The Night Crew

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

The thorns took quite 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 knew, 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: he 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 sidelinewe'd have six or seven Saabs sitting around the house at any one time. I started driving them when I was a kidI 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 fieldI was so madI 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 herhadn't turned her into a blubbering idiot, but she'd liked it, a lotand 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.

Chapter 14

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 said.

'The Malibu cops went over to Tony and Ronnie's place after the shooting and the woman up thereyou 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 itshe 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, somewherethey're still going through the paper, looking for an address.'

'And they're all arrested.'

'All but Tony. Turns out Tony didn't live therehe lives up the hillso 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.'