The Night Crew

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.'

'He's not what I expected,' Anna said. 'The prowler was fast, and the guy who shot Creek, hewas fast. Really fast. He had to be a young guy.'

'So we've got twopeople giving us a hard time?' He looked at her with thin amusement. 'And we can't find either one of them?'

The Philadelphia Grill was a baked-meatloaf-and-powered-potatoes place on Westwood, jammed into the lower corner of a colored-concrete building; it had a wraparound glass window, but the window was blocked with blinds pulled nearly shut.

Inside, the clientele seemed to hover over their coffee, arms circling the cups, as though somebody might try to take the coffee away from them; and they tended to look up whenever the door opened. The blinds, which blocked the view in, were open just enough that, from the inside, they could see out.

'There he is,' Anna muttered.

Tarpatkin looked like her idea of a crazy killer: his pitch-black hair, six inches long, streamed away from his narrow face, as though an electric current were running through it. He had thin black eyebrows over a long, bony nose; his lips were narrow, tight, and too pink, the only color in his face. He was dressed all in black, and was reading a tabloid-sized real-estate newspaper. He had one hand on a cup of tea, showing a tea-bag string and tag under his hand. He was wearing a heavy gold wedding band, but on his middle finger. An empty cup sat across the table from him. 'What if he's the guy?'

'Do you know him? Ever met him?' Harper said.

'No. I'd remember the face.'

'Then he's not the guy, because you know the killer, at least a little bit,' Harper said. 'Slide into the booth across from him; I'll get a chair.'

Tarpatkin watched them coming, eyes just over the top of the paper. His expression didn't change when Anna slid into the booth: 'Hi,' she said, smiling. Harper hooked a chair from an empty table across from the booth, turned in backward and sat down, just blocking Tarpatkin's route out of the booth.

'Mr Tarpatkinname's Harper, and my friend here is Anna.'

'Hello, Anna,' Tarpatkin said. 'Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?'

'No, no, it's a gun,' Anna said pleasantly.

'We'd show it to you, but in here'Harper looked around'somebody might get excited and we'd all start shooting.'

'What do you want?' Tarpatkin asked.

'Just need to talk,' Harper said.

'That's all you guys ever want,' Tarpatkin said. 'Talk. Then your ass winds up in jail.'

'What?' Anna's eyebrows went up and she glanced uncertainly at Harper.

Tarpatkin caught it, and clouded up: 'If you assholes ain't cops, you can get the fuck out of my booth.'

'We're not cops, but I used to be, and I still know a lot of deputies,' Harper said. 'The thing is, you're caught right in the middle of a major murder case and the cops are freaking out. You can talk to us, off the record, or talk to them, on the record.'

'You're talking bullshit, man, I don't know any murder mysteries.' His language veered from formal, almost scholarly, to the street, and then back again; he might have been two people. Tarpatkin shook out the newspaper, as though he were about to resume reading.

'One of your clients, Jason O'Brien, got taken off in a really bad way a couple of days ago. Beat to death, carved up with a knife.' When Harper said it, Anna was watching Tarpatkin's eyes: they flickered when Jason's name was mentioned. 'And maybe you know a guy named Sean MacAllister?'

Another flicker: 'He knows them both,' Anna said to Harper, not taking her eyes off Tarpatkin.

Tarpatkin didn't deny it: this was news he could use. 'Carved up?'

'You know a guy who likes knives?' Harper asked.

Tarpatkin thought for a second, then said, 'I know a couple of them, but they don't know those two. When did this happen? I haven't seen anything about it in the paper.'

Anna told him, briefly, and then said, 'We're looking for a guy selling wizards. We understand you don't, but we're hoping that you might know who does. Right around herethe university neighborhood.'

Tarpatkin looked her over for a moment, then said, 'Honey, I don't know what kind of mission you're on, but you really don't want to mess around with those people. They're amateursthey're crazy and they'll kill you for a nickel.'

'Somebody might be trying to kill me for free,' Anna said. 'We're trying to get him to stop.'

'Huh.' He pulled at his goatee, then said, 'Let me give you fifteen seconds on how the smart part of this business worksand for the tape recorder, if you're wearing one, you'll notice that this is all hypothetical.'

