Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(92)

“A lot of timing’s gotta be right. When we were hitting those houses, we knew exactly what we were doing,” Cole said. “We knew who was inside the house, what we’d get, where the cops were. This is a crapshoot.”

“Just take it easy when you drive out of here. A goddamn fender bender and I’m dead and you won’t get a nickel,” Deese said.


THEY DROVE BACK to the drainage channel, unloaded the bike, lifted it over a fence, and Deese rolled it down the slope to the sandy bottom and pushed it under the narrow bridge. A few street people were sitting outside the tunnel entrance, watching them, but made no move to come over to the bridge. “What are you going to do if one of the bums grabs the bag?” Cole asked.

Deese said, “Won’t happen. If it does, I’ll handle it. You better go.”

“We could still walk away,” Cole said.

“Go! Go!”

Cole went.


HE WAS IN his surveillance spot early, ten minutes before nine. Five minutes later, he saw the Yellow Cab Porsche turn into the bank’s parking lot. He saw Harrelson get out of the car—pink shirt, khakis, sunglasses, bandages on his face. He reached back into the car, got a floppy-brimmed golf hat, pulled it on. No question that it was him. Reached back into the car again and pulled out what looked like an empty green shopping bag. He walked toward the bank. Cole punched his burner, calling Deese, and said, “We’re on. He’s waiting outside the bank.”

Deese clicked off without a reply.

Cole waited for what seemed like a long time. He supposed Harrelson would have to get back into the bank vault, count out the money. Cole once had a safe-deposit box and whenever he took out the box, bank people escorted him to a private room to load or unload it. That would suck up some time.

People came and went from the bank. Fifteen minutes later, Harrelson came back out, climbed into the Porsche . . . and waited. Cole thumbed the power button on the burner, and when Deese came up he said, “He’s in the car. I’m outta here.”


THEY’D DECIDED Deese would make the call, so that Cole wouldn’t have to do it while he was driving. Cole rolled out of the parking lot, up to Sands, took a left, and headed for the Strip. By the time he got there, Harrelson should be getting close to the Hard Rock. He worked his way to the back of the LINQ parking garage; a security car was parked in one of the spaces he was planning to use, but there was nobody in it.

His phone rang, and Deese shouted, “On the way.” Cole hopped out of the car, got the two metal cash boxes from the backseat, crossed the fence, and ran down into the drainage channel to the metal grates blocking the tunnel entrance.

He yanked the grate bar to one side, stepped through, ran twenty or thirty yards down the tunnel, far enough that a GPS wouldn’t work, and opened the metal boxes; the boxes would act as a Faraday cage if there was a GPS tracker in with the cash. The concept for such a cage had come out of the research he’d done with Beauchamps and the gang in LA. They’d worked hard on that, he thought now. Beauchamps had been a smart guy, and he, Cole, was also a smart guy. How they’d ever gotten a dumbass like Deese hung around their necks . . .

Fifteen seconds later, he heard the distant motor grind of the dirt bike and saw a tiny dot of light, its headlight, getting closer.

Thirty seconds later, Deese was rolling to a stop. He tossed the money bag at Cole and said, “Dump the money, dump the money.”

Cole began transferring the money from the bag to one of the metal boxes, all they’d need. As he was transferring the last few bricks of cash, he found the GPS transmitter.

“Transmitter,” he shouted at Deese, who’d killed the bike and dumped it on its side. He turned and threw the transmitter farther down the tunnel, then looked up at Deese, who was pointing a pistol at his head.

He barely had time to flinch.


COLE THREW the transmitter down the tunnel and turned back, and Deese pulled his gun out of his belt and shot Cole in the forehead. Cole sagged over the empty metal box. The muzzle blast had been deafening in the tunnel, but Deese took a second to shoot Cole again in the head, then picked up the money. He patted Cole’s jeans pockets, found the truck keys, jogged to the end of the tunnel, squeezed through the gate, pushed the bar back in place.

He was back in the truck in thirty seconds.

He had one more stop to make; he’d be back at Ralph’s in two hours for the cleanup. Too bad about Ralph. The old fucker had to go, along with Cox and Gloria Harrelson. At that point, he’d be well into the wind, running free, with two million bucks and a high-powered Lexus.





CHAPTER


TWENTY-FIVE


The FBI SWAT team was sent home, on standby, and Bob and Rae showed up at Lucas’s hotel room, where Tremanty was working the phones, with various federal agencies, trying to find out who serviced mining claims.

Another agent was trying to work through Nevada state agencies to see if any of them tracked turquoise mining, while Lucas called a variety of raw stone dealers asking about a prospector named Deese. In the meantime, the Ney County Sheriff’s Department was interviewing people around Beatty, Nevada, in an attempt to find someone who knew where Ralph Deese had gone after being run out of town.

They got a break: the Bureau of Land Management showed Deese had a current claim southwest of Beatty, apparently within a few hundred yards of the California border. The BLM provided a GPS location, and a federal satellite image showed them a silver oval—a trailer—parked on the site, which was in a mountainous area well off a lonely dirt road.