The Night Crew (14 page)

She dabbed on the antiseptic cream and he flinched and said, ‘‘Ow,’’ and ‘‘Is there a sliver in there?’’

She touched the spot again and he flinched and she said, ‘‘Maybe. I’m gonna have to wipe this off.’’

‘‘Well, take it easy.’’

‘‘Hey, I’m doing the best I can.’’

She wiped the cream away with a Kleenex, spotted a broken thorn—and then, further down his back, three more of them. ‘‘Sit still,’’ she said. ‘‘I need tweezers.’’

The thorns took a while, but she got them all, and layered on the antiseptic cream. ‘‘You’ll make a mess out of a shirt,’’ she said.

‘‘I’ve got a couple of old t-shirts,’’ he said. He stood up, turned around once in his tracks, stretched, flexed, testing his back, and said, ‘‘I’m gonna be a little sore in the morning.’’

Anna could suddenly smell him, sweat and some kind of musky deodorant and blood, maybe, a salty smell; and realized that she was standing very close to a large half-naked man in her kitchen, and that patching up his back might have broken down a wall a little before she’d intended.

Harper picked up the sudden change of atmosphere and laughed, lightly, and said, ‘‘Suddenly got a little close in here.’’

‘‘Yeah.’’ She flushed.

She reached over to pick up the first-aid cream and he caught her arm and said, ‘‘So . . . could you kiss me once to make it feel better?’’

‘‘Well . . .’’

He kissed her very easily, and she kissed back, again, just a little out of her control, for that extra half-second that she hadn’t intended. She pulled away and said, ‘‘Oh, boy,’’ and Harper said, ‘‘Maybe I better get that t-shirt.’’

The t-shirt put a little distance between them, but not much: at least, she thought, there wasn’t so much skin around. He brought a kitchen chair into the hallway, next to the piano, and said, ‘‘You were gonna play a Satie for me.’’

‘‘It’s late . . .’’

‘‘I can’t lie down until my back dries up a little,’’ he said.

So she played for him: the delicate, familiar, simple little
‘‘First Gymnopedie.’’ The final chords hung in the hall, and when they died, she said, ‘‘There. Like it?’’

He bobbed his head: ‘‘Yeah.’’

Sticky silence.

‘‘I don’t suppose you’d want to come sit on my lap for a minute, over on the couch,’’ he said.

‘‘Maybe just for a minute,’’ she said.
So they necked for a while, and he was careful with his hands; held on tight, but didn’t presume; or not too much.

‘‘You don’t presume,’’ she said, after a while. ‘‘Too much.’’

‘‘I’m a subtle guy; I’ve got you figured out, and not presuming is my way of worming myself into your confidence. Then, just when you’re looking the other way, bang!’’

‘‘Could have picked a better word,’’ she said.

‘‘Hmm . . .’’
Harper’s father had worked at a bank for forty years, he said, just high enough up to get a golf club membership back when that was done. His mother had been a housewife and a better golfer than her husband. Harper had taken the game up early, gone to college on a golf scholarship and was ‘‘last man at UCLA.’’

‘‘Didn’t get along with the coach,’’ he said. ‘‘Got along with his wife, though.’’

‘‘Ah.’’

‘‘The coach and his pals convinced me I’d never make the tour,’’ he said. ‘‘I was taking the law enforcement sequence because that was the easiest one to fit around the golf. The next thing I know, I’m working for the L.A. sheriff’s department. Nine years, never liked it much: I finally went off to law school because the police work was driving me nuts.’’

‘‘What happened with you and your wife?’’

‘‘Ah, you know . . . We just couldn’t keep it together. First I was on the street all the time, then I got sent to vice and I was hanging out with dopers and hookers . . .’’

‘‘Mess around a little?’’

‘‘Never. But you start to reflect the culture. Sometimes I think I scared her. Or disgusted her,’’ he said. ‘‘Then I started going to law school full time, and then I moved up to homicide, Christ, I was so busy I never saw either her or the kids . . .’’
And he carefully opened up Anna, again, as he had in the car: got her to talk about her mother, her brother, her father.

