his screen. Somebody called the phone you’re watching. The call came from the Forum Shops. About six minutes ago.”
“You mean, like, somebody spotted me?”
“Or Bob or Rae. But probably you,” Forte said. “After you got shot, your name was in the papers in LA, so they may know who’s looking for them. There are about a million photos of you online, going back twenty years, in Minnesota.”
“Goddamnit. Where was the phone when it got answered?”
“Same place it got answered before, near that trailer park. I’ll bet they burn the phone after this call. They could already be moving.”
* * *
—
LUCAS CALLED Bob and Rae. “Back to the cars. Hurry.”
He hadn’t seen them because of the crowds in the casinos until they were headed back to the Bellagio. They all got in the Volvo, Rae in the back since she was the only one of them who’d fit there. Bob called up the mapping app on his phone and two minutes later they were out on the boulevard and around the block heading west.
Not much traffic. Wide streets, flat desert-colored houses with tile roofs. They arrived at the Jacaranda Estates Mobile Home Community fifteen minutes after they ran out of the Forum Shops, and a few minutes more than that since the phone call was made.
The community was a perfect square, a quarter mile on each side, wrapped by a six-foot-tall concrete wall with flaking white paint. The guardhouse at the entrance was empty.
A small red arrow-shaped sign on the street opposite the guardhouse said “Manager, 300 Dodgers.” The streets, it turned out, were named after baseball teams. “Dodgers” was the street leading away from the entrance and they followed it to number 300, which turned out to be an aging and thoroughly immobile mobile home surrounded by sunburnt zinnias and marigolds.
They parked and Lucas led the way to the door; they knocked and a woman in pink hair curlers opened it, looked at them, frowned, and asked, “Who are you?”
“U.S. Marshals,” Lucas said, showing her his badge.
“You better come in. It’s so goddamn hot out there, you could boil water on the sidewalk.”
They crowded into the trailer, which smelled like cream of mushroom soup and Gerber’s baby food—pureed peas, Lucas thought, an odor he wouldn’t easily forget, either going in or coming out of a kid—and the woman said, “Gotta be quiet. I just put the baby down.”
Lucas showed her mug shots of Deese, Beauchamps, and Cole. After a moment, she tapped the picture of Beauchamps and said, “He used to be here. Over on . . . Astros. 712. Haven’t seen him in a couple of months.”
“Who’s living there now?”
“College student. Kelly something. Has a black-and-white dog; you see her walking the dog at night. I tell her, ‘Listen, if you’re at school and the air-conditioning goes out here, the power goes off, that pooch will die in there.’ So then a couple days later she told me she made arrangements with the woman who lives across the way to make sure the dog is okay if there’s a power problem. Nice girl.”
“Is she related to this guy?” Lucas held up the Beauchamps picture. “A girlfriend, anything like that?”
“Don’t know, don’t keep track of that kind of thing. But I don’t think so. I believe she rented it from them. This guy”—she nodded at the photo in Lucas’s hand—“told me he was going to Alaska and he didn’t know when he’d be back, exactly. He left me fifteen hundred bucks for repairs and said if it was more than that, I should kick out the renter and lock it up until he did get back.”
“How do you know she rented it?” Rae asked. “How do you know they’re not related?”
The woman shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what I think.”
Lucas said to Bob and Rae, “Let’s go look.”
CHAPTER
TEN
A multi-dented Subaru Outback with lefty bumper sticker—“That’s Ms. Liberal, Pro-Choice, Tree-Hugging, Vegan Hippie Freak to You, Asshole”—was parked outside the target trailer, which showed lights in all the windows even though it wasn’t dark yet. Over the hum of the air-conditioning they could hear Taylor Swift singing “Teardrops on My Guitar.”
Lucas said, “College student. Not a problem.”
Bob hooked his arm. “What happened the last time you stuck out your face in front of a house, Lucas? We’ll do this—it’s what we do. You can go around and watch the back. There’ll be a door or fire exit there.”
Rae had already popped the hatch on the Tahoe and was pulling on a