Neon Prey

by John Sandford

  Beauchamps would never touch a media light of any kind—movie, video, singer, not even one of the talking heads on E!—because the publicity would go on forever. Publicity, he thought, was his biggest enemy and he was careful not to attract any.

  * * *

  —

  IN A SECOND BEDROOM, John Rogers Cole was working his way through Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. A morning insomniac, he found Jest usually helped him grab a couple more hours of sleep before he had to start the day.

  Cole was a nondescript sort, which was the way he liked it. If you were nondescript, you didn’t have a cop looking in the driver’s-side window at a traffic stop and asking himself, “Say, don’t I know that face?”

  Of middle height, he had fine brown hair, worn short, brown eyes, an ordinary nose and chin, and narrow shoulders. He usually wore a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows. The shirt concealed a gym rat’s body: he had biceps like a drywaller and could run three miles in eighteen minutes. His current driver’s license and Visa card said his name was Douglas Moyers, but the gang all called him Cole.

  His lack of facial drama didn’t help him with women, who always went for the square-jawed, blunt-nosed, big-shouldered guys like Beauchamps, but he did all right. In Cole’s experience, if you sat around in Starbucks long enough, drinking lattes and reading Jest, something would come along. He dug librarian types, black-rimmed glasses and an overbite.

  * * *

  —

  ALSO SLEEPING ALONE, on a mattress on the floor of the home office, was Beauchamps’s half brother Clayton Deese, the cannibal. He’d been all over the internet since the FBI said he’d eaten some lady, and maybe a couple of guys, which Cox and Cole and even, to some extent, Beauchamps found disturbing.

  Not only the eating part but the fact that cannibals tend to attract the eye, and Deese had a distinctive face and those tattoos. He’d always been clean-shaven, right up to the time he left New Orleans. He now wore a reddish beard that qualified him to hunt alligators down in the bayous, but there was something about his eyes that still attracted attention.

  He looked like a mean motherfucker, and there was no way to cover it up. When a normal law-abiding citizen looked at Clayton Deese, his first thought was that Deese belonged in jail. Not that Deese ran into many normal citizens.

  Deese dreamed in full-color porn; in between erotic dreams, he’d wake and his mind would snap to his problem, which was the same it had been in New Orleans. He had to get away. He was gone, but he hadn’t yet gotten away. He needed a bunch of money for that and he didn’t have it.

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE all sleeping soundly when, at sunrise, there was a sudden burst of dings from the living room. And then another burst, at a slightly different pitch. Beauchamps quit snoring and launched himself from the bed and went running out of the room, his REM sleep hard-on leading the way like a wobbly flashlight.

  And then the shit hit the fan.

  Like a fuckin’ machine gun, which is what Cox screamed it was.

  When it had ripped open the dawn, she’d sat up in bed, her mouth dropped open, she’d shrieked, “Fuckin’ machine gun,” she’d grabbed a terry-cloth robe, and run after Beauchamps, pulling the robe on as she ran.

  Deese bolted out of the home office, and Deese and Cox followed Beauchamps to a tinted-glass window in the family room that looked across the backyard to the house behind them. Men in dark uniforms were running through their yard and setting up behind palm trees, the deeply shaded lawns sparkling with muzzle flashes of dozens, and maybe hundreds, of fired cartridges, going both in and out of the house.

  Beauchamps said, “Cops,” and then Cole ran in, fully dressed and carrying a book, and Beauchamps said, “They’re all over Nast’s place. They’ll get here, sooner or later. We gotta get outta here. Grab what you can, meet in the garage. One fuckin’ minute.” And they all ran back to their respective rooms.

  The battle continued outside, the volume of gunfire like something from a war video. In what was a little more than one fuckin’ minute, they were all more or less dressed. Cox, still naked under the robe, had jammed an armful of pants, blouses, underwear, and seven pairs of shoes into two fake Louis Vuitton tote bags and had run toward the garage, where she bumped into Cole, who’d just thrown a bag in the back of Deese’s pickup. Her robe had parted as she ran, and Cole said, “Whoa!” as he took a look, and Cox said, “Hey, there,” but not as a firm objection, and she didn’t bother to close it as she threw her clothes in the Cadillac and headed back into the house, her long pale legs flashing in and out of the flapping robe.

