The Night Crew

Anna recoiled: 'I won't come into it, will I?'

Glass grinned. 'Can't stand the heat, huh? You know how it is. a couple of days, and something'll leak.'

'Yeah. jeez.' Anna pulled at her lip, staring at Creek. 'You: get back into bed.'

'Why? I feel okay.'

'Cause I want to take Pam away for a few minutes, and I don't want you dropping dead while we're gone.'

'You'd rather have me laying dead in bed?'

'Yeah, as a matter of fact. Then it wouldn't be my fault for not telling you to lay down.'

Creek shook his head, not following the logic, but sat on the bed, and finally pulled his legs up.

'Stay there,' Glass said.

'Arf, arf,' Creek said. 'Like the family dog. Stay, Fido.'

In the hall, Glass said, smiling but intent, 'I've been wanting to talk to you.'

'About Creek.'

'Yes. Right now, if you crooked your finger, he'd come running. I want to know if you're going to crook.'

Anna shook her head. 'I'm not sure you're right about thatbut anyway, Creek and I. I don't know. We went past that point. Or I did. And I think he did, but maybe he hasn't figured it out yet.'

'Why didn't. you know.'

'He came along at the wrong time, and by the time I was, you know, ready for something. it was too late. We'd been sort of. brotherly-sisterly for too long.'

'He never tried to.' They were both fumbling for words, as though they were creating a special Creek vocabulary,'. develop anything?'

'Not directly. Creek looks like a bear, and he's been to jail, and the Marines, and all thatbut he's sensitive. He usually knows what I'm thinking before I do, and if you guys last, he'll get that way with you.'

'He already is, a little.'

Anna nodded, grinned and poked Glass on the arm: 'He's a good deal.'

Glass blew hair out of her face and her shoulders drooped, as if her blood pressure had just dropped fifty points. And she said, 'You needed something from me?'

'I just needed to talk to you about your partner.'

'Huh?'

'I think he's the guy we saw up here, that we chased. I think he was trying to check on you.'

The other woman's eyes defocused for a few seconds, then she nodded briskly and said, 'Yeah. Damn.'

'So.'

'I'll talk to him,' Glass said. Then she grinned ruefully and said, 'Men really do come from another planet, you know?'

Anna was ready when she went back into the parking garage: but nothing happened. Nothing. The garage was so silent that no television movie in history could have resisted the moment: the killer and Anna would be there, toe to toe, and Anna would kill him.

Or something.

She was barely prepared for nothing at all.

In the car, she went back to her house, parked nose-in to the garage, left the engine running. Hobie called down, 'Offer's still open,' and she yelled, 'Thanks, Hobie, but I'm out of here.'

She sat in the house for a moment, then walked through the kitchen and checked the lock on the canal-side door, and then went back through the house and out, locked the front and drove back out.

She thought this way: If the killer was watching her, he wouldn't watch from within the canal area. The road through the district was one-way, and narrow, and nobody could wait on it without being noticed. He'd watch either the entrance or the exit, and pick her up coming or going.

All right. Let him pick her up.

She touched the gun in her pocket.

When she told him on the phone that she was going to kill him, it wasn't idle chatter. If she could get him in the right place, she'd do it.

But she'd have to handle it carefully.

She liked Jake a lot, liked everything about himor, at least, thought she could straighten out the parts of him that weren't quite right. A snip here, a tuck there, and he'd be presentable. But she liked his looks, his attitude, the way he lived.

But she didn't quite understand, deep in her heart, why, he hadn't killed the dealer in the hotel. She would have.

So if she was going to stir this killer out of his muck. Jake couldn't know.

Chapter 22

Harper was sitting in a lawn chair in front of his house, a hardcover book by his heel, in an attitude of waiting. He pushed himself out of the chair when Anna pulled up, and sauntered around the car.

'Long time,' he said. 'Did you get your head straight?'

'About some things,' she said. She stood on her tiptoes, gave him a peck on the lips, feeling guilty for not telling him that she was trolling for the killer. More guiltythis was oddbecause he smelled kind of good. She said, 'Creek's walking around.'

'Excellent.' Harper, nice guy, seemed genuinely pleased.

'Listen, I've had a few thoughts.'

'Let's go around back. I've been itching to fire the gun again.'

His eyebrows went up: 'Your violent streak is showing.'

She grinned at him: 'I've just been carrying it everywhere, and. I don't know, I've just got the urge to pull the trigger.'

Harper got the earmuffs and a couple of Coke cans and they walked side by side out to the gully. 'We didn't spend enough time with Catwell, Jason's friend at Kinko's,' he said. 'I figured out this much: either it's a coincidence that this killer shows up the day after Jason is killed, or.'

He waited for her to fill in the blank, but she couldn't think of anything. 'Or what?'

'Or,' he said, 'it's not. A coincidence.'

'Gosh. You're just like Einstein.'

He held up a finger, his face serious: 'Listen. I don't think it's a coincidence. Maybe it isI've got some ideas about that, toobut I don't think so. So let's take them one at a time.'

'Go ahead.'

'If it's not a coincidence, then the killer fixed on you between the time you picked up Jason, and the time Jason ran off.'

'Okay.' She was amused by his lawyerly dissection.

'In that time, you only did two things,' he said. 'You went to the animal rights raid and you went to where Jacob was. So you probably picked up the guy at one of those places. We've assumed it was with Jacob, because of the drugs. We were probably wrong.'

Anna frowned, took the pistol out of her jacket pocket, flicked out the cylinder, spun it once, looking at the little undimpled primers. 'We talked to two guys, really, at the animal rights raid,' she said, snapping the cylinder shut. 'One of them was wearing a mask, but he had this voice. I was thinking, maybe someday he could go on TV. Jesus, this guyit could be him! I mean, he was a little strange, his attitude, I didn't pay much attention because we run into lots of strange people.'

'All right,' Harper said. 'Where do we look him up?'

'I don't knowJason was the contact. But I could find out.'

Harper was absently juggling the empty Coke cans: 'Okay. But before we get too enthusiastic. you said there were two guys at the animal rights raid.'

'Yeah,' she nodded, thinking about it. 'The other one, he was just a kid, kind of wimpy.'

Harper found a dirt ledge for the cans, and set them up. 'I saw him on TVyou mean the kid who tried to fight them off.'

'Not a violent type, like me,' Anna said. 'He was crying about getting a bloody nose.'

'Doesn't sound like our guy,' Harper agreed. He pointed at her plastic muffs: 'Pull down your earmuffs, you're too young to lose your hearing.'

Harper stuck his fingers in his ears, and Anna pulled down the earmuffs and pointed the gun at one of the cans. Then a thought struck her and she pulled the muffs back and said, 'I just thought of something else.'

'Yeah?' He took his fingers out of his ears.

'Creek noticed that there was only one guy on the raid, all the rest were women. And they were, I don't know, kind of busty. Creek said it looked like a harem.'

'So maybe the guy's a freak.'

'God.' She pulled the muffs down again, and Harper stuck his fingers back in his ears and Anna pointed the pistol at the first can, jerked the trigger. She missed by two feet.

'Settle down,' she said aloud. She relaxed, brought the pistol up, fired again and the can flipped up the dirt wall, and clattered back down again, a neat hole punched in the center of the white C-for-Coke. Anna pulled the muffs up and said, 'I just thought of something else: He had this pig and it knocked him down.'