Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(99)

“Honest to God, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna catch that motherfucker and skin him alive,” he shouted into the steering wheel.

An hour later, still fuming, and defeated by his attempts to figure out how much money he actually had—he thought maybe thirty thousand, mostly in ones, so how the hell do you spend thirty thousand dollars’ worth of one-dollar bills?—he turned off the highway and onto the dirt road that would take him to Ralph’s place.


COX saw him coming. Gun was ready, safety off.

She had to get close.





CHAPTER


TWENTY-SEVEN


When the dust from the oncoming truck appeared below them, still a couple of miles away, Tremanty said, “We want to take Deese alive, if we can. Any way we can. If we can get him alive, I can bring down Roger Smith’s whole gang. The rest of them . . . You know, whatever’s necessary.”

“Is that the same thing as not givin’ a shit?” Bob asked.

“In that direction,” Tremanty said.

“That could be a problem,” Bob said. He’d propped his scope on Lucas’s backpack and was watching the approaching truck. “The woman’s been in the car ever since Rae cut the power. Nothing else is moving, and the trailer door is wide open. It’s gotta be a furnace inside. I don’t think there’s anybody in there. Nobody alive anyway.”

“Then where are they?” Tremanty asked.

“I can’t answer that question,” Bob said. “But I don’t think they’re in the trailer.”

“He and Cole could have taken Mrs. Harrelson down to Las Vegas,” Tremanty said.

“If they did, nobody knows where she is or we would have heard,” Lucas said. “My personal feeling is, she’s probably in a hole up here. Deese had no reason to turn her loose. Not after what you guys found in Louisiana.”

“Yeah, well, I still want him alive,” Tremanty said, “if we can get him that way.”

“You know, it’s my call,” Lucas said. He wiped sweat out of his eyes, blinked against the glare. “All due respect to the FBI, I’m the one in charge of chasing him down. If we can get him alive, we’ll do it. If we have to seriously risk somebody else’s neck, I won’t do it. I’ll green-light Bob.”

“I won’t have any trouble pulling the trigger,” Bob said. “Not after looking at all those people in the holes, including some that he ate.”

“Goddamnit, Lucas . . .”

“Lucas is right, Sandro,” Bob said, lifting his face away from the scope. “But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. From here, I could punch a bullet through one of those rivets in the trailer. Or a kneecap. I might possibly be able to knock him down without killing him. I can’t think of why we’d do that, what the circumstances might be, but we can keep it in mind.”

Lucas said, “Give me a handset.”

The truck was still a mile out—they couldn’t see all the twists and turns in the approach track—and maybe as much as five minutes, given the rough approach road. Lucas called Rae and told her what they’d been talking about.

She agreed. Take him alive, if possible. Shoot him if he looked like he might kill somebody else. Tremanty was on the handsest to the helicopter, who relayed his questions to the FBI office in Las Vegas, and, after a moment, he looked at Lucas and shook his head. He listened for another minute, then said into the handset, “We think Deese is coming in now. I gotta go.”

He clicked off, and said to Lucas and Bob, “No sign of Gloria Harrelson. And the body in the hole? They printed the guy and put a rush on it. It’s Cole.”

“Holy shit,” Bob said. “The guy’s a—”

“He’s a cannibal. And now he’s eating his own,” Lucas said. “Whoever that woman is, I think she’s in trouble. She’s got the keys to the car. She should have taken off.”

“Unless she’s working with Deese,” Tremanty said. “Maybe we should have run down and grabbed her.”

“He’s thirty seconds out,” Bob said.

The truck came over a low rise, and the woman got out of the car. They were looking at her right side and back, and Tremanty, with the binoculars, said, “She’s got a pistol in her back pocket.”

“I see it,” Bob said. “What the heck is going on? Is she gonna shoot Deese?”


DEESE, in the truck, first saw the door open on the Lexus, then Cox climbing out, carefully facing him. Probably wondering where Cole was. And he noticed the trailer’s open door, and that wasn’t right. Every time somebody left the door open for even a second, Ralph would yell at him. And it was just hanging there, wide open, a dark rectangle against the blast of reflected sunlight that was the aluminum capsule. He came up to Cox and the Lexus, but he didn’t stop. Instead he circled her, drove back to the trailer, stopped outside the door.


BELOW THEM, ninety or a hundred yards away, Deese got out of the truck, turned toward the open door, paused—a perfect target—and Bob asked, “Lucas?”

Tremanty, hissing: “No.”

Lucas: “Not yet.”

Deese went into the trailer.


DEESE BLINKED, in reaction to the heat and the darkness. No lights on, few windows, it took a minute for his eyes to adjust, and he first made out Ralph’s body as being something like a lumpy pile of clothes outside the bedroom door. Then, when he realized it was a body, the thought popped into his mind that Ralph had killed Gloria Harrelson. But no . . .