  Beauchamps ran into the garage with an armload of stuff, threw it in his Cadillac, and Cole said, “Don’t touch the lights, don’t open the doors, and when we do open them don’t talk loud.” As Beauchamps ran back out, Cole picked up a broom and used the handle to smash the overhead door’s lights.

  Deese ran in carrying a dog shit brown Filson duffel bag, which he threw in the back of his pickup. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt but was barefoot. Cole said, quietly, “I broke the lights, watch the glass.” And there was more shooting from the back and also men shouting. Beauchamps ran in and said, “I don’t see anybody out front,” and, “Everybody got their money?”

  And Cox cried, “Oh, shit,” and dashed back into the house and was back fifteen seconds later with a Christmas cookie tin. “We almost forgot the coke,” she said. And Beauchamps said, “Clay, you take Cole and I’ll take Geenie. Let’s go! Push the button.”

  Cole pushed the button and ran around the front of Deese’s truck and got in and pulled the door closed with a quiet click and five minutes after the shooting started they followed Beauchamps’s two-year-old Cadillac SUV out of the dark garage and down the driveway. There were lighted windows everywhere, and a few people already out on lawns. The shooting behind the house continued.

  Eight blocks out, Beauchamps pulled over to the curb. Deese rolled up behind him. Beauchamps stepped back to his half brother’s truck and said through the lowered driver’s-side window, “We’re busted. They’ll figure out the house, they’ll print the place, and we’re all over it. That’ll take a while. I’m thinking Vegas. At least until things calm down.”

  “Maybe they got Vegas, too,” Cole said, leaning forward to talk past Deese.

  “I don’t think so,” Beauchamps said. “Somebody spotted us. I’m thinking they spotted Nast because he’s so damn visible and he’s been hitting the clubs. They didn’t even know about the back house.”

  “If they got Nast and Randy and they talk . . .”

  “Nast and Randy are dead,” Beauchamps said. “You heard what was happening. Nast hated cops, he was hosing them down with that fuckin’ M16. No way they let him walk away from that. They’re deader’n shit, both of them.”

  Deese said, “Vegas is okay. But we gotta go. We’re still too close.”

  “Right out the 210 to the 15, stay in touch on the phones and not too far apart in case there’s a problem.”

  “Go!” Deese said.

  * * *

  —

  COX STARTED ragging on Beauchamps before they got past the racetrack at Santa Anita.

  “I knew this was gonna happen,” she said. “I told you we were pushing our luck. We shoulda been outta there a year ago. And now Nast and Randy are dead, not that it’s a huge loss. Especially Nast. What an asshole he was. Or maybe still is—”

  “Was,” Beauchamps said. And, “Be quiet, for Christ’s sakes, I’m trying to think.”

  “Maybe you shoulda tried thinking before you threw me in a car half naked and we . . . What are we gonna do? I’m not gonna live in that fuckin’ trailer, not in May in Vegas . . . I’ve never been arrested for anything and my fingerprints are all over that house. And now the cops will be looking for me. And if Nast killed some cops, then it might be murder . . . Oh, J
esus Christ. I didn’t even think of that until now. Murder!”

  “I’ll tell them you were a hooker we brought in, you didn’t know anything about it. Now, shut up.”

  “Like that’s gonna work. You know any hooker’s never been arrested? Me, neither,” she said. “We gotta go a lot farther away than Vegas. And I’m not staying in that fuckin’ trailer, I did that once and once was enough. You got fake IDs. We oughta check into the Mandalay, or something. Or the Wynn . . .”