‘‘Pretty normal family, until Mom died,’’ Anna said. ‘‘ After that: I don’t know. It just seemed like everybody started to work themselves to death . . . We still had some good times, but overall, there was a pretty grim feeling to it. When I go back now . . . I don’t want to stay.’’

‘‘Did your brother teach you to drive? Like tonight?’’

Anna laughed: ‘‘My dad used to fix Saabs as a sideline— we’d have six or seven Saabs sitting around the house at any one time. I started driving them when I was a kid—I mean, like really a kid, when I was seven or eight. My dad and my brother used to run them in the enduro races at the county fair, I’d pit crew . . .’’

‘‘Sexism,’’ Harper said.

‘‘Severe sexism,’’ she agreed. ‘‘Once . . . my dad always took me up to Madison for my music lesson, but one time, in the summer, he’d cut hay when it was supposed to be dry all week, and the next thing you know this big line of thunderstorms popped up over in Minnesota. You could see them coming on the TV radar, and he was running around baling and he just didn’t have time to take me. So when he was out in the field—I was so mad—I jumped in this old Saab and
drove in myself. I was ten, I had to look through the steering wheel to see out the windshield. My music teacher didn’t see me coming, and I got through the lesson, but she saw me drive away and she freaked out and called the cops and called my dad . . .’’ She laughed at the memory: ‘‘He never missed another lesson, though.’’

‘‘Ten?’’ he asked.

‘‘Yup. I can drive a tractor, too. And a front-end loader.’’

‘‘If you could do plumbing and welding, I’d probably marry you,’’ he said.

And they necked a little more, until he shifted uncomfortably and said, ‘‘We either stop now, or we . . . keep going.’’

‘‘Better stop,’’ Anna said. She hopped off his lap, leaving him a little tousled and forlorn. She laughed, and said, ‘‘You look harassed.’’

‘‘A little,’’ he said, and again, some underlying source of amusement seemed to rise to the surface of his eyes.

She turned and headed for the stairs. ‘‘No rattling of doorknobs, okay?’’

‘‘Okay,’’ he said, watching her go. She was on the stairs when he called after her, ‘‘You weren’t thinking about this other guy, were you? This Clark weasel-guy?’’

‘‘No . . . no, I wasn’t, and he’s not a weasel,’’ she said. And, in fact, the name ‘‘Clark’’ had never touched her consciousness.
But it did that night.

Sitting on Harper’s lap had aroused her—hadn’t turned her into a blubbering idiot, but she’d liked it, a lot—and in her sleep, she relived a night with Clark, pizza and wine and a little grass. And Clark, talking, touching her, turning her on . . .

She rolled and twisted, and woke a half-dozen times, listening: but nobody touched a doorknob.

fourteen

The next morning they bumped around the kitchen, not talking much but jostling each other, eating toast, looking at the blue morning sky, touching; working up to something.

Then Wyatt called for Harper. Harper took the phone from Anna, listened a while, said quietly, ‘‘Thanks, man . . . let me know.’’

‘‘What?’’ Anna asked.

‘‘The Malibu cops went over to Tony and Ronnie’s place after the shooting and the woman up there—you could hear her screaming at me?—anyway, she ran out the back and threw a bag of dope over the hill.’’ He picked up his putter and twirled it like a baton.

‘‘Over the hill? Down where you were?’’

‘‘Yeah. She was trying to get rid of it—she thought they were being busted. But a cop coming up from the next yard saw her, found the bag. They took five pounds of methedrine off the hill, got a warrant, took a half-pound of cocaine out
of a bedroom and found receipts for a couple of rental storage places.’’

‘‘Almost big enough to make the papers,’’ Anna said.

‘‘Almost . . . They took the rental places down this morning and found lots of interesting chemicals. There’s a factory, somewhere—they’re still going through the paper, looking for an address.’’

‘‘And they’re all arrested.’’

