The Night Crew (13 page)

‘‘One of his
poems
?’’

‘‘Compositions; he calls them poems. He’s not really that arty, he just knows . . . how to work the levers on the classical music machine.’’

Harper glanced at her: ‘‘Sounds like you might resent that, a little.’’

‘‘Oh, no. I guess it’s necessary. But I wasn’t good at it.’’

‘‘So you’re a musician.’’

‘‘That’s what I really am,’’ she said. Harper had a way of listening—maybe picked up when he was a cop—that seemed to pull the words out of her. He was attentive:
really
listened.

She told him about growing up in Wisconsin, about her mother’s death. How she’d been the best pianist in her high school, the best they’d ever had. That she’d been the best at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, the year she graduated. That she was the one of the best two or three in graduate school.

‘‘Not quite good enough,’’ she told him, staring out the window at the night. Clark had also been a pianist, not quite at her level, but he’d seen the writing on the wall much sooner than she had. He’d branched into direction and composition, started working the music machine.

‘‘Couldn’t you have gone that way?’’

‘‘Nah. Performance is one thing, composition is something else. Takes a different kind of mind.’’

‘‘Did you ever try it?’’

‘‘I was never really interested in it,’’ she said.

‘‘So what happened?’’

‘‘We were living together, and he was the big intellectual and I was doing session gigs. Movie music. I don’t know; it pulled us apart. I kept thinking that if you just played well enough, practiced hard enough, you’d make it. And that
wasn’t the game at all . . . So I went to Burbank, and he went to Yale.’’

‘‘Ah, that’s really excellent,’’ Harper said.

‘‘What?’’ she asked, half-smiling.

‘‘You
do
resent the mealy little poser.’’

‘‘No, I really don’t,’’ she protested. Then, ‘‘You’d like him. He even plays golf.’’

‘‘Rock bands
play golf,’’ Harper said, not impressed. ‘‘So . . . are you pining for him?’’

‘‘I don’t know,’’ she said. ‘‘Maybe.’’

‘‘Shit.’’

‘‘Yeah, it’s sort of a problem. You know, if you’re thinking about . . . it might be sorta awkward having you stay over.’’

‘‘I’m gonna stay over,’’ he said. ‘‘But I won’t be rattling your doorknob in the night. Staying over is business.’’

‘‘Okay.’’ Was she just the smallest bit disappointed? Maybe.

‘‘Would you play something on the piano for me?’’ he asked.

‘‘If you like.’’ The car seemed hushed; the outside world away from the two of them. ‘‘What music do you listen to?’’

‘‘Mostly hard rock or hard classical; some old funky blues and jazz, but only for an hour or so at a time.’’

‘‘We like the same things,’’ she said, ‘‘except I’m not so big on rock, and a little bigger on the jazz . . . what should I play for you?’’

‘‘Maybe something by, I dunno . . . Sousa, maybe.’’

He turned quickly, saw her embarrassed: ‘‘That was a joke, for Christ’s sake,’’ he laughed. ‘‘Loosen up, Batory.’’

‘‘So who do you like?’’

‘‘You could play me anything by Satie.’’

‘‘Satie? Really?’’

‘‘Really,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve been listening to him a lot; he’s
very delicate and funny, sometimes.’’ He glanced at her, interpreting her silence as skepticism. ‘‘I’m a lawyer, not a fuckin’ moron,’’ he said.

She ducked her head and pointed up the hill. ‘‘Malibu,’’ she said.
The house was a half-block east of Corral, on a short, hooked turnoff with a circle at the end. There were two other homes on the circle, all three showing lights, and all with steel fences, darkened and turned to resemble wrought iron, facing the street. The driveways were blocked with decorative eightfoot-high electric gates between stone pillars.

‘‘We’ll just keep rolling through,’’ Harper said, looking out through the sweep of his headlights. ‘‘Look for dogs, anything that might be a dog . . .’’

‘‘I can’t see anything,’’ Anna said.

They were back out at Corral: Harper stopped, looked both ways, then said, ‘‘We’d be crazy to try to get in the front.’’

