with the freestanding tents/tarps fastened to the walls. There was crap all over the place: food wrappers, McDonald’s cartons, old discarded blankets clogged with damp sand. The series of lights ended with a single kerosene lantern a hundred yards in and the heavyset woman who sat next to it with two shopping carts draped with a blue plastic tarp as a tent.
“You cops?”
Lucas grunted as he went by.
And she called out after him, “I think he shot somebody. I heard a shot. I think.”
* * *
—
LUCAS AND THE AGENT continued running down the tunnel; it had smelled bad from the beginning, but the stink got heavier as they ran. The agent pulled the tail of his jacket up over his mouth and nose, and called, “I think this is their toilet,” and Lucas nodded and pulled his shirt up over his nose. He took it down once, to see if he could talk to Tremanty on the handset, but the handset was dead.
Lucas had lost track of time, but thought they must have been running for five or six minutes, when they saw a light ahead. They ran on for another minute, to the end of the tunnel, where seven-foot-tall grates blocked it top to bottom. One side of the grate had been pried open far enough for a man to squeeze through.
A body lay by the grate, a man’s, with a bullet hole in the head. And beside the body, the green motorcycle and the money bag, empty except for the GPS tracker. The bike had no license plate.
The agent, who looked like a teenager, said, “Murdered somebody,” and then he gagged from the smell of the tunnel. And maybe the sight of the body.
Lucas said, “Nothing we can do now. We gotta go up.”
They went up and found themselves standing under an enormous ultra-modern Ferris wheel. To the left, they saw a parking garage for the LINQ, a casino.
The agent said, “Jesus, we’re right on the Strip.”
Lucas lifted the handset and called Tremanty. “You there?”
“Lucas? Where the hell are you?”
“We’re at the exit of the drainage tunnel, right behind the LINQ, under that Ferris wheel—that white Ferris wheel. We’ve got a body, a motorcycle without a license plate, an empty money bag, and a GPS tracker.”
“Be there in two or three.”
* * *
—
TREMANTY ARRIVED in two, or three, with a squadron of other FBI cars. He walked up to Lucas and said, “We’re screwed.”
“Gloria Harrelson’s screwed, when they take a close look at that money,” Lucas said. “The guy in the airplane didn’t see anything?”
“No. He wasn’t looking here. We were a half mile away. Any ID on the dead guy?”
“Didn’t have a chance to look.”
Lucas turned to the agent who’d run the tunnel with him. “Go down there and see if there’s a VIN on that motorcycle. I don’t know where you’d find it. But . . . Here, I’ll come with you.”
One of the other agents, a slender man who looked like anything but a biker, said, “The VIN’s usually on the steering column. Let me go down. Gimme a flashlight.”
Tremanty walked a few steps away and got on his phone. “We’re gonna need the name and address that goes with a VIN we’re about to get and we need it right now. Right now. We’ll have it in a minute.”
And a minute later the agent in the tunnel shouted, “Yamaha,” then called out the vehicle identification number. Lucas wrote it down, and Tremanty relayed it to whoever he was speaking with on the phone. He listened and a moment later said to Lucas, “Jesus, it’s a ’96.”
And after another moment said, “It goes to a Ralph Deese . . . in Beatty, Nevada.”
“Where’s that?” Lucas asked.
Tremanty shrugged and spoke into the phone: “Find out where Beatty is. See if they have a police force.”
He listened for a while longer, as Lucas paced around him, and then said, “Get me that number.”
He hung up and said, “No police force, but they’ve got a sheriff’s substation. I hope somebody’s home.”
Somebody was.
Tremanty put his phone on speaker, and Lucas and the other agents gathered around him as he spoke to a sheriff’s deputy. The deputy said, “Yeah, I’ve heard of Ralph. I think he lives up in the hills somewhere, but I don’t know where exactly. That’s what I heard anyway. I can’t guarantee that it’s right. The people here pretty much ran him out of town. Must’ve been four or five years back, before I got here.”