‘‘All but Tony. Turns out Tony didn’t live there—he lives up the hill—so they had to let him go.’’ He looked bleakly pleased with that.

‘‘So what’re we going to get out of this? Will they ask about your kid?’’

‘‘That’s part of the agenda,’’ Harper said, putting on his grim face. ‘‘As a favor. They owe me, now.’’
Creek didn’t seem to have changed much, although his doctor said he was improving: ‘‘He was awake, asking about you,’’ the doc said. ‘‘He was more worried about you than about himself.’’

‘‘So he’s fine,’’ Anna said.

‘‘No. He’s still got one foot in the woods. He could still have a clot problem, the way his lung was damaged . . . but he’s looking better. And that friend of his is a real morale boost.’’

Glass was sitting by Creek’s bed, reading a mystery, looking up every few minutes to see if he had wakened.

‘‘I should have been here,’’ Anna said. A little finger of envy touched her. Glass had been here, she hadn’t; she had been the one perceived as faithful. Of course, she hadn’t been: she’d been running around Malibu getting shot at, and necking with a guy Creek didn’t like . . .

‘‘. . . blood work looks fine,’’ the doctor was saying. ‘‘He

could be out walking around in a week, and you’d never know he’d been shot.’’

But Creek’s face still looked like it had been made of old parchment; Anna shivered, and turned away.
They were just leaving the hospital when the cell phone rang and Anna lifted it out of her jacket pocket and said, ‘‘Yeah?’’

‘‘Let me talk to Harper.’’ A man’s voice, not one that she knew.

She looked at Harper and said, ‘‘Jake: It’s for you.’’

Harper took the phone and said, ‘‘Yeah.’’

He listened for a moment, then handed it back to Anna: ‘‘I don’t know how to hang it up.’’

‘‘What’s happening?’’

‘‘I gotta drop you off.’’

She looked at him, catching his eyes: she was beginning to get into him, like she could get into Creek. Harper’s eyes shifted, but just a second too late. ‘‘Something happened,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m coming.’’

‘‘Anna . . .’’

‘‘Shut up. I bailed your butt out last night when you were falling off the cliff: that counts for something.’’

‘‘Something—but this is different.’’

‘‘I’m going,’’ she said.
Harper drove downtown, hard, jumping lights, busting traffic, ignoring the fingers from angry drivers, getting there. ‘‘Gimme the phone,’’ he said, as they pulled into a noparking zone outside the Parker Center. She handed it to him and he poked in a number, listened for a minute, then said, ‘‘We’re here,’’ and then, ‘‘Okay.’’

He handed the phone back to Anna and said, ‘‘Wait here. If a cop tries to move you, tell him your boyfriend’s a cop and he’s inside talking to Lieutenant Austen.’’

She nodded and said, ‘‘Okay,’’ and he hopped out of the car and hurried away. Five minutes later, he was back. He jumped in the car, did a U-turn and they were gone, headed north.

‘‘Where’re we going?’’

‘‘Malibu,’’ he said.

‘‘What for?’’

‘‘See a guy.’’

‘‘Jake, goddammit . . .’’

‘‘Look: I don’t know what’s going to happen.’’

Ronnie’s house—or Tony and Ronnie’s, or whatever it was—looked abandoned behind its gate. Fluorescent-yellow crime-scene tape was wrapped around the stone posts, with a notice forbidding entry to anyone who wasn’t a cop.

Harper pulled into the driveway, climbed out, stuck a key in a lock at the side of the gate. As the gate silently rolled back, Harper got into the car and drove up the driveway to the garage, where he parked. He walked around behind the car, pressed a button on his key and the trunk popped open. He took out a small brown-paper grocery sack, with a rolled top, like a kid’s lunch bag.

‘‘Let’s go,’’ he said. Anna started toward the house, but he said, ‘‘This way—we’re just parking here.’’

He was walking away from the house, up the hillside.

‘‘Where’re we going?’’

