Tremanty’s phone buzzed. “Yeah?” He listened, then said, “Well, shit. But, thank you.”
“Where is it?” Rae asked.
“On Las Vegas Boulevard north of here. Then it died.”
“She said she threw it in the toilet,” Lucas said. “And she said Deese is going to be at the Show Boat mall, at a Chipotle restaurant, at seven o’clock.” He glanced at his phone. “We’ve got nineteen minutes to get there, wherever there is.”
“I know where it is,” Bob said. “You can check a map on your phone, but I saw it right up the boulevard. North of here—where that phone was. Maybe three minutes away.” They were all hustling along behind Bob. “Not counting how long it takes to get to the self-parking.”
They ran, weaving through the slot machines on Caesars main floor, setting off whirlpools of unhappy gamblers.
—
IN THE CAR, Tremanty asked, “Call the Vegas cops?”
Lucas: “What do you think? If we have a bunch of copsflooding the place, we’ll never see him. He’ll see them first and be outta there.”
Bob said, “We’ll really stink up the place if we don’t tell them at all. We gotta tell somebody or we’ll have major diplomatic problems.”
“You’re right,” Lucas said. And Tremanty nodded.
Lucas, in the passenger seat while Bob drove, took out his wallet and found a card for Tom Harvey, the homicide cop they’d met over Beauchamps’s dead body. Harvey had scribbled his personal cell number on the back. Lucas punched it into his phone as Bob ran a red light turning north onto Las Vegas Boulevard.
Rae was looking at her iPad, with a map of the mall’s interior on it; she spotted the Chipotle’s.
Harvey answered, and Lucas identified himself and told him what was happening. Harvey said, “Jesus, Davenport, we gotta have somebody on the scene. Let me round up all the plainclothes guys I got—”
“If the tip’s right, he’ll be there for only five minutes, starting at seven o’clock,” Lucas said. “We’re on our way, with an FBI agent, and will be there in three or four minutes, but we’ve got to park and then find the Chipotle’s. So it’s now fourteen minutes, no, thirteen minutes to seven, so do what you gotta do, but we can’t have a bunch of uniforms running through the place, waving their guns around.”
“I’m on the way,” Harvey said, and he hung up.
Lucas said, “I’m dialing up the conference call,” and all their phones started ringing. They checked to make sure they were all talking to one another, then tucked the phones away still turned on.
—
A MINUTE LATER, Bob made a wild left turn, and Rae directed him to the parking structure. Parked, looking at Rae’s iPad map of the mall, Lucas and Tremanty worked through how they’d make the approach as Bob and Rae pulled on compact bulletproof vests.
They locked the truck and, outside the mall’s entrance, stopped to catch their breaths, and Lucas said, “She said he’ll be in the Chipotle’s for five minutes. It must be a meet. I bet he’s meeting with Santos, or maybe even Roger Smith. Deese, Smith, and Santos know me and Sandro. We gotta hang back. Rae and Bob, you lead. When you see him, move, and we’ll come running.”
Rae: “Time’s up. We gotta go.”
Everybody nodded, and Lucas said, “Inside and to your right,” and they went through the doors into the mall. A few seconds later, Lucas grabbed Rae’s arm, as she led the way in, and said, “Wait, wait. Jesus, the place is jammed.” He turned to Bob and Rae. “You gotta get right on top of him. We can’t have a firefight in here, everybody will panic, we’ll kill ten people.”
“Got it,” Bob said. To Rae: “We keep people between us and him until we go through the door and then we’ve gotta be fast. Real fast.”
Rae, tense, focused: “Yes. Watch his hands, Bob. Watch his hands.”
—
LUCAS AND TREMANTYheld back as Bob and Rae led the way.
Tremanty: “My God, there are a lot of people. Must be a special event.”
There were forty or fifty people within a few dozen feet of them, strolling through the mall, drinking soda from plastic cups, some of them dragging kids along, dressed in T-shirts and shorts and athletic shoes and baseball caps.
“This is bad,” Lucas said. He could feel the anxiety crawling up the back of his neck. People in the mall were looking at Bob and Rae and their bulletproof vests. He saw Rae talking to a blond woman in a cowboy suit, who, shaking her head, turned and hurried off into the crowd. And then Bob lifted his phone to his face and said, “I can see inside the Chipotle’s and he’s not in there.”
“Then back off,” Lucas said. “Get all the way across to the other side of the mall, like you’re going somewhere else. That crowd doesn’t like the looks of you.”