  She really never stopped until they were up the hill at Victorville, an hour out of the house, not even when she’d bent herself over the seat to get a different set of clothes out of her bag and her naked and, honestly, totally excellent ass was rubbing Beauchamps’s right cheek, which made it even harder to maintain his lane. In Victorville, they pulled into a Mobil station for gas and food and cold drinks.

  As they were gassing up the vehicles, Cole told Beauchamps and Deese, “I got my laptop, if we can find some WiFi, and we can get the news.”

  “Wait until we get to Vegas. There won’t be anything yet anyway,” Beauchamps said. “We need a better place than the trailer park, we can’t all four stay there. Geenie’s already driving me crazy with her whining.”

  “You think Vegas is far enough?” Deese asked.

  “Orange County would have been far enough, except for that fuckin’ LA television. Vegas is quick, and we got the trailer and can lay low for a while until we can find a house to rent,” Beauchamps said. He looked at Cole. “We’ll get to Vegas, buy some wedding rings for you and Geenie, and you can rent a couple of houses. Nobody knows your face. And it’s easy renting houses there.”

  “We can do that,” Cole said. He lit a cigarette. “If Geenie’s getting on your case, she could ride with me.”

  “There’s an idea.” Cox had gone to the restroom to change clothes. When she came back, they’d transferred Cole’s stuff to Beauchamps’s car and Beauchamps’s stuff to Deese’s truck.

  Beauchamps told her about the wedding rings and renting houses, and she said, “Hey, my friend rented an apartment for two months with that Airdnc thing. She said there was this girl in Vegas who’ll get you into one of them, no questions asked, and you can stay as long as you want, if you pay up front. All furnished with WiFi and TV and everything.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Beauchamps said. “We’ll check it out when we get there.”

  “How come I’m riding with Cole?” Cox asked, looking among the three men.

  “’Cause Deese and I got things to talk about. And because you’re driving me fuckin’ nuts,” Beauchamps said. “Besides, you and Cole can work on your husband-wife act.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE out of Victorville before it got hot, and Cox, who’d changed into shorts and a T-shirt in the Mobil station restroom, started talking again, about leaving California, about life in general, and though Cole didn’t have much to say, he’d chip in with a word every now and then, encouraging her to go on, which she appreciated, because sometimes she had the feeling she talked too much.

  Once past Barstow, with the sun now getting up in the sky, she said, “This is the part I hate. There’s nothing from Barstow to the Nevada line. Two hours of nothing. Down in Tucson, they got great-looking cactuses. Up here, we got shit.”

  “Time passes,” Cole said. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “I don’t mind, but crack the window and blow the smoke out,” she said. She looked out the window at the Mojave as he lit up. “Absolutely nothing out here. It’s like looking at a TV with the power off. We’d usually get about halfway up there and Marty would make me go down on him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Something we did. He’d be swerving all over the highway when he got close. Couple of times, we got passed by a semi and the driver saw what we were doing and he’d honk his horn at us. You know, real long . . . Hooooooonk.”

  Cole grinned and took a long drag off the cigarette.

  Deese’s truck was a quarter mile ahead of them, both vehicles rolling along at a steady 80 miles an hour. “So fuckin’ boring,” Cox said. Then, “You know, the brothers are going to take care of themselves. They’re not going to take care of us. I don’t even know why they’re taking me along. I could go back to LA and who’d guess I even knew you guys?”

  “Remember about the fingerprints,” Cole said. “If you’ve ever been printed—”

  “I haven’t been. I never been arrested for anything,” Cox said.

  “Really?”

  “Really. What’d you think, that I was on the corner?”

  “Well, I never figured out you and Marty,” Cole said. “You didn’t exactly seem like a girlfriend. Like when he was banging that actress chick, he was right out front about it. You didn’t seem to care.”

  “I didn’t. Less wear and tear on me,” Cox said.

  “So . . . I thought maybe he was paying you to hang around.”