‘‘The next house up is Tony’s. There’s a pathway up here somewhere, through the plantings.’’

‘‘Your friends,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Do they know what you’re doing?’’

‘‘They think they do,’’ Harper said. He turned and looked down at her. ‘‘Listen, I sorta wish you weren’t here, but . . . I can use the help. My friends’ll help me out from a distance, because they know I’d never talk about it. But they won’t
be here when the shit hits the fan and I might need somebody to be here.’’

She shrugged: ‘‘So I’m here. If this is the jerk who shot Creek, who’s been chasing me around . . .’’

‘‘Probably not this guy,’’ Harper said. He started up the hill again, then pointed: ‘‘There’s the break in the brush, that’s the path . . . This isn’t our guy, but he knows our guy, I think.’’

He took a few more steps up the hill, then stopped again. ‘‘Whatever happens here, you do two things: you don’t freak out, and you stand there with your gun and you watch everything and don’t say shit, no matter what happens. No matter what happens. If we bump into somebody, you’re this tough methedrine chick and you keep your mouth shut.’’
They climbed through a hedge and up the hill, Harper still carrying the sack, then broke into a grassy slope below a pool patio. The house, a white concrete Mediterraneanmodern, loomed over the patio. Harper never hesitated, but with Anna hurrying behind, climbed straight ahead, crossed the patio, took another key out of his pocket and pushed it into a back-door lock.

‘‘Alarms are off,’’ he said, as he turned the key. ‘‘No dogs.’’

‘‘Your friends tell you that?’’

‘‘Yeah. Don’t touch anything.’’ He stuck his head inside and hollered, ‘‘Hello? Anybody home? Anybody?’’ No answer. He took a few more steps into a red-tiled wet room: ‘‘Hello? Anybody home?’’

The house answered with the silence of emptiness. ‘‘We’re okay,’’ he said. He unrolled the sack, took out a pair of yellow plastic household gloves and handed them to her. ‘‘Put these on.’’ She took the gloves and he took out a pair for himself, stuck the bag under an arm and pulled the gloves
on, wiggling his fingers. ‘‘Good,’’ he muttered. He opened the sack again, took out a brown fabric wad, shook it into the recognizable form of two dark nylons and said, ‘‘For your head.’’ He pulled his on like a stocking cap, so that he’d pull it down over his face with one move.

Then he opened the sack a last time, and took out a gun, a black revolver.

‘‘Jake?’’

‘‘Yeah. Now we both get one,’’ he said, and she felt the weight of the pistol in her pocket. ‘‘These are bad people . . . C’mon.’’

‘‘What’re we doing?’’

‘‘Look around the house. Probably won’t be much, but you can’t tell.’’

The house might have been elegant, in a certain California-nouveau way, but it wasn’t. The furniture looked like it had been rented, complete with the phony modern graphics on the walls; the pale green carpets were stained and the exposed hardwood near one row of windows was raw and warped, as though the windows had been left open for several weeks, and rain had come in; and the curtains stank with tobacco—cigars, Anna thought. The basement was empty except for a pile of cardboard appliance boxes at the bottom of the stairs—boxes for TVs, stereos, computers, Xerox machines, satellite dishes, VCRs, an electric piano. ‘‘Haul the packing boxes to the top of the stairs and fire it down,’’ Harper said as he peered at the mess.

The master bedroom contained a circular bed with a circular headboard and custom rayon sheets; it faced a projection TV. Beside the TV was a rack of porno tapes, along with a few Westerns and music videos. The chest of drawers held perhaps two hundred sets of Jockey underwear and almost nothing else. A dozen suits hung in a closet, along with a pile of blue boxes full of dry-cleaned shirts and more underwear.
The other four bedrooms had been slept in—the beds were unmade—but neither the bedrooms nor the adjoining baths showed much in the way of personal effects— nothing feminine—and only the most basic shaving and washing supplies.

They found nothing of special interest—no paper. The house was eerily devoid of records of any kind. ‘‘He doesn’t do business here,’’ Harper said.

