Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(98)

Harrelson cried, “Oh, thank God, thank God.”

Not quite, Cox thought, grimly.

She stepped over to the door, where Ralph had propped up his shotgun in the corner. When she pushed the safety, a little knob to one side of the trigger, it popped out on the other with a red ring around it. That meant it was ready to fire, she figured.

She stepped back to the bed and said, “I’m sorry,” and moved the muzzle of the gun to within an inch of Harrelson’s heart and pulled the trigger. It clicked, but nothing happened.

“What are you doing?” Harrelson shrieked. She shrank away, as far as she could with the chains. “What are you doing? What are you . . .”

Cox thought, Shit, and pulled hard on the shotgun’s forestock, popped an empty shell out of the chamber and new one in. She again aimed the gun at Harrelson’s heart, as the woman tried to push away from her, and this time when Cox pulled the trigger the shotgun bucked, the blast deafened her, and Harrelson died, a bloody red hole in her chest.

Cox rubbed her face and thought, Done.

Now, in this entire world, there were only two men left who knew what had happened on this long, horrid trip: Deese and Cole.


SHE REMEMBERED from somewhere—a movie, she thought— that the cops did tests on people’s hands and arms to see if they’d fired a gun. That could be a problem. She managed to prop open the small bedroom window, get the shotgun muzzle an inch or two outside, with Ralph Deese’s dead hand wrapped around the stock of the weapon, his face near it. She pulled the trigger with his dead finger and left the gun on the floor next to his body.

Now what? Her mind felt cold—or cool anyway. If she had been kidnapped and mistreated, if the gang hadn’t allowed her to leave . . .

Harrelson had been chained to the bed, but there were several feet left over. Cox crossed the bedroom, not worrying too much about the blood spattering the floor and walls, and got a length of the chain and wrapped it around her waist, then yanked it back and forth to bruise herself. She didn’t want fresh blood, just bruises, and a lot of them, from below her breasts to her hips.

The process hurt, but she kept it up, until the whole area between her breasts and hips were crossed with bruises and vividly reddened flesh. When she was satisfied, she put the chain down, went to the kitchen area, found a plastic bag, filled it with ice from the refrigerator, and wrapped that around her waist.

Done right and given time, she thought, the bruises would look old.


AND WHAT ELSE?


WELL, there was the jewelry and cash. She went out to the car and got it, took it inside, found a garbage bag, put the jewelry and all the cash, except for a couple of thousand dollars, in the bag, cinched it tight. She carried the bag outside, into the sun. When the men had taken the pickup, they’d thrown some tools out of the back, including a shovel.

She carried the shovel to a lonely, stunted tree on the edge of an arroyo, a hundred yards from the trailer, paced off six feet from the tree, dug a hole through the sand down into the crusty subsoil, put the bag in the hole, covered it with a couple shovelfuls of sand, smoothed the sand with her foot, erasing all signs of the hole. She walked a short distance up the slope, found a bluish rock the size of a dinner plate, brought it back, placed it on the cache site, and brushed some sand over it.

Nothing more to do now . . . Except kill Clayton Deese.

She could do that, if he didn’t see it coming.

Cole, she’d have to think about. She really did like him. But a girl had to take care of herself.

She went back in the trailer and washed her hands and arms again, then took off her blouse and washed her entire upper body. Put her blouse on again. Washed her hands and arms again . . .


DEESE WAS an hour north of Vegas when he realized that the gas gauge hadn’t moved off full. When he and Cole got in the truck, he’d checked and assumed they had a whole tankful. But now he had no idea how much gas he had left. He really didn’t need to run out, not with two million in cash in the truck and his face all over television screens.

He was trying to decide whether to go back for gas or risk going ahead when he saw a sign for a gas station and convenience store. Two miles later, he slid up next to a row of gas pumps. He pulled his hat down, went inside, paid twenty dollars for gas, and a few dollars for two cold Pepsis and a candy bar, went back out, and pumped the whole twenty into the tank.

He was well out in the desert, not a lot around. One other car was parked at a second row of pumps when he pulled in, but the woman driver finished filling her tank before he was done and drove off.

When he put the nozzle back on the pump, he checked again to make sure he was alone, then opened the back door on the truck, looked in the money bag, giving himself a minute to reassure himself of its being there and to enjoy it for a minute. He took a stack of bills in his hand and riffled through them and . . . what?

He pulled a bill out. A dollar bill. Near panic, he pulled out another stack: same thing, a hundred-dollar bill top and bottom, nothing but dollar bills between. That fuckin’ Harrelson had ripped him off. He was gonna . . . What was he gonna do? One thing, he was gonna cut Gloria Harrelson’s head off and leave it on the highway where somebody would find it and return it to Harrelson.

Consumed with the fury of the moment, he got in the truck and drove off, the pedal to the floor, until the old vehicle began to scream and a speed limit sign that read 80 flashed by and he realized he could blow it all right there. He backed off, from 97 to 70, his head almost down to the steering wheel, fantasizing about catching up with Harrelson and skinning him alive.