‘‘Get in?’’ She looked back at the house, at the fence and the hedge behind it, the security sign next to the stone pillars beside the driveway. ‘‘That place is a fort.’’

‘‘Let’s go get an ice cream,’’ he said. ‘‘Isn’t there an ice cream place down at the shopping center?’’
She got a Dutch chocolate and he took a raspberry and they sat on a bench outside of a Ben & Jerry’s and ate the ice cream, talking about nothing of importance. When they finished, Harper wiped his hands and face with the tiny napkin from the ice cream parlor, pitched it into a trash container and said, ‘‘You drive.’’

‘‘Why?’’

‘‘I want to go back there and take one more look. . . .
Maybe get out.’’

‘‘Jake . . . this is a really bad idea.’’

He nodded. ‘‘I know, but I can’t figure out what else to do. I just want to stand on one of those stone pillars, if I can, and take a look. See what’s in there.’’

‘‘Jake . . .’’

‘‘What, you chicken?’’ he asked.

Never a chicken. Never.
One of the houses had gone dark, but the target house showed lights on all three floors. ‘‘We’ll roll right up, I’ll hop out, do a quick step-up, look in and then get right back in the car and we’re out of there,’’ he said.

‘‘Aw, man . . .’’ But she felt a little thrill, a little of the roaming-through-the-night feel; she took the car into the hook and heard Harper’s door pop.

She slowed and he said, ‘‘Keep rolling, slow, I’ll latch the door, don’t want them to see headlights stopping . . .’’ He hopped out with the car still moving, pushed the door shut until it caught, looked around once as he approached the fence and then stepped on a horizontal brace-bar, pulled himself up and looked into the yard. Anna continued through the circle, headed out toward the street; she rolled her window down and looked over at his back and said, in a harsh whisper, ‘‘Let’s go.’’

‘‘Just a minute . . .’’

And suddenly he was over the fence and out of sight.

‘‘Oh, no . . .’’ She continued moving, but her mind was churning. Better to move than to stop, she thought; she’d go out to the street, do a U-turn out of sight, and come back in. What was he thinking, hopping over the fence? He
was
a moron. She was at the street, touched the brakes to show the red flash of a departing car, did the U-turn on Corral and started back in; rolled the window down on his side as she went, and tried to look out.

As she did, somebody behind the fence screamed: ‘‘Get him . . . get him, over there.’’

And Harper shouted, ‘‘Anna, the highway.’’

She couldn’t see him, but his voice was clear enough: Anna rolled through the circle again, accelerating, the wheels squealing on the new blacktop. Down the short street, a finger of fear in her throat, left down the hill, the BMW tracking as though it were on rails.

BAK!

Was that a shot? Her face jerked to the right, but all she could see was hillside. She’d heard something, but what was it?

BAK!

A shot, that’s what it was. She jammed her foot to the floor, powering through sixty-five, downhill, then hammered the brake as she got to the bottom, paused at the highway, then ran the light and headed around to the left . . .

She looked up the bluff, saw nothing but scrub brush and weeds; the house was right there, fifty feet ahead . . .

And so was Harper. He was spilling down the hill, tumbling, hitting every ten feet, dirt flying, not quite out of control, but not quite under control, either. A car passed her going north, and as soon as it was clear, she swerved across the highway to the left, up onto the narrow weedy shoulder, powered through the dirt and rocks until she was directly below him. He landed in a cloud of dirt, struggled to get up, limped around the car as she popped the passenger door, fell inside and gasped, ‘‘Go . . . go.’’

‘‘I can’t . . .’’ She was looking into a stream of cars coming up from the south . . .

BAK!

‘‘Go, that’s a fuckin’ gun.’’

She jumped on the gas, still on the shoulder, blinked her
lights a few times to intimidate a small white northbound car and swerved across the highway.

‘‘Are you all right?’’

‘‘Yeah.’’ He was out of breath, and his shirt was ripped. ‘‘Boy, was that stupid.’’ He was looking out the back window.

‘‘No kidding,’’ she said, angrily. ‘‘What did you . . .’’

‘‘Yell at me later.’’ He was looking out the back window. ‘‘Right now, I think they’re coming after us. A Cadillac just cleared the bottom of the hill coming this way, I heard them yelling about getting a car.’’

