The Night Crew

'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.'

'Somethingbut 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 no-parking 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 houseor Tony and Ronnie's, or whatever it waslooked 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 waywe'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 Mediterranean-modern, 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 tobaccocigars, Anna thought. The basement was empty except for a pile of cardboard appliance boxes at the bottom of the stairsboxes 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 inthe beds were unmadebut neither the bedrooms nor the adjoining baths showed much in the way of personal effectsnothing feminineand only the most basic shaving and washing supplies.

They found nothing of special interestno 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 elsethis 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.