He pulled a napkin out of a chrome napkin holder and smoothed it on the tabletop. Anna thought he was going to write on it, but then he started folding it as he talked: L.A.-diner origami. 'Suppose you got a small-time dealer,' Tarpatkin said. 'He's got maybe seventy-five, a hundred regular customers. He only takes new customers from recommendations, and only after looking them over.

'This guy is making, say, ten grand a week after expenses, no taxes. He flies over to the Bahamas a few times a year and makes a deposit, takes a little vacation. In ten years, with some careful investments, he's got eight or ten million in the bank, and he moves to the Bahamas full time. Or Mexico. Costa Rica. Somewhere.

'If he's smooth, he don't have to worry too much about the cops, because he's such a small-timer, and when they come around, he cooperates. The cops always want the big guysChrist, if they busted everybody like this small-timer, they'd have to build twenty new jails. So, they don't. I mean, hey, he's a small businessman. A little better than insurance, maybe not so good as selling stocks and bonds.'

Anna broke in: 'But these other guys are different.'

Tarpatkin shook a finger at her, like a schoolmaster making a point. 'I'm coming to that, honeythey're very different. They go into the dope business, and they think, "If I sell a pound of crank, I make ten thousand dollars. If I sell a ton of crank, I make twenty million dollars. So I'll sell a ton of crank. This year."

'And since they've been to the movies, they know the business is dangerous. So they buy a load of guns and knives and dynamite and chain saws and whatever else they can think of. Then to get their heads right, they get into the product themselves. The next thing you know, you've got these drug freaks with guns and dynamite and chain saws, and there's crank all over the street and everybody's going crazy looking for themcompetitors, cops, DBA. They always find them. Go to jail, don't get your twenty million. Or wind up in a bush somewhere, with your head cut off.'

He shook his head sadly, and asked in his street patois: 'Is this any fuckin' way to run a fuckin' business?' And then back to the scholar: 'I think not. But these are the people who are selling your wizards.'

'So can you put us onto somebody?'

Tarpatkin shook his head. 'No, I can't. I stay away from those people. However, if one of you has a cell phoneor a regular phone, for that matterI could ask around and call you.'

'So you wanna talk to the cops,' Harper said.

'No. But I don't know anythingnot what you want. Why would I? I don't hang with those people. I stay as far away as I can.'

'That's bull,' Harper said. 'You guys have always got your ears to the ground.'

Tarpatkin shrugged: 'Well, you could drag me out into the street and beat the shit outa me until I tell you what you want. except that I don't know it.'

Anna and Harper looked at each other, and then Anna dug in her purse, found a pen and wrote her cell phone number on Tarpatkin's folded napkin. 'Call me anytime,' she said.

'I will. You're a little sweetie.'

'About your hypothetical dealer sending his hypothetical money to the Bahamas,' Anna said. 'How long has he been doing this, hypothetically?'

'Could be eight years,' Tarpatkin said. He bobbed his head and smiled; one of his canine teeth was solid gold, and it winked at her from beneath his ratty mustache.

Outside, Harper said, 'I don't know what we could do: all we got is threats of siccing the cops on him.'

'We could drag him out in the alley and beat the shit out of him,' Anna said wryly.

'In that place, we' d get about three steps,' Harper said. 'I have a feeling they sort of look out for each other. In fact. just a minute.' He walked back to the diner door, pulled it open, looked in, then walked back, shaking his head. 'He's gone. He'll be in the Bahamas by dawn.'

As they were getting into Harper's BMW, the phone in Anna's purse rang. She glanced at Harper, then took the phone out and clicked it on: 'Hello?'

A little girl's voice, oddly tinny, with an adult's vocabulary and intonations, said, 'The men you want to see are brothers named Ronnie and Tony and they live.'

'Just a minute, just a minute,' Anna said. And to Harper: 'Gimme a paper.'

She found the pen in her purse and Harper groped in a door bin and finally came up with a road map. 'Write on it,' he said. The tinny little girl's voice recited an address in Malibu, and finished,'. real modern, gray weathered wood, lots of black glass, right on the hill above the highway. You won't have any trouble finding it.'

And sheit, Tarpatkin?was gone.

'Voice-altering phone deal,' Harper said, when Anna described the voice. 'Lot of dealers use them. You get like twenty choices of voice.'

'Why?'

'So in case we were recording it, he wouldn't be on the record.'

'Strange life.'

