The Night Crew

'All right, we'll tell the doc. You're gonna be around, right?'

'Yeah. Wait.' Anna dug in a pocket, took out a business card, borrowed a pen from Wyatt and said, 'Turn around, let me use your back.' Using his back as a writing surfacehe seemed to like itshe scribbled two phone numbers on her card, and handed it to him. 'The first number is my home phone, it's unlisted with an answering machine. The next one is the cell phone I carry around with me. And on the front is the phone in the truck. I'm always around one or two of them.'

'Thanks. Make the statement.' He looked back at his partner, sighed and started that way.

'Makes your teeth hurt, doesn't it?' Anna said after him.

He stopped and half-turned. 'What does?'

'Wanting to sleep with her so bad.'

Wyatt regarded her gloomily, then broke down in a self-conscious grin. 'I don't think a woman could ever know how bad it gets,' he said. He started walking back, then turned, and in a tone that said, This is important, he added: 'And it's not just that I want to sleep with her, you know. That's only. the start of it.'

Chapter 5

Anna made the statement, and headed south. Creek lived in a town house in Marina Del Rey with two Egyptian Mau cats, seven hundred sailing books and a billiards table he claimed had been stolen from the set of a James Cagney movie. He still wasn't answering the phone, and Anna suspected that he'd be on his boat.

Lost Dogwas a centerboard S-2/7.9 with a little Honda outboard hanging off the stern, and Creek had sailed it to Honolulu and back. On his return, Anna had presented him with a Certificate of Stupidity, which hung proudly in the main cabin, over the only berth big enough for Creek to sleep on.

Anna dumped her car in a parking lot, walked across the tarmac to the basin, down the long white ramp, through the clutching, pleasant odors of algae and gasoline. She spotted the Lost Dog'skelly-green sail covers, so at least he wasn't out sailing.

He was, in fact, down below, installing a marine head where he'd once carried a Porta Potti.

'Creek,' she called, 'come out of there.'

Creek poked his head up the companionway. He was shiftless, had a hacksaw in his hand, and his hair was sodden with sweat. He read Anna's face and said, 'What happened?'

'Jason's dead,' Anna said bluntly.

Creek stared at her for a moment, then shook his head wearily, and, 'Aw, shit.' He ducked down the companionway and the hacksaw clanged into a toolbox. A moment later, he emerged again, wearing gym shorts, his body as hairy as a seventies shag carpet. 'Fuckin' crank, I bet,' he said.

'He was shot,' Anna said.

'Shot?' Creek thought about it for a moment, then shrugged, an Italian shrug with hands. 'Still, probably dope.'

'Yeah, maybe,' Anna said.

'What else would it be?'

'I don't know,' Anna said. She filled him in on the details: where the body was found, how. 'I was afraid it was you.'

'Naw; I won't float.'

She let some of it out, now: 'His face looked like notebook paper: it was white, it was like.' She happened to look into the harbor water, where a small dead fish floated belly-up. '. Like that fish. He didn't look like he'd ever been alive.'

'You know who he hung out with,' Creek said. 'You give those kids enough time, they'll kill you. Fuckin' crazy Hollywood junkie crackheads.'

Anna looked up at him, nibbled her lip. She didn't want to tell him that she'd given his name to the cops, but she had to. He had to be ready. 'Listen, I had to make a statement to the cops. We might have been the last people who saw Jason alive, except for the killer. I told them about Jason using the crank and the other stuff, 'cause it might be relevant.'

Creek exhaled, threw his head back and looked at the Windex at the top of the mast. 'Wind is shit today,' he said. And: 'They'll be coming to see me.'

Anna nodded. 'That's why I stopped by. They wanted the names of everybody on the crew with Jason,' she said. 'I think we ought to bag it tonight, maybe for a couple of days.'

'Fine with me. I've got work to do on the boat,' Creek said. He flopped his arms, a gesture of resignation. In the bad old days, Creek had run boatloads of grass up from Mexico. He'd never been caught with a load, but at the end, the cops had known all about him, and when he'd been tripped up with a dime bag, they'd used it to put him in Chino for three hard years. He considered himself lucky.

'If this was Alabama, I'd still be inside,' he said. He hadn't smuggled or used drugs in a decade, but if the cops ran his name as a member of the night crew, they'd get a hit when his name came up: and they'd be around. 'You better get in touch with Louis.'

'Already did, on the phone,' Anna said. 'But I wanted you to know they'll probably be coming around. I woulda lied to them.'

'Nah, they would of caught you, and then they woulda wondered why you were lying.' He grinned at her: 'You want to go out and sit in the sun?'

On the afternoons when Creek wasn't working, he'd crank up the Honda outboard, motor out of the marina into the Pacific, raise just enough sail to carry him out a bit further, then back the jib, ease the main, lash the tiller to leeward and drift, sometimes all night, listening to the ocean.

Anna shook her head at the invitation: 'I don't think so,' she said. 'I want to get back home, take a bath. I smell like a. dead guy. I've got it in my nose.'

Jason had worked with them on and off for two yearsthey'd probably been out with him once a month, perhaps a little more often. Say, thirty times, Anna thought, a few hours each time. He was good at it: he had an artistic eye, knew how to frame a shot and wasn't afraid to stick his face into trouble.

His main shortcoming was a lack of focus: he would get caught by something that interested himmight be a face, or visually tricky shot, and lose track of the story.

Anna cleaned up the house for a half-hour, bored, on edge and depressed all at once, and finally dragged two old Mission chairs into the back and began sanding the paint off. She'd found them in a yard sale, in reasonable condition, and figured she'd make about nine million percent profit on them, if she could ever get the turquoise paint off them.

The work was fiddly, dull, but let her think about Jason: not puzzling out the murder, not looking for connections, just remembering the nights he'd spent in the back of the truckthe decapitated woman on Olympic; the crazy Navajo with the baseball bat in the sex-toy joint, the pink plastic penis-shaped dildos hurtling through the videotape like Babylonian arrows coming down on Jerusalem.

She grinned at that memory: stopped grinning when she remembered the fight at the Black Tulip, when the horse-players had gone after the TV lights. Or the time they taped the two young runaways, sisters, looking for protection on Sunset, the fifty-year-old wolves already closing in.

At seven o'clock, with the daylight fading, she quit on the sanding, went inside, made a gin and tonic. The TV was running in the background, as it always was, and as she turned to go back outdoors, she saw the tape of the guy being hit by the pig. He was getting more than his money's worth, she thought, and grinned at the sight. Then: Jason got that shot. She stopped smiling and, still smelling of the paint-stripper, carried the drink out to the canal-side deck and dropped into a canvas chair.

'Anna.' Her name came out of the sky.

She looked up, and saw Hobart Page looking down from his second-story sundeck next door. 'We're having margaritas. Come on up.'

'Thanks, Hobie, but, uh, I had a friend die. I just want to sit and think for a while.'

Another voice: Jim McMillan, Hobie's live-in. She could see his outline against the eastern sky. 'Jeez. You okay?'

'Yeah, yeah. Bums me out, though,' she said.

'Well, come over if you need company.'

She'd just finished the drink when the phone rangthe home phone, the unlisted number. Creek or Louis, maybe her father, or one of a half-dozen other people, she thought.