Neon Prey Read online

  Wherever she’d gone, he thought, she was calling the cops. This was not one of those live-and-let-live places; she’d definitely be on the phone. He looked back at Paine, who was lying motionless on the carpet. Blood everywhere. Maybe he’d hit him too hard? He’d sort of let it out there.

  Had to get out of there . . .

  He half jogged, half limped out to his car, wiping blood from his eyes. Didn’t see the woman come back out on the walkway with her cell phone, taking the video that would help hang him.

  The cops came for him later that day.

  He’d gotten all cleaned up . . . But then they pulled up his pant leg, ripped off the newly applied bandage, and looked at the half-dollar-sized hole.

  Nothing to say about that, except, “I want a lawyer.”

  * * *

  —

  OKAY.

  Seven months later.

  Two dusty dark blue Chevy Tahoes turned off Louisiana 405, away from the Mississippi River and the levee, into the patchwork of black-earth cotton fields and woodlots. A quarter mile in, they slowed as they approached a dirt side road. Rae Givens, who was driving the lead vehicle, peered down the road and asked, “You sure this is right? Looks like a jungle back there.”

  Her partner, Bob Matees, said, “Checks on mileage . . .” He looked at his cell phone. “And on the GPS. It seems right, as far as I could tell from the satellite pictures.”

  “Wouldn’t want to come out here at night,” Rae said, as she rolled off the highway and onto the dirt track. “The mosquitoes gotta be the size of crows.”

  “Or at noon. It’s already hot as a bitch out there,” Bob said. Though it was only ten o’clock, and not yet summer, they could see waves of heat coming off the blacktop.

  “Dependin’ on which bitch you be talking about,” Rae said, falling into her phony hip-hop accent. Rae was a six-foot-tall black woman with a degree in art history from UConn, where she’d been a starting guard on an NCAA championship basketball team.

  “Have I mentioned snakes?” Bob asked. Bob was a short, wide white man with a soft Southern accent, a onetime wrestler at the University of Oklahoma.

  “No, and you don’t have to,” Rae said. She took the turn onto the dirt road, a two-track with weeds growing up between the tracks. “Where’s that turnoff?”

  “Maybe . . . another hundred yards.”

  There was no particular reason that they could see for there being a turnoff when they got to it: a crescent of hard-packed dirt sliced back into the jungle, partially occupied by an aging Ford F-150 with a camper back.

  A man had opened the back of the camper, and they could see a cot, and, on the wall opposite the cot, a small television set with rabbit ears. He turned toward them when they pulled in, looking doubtfully at the two oversized vehicles. He was slender, middle height, with close-cropped hair the color of wheat, wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt with sweat stains at the armpits, wear-creased jeans, and boots.

  Bob and Rae climbed out of the truck. They were both wearing blue T-shirts with “U.S. MARSHAL” emblazoned across both the chest and back, khaki fatigue pants, and combat boots. Both had marshal badges and guns clipped to their belts. Bob nodded to the man and asked, “How you doin’?”

  “Doin’ fine, sir.”

  “You live roundabouts?”

  “Well, sir, I live right here,” the man said. He patted the side of his truck. “Come down looking for work in the oil,” he said, though he actually said “oll,” the way Texans do. The far side of the Mississippi was lined with chemical plants. “Sorta using this as my scoutin’ headquarters.”

  “Best of luck with that, then,” Rae said. “You know the gentleman that lives down at the end of this road?”

  “No, no, I don’t, ma’am. I been here three days, off and on, and never seen nobody comin’ or goin’, except one colored lady who goes down there every morning. She down there now.”

  Another marshal got out of the trailing truck. He was wearing a tan marshal’s T-shirt and green tactical pants, razor-type sunglasses, a baseball hat with a black-and-white American flag on the front, and boots. A second man got out of the passenger side, tall, dark-haired and blue-eyed, with an olive complexion, who would have fit neatly into the local Cajun population. He was wearing pressed khaki slacks and a blue long-sleeved dress shirt, a “New Orleans Saints” ball cap, and high-polished cordovan loafers. He had a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses in his hand, which he put on as he climbed out onto the dirt track. They came up and the man in the dress shirt asked, “What are we doing?”