'Trying to make it to retirement,' Harper said. 'Two years.'

Anna glanced at her watch: 'We've got time to run out to Malibu. Or we could head down to BJ's.'

Harper glanced at her: 'The question about BJ's is this: you'll see some people you know, but so what? How do we pick out the guy?'

'If he talks to me, or comes on to me.'

'Somebody'sgonna come on to you, you go to a party box. That's what it's for.'

Anna thought about it for a minute. Harper was not only right, but he was also on the track of the people who'd fed dope to his son. She'd go with that: 'Malibu,' she said.

Harper nodded. 'We spot the house, but we don't do anything. I want to check with some guys in the sheriff's department, run these names. Ronnie and Tony.'

Harper had a Thomas Brothers Guide stashed in the back seat. Anna turned on the car's reading lights as they dropped onto the PCH and made the right turn up toward Malibu, and began paging through the maps.

'If the address is right, it's just before the turnoff for Corral Canyon,' she said after a moment.

'Should be easy to pick out,' Harper said.

They sat in companionable silence for a while, not much traffic, just cruising. Then Harper said, 'How come you're not going out with anyone?'

'I don't know,' she said. She looked out her window, away from him: nothing to see but the dirt bluff rising away from the highway into the dark. 'I've just had other things.'

'Been a little lonely?'

'I've been busy,' she said. And after a few seconds, 'Yeah, I've been a little lonely. Then.'

'What?'

'Ah, there's this guy. I went out with him years ago; pretty intense. I thought we were gonna get married, but we didn't. I saw him the other day, at a gas station. He's out here on a fellowship, I guessI called a mutual friend. Anyway, it all sorta came back on me.'

'What's he do?'

'He's a composer. Modern stuffthe New York Philharmonic debuted one of his poems, "Sketch of Malaga".'

'One of his poems.'

'Compositions; he calls them poems. He's not really that arty, just knows. how to work the levers on the classical music machine.'

Harper glanced at her: 'Sounds like you might resent that, a little.'

'Oh, no. I guess it's necessary. But I wasn't good at it.'

'So you're a musician.'

'That's what I really am,' she said. Harper had a way of listeningmaybe picked up when he was a copthat seemed to pull the words out of her. He was attentive: reallylistened.

She told him about growing up in Wisconsin, about her mother's death. How she'd been the best pianist in her high school, the best they'd ever had. That she'd been the best at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the year she graduated. That she was one of the best two or three in graduate school.

'Not quite good enough,' she told him, staring out the window at the night. Clark had also been a pianist, not quite at her level, but he'd seen the writing on the wall much sooner than she had. He'd branched into direction and composition, started working the music machine.

'Couldn't you have gone that way?'

'Nah. Performance is one thing, composition is something else. Takes a different kind of mind.'

'Did you ever try it?'

'I was never really interested in it,' she said.

'So what happened?'

'We were living together, and he was the big intellectual and I was doing session gigs. Movie music. I don't know; it pulled us apart. I kept thinking that if you just played well enough, practised hard enough, you'd make it. And that wasn't the game at all. So I went to Burbank, and he went to Yale.'

'Ah, that's really excellent,' Harper said.

'What?' she asked, half-smiling.

'You doresent the mealy little poser.'

'No, I really don't,' she protested. Then, 'You'd like him. He even plays golf.'

'Rock bandsplay golf,' Harper said, not impressed. 'So. are you pining for him?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'Maybe.'

'Shit.'

'Yeah, it's sort of a problem. You know, if you're thinking about. it might be sorta awkward having you stay over.'

'I'm gonna stay over,' he said. 'But I won't be rattling your doorknob in the night. Staying over is business.'

'Okay.' Was she just the smallest bit disappointed? Maybe.

'Would you play something on the piano for me?' he asked.

'If you like.' The car seemed hushed; the outside world away from the two of them. 'What music do you listen to?'

'Mostly hard rock or hard classical; some old funky blues and jazz, but only for an hour or so at a time.'

'We like the same things,' she said, 'except I'm not so big on rock, and a little bigger on the jazz. what should I play for you?'

'Maybe something by, I dunno. Sousa, maybe.'

He turned quickly, saw her embarrassed: 'That was a joke, for Christ's sake,' he laughed. 'Loosen up, Batory.'

'So who do you like?'

