Neon Prey - John Sandford Page 0,127
there were many. With no prior convictions, he was given three years in prison.
His three years—he’d actually serve thirty months—cost Roger Smith three million dollars in cash; money well spent, in Smith’s view.
Thinking about it drove Tremanty into an occasional frenzy.
* * *
—
KERRY BLACK, the college girl who’d rented Beauchamps’s trailer in Vegas, kept sending off rent checks that were never cashed, and because Beauchamps owned the trailer under a false name, nobody ever picked up on it. She got two whole years out of the place, before graduating and moving on. The checks went to a mail drop store. When the rent on the mailbox ran out, the store bundled up the envelopes and returned them to the post office, who forwarded them on to Black’s new address. She really wasn’t sure that she should spend the uncollected money, but life is life and she eventually did.
* * *
—
TREMANTY AND RAE remained an item. Their relationship caused a two-day breach in Rae’s relationship with Bob. They had desks facing each other, and Rae came in one morning, humming to herself, and Bob stared at her until she asked, “What?”
Bob blurted, “You look like the most thoroughly fucked woman in the continental United States.”
That was on a Monday. She forgave him on Wednesday afternoon.
* * *
—
THERE WAS one lonely body at the cannibal’s place that was never found and molders there still beneath the tangled brush and among the slithering snakes.
* * *
—
COX and her excellent attorney remained tangled in the court proceedings until Santos pled out. Then she walked. But not far. She rented a Jeep, drove to the site of Ralph Deese’s Airstream, which had been hauled away as evidence and eventually junked. She dug up the money and jewelry she’d hidden there. Altogether, a bit over sixty thousand dollars, enough to be a star—at least for a while.
At a dance club in Santa Monica called Lancer’s, she met a smart guy who didn’t want to talk about himself because, it turned out, when he eventually did talk, in her bed, he revealed he was on parole for an armed robbery conviction. When she pressed him about what he was planning to do in his post-prison life, he confessed that it’d probably be more armed robbery. It was his only real skill set.
“There’s a better way,” she said. “Would you know any guys who are, like, really big and frightening?”
Of course he did. He’d just gotten out of High Desert State Prison.
Cox still had the Panther pin given to her by Cole and she wore it as a talisman for good luck, though, truth be told, his face was beginning to fade in her memory. A year after the shootings in Vegas and at Ralph Deese’s trailer, she and her new home invasion gang were driving Rocha, the LA robbery cop, insane.
* * *
—
ON A WARM EVENING in early September, Virgil Flowers had taken off his cowboy boots and had his feet up on Lucas’s backyard dining table, waiting for the barbecue ribs to get done. His very pregnant girlfriend, Frankie, shuffled around the yard after her son Sam, and Lucas’s son Sam, both nine, who were playing a species of football that involved a lot of wrestling, the occasional headbutt, and, every once in a while, a muffled curse.
Frankie demanded, “Who said ‘asshole’? Which one of you little f . . . who said ‘asshole’? You should be ashamed.”
Her son said, “You said ‘asshole,’ Mom.”
Frankie: “I was quoting, that doesn’t count.”
Lucas’s grass-stained kid shouted, “Dad! Frankie said ‘asshole’!”
* * *
—
VIRGIL, normally stationed in Mankato, in southern Minnesota, had been working in Minneapolis on a murder at the University of Minnesota. Frankie had driven up to the Cities to renew their acquaintance.
Virgil pointed a beer bottle at Frankie and asked Lucas, “Isn’t it true that if we don’t get married, the kids’ll be little bastards?”
Lucas said, “Yup. They will. Had that same problem myself, with my first daughter. Her mom wouldn’t marry me and she went on and married this rich guy who adopted my kid—I had to sign the papers, but he’s a good guy, so I did. Technically, I think that means she isn’t a little bastard anymore. But she was for a while.”
“I hate the idea that some kid’s a bastard. I even hate the word ‘bastard,’” Virgil said. “You ever look the word up on Google? The synonyms are, like, ‘scoundrel,’ ‘villain,’ ‘rogue,’ ‘weasel,’ ‘good-for-nothing.’ I’m gonna get her to marry me, one way or another.”
“Between the two of you that’d be, what, six marriages?”
“Yee . . . aah, I guess,” Virgil said, pausing to add them up. “One of mine didn’t count, though. That was more, like, an overnight camping trip.”
“If you had to get a divorce, then you were married,” Lucas said. “And if you’re gonna marry this one, you’re gonna need a plan.”
Virgil took his feet down, and said, “Like what?”
“Let me think for a minute,” Lucas said.
Weather came out of the house. “You got a call,” she told Lucas. “From Elmer. I told him you’d call him right back.”
“Quiet,” Virgil said, “He’s thinking about how to get Frankie to marry me.”
“That’s a heck of a lot more important than anything Elmer might have to say,” Weather said.
“Exactly.”
Lucas: “How about this? Tell her that you want to get a marriage license, in case she changes her mind. It’s good for six months here in Minnesota. Then you wait until she goes into labor and you show up with your old man . . .”
Virgil’s old man was an Episcopalian minister.
“That’ll work,” Weather said. “About halfway through labor, you’ll do anything to get your mind off of it. Even get married.”
“Seems treacherous,” Virgil said. “I like it. A lot.”
Weather handed Lucas his cell phone. “You gotta talk to Elmer. He seemed . . . disturbed.”
Virgil: “Oh-oh.”
Elmer Henderson was a former governor of Minnesota, now a U.S. senator. He’d been appointed to the job by the current governor after the previous senator had been shot to death in Washington. According to the local political pundits, the appointment had come only after considerable arm-twisting. The current governor was not numbered among the brightest half of Minnesotans and initially had wanted to appoint his sister to the job.
Lucas took the phone, pressed recall and then speaker, and Henderson instantly picked up. “Lucas?”
“Senator . . . or Governor . . . Elmer?” Lucas said.
“Lucas. We’ve got a nasty problem,” Henderson said. “Nasty. When can you get here?”
“Washington?”
“Yes, of course. Can you make it tomorrow? I’ll send a plane.”
Virgil shouted, “Senator . . . Virgil Flowers: could he get shot again?”
Henderson asked, “Is that that fuckin’ Flowers? Ah, jeez . . .”
Lucas: “Well? Could I get shot again?”
Henderson: “Look, guys. I can’t promise anything . . .”