  “This gentleman has been here for three days, off and on, and hasn’t seen anybody coming or going except one black woman,” Rae said. “So . . . let’s get it on.”

  The third marshal said, “Oorah!” like they might have once done in the Big Army, and maybe still did, but he was a former Ranger and said it with a sarcastic overtone and trekked back to his truck and popped the back lid.

  Rae did the same, and she and Bob and the other marshal pulled on heavy bulletproof vests and helmets with chinstraps. The man in the dress shirt got back in the trailing truck and closed the door, where he had some air-conditioning. Two of the marshals armed themselves with semiauto M15-style rifles, while Rae had a fully automatic M4. They went through a nearly unconscious series of checks—everybody loaded up and ready to go—and the man in the F-150 asked, tentatively, “You got a bad guy down there?”

  “Pretty bad,” Rae said. “You stay here, you’ll be okay. Or you might want to drive out a ways.”

  “Maybe I’ll do that,” the man said.

  As they pulled away from the turnoff, Rae saw the F-150 do a U-turn and head out to the blacktop road in a hurry. She said, “The oll man’s going out.”

  Bob was contemplating his cell phone and muttered, “We pick up Deese’s ass, right? Or maybe he’s run and we don’t pick up Deese’s ass. Either way, we go on down to New Orleans and drop off Tremanty and then get outside some crawfish boil. Should be perfect right now. Mmm-mmm.”

  Tremanty was the man in the blue dress shirt, an FBI agent who’d originally arrested Clayton Deese on charges of assault with a deadly weapon in aid of racketeering activities. The “in aid of racketeering activities” made it a federal crime. That is, Clayton Deese had beaten the living shit out of Howell Paine. When Deese had finished with him, Paine had been howling with pain indeed, the bones of his hands broken into pieces that, on an X-ray, looked like a sock full of golf tees.

  Paine had owed a few thousand dollars to a loan shark named Roger (“Rog”) Smith and had been unwilling to pay it back, even when he could. He’d been known to say in public that Smith could suck on it. A lesson had to be taught, and was, and now Paine, seriously worse for the wear, was in the Marshals Service Witness Protection Program until Deese’s trial. Tremanty didn’t want Deese all that bad; the one he really wanted was Smith, and Deese could give him up. Nothing like looking at fifteen years in the federal prison system to loosen a man’s tongue.

  Unfortunately, Deese, who was out on a bond, had failed to show for trial, and his ankle monitor had gone dead three days earlier. They would have gotten to him sooner, except . . . bureaucracy.

  On the way down to Deese’s house, with Bob driving now because Rae was holding the machine gun, Rae said, “Three days. Deese could be in Australia by now. Up in the mountains.”

  “They got mountains in Australia?” Bob asked.

  “Must have. They got skiers in the Olympics.”

  “Could be dead,” Bob said. “Deese—not the skiers.”

  “Could be,” Rae said. “But Tremanty says he’s the baddest guy that Roger Smith has available. He thinks Smith would want to keep him available if he can. Smith thinks Deese might beat the rap—the judge isn’t known as ‘Cash’ McConnell for nothing.”

  “Tremanty says? You been going out for cups of coffee with t
he FBI? Meetin’ Agent Tremanty for a little tit-à-tit?”

  “It’s pronounced tête-à-tête, not tit-à-tit, you ignorant Oakie,” Rae said. She always got tight on a job like this. Her M4 had a sling, and she was clinking the sling’s swivel against the handguard and it went dink-dink-dink as they talked.

  “It’s pronounced tête-à-tête if you mean a face-to-face meeting,” Bob said. “It’s pronounced tit-à-tit if you mean . . .”

  “Off my back, dumbass,” Rae interrupted. “Here we go.”