'You could play me anything by Satie.'

'Satie? Really?'

'Really,' he said. 'I've been listening to him a lot; he's very delicate and funny, sometimes.' He glanced at her, interpreting her silence as skepticism. 'I'm a lawyer, not a fuckin' moron,' he said.

She ducked her head and pointed up the hill. 'Malibu,' she said.

The house was a half-block east of Corral, on a short, hooked turnoff with a circle at the end. There were two other homes on the circle, all three showing lights, and all with steel fences, darkened and turned to resemble wrought iron, facing the street. The driveways were blocked with decorative eight-foot-high electric gates between stone pillars.

'We'll just keep rolling through,' Harper said, looking out through the sweep of his headlights. 'Look for dogs, anything that might be a dog.'

'I can't see anything,' Anna said.

They were back out at Corral: Harper stopped, looked both ways, then said, 'We'd be crazy to try to get in the front.'

'Get in?' She looked back at the house, at the fence and the hedge behind it, the security sign next to the stone pillars beside the driveway. 'That place is a fort.'

'Let's go get an ice cream,' he said. 'Isn't there an ice cream place down at the shopping center?'

She got a Dutch chocolate and he took a raspberry and they sat on a bench outside of a Ben amp; Jerry's and ate the ice cream, talking about nothing of importance. When they finished, Harper wiped his hands and face with the tiny napkin from the ice cream parlor, pitched it into a trash container and said, 'You drive.'

'Why?'

'I want to go back there and take one more look. Maybe get out.'

'Jake. this is a really bad idea.'

He nodded. 'I know, but I can't figure out what else to do. I just want to stand on one of those stone pillars, if I can, and take a look. See what's in there.'

'Jake.'

'What, you chicken?' he asked.

Never a chicken. Never.

One of the houses had gone dark, but the target house showed lights on all three floors. 'We'll roll right up, I'll hop out, do a quick step-up, look in and then get right back in the car and we're out of there,' he said.

'Aw, man.' But she felt a little thrill, a little of the roaming-through-the-night feel; she took the car into the hook and heard Harper's door pop.

She slowed and he said, 'Keep rolling, slow, I'll latch the door, don't want them to see headlights stopping.' He hopped out with the car still moving, pushed the door shut until it caught, looked around once as he approached the fence and then stepped on a horizontal brace-bar, pulled himself up and looked into the yard. Anna continued through the circle, headed out toward the street; she rolled her window down and looked over at his back and said, in a harsh whisper, 'Let's go.'

'Just a minute.'

And suddenly he was over the fence and out of sight.

'Oh, no.' She continued moving, but her mind was churning. Better to move than to stop, she thought; she'd go out to the street, do a U-turn out of sight, and come back in. What was he thinking, hopping over the fence? He wasa moron. She was at the street, touched the brakes to show the red flash of a departing car, did the U-turn on Corral and started back in; rolled the window down on his side as she went, and tried to look back.

As she did, somebody behind the fence screamed: 'Get him. get him, over there.'

And Harper shouted, 'Anna, the highway.'

She couldn't see him, but his voice was clear enough: Anna rolled through the circle again, accelerating, the wheels squealing on the new blacktop. Down the short street, a finger of fear in her throat, left down the hill, the BMW tracking as though it were on rails.

BAK!

Was that a shot? Her face jerked to the right, but all she could see was hillside. She'd heard something, but what was it?

BAK!

A shot, that's what it was. She jammed her foot to the floor, powering through sixty-five, downhill, then hammered the brake as she got to the bottom, paused at the highway, then ran the light and headed around to the left.

She looked up the bluff, saw nothing but scrub brush and weeds; the house was right there, fifty feet ahead.

And so was Harper. He was spilling down the hill, tumbling, hitting every ten feet, dirt flying, not quite out of control, but not quite under control, either. A car passed her going north, and as soon as it was clear, she swerved across the highway to the left, up onto the narrow weedy shoulder, powered through the dirt and rocks until she was directly below him. He landed in a cloud of dirt, struggled to get up, limped around the car as she popped the passenger door, fell inside and gasped, 'Go. go.'

'I can't.' She was looking into a stream of cars coming up from the south.

BAK!

'Go, that's a fuckin' gun.'

She jumped on the gas, still on the shoulder, blinked her lights a few times to intimidate a small white northbound car and swerved across the highway.

