Beauchamps was thinking about what Deese had said and how he himself would behave if he were Santos and there were six hundred thousand dollars on the line. He opened the refrigerator with his left hand and took out a beer while his right hand crept around to his back and grasped the Beretta.
Santos saw it and put up his left hand and said, “Wait,” but Beauchamps saw Santos’s arm going for his back and he pulled the Beretta and thrust it at Santos and pulled the trigger but nothing happened, and, in a flash, thought: safety. He thumbed the safety off and pulled the trigger again, and his hand hopped with the hard recoil as Cox screamed and ran across a coffee table and went down in a crash of cheap glass. And Santos got his gun out and fired at Beauchamps’s face.
Beauchamps and Santos, five yards apart, both realized that they’d missed with their first shots, though that seemed almost impossible, and they both kept cranking on their triggers until Santos ran out of ammo and Beauchamps went down, firing his last, dying shot into the floor.
Santos, stunned, freaked out, patted his chest, looking for bullet holes. He found none. Although nearly deafened, he heard a crash in the bedroom and trotted to the door, found it locked, hit it with his shoulder, then tried to kick it in, felt weighted resistance.
The blonde had blocked the door with something heavy, andSantos had to get out. He didn’t know how many shots he and Beauchamps had fired at each other, but it was a lot—the house stank of burnt gunpowder—and Beauchamps had not been using a suppressor.
His own gun, even suppressed, had been loud, and they weren’t more than a mile from the scene of the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, which made him think that the cops might already be on their way.
He gave the bedroom door one last kick, and the blonde, who’d gone quiet, began screaming again. Santos took a spare magazine out of his pocket, jammed it into the Sig, and sprayed the whole load through the door and the Sheetrock walls. He heard one last crash of breaking glass from the bedroom and then hurried to the front door, to the car, and sped away.
At the end of the block, he saw a man standing in front of his house, staring at Beauchamps’s house. He turned the corner and was gone.
—
COX THOUGHTshe might have broken a leg when she ran into the coffee table, but it seemed to work all right, and she lay huddled behind the heavy wooden bureau she’d toppled in front of the bedroom door, her feet pushed against it.
When the shooting stopped and she took her hands away from her ears, somebody—it had to be Santos because Beauchamps would have called to her—tried to kick his way into the bedroom, but she rolled against the bureau and pushed back. Then Santos sprayed the bedroom with bullets, blowing out the only window.She closed her eyes and covered her ears again until the shooting stopped.
The front door slammed. She crawled to the window and looked out but couldn’t see anything in the street, and she couldn’t hear much at all, her ears still ringing with the muzzle blasts of the two guns, and then she saw Santos’s car speed away, him hunched over the steering wheel.
She pushed the chest of drawers away from the bedroom door and stepped out. Beauchamps was dead, no question of that. When she looked at his chest, the word that popped unwanted into her head was “colander.”
She began talking. “Oh, God. Oh, jeez. Oh... shit. Oh my God...”
She’d never seen a dead body before and this was an unsightly one, lying on the floor, eyes still open, looking at her, mouth slack, blood still oozing out into his shirt like a paper napkin sopping up spilt cranberry juice. She poked him once to see if he’d react but he didn’t. And there were all those bullet holes...
Dead.
She had to get out. Cox shopped at Whole Foods and had one of their tote bags. She grabbed it, stuffed her purse and several pairs of shoes in it. She rolled Beauchamps up on his side and pulled out his wallet and then slipped her hand into his side pocket for the money roll he kept there. Grimacing at the warmth of his blood-splattered hand, she unclasped the gold Rolex and pulled it off his wrist.
His burner phone was sitting on the breakfast bar, and she threw it in the bag.
All that done, she ran to the door to the garage, paused, saw two more paper grocery bags on the floor by the kitchen counter, grabbed them, ran back to the bedroom closet, stuffed the bags with the rest of her shoes, plus a plastic Tupperware box of jewelry, swept some cosmetics into the bag from the bathroom counter, added a baggie of cocaine, got her birth control pills and her sunglasses, yanked open the drawers of the other bureau—the one used by Beauchamps—saw nothing useful or valuable except for a wooden jewelry box that she thought might contain another Rolex, and maybe two, so she threw it in the bag also. She saw a box of 9mm ammo, grabbed it, and on the way through the front room picked up Beauchamps’s Beretta by the barrel and dropped it in the bag, too.
With the two paper shopping bags and the Whole Foods tote, she stepped into the garage and tossed them in the backseat of Beauchamps’s Cadillac Escalade. Didn’t hear any sirens, but it hadn’t been but five minutes since the shooting. Still, she ran inside, got an armful of clothing from her closet, carried it out and dumped it in the SUV. Went back to the bedroom again, yanked all the drawers out of Beauchamps’s dresser and dumped them. The bottom drawer produced a bag of currency; she took it but didn’t stop to count it. Finally, she went back to the toppled dresser by the bedroom door, took out an armful of lingerie, including everything she had from La Perla, and a bunch of bras and underpants from Victoria’s Secret, carried it all to the car, threw it in the backseat.
She pushed the button to lift the garage door, ran around to the driver’s side of the Cadillac, got in, and backed into the street, taking a second to drop the garage door again to give it back thesimple anonymity of the rest of the street. A man was turning the corner, on foot, shaded by a red umbrella, walking an overheated, panting black-and-white dog. She twiddled her fingers at him and he waved back. And she was outta there.
—
DEESE WASon his way back to the house when Cox called on the burner and he asked, “Now what?”
She screamed, “He killed Marion! He shot Marion! Marion’s dead! Marion’s dead!”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Lucas, Bob, and Rae spent a couple hours chilling out at the hotel. They took restless twenty-minute naps, gathered again and spent an hour making calls to home rental and real estate agents, with no luck. Late in the afternoon, with Lucas in the Volvo and Bob and Rae in the Tahoe, they headed south to the neighborhoods that were beneath the airport flight path. The heat was still ferocious, at 103 degrees, the sun like a molten glass marble.
They were making the turn off Las Vegas Boulevard onto Warm Springs Road when a cop car, lights and siren, blew by, and then another, and Lucas called Rae and said, “Maybe it’s nothing.”
Another cop was coming up behind, not running quite as fast, no lights or siren, and Rae said, “Looks like a big-time nothing.”
“Let’s tag along and see where they go... Maybe this is a high-crime neighborhood,” Lucas said. But it didn’t look high-crime. Itlooked empty, with hot stretches of tan stucco houses with tile roofs, separated by steaming blacktop, nobody on the street.