‘‘I don’t think he really lives here,’’ Anna agreed. ‘‘He must have a place somewhere else—this is like a motel room. You notice in the bathroom, his shaving stuff is still in a Dopp kit.’’

‘‘Yeah . . .’’

Harper glanced at his watch: ‘‘Let’s go.’’

‘‘We’re done?’’

‘‘Not exactly.’’

He led the way downstairs, looked around once more, then pulled her into a book-lined office. All the books were in sets: none of them, as far as Anna could tell, had been opened. Harper started pulling them off the shelves, letting them drop to the floor. He did it almost idly.

‘‘Jake?’’ Anna asked. ‘‘What’re we doing?’’

‘‘Waiting,’’ he said. ‘‘Tony ought to be here any minute.’’

‘‘What?’’ She turned and looked out of the library; the front door was out of sight, but it was right around the corner.

‘‘We’ll hear the car,’’ he said. ‘‘He’ll either put it in the garage and come in through the kitchen, or he’ll leave it in the drive and come through the front door.’’

Anna was confused. ‘‘What? We’re gonna jump him?’’

‘‘More or less,’’ Harper said. He pushed a few more books on the floor. One of them was a fake: the cover fell open to reveal a hollowed-out interior packed with money. Harper
turned and gazed at her for a moment, weighing her, and then said, ‘‘That’s why we’re here.’’
She thought she could talk him out of it: ‘‘Jake, we can’t do this—too much could go wrong. Somebody could get hurt, bad.’’

But he wouldn’t move. ‘‘I’ve done stuff like this two hundred times. Tony oughta be paranoid enough that . . .’’ And then they felt, rather than heard, arrival sounds from outside. Harper said, ‘‘Quiet now . . . just stick with this.’’

He dropped to his hands and knees and crab-walked into the front room. From her angle in the office, she could see him easing up to a crack in the drapes.

Five seconds later he was back: ‘‘Shit. He’s with somebody. Another guy. Stay with me, Anna.’’

‘‘Aw . . .’’ She was trapped: a bad idea that she’d ridden too far, and now it was too late to get out. So she crouched, tense, and Harper pulled the nylon over his face, and waved a hand at her, and she pulled hers down. Then Harper took the gun out of his pocket and they waited.
Tony came through the door and he was shouting when he came through: ‘‘You don’t tell me that shit, you don’t tell me, you just fuckin’ well better . . .’’ He was a short, paunchy man in his late thirties, wearing a gray dress suit, a striped tie over a blue silk shirt; the man with him was tall, thin, with a mustache, a deep tan and a black leather briefcase; in good shape, like a serious tennis player. When Harper, with the mask and gun, stepped out of the office, his double-take spun Tony around in midsentence.

‘‘If either one of you fuckin’ move, I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ heart right through your fuckin’ spine,’’ Harper growled. His gun, held in both hands, was pointed at Tony’s chest. ‘‘Lay down on the floor, on your backs, heads toward
each other, top of your head toward the top of his head, arms stretched out so they overlap.’’

‘‘What the fuck . . .’’

‘‘LAY ON THE FUCKIN’ FLOOR,’’ Harper screamed, and the pistol began to shake and jerk, and Anna could see him chewing on the nylon mask; if he was acting, he was terrific. If he wasn’t, he was crazy. ‘‘LAY DOWN, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS, OR I’LL . . .’’ Saliva and anger seemed to choke him and he gnashed at the nylon, and suddenly his teeth broke through and he ran three steps toward Tony, the gun poking out at Tony’s forehead, and Tony screamed back, ‘‘No, no, no . . .’’ and the two men got shakily down on the floor, lying on their backs, arms stretched over their heads.

Harper, gun fixed on Tony’s head, fished a pair of open handcuffs out of his pocket and dropped them on Tony’s face. ‘‘Put them on. I want to hear them snap shut.’’ Tony put them on. The tall man was next: ‘‘Thread ’em through Tony’s, then snap ’em.’’