'Are you all right?'

'Yeah.' He was out of breath, and his shirt was ripped. 'Boy, was that stupid.' He was looking out the back window.

'No kidding,' she said, angrily. 'What did you.'

'Yell at me later.' He was looking out the back window. 'Right now, I think they're coming after us. A Cadillac just cleared the bottom of the hill coming this way, I heard them yelling about getting a car.'

'Oh, boy.' The highway was not particularly busy. The northbound cars arrived in short packs, with open stretches between the packs. In the rearview mirror, she saw headlights slewing left to pass a slow moving southbound car, taking advantage of a break in the oncoming traffic.'

'You're gonna have to drive a little faster,' Harper said.

'Hold onto your socks.' She floored it. Anna always liked speed, and the big BMW accelerated like an unwinding spring, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred, all without hesitation. She blew past two cars, had five seconds of peace in the right-hand lane, then squeezed past an idling Jaguar in the face of an oncoming pickup.

Harper winced, then reached up to the overhead and found a handle to hang onto. 'Maybe not this fast,' he said.

'They're still back there,' she said. The Cadillac was cutting through the traffic like a shark through a school of tunabut its lights seemed to be getting smaller.

They blazed through Malibu, past the shopping center, the garage doors of the beach houses blurring into one long gray line. 'Anna, for Christ's sake, you're doing a hundred and twelve. Slow down.'

She shook her head: she was mad, and she could drive. He deserved to be scared. She took another car, pushed a little harder on the gas, glanced down at the speedometer: a hundred and eighteen. 'This thing rolls.'

'Jesus,' Harper said. He turned to look behind them: 'Anna, they're out of sight. They're out of sight.'

'Keep watching for them,' she said. She let the car out for a few more seconds, feeling the speed, then eased off the gas, watched the speed drop below a hundred. Fifteen minutes later, they burned through the Sunset intersection; two minutes later, she turned up Temescal, dropped to a cruise and looked at Harper.

'You were limping.'

'I might've sprained my knee. I banged myself up coming down the hill.'

'And got shot at.'

'But nothing happened.'

'Jake.' she said in exasperation.

'I was standing there, and I could see some people moving inside a window and there was a crack in the drapes. And I just thought I could take a look. and I got in and there was another window down the side. And then everybody started yelling,' he said, talking fast. 'There must've been some kind of alarm, and I was stuck in the back and people were coming out the front. I ran right past the pool in back, there was a woman out there, she started yelling and I went over the edge and some asshole started shooting.'

'What do you expect, prowling a house? I used a fish-whacker on a guy who was doing that.'

'Yeah, well.' After a moment he said, 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'

Anna laughed aloud, the first time since she'd heard that Jason was dead. She liked the speed.

Harper made her stop at a gas station pay phone, got a number for the Malibu cops, dialed it and said, There's been a shooting.' He gave them the address, and hung up. 'Stir up the bees' nest,' he said.

'What for?'

'See what happens.'

There was no point in even trying to go to BJ's; Harper was a mess from the fall down the hill. He looked, as he said, like he'd been whipped through hell with a soot-bag.

At Anna's house, Harper hobbled up the walk: 'It's not really damaged. It just hurts; but nothing's loose.'

'I've got some of that blue ice stuff you can put on it,' she said.

'That'd be good.'

She kept the ice packs in the refrigerator, and went to get one while Harper disappeared into the bathroom. She stood outside the door with the ice pack and said, 'Okay?'

Harper opened the door. He'd pulled his golf shirt over his head, and turned around to show her his back. He looked like he'd been scourged, long fiery rips running down his back. 'Not so good,' he said.

'You must've run into some thorn trees up there.' She walked around him to the medicine cabinet, found some antiseptic cream. 'C'mon, I'll put some of this stuff on.'

He sat shirtless in a kitchen chair, while she pulled a desk lamp around, focused it on his back. Some of the scratches were deep, but none were still bleeding; he also showed a scrape on his shoulder and a large red-blue bruise on his forearm.

She dabbed on the antiseptic cream and he flinched and said, 'Ow,' and 'Is there a sliver in there?'

She touched the spot again and he flinched and she said, 'Maybe. I'm gonna have to wipe this off.'

'Well, take it easy.'

'Hey, I'm doing the best I can.'

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.