Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(77)

“Yes.”

“All right.” She pointed at another cop. “That’s Lenny. Lenny’ll tell you where to go.”

Lenny had a large-scale map that he’d broken down into quadrants and then smaller squares. He assigned Lucas and Bob to a square on the edge of a densely packed subdivision.

“We’re looking for a white Ford F-150 SuperCab—that’s the model with the smaller doors in back, the back-hinged kind. And we’re looking for a silver or maybe champagne Cadillac Escalade,” Lenny said. “Both have mud on the plates, and there aren’t a hell of a lot of mud puddles around here at this time of year so if you see muddy plates, that’s them. Both plates are white, we think California and Louisiana. Nevada plates are light blue with a yellow or orangish scene at the top or bottom.”

“We’re thinking a couple doors per block,” Lucas said.

“We’re saying two doors per side of each block. There are a lot of houses per block out here, and you get some of those curved streets and you can’t see very far along them. Use your best judgment,” Lenny said. “We’re telling people to look for houses with vehicles parked outside that have Nevada plates and aren’t the target vehicles. You wouldn’t want to knock on the door and have the fuckin’ cannibal open it on you.”

“We’d probably try to avoid that,” Bob agreed.

“I don’t have any extra radio chest packs for you guys. I do have a handset you can use,” Lenny said.

Bob took eight seconds to figure out the handset, and he and Lucas headed for their square. Rae called a few minutes later and said, “Where are you? I want to get in on this.”

“How’s Sandro?” Lucas asked.

“He wants to come, too. He’s shaking it off, I think, now that he’s got the blood out of his eyes and mouth.”

Lucas told her about the rendezvous site at the CVS. “You guys might as well get your own assignment. But stay in touch.”

Lucas and Bob had drawn a roughly rectangular area. On Rae’s iPad, Lucas counted a hundred and twenty-four houses arranged in fourteen adjoining blocks of differing sizes. He and Bob conferred over the iPad, agreed that they should probably try to hit about forty houses to be sure of covering the area.

They parked the Tahoe and locked it and started walking through the warm, lingering twilight. Lucas had never been in a subdivision quite like it: the houses were large but only a few feet apart. Some had no lawn at all, nothing but a concrete slab right up to the front doors. Others had postage-stamp lawns, gravel, and a few desert shrubs. One startling lawn, hard green under the streetlight, turned out to have plastic grass. All the houses had three-car garages, usually a double-door and a single-. Most were white, though the neighborhood was sprinkled with pastels, green, beige, tan. The streets were empty.

Bob worked one side, Lucas the other, looking at the houses with their lights on. Only a few had both the lights on and vehicles outside, and they chose those. The people inside were cautious. One man shouted at Lucas, after Lucas rang the doorbell, “I’m calling the police!” Another yelled, “We don’t want any!”

They’d been knocking on doors for an hour, into darkness, when Bob got a call on the handset. “This is Lenny. Marshal?”

“Yeah, this is Bob Matees.”

“We got them. We’re sure. We’re setting up the SWAT to go in. There are lights on in the house but no visible vehicles. But, then, there wouldn’t be, huh? Anyway, we’re informing you. If you want to come back to the CVS, we’ll lead you down to the house and you can watch it go down . . . If you want . . . I understand you got shot the last time you did this.”

“That was the other guy,” Bob said. “See you in five minutes.” He whistled for Lucas, then shouted: “They got ’em!”

They ran back to the truck and took off.


AT THE CVS, Rae jogged over, trailed by Tremanty. He was wearing a fresh short-sleeved shirt, no bloodstains. “It’s them,” Rae said. “A neighbor said they were driving a silver Escalade and a white pickup, that they’d only been there a couple of months—two guys, no blonde—but picked Deese out of a photo display as the driver of the truck.”

“How far from here?” Lucas asked.

“Not a mile. East down Windmill, then over a block. The neighbor said the house was an Airbnb, renters coming and going every week before these two guys showed up. It’s them.”

“When’s the SWAT going in?”

“They were ready, they’re closing in right now. We’re welcome to go down that way, but they want us a few hundred yards out . . . They’ll be doing it in fifteen minutes or so. Not a lot to think about.”

“I thought we’d be doing this,” Lucas said.

Tremanty nodded. “So did I. But I don’t care as long as I get Deese.”


CASE, the assistant sheriff, had set up two rings of pursuit cars around the target house. One ring one block out, the other ring three. If by some weird chance Deese and the others broke past the SWAT squad, the net would collapse on them.

Lucas, Bob, Rae, and Tremanty, all in the Tahoe, moved up to the first ring and parked. Bob asked Tremanty, “How’s the head?”

“Okay. I stood in a shower for ten minutes with cold water in my face. I won’t forget it, but I’m not stumbling around like a clown anymore,” Tremanty said. To Lucas: “What’d you mean when you told me you’d been there?”