  * * *

  —

  DEESE’S HOME was a low, rambling building clad with wide, unpainted pine weatherboards gone dark with the sun and wind. The house looked old, nineteenth-century, but wasn’t; it had been built in 1999 on a concrete slab, according to the parish assessor’s office.

  A narrow porch stretched down the length of the structure, a foot above ground level, with a door opening off the middle of the porch. Two green metal patio chairs on the porch, their paint faded by sunlight and rain. The third marshal popped out of his truck and ran toward the back of the house, while Bob and Rae went straight in from the front, watching the windows for movement, their rifles already up, safeties off, fingers hovering over the triggers.

  Rae crossed the porch and stood to one side of the door and pounded on it with her fist and shouted, “Mr. Deese! Mr. Deese!”

  Bob was to one side, in the yard, watching windows, but with his rifle now pointed in the direction of the door. Rae pounded on the door again. “Deese! Deese!”

  No reaction. Bob stepped back to the center, at the bottom of the porch steps. “Ready?”

  “Anytime,” Rae said.

  Bob cocked himself to kick the door, but then the door moved—and he went sideways and shouted, “Door!”

  The door opened farther and a frightened, round-faced black woman stuck her head out. She said to Rae, who was pointing a gun at her, “Mr. Deese ain’t here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Don’t know. He been gone.”

  Bob said, “Please step back, ma’am.”

  They followed the muzzles of their rifles into the house, which was dark and well cooled. They walked through to the back, shouted out at the other marshal, then opened the back door to let him in. Together, they cleared the place.

  The black woman was named Carolanne Pouter and she worked three days a week cleaning house, doing Deese’s laundry and occasional grocery shopping, mowing the yard, and keeping a daily eye on the place when he was traveling.

  “Did he tell you where he was going?” Bob asked.

  “No, sir. He never does. But this time . . .” She eyed their marshal shirts. “This time, it ain’t like the other times. He was two days burning paper out back. He was coming and going and coming and going for three weeks, and then he loaded all his baggage into his pickup and he went on down the road. Took all his cowboy boots, too. Told me to lock up and gave me five hundred dollars to watch the house for six months. Which I been doin’, faithful.”

  Tremanty had come inside, and now he asked, “Did Mr. Deese have an office in the house or a place where he did his paperwork?”

  “Yes, sir, upstairs, next to the bedroom.”

  Tremanty said to Bob, “Why don’t you get Miz Pouter to show you where he was burning paper. See what the situation is. I’ll check out the office.”

  Rae followed Tremanty up the wooden staircase, and Tremanty said, “The whole place is pine. If he’s running, I’m surprised he didn’t torch it. It’d burn like a barn full of hay.”

  Deese’s office space was small, only about ten by ten feet, with one window looking out toward the jungle in back. An inexpensive office desk, the kind you might buy from a big-box office supply store, sat next to two empty filing cabinets. There were no closets, no place to hide, so when the marshals had cleared the house, they’d spent no more than five seconds in the room.

  Tremanty said, “He’s gone and we won’t find him in a hurry.”

  “That’s some fine detectin’,” Rae said. “Since we only been here one minute.”

  “I found a clue you missed,” Tremanty said. He was really handsome, and when Rae had first seen him she’d had to bite her lip. “On the desk.”

  Rae stepped over to look. Sitting on the desk, on a sheet of white computer paper, was Deese’s ankle monitor, which had been severed with a pair of wire cutters. The paper had a straightforward note, apparently to Tremanty: “Fuck you.”

  “That’s so rude,” Rae said.

  * * *

  —

  OUTSIDE, Bob and the third marshal, with Pouter, were looking at a fifty-five-gallon drum that had been used as a burn barrel and was half full of powdered ash. A six-foot dowel rod, heavily singed, was lying on the ground next to the barrel. Bob used it to stir around in the ash and found nothing but more ash. Deese had not only burned a lot of paper, he’d carefully broken it up so there’d be no chance of reconstituting it; and there were no partially burnt pages. It was all gone.