  “He was, sorta. Not like a hundred bucks a time, or whatever,” Cox said. “But, well, two words: ‘money’ and ‘cocaine.’ I wasn’t on the corner, but I do like money and cocaine. I like rich guys, especially the ones who like to spend the money and who like to go out clubbing. Dancing. Who’ll loan out their Amex cards. I dated a lot of Arab boys from USC.”

  “Huh.” Cole thought about that, then said, “I only had one legitimate credit card in my life. From Sears, and I think they went broke. I got it when I was a kid so I could buy tires and tools and shit.”

  Cox reached across the seat and patted him on the leg. “You always seemed like a nice guy to me, a lot nicer than the others,” she said. A minute later: “If Marty and I develop a problem, would you take care of me?”

  “If I could,” Cole said, “I guess. I don’t know what I could do. I lost a lot of money in this deal. I kept it in my car, down below. Cops got it now.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “No kiddin’.”

  “Something bad is going to happen,” Cox said. “Marty’s not a guy to keep his head down. You seem more responsible that way. I know he and Deese are going to start gambling up in Vegas because . . . because that’s what they do.”

  “That’ll get them caught. They got cameras, tight security, and smart cops up there,” Cole said. “We need to lay low until we can get a little cash together.”

  “If we worked on this husband-and-wife stuff, like Marty said, we’d have a better chance to get away. Couples up in Vegas are invisible. People look at single guys and single girls, but not couples, because they aren’t . . . available. There are millions of them, all over. Nobody even looks.”

  “But what’s to work on? Being a couple? You just go around together, right?”

  “People who are couples act different than other people,” she said. “You can tell.”

  “Tell what?”

  “That they’re together,” she said. “You know, that they’re intimate with each other.”

  “You mean, sleeping together?”

  She shrugged. “Or whatever. Intimate.” Long silence, the two of them looking out at the overheated desert, which definitely wasn’t as picturesque as the one in Tucson. “Listen . . . you wanna blow job?”

  Cole scratched his head, looked at her, checking to see if she was serious. She seemed to be, her eyes flat and not wise. Finally: “Sure, if you think Marty won’t mind.”

  “I don’t plan on telling him,” she said. And, “You know his real name is Marion?”

  “Yeah, but he wanted everybody to call him Marty because he’s had legal problems with the Marion name.”

  Neither said anything for another minute, then Cox said, “You probably ought to slide the seat all the way back.”

  “Oh. Sure. Let me get rid of the smoke first. It is pretty boring out here.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  The
y had driven Bob’s Malibu around the block and parked it, leaving the driveway empty. Rocha left in the minivan and came back an hour later with two sheriff’s deputies to help with the surveillance. They brought more groceries.

  The Jaguar came back late in the afternoon, followed a few minutes later by the BMW. One of the deputies took photos with a telephoto lens.

  As they waited through the afternoon for Rocha to coordinate the raid with the three different departments involved, Lake hooked a laptop into an industrial-strength hotspot and brought up all kinds of official documents regarding the target house—building permits, tax assessor’s reports, plat maps, aerial views. The original permits, thirty-five years old, showed the house as having three modestly sized bedrooms, but a later permit hinted at extensive internal remodeling but didn’t include detailed plans.

  “We don’t really know what it’s like in there,” Rocha said. “The building permits are mostly about new HVAC, but those are old-style family bedrooms, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d combined some of them into one- or two-bedroom suites. We can’t count on the doors and bedroom access being where the plans say they are.”

  “But there are at least four people using the place,” Rae said.

  “First-floor family room could have been converted into another bedroom suite,” Lake said. “Maybe even two.”

  “We don’t know, though,” Rae said. “I’m thinking we go in really hard, flashbangs through exposed windows, hit the door with a ram. There’s CBS construction up to waist height; that’ll be a problem for lighter weapons if there’s a fight.”

  All the overhead views of the house were obscured by the heavy year-round foliage. “There’ll either be a fence or a hedge to separate it from the house behind it,” Rocha said. “We’ll have SWAT guys coming in from the backyard and they’ll have to cross that before we hit the front of the house.”