Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(76)

Or so they thought.

In actuality, Rinker knew exactly what was happening. She’d sent a burner phone to the target, saying that she didn’t want to give him her real number in advance because she was afraid he could track it. She would call him on the burner.

A friend of hers, an Army ordnance sergeant, had put a pea-sized wad of C4 inside the phone, triggered by pressing a cell phone button. Lucas and the feds, eager to listen to the call, had gathered around the mafioso as the call came in, with FBI technical people waiting to trace it. Instead, Rinker had triggered the tiny bomb. The mafioso’s head had been mostly blown off and his brains hit Lucas square in the face.

Lucas had freaked. “Get it off me, get it off me . . .”


HE REMEMBERED that moment as he looked at Tremanty, still covered in the woman’s blood, from a bullet meant for the FBI man.

Lucas said to Rae, “We might be able to track them. Get Sandro back to his hotel. We can talk to you on a phone and you can catch us with a cab or a cop car. I think our boy needs to chill for a while.”

“I’m okay,” Tremanty said, but the glazed looked never left his eyes.

“No, you’re not,” Lucas said. “I’ve been where you’re at and it’ll take time to get straight. So go get straight. Run in place, do some pushups, take a shower.”

To Rae he said, “Take him. Get a cop car back to the hotel. Bob and I are going. Catch us when you can.”

She nodded, and to Tremanty said, “Come on, Ess-Tee. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

Tremanty yawned—the result of shock—then said, “My clothes . . . my bag . . . still in the car.”

“Damnit,” Lucas said. He looked at his watch. “C’mon, we’re three minutes from the hotel. We’ll take you.”


BOB WAS WAITING at the truck, and as they left the parking structure he hit the lights and siren. “They’ve tracked them both south on Las Vegas Boulevard, down to the end of the Strip, now they’re looking for them farther south,” he said, talking a mile a minute. “The problem is, the cameras are mostly along the busier intersections. If they turn off into a residential area, we’ll lose them.”

“So we work the street, like we planned,” Lucas said. “With all those people shot at the mall, we’ll get all the help we need.”

Bob’s phone dinged and he answered, listened for a moment, said, “Keep me up,” hung up, and said to Lucas, “Still on the boulevard, but farther south. Down toward the house where Beauchamps got killed.”

“Of course,” Lucas said. “The backup safe house. It was bound to be close.”

Tremanty asked, “This isn’t live, is it? You’re not actually seeing live video?”

“No, it’s all recorded,” Bob said. “We’re a half hour late.”


THEY DROPPED Tremanty and Rae at the Bellagio, and as Rae led Tremanty away Bob said, “He looks pretty shaky.”

“I could tell you about that,” Lucas said.

Bob’s phone dinged. He answered, listened, and hung up.

“Gotta get more south. They were headed right for the Beauchamps site. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Sun’s below the horizon,” Lucas said. “Gonna start getting dark. Damn, I wish we had another hour of light.”

“It is what it is,” Bob said.

They were rolling fast down the boulevard, siren squawking at the red lights, trying to catch up with a couple of Vegas cop cars that were leading that way. Bob’s phone dinged again. He listened, hung up, and said, “They got them at Sunset, still heading south. But there’s no camera at Warm Springs, so if they turned there—”

“Bet they did,” Lucas said. “We’re gonnna need a map, and maybe twenty or thirty cops knocking on doors.”

The phone yet again. Bob listened, hung up, said, “You would have lost your bet. They went on south past Warm Springs, because they picked them up at Blue Diamond, where there isa camera. They turned east there. We won’t see them again, we’re outta cameras, unless there are some in storefronts. We need a map of the residential areas east of Blue Diamond.”

Lucas got Rae’s iPad from the back, called up a map, studied it for a moment. “Maybe . . . two square miles of houses. That’s where they’ll be, if they didn’t see the cameras and are trying to dodge them. Let’s find out how many cops we can get in there. If we can get enough cops, we’ll spot them tonight.”

“Assuming they hang around,” Bob said.

“Yeah. That,” Lucas said.


BOB TOOK another call and was told Las Vegas Metro cops were moving into the area, rendezvousing at a CVS pharmacy on what turned out to be Windmill Lane, if you were going east, Blue Diamond if you went west. When they got there, nine Metro cop cars were already in the parking lot, with more coming in behind. They parked and found an improvised command post run out of a van by an assistant sheriff named Deborah Case.

Lucas introduced himself and Bob to Case, told her they’d been at the mall, and she asked, “You have anything for us?”

Lucas shook his head. “Nope. Looks like you’re doing what we’d be doing. Give us a few blocks to cover, we both have experience doing that.”

“You have a vest?”