  They had turned back toward the house when Rae came out, followed by Tremanty. “Lot of ash,” Bob said. “Nothing we can save.”

  “He’s cleaned the place out,” Rae said. She turned to Pouter. “Did Mr. Deese have a computer?”

  “Yes, ma’am, and a printer, too. They were old, but they worked okay. They gone now.”

  “We noticed,” Tremanty said.

  He walked down to one back corner of the house, looking this way and that, and then down to the other corner, and when he rejoined the group he said to Bob, “There’s a walked-in trail goes back into the trees, right over there. Go back and take a look, see if there’s anything we need to see.”

  “Ah, man, it’s a swamp . . .”

  “So stay on the path.”

  “Shouldn’t do that. There’re poison snakes back there,” Pouter said. “Mr. Clay said he seen moccasins bigger ’round than his leg. He told me, if I ever go back there, he’d fire me because he didn’t want to go hauling some dead black ass out of the woods. That was what he said. Except he didn’t say ‘black.’ You know what I mean.”

  “I do,” Rae said.

  “But he paid regular,” Pouter said.

  “You hear that?” Bob asked Tremanty. “Snakes. Water moccasins the size of tree trunks.”

  “Life sucks and then you die,” Tremanty said. “Besides, I’m wearing loafers, and if there are snakes back there I got nothing between my ankle and the snakes except a pair of Ralph Lauren dress socks.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Rae said to Bob. “Bring that pole.”

  “Ah, jeez.”

  But Bob went, and even led the way. The trail looked like something that might have been used by deer, or even pigs. It was only a foot wide and, here and there, overgrown with sedges, which Bob carefully probed with the dowel before crossing. The place had a wet dirt odor, but when Bob broke through some round green plant stems the air was immediately suffused with the smell of green onions, or garlic. A tiger swallowtail flittered in and out of shafts of sunlight—now here, now gone, now here again.

  They saw no snakes, but the trail went on, and so did they, cutting through downed trees and live ones, stepping around low spots filled with stagnant water, until Rae said, “Bob? Look.”

  She pointed at an oval depression, six feet off the trail, in which the weeds were half the height of the surrounding foliage; they were younger, and a lighter shade of green. “What does that look like?”

  “Looks like this one, over here,” Bob said, pointing to a similar-sized depression on the other side, well off the trail. Ten feet farther along the track, they saw another, but with taller brush growing over it.

  “Let’s go have a tit-à-tit,” Bob said.

  They went back out, told Tremanty that they hadn’t seen any snakes, but that they needed an opinion. Tremanty followed them back,
stepping high, keeping a sharp eye out for slithers. When they showed him the low spots, he looked at them and said, “Could be natural.”

  “Nature often fools the eye,” Bob said. “Since that’s decided, let’s get out of here and down to New Orleans and get some crawfish. I’ll buy.”

  “Goddamnit. Every time I go out with marshals, weird shit happens,” Tremanty said. He took a cell phone out of his pocket.

  “So, in your opinion . . .”

  “My opinion is, those are natural depressions, or maybe Deese was burying something back here.”

  “Let me say it again,” Bob said. “Crawfish.”

  Tremanty shook his head. “I gotta make some calls.”

  “If those are graves, there could be a hundred of them back here,” Rae said, looking into the twisted, fetid brush around them.

  “Pray that they’re not,” Tremanty said, as he punched a number into his phone. “I’m serious. Pray.”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Five guys sat in the bar’s back room, playing dealer’s choice poker, five-card draw on this particular hand, and they were cheap. The most valuable chips, the white ones, were worth a buck.

  Lucas Davenport was in the awkward position of holding a pair of fives after the draw, with three people still in the pot, and, at the same time, defending the FBI.

  “They’re not all assholes,” he said. He was the only one wearing a suit, a silvery-gray ensemble too relaxed to be currently fashionable except maybe in certain parts of Milan, where he’d never been but would like to go for the shopping. He was tieless in a checked shirt open at the collar. He looked again at his hand, threw the cards facedown in the center of the table, and said, “I’m out.”