Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(90)

Lucas had lost track of time, but thought they must have been running for five or six minutes, when they saw a light ahead. They ran on for another minute, to the end of the tunnel, where seven-foot-tall grates blocked it top to bottom. One side of the grate had been pried open far enough for a man to squeeze through.

A body lay by the grate, a man’s, with a bullet hole in the head. And beside the body, the green motorcycle and the money bag, empty except for the GPS tracker. The bike had no license plate.

The agent, who looked like a teenager, said, “Murdered somebody,” and then he gagged from the smell of the tunnel. And maybe the sight of the body.

Lucas said, “Nothing we can do now. We gotta go up.”

They went up and found themselves standing under an enormous ultra-modern Ferris wheel. To the left, they saw a parking garage for the LINQ, a casino.

The agent said, “Jesus, we’re right on the Strip.”

Lucas lifted the handset and called Tremanty. “You there?”

“Lucas? Where the hell are you?”

“We’re at the exit of the drainage tunnel, right behind the LINQ, under that Ferris wheel—that white Ferris wheel. We’ve got a body, a motorcycle without a license plate, an empty money bag, and a GPS tracker.”

“Be there in two or three.”


TREMANTY ARRIVED in two, or three, with a squadron of other FBI cars. He walked up to Lucas and said, “We’re screwed.”

“Gloria Harrelson’s screwed, when they take a close look at that money,” Lucas said. “The guy in the airplane didn’t see anything?”

“No. He wasn’t looking here. We were a half mile away. Any ID on the dead guy?”

“Didn’t have a chance to look.”

Lucas turned to the agent who’d run the tunnel with him. “Go down there and see if there’s a VIN on that motorcycle. I don’t know where you’d find it. But . . . Here, I’ll come with you.”

One of the other agents, a slender man who looked like anything but a biker, said, “The VIN’s usually on the steering column. Let me go down. Gimme a flashlight.”

Tremanty walked a few steps away and got on his phone. “We’re gonna need the name and address that goes with a VIN we’re about to get and we need it right now. Right now. We’ll have it in a minute.”

And a minute later the agent in the tunnel shouted, “Yamaha,” then called out the vehicle identification number. Lucas wrote it down, and Tremanty relayed it to whoever he was speaking with on the phone. He listened and a moment later said to Lucas, “Jesus, it’s a ’96.”

And after another moment said, “It goes to a Ralph Deese . . . in Beatty, Nevada.”

“Where’s that?” Lucas asked.

Tremanty shrugged and spoke into the phone: “Find out where Beatty is. See if they have a police force.”

He listened for a while longer, as Lucas paced around him, and then said, “Get me that number.”

He hung up and said, “No police force, but they’ve got a sheriff’s substation. I hope somebody’s home.”

Somebody was.

Tremanty put his phone on speaker, and Lucas and the other agents gathered around him as he spoke to a sheriff’s deputy. The deputy said, “Yeah, I’ve heard of Ralph. I think he lives up in the hills somewhere, but I don’t know where exactly. That’s what I heard anyway. I can’t guarantee that it’s right. The people here pretty much ran him out of town. Must’ve been four or five years back, before I got here.”

“Why was that?” Lucas asked. “Why’d they run him out?”

“Everybody said he was a bad man. People think he raped a girl up here, but she couldn’t ID him. And he must’ve been wearing a condom, or something, because the guy before me ran her down to the hospital and got a rape kit done that came up negative on DNA. There’s rumors around that he might have killed a guy out in the desert, an ex-partner of his. He’s supposedly a prospector, but he never came up with any gold, far as I know.”

The bottom line was that Ralph Deese no longer lived where the motorcycle put him and nobody knew where he currently was, though the deputy said he’d ask around.

Tremanty hung up and said to Lucas, “Asking around is going to be too late.”

Lucas said, “Listen. When I was talking to Roger Smith back in New Orleans, he said that the Deese brothers had an uncle out here. That’s got to be who this is. He said the uncle was a miner, that he looked for turquoise. I remember because that seemed like a weird thing, to mine. You think there’d be some kind of claim, or whatever they do out here. Something with a location and a name.”

“I dunno, but I can find out,” Tremanty said. “Give me one more minute.”





CHAPTER


TWENTY-FOUR


The gang’s day began at five in the morning with an argument: Ralph wouldn’t be going to Las Vegas because they were taking his truck and they only had room for two. Cox argued that they should take both vehicles, the truck and the Lexus, and abandon the Lexus when they released Gloria.

“That ain’t gonna work. Gloria will know about the truck, and we couldn’t outrun a fuckin’ Prius in that thing,” Deese said. “Me’n Cole are going down, that’s all we need. Right now, Gloria doesn’t know where she’s at, and we’ll keep it that way. You and Ralph wait here, watching her.”