack up and not need to even come back here.”

They thought about it for a minute, then Cole said to Cox, “We need the cash. That hasn’t changed. We’re still in the game.”





CHAPTER


NINETEEN


Bob called Lucas from the mall’s video monitoring station. “Get the guys out to the car. The lookouts and Deese came in separate cars and we’ve spotted both of them. Vegas has stoplight cameras. We ought to be able to track them for a while. We might not get right on top of them, but the Vegas operations guys could get us close.”

“I’ll get them down there,” Lucas said. “See you at the car.”

Rae was still working with Tremanty, who now seemed dazed.

Lucas had once been tracking an assassin named Clara Rinker and, with the cooperation of the FBI, had managed to con her into making a call to an organized crime figure who had betrayed her.