The Night Crew

'Yeah, but that doesn't get going until late.'

'So we look up this Tarpatkin first,' Harper said. 'I'm looking forward to that.'

In the car, headed back, she asked casually, 'What kind of women do you go out with? Lawyers? Golfers? Country-clubbers?'

He thought for a long moment, guided the car through a knot of curb cruisers, and said, finally, 'I don't go out much anymore.'

She looked at him curiously. 'You don't seem shy.'

'I'm not. I'm just. tired. I mostly want to work, play golf and mess around at my house. I used to go over to see Jacob a couple of times a week. Maybe we'd go out to eat.'

'You're gonna miss him.'

'I can't even believe he's gone,' Harper said, hunching down over the steering wheel, holding on with both hands.

'So maybe I'm being nosy.'

He grinned. 'Maybe you are.'

'Well. That's what I do,' she said.

Then she shut up, because sooner or later, she thought, he'd have a little more to say. He wasn't glib. He wasn't exactly taciturn, but he didn't have much of a line of bullshit.

And after a while he said, 'Going out with women. is just a lot of trouble. Most of them you meet, you know nothing's going to happenbut you've got to spend a few hours with them anyway, being nice. I guess I'm too busy for that. When it's obvious that nothing's going to happen, I'd like to say, "Well, that's that. I'll get you a cab and we can all go home".'

Anna pretended to be horrified: 'Have you ever done that?'

'Of course not. I'm too polite.'

'I'd think you've got a lot of women coming around. You look okay, you've got a lot of hair, guys like you make some money.'

'You'd be surprised how many women don't care about money,' he said. But then he shrugged and added, 'But, yeah. There were quite a few women around for a while. Now I'm getting a reputation as a nasty old curmudgeon, so it's not quite as intense as when I was. on the market.'

'No girlfriends at all?'

'Not right nownot for a while, really. I'd like to.'

He stopped. 'What?' she pressed. 'Like to what?'

'We don't know each other well enough,' he said, 'for me to tell you what I'd like to do.'

A parking place appeared a half-block from the hospital's emergency entrance; Harper dove into it, chortling, fed the meter. But as they started down toward the hospital, a man in a suit in the dimly lit glassed-in entry half-turned toward them, saw them and then suddenly and hurriedly turned back to the hospital doors and disappeared inside.

'Did you see that?' Anna said.

'Yeah.' Harper broke into a trot, Anna running beside him. 'Somebody who doesn't want to talk to us. You know him?'

'Couldn't see his face,' she said.

'White hair,' Harper said. They were moving fast now, hit the doors to the entry, burst into the reception area. No white-haired men. A guard was looking at them, quizzically. Harper hurried toward him, Anna a half-step behind.

'A white-haired guy just came through here,' Harper said. 'Did you see where he went?'

The guard said, 'Yeah, he. hey, who are you guys?'

But he'd started to point, down the halclass="underline" the elevators were just around the corner.

'Elevators,' Anna said to Harper. And she said to the guard, 'Call the intensive care unit on the third floor. If a white-haired guy shows up, watch him. he may have a gun.'

Harper was already hurrying toward the elevators, Anna catching up as the guard said, 'Yes, ma'am,' and picked up a phone.

They turned the corner. Three elevators, one with the door open, waiting. Of the other two, one was on eight, coming down. The other was on two, stopping at three.

'Damn it,' Harper said. He looked around and Anna said, 'Stairs'd be faster,' and they went left and up the stairs, around two flights; as they got to the third floor, Anna heard a door shut below them, the hollow tunnel sound of metal on concrete. She stopped, looked down. 'You hear that?'

'Yeah,' Harper grunted, but he went on past, into the corridor on three. Two nurses were talking at a work station, one with a phone in her hand, and looked up at them.

'Did a white-haired man.'

'No. Nobody came here. The guard just called.'

'Is Pam Glass still down in intensive care, the police officer?'

'I think so.'

They went that way, and Anna blurted, 'Maybe he went down. You heard that door close, he couldn't have been too far ahead of us.'

'Yeah.' They turned the corner into the intensive care unit. Glass was standing next to Creek's bed; Creek's eyes were closed. No white-haired man.

'Nobody just came through here?' Anna asked.

Glass shook her head. 'No. What.?'

Harper said, 'Tell them,' and ran back toward the stairs. Anna asked Glass, 'You got your gun?'

'Yes.'

'Keep a hand on it, there's a guy,' and turned and ran after Harper. She caught him on the stairs and Harper glanced back at her, grunted, shook his head and kept circling down. They came out in a sub-basement, looked both ways, finally turned left, a shorter hall and an exit sign.

The exit led to an underground parking ramp: they hurried along the ramp, and Harper said, 'Get the gun out.'

Anna took the gun out of her jacket pocket, feeling a little sillyand a little dangerousand held it by her pants leg as they turned up the ramp toward a pay booth. A Latino was running out an adding machine in the booth, and Harper said, 'Did a man just run by here?'

'Yes, si, he went that way, one minute.' He pointed up the ramp to the street. They ran up the ramp and found. traffic.

Harper looked both ways, down at Anna and said, 'He's gone.'

She shoved the gun back into her jacket and said, 'Yeah.'

Creek had been awake for a few minutes, had maybe recognized Glass, but maybe not: 'He was drifting,' Glass said. 'He thought he was on his boat.'

Anna told Glass about the white-haired man, and finished with, 'It's possible that it was nothing.'

'No.' Harper disagreed. 'That move he madeI saw that two hundred times when I was a cop. Especially working dope. Someone sees you, figures you for the cops and he turns and splits. Runs in the front door, runs out the back. Just like that: and that's what he was doing.'

'I see it all the time,' Glass said.

'That's what it felt like,' Anna admitted. She kept looking at Creek, then glancing away: his figure disturbed her. He looked hollow, tired. Old, with lines in his face that she hadn't noticed before. He'd always been the opposite of those things, a guy who'd go on forever.

Now he lay there, little of him visible other than his hair and oddly pale eyelids, breathing through a plastic mask, his breath so shallow, his life bumping along on the monitors overhead, like a slow day on a stock-market ticker.

Chapter 13

They left Glass and CreekGlass said she'd try to get Creek moved again, in case the white-haired man was a real threatand went back into the night, heading for the Philadelphia Grill.

'The guy was probably a doper,' Harper said, 'cause he moved so fast. Like a guy who's holding. He didn't stop to look us over, he didn't stop to see if we were coming after himhe just took off. And the way he went out, he must've already been in the hospital, because he knew about the parking ramp exit and how to get there in a hurry.'

'That worries me; he was scouting the place,' Anna said. 'What surprises me is, he was old. Or older.'

'Maybe notcould've been blond, could've been the light on his hair.'

'No. He was older. Fifties, anyway. The way he moved, I'm thinking.' She closed her eyes, letting the scene run through her mind. 'He saw us, he turned, he sort of groped for the door, he pulled it open, almost hit himself with it. He was a little creaky. Maybe even a little heavy. He wasn't a kid, though. He just moved like an older guy.'

'That doesn't fit the profile of any psycho I ever heard of,' Harper said thoughtfully. 'Maybe the guy in ChicagoGacey. He was sorta porky, and a little older than most of them. I think.'