‘‘Oh, boy.’’ The highway was not particularly busy. The northbound cars arrived in short packs, with open stretches between the packs. In the rearview mirror, she saw headlights slewing left to pass a slow moving southbound car, taking advantage of a break in the oncoming traffic.

‘‘You’re gonna have to drive a little faster,’’ Harper said.

‘‘Hold onto your socks.’’ She floored it. Anna always liked speed, and the big BMW accelerated like an unwinding spring, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred, all without hesitation. She blew past two cars, had five seconds of peace in the right-hand lane, then squeezed past an idling Jaguar in the face of an oncoming pickup.

Harper winced, then reached up to the overhead and found a handle to hang onto. ‘‘Maybe not this fast,’’ he said.

‘‘They’re still back there,’’ she said. The Cadillac was cutting through the traffic like a shark through a school of tuna—but its lights seemed to be getting smaller.

They blazed through Malibu, past the shopping center, the garage doors of the beach houses blurring into one long gray line. ‘‘Anna, for Christ’s sake, you’re doing a hundred and twelve. Slow down . . .’’

She shook her head: she was mad, and she could drive. He deserved to be scared. She took another car, pushed a

little harder on the gas, glanced down at the speedometer: a hundred and eighteen. ‘‘This thing rolls.’’

‘‘Jesus,’’ Harper said. He turned to look behind them: ‘‘Anna, they’re out of sight. They’re out of sight.’’

‘‘Keep watching for them,’’ she said. She let the car out for a few more seconds, feeling the speed, then eased off the gas, watched the speed drop below a hundred. Fifteen minutes later, they burned through the Sunset intersection; two minutes later, she turned up Temescal, dropped to a cruise and looked at Harper.

‘‘You were limping.’’

‘‘I might’ve sprained my knee . . . I banged myself up coming down the hill.’’

‘‘And got shot at . . .’’

‘‘But nothing happened . . .’’

‘‘Jake . . .’’ she said in exasperation.

‘‘I was standing there, and I could see some people moving inside a window and there was a crack in the drapes. And I just thought I could take a look . . . and I got in and there was another window down the side. And then everybody started yelling,’’ he said, talking fast. ‘‘There must’ve been some kind of alarm, and I was stuck in the back and people were coming out the front. I ran right past the pool in back, there was a woman out there, she started yelling and I went over the edge and some asshole started shooting.’’

‘‘What do you expect, prowling a house? I used a fishwhacker on a guy who was doing that.’’

‘‘Yeah, well . . .’’ After a moment he said, ‘‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’’

Anna laughed aloud, the first time since she’d heard that Jason was dead. She liked the speed.
Harper made her stop at a gas station pay phone, got a number for the Malibu cops, dialed it and said, ‘‘There’s been a
shooting . . .’’ He gave them the address, and hung up. ‘‘Stir up the bees’ nest,’’ he said.

‘‘What for?’’

‘‘See what happens.’’
There was no point in even trying to go to BJ’s; Harper was a mess from the fall down the hill. He looked, as he said, like he’d been whipped through hell with a soot-bag.

At Anna’s house, Harper hobbled up the walk: ‘‘It’s not really damaged. It just hurts; but nothing’s loose.’’

‘‘I’ve got some of that blue ice stuff you can put on it,’’ she said.

‘‘That’d be good.’’

She kept the ice packs in the refrigerator, and went to get one while Harper disappeared into the bathroom. She stood outside the door with the ice pack and said, ‘‘Okay?’’

Harper opened the door. He’d pulled his golf shirt over his head, and turned around to show her his back. He looked like he’d been scourged, long fiery rips running down his back. ‘‘Not so good,’’ he said.

‘‘You must’ve run into some thorn trees up there.’’ She walked around him to the medicine cabinet, found some antiseptic cream. ‘‘C’mon, I’ll put some of this stuff on.’’

He sat shirtless in a kitchen chair, while she pulled a desk lamp around, focused it on his back. Some of the scratches were deep, but none was still bleeding; he also showed a scrape on his shoulder and a large red-blue bruise on his forearm.