The Night Crew

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.'

'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.

'Jake?' Anna asked. 'What're we doing?'

'Waiting,' he said. 'Tony ought to be here any minute.'

'What?' She turned and looked out of the library; the front door was out of sight, but it was right around the corner.

'We'll hear the car,' he said. 'He'll either put it in the garage and come in through the kitchen, or he'll leave it in the drive and come through the front door.'

Anna was confused. 'What? We're gonna jump him?'

'More or less,' Harper said. He pushed a few more books on the floor. One of them was a fake: the cover fell open to reveal a hollowed-out interior packed with money. Harper turned and gazed at her for a moment, weighing her, and then said, 'That's why we're here.'

She thought she could talk him out of it: 'Jake, we can't do thistoo much could go wrong. Somebody could get hurt, bad.'

But he wouldn't move. 'I've done stuff like this two hundred times. Tony oughta be paranoid enough that. And then they felt, rather than heard, arrival sounds from outside. Harper said, 'Quiet now. just stick with this.'

He dropped to his hands and knees and crab-walked into the front room. From her angle in the office, she could see him easing up to a crack in the drapes.

Five seconds later he was back: 'Shit. He's with somebody. Another guy. Stay with me, Anna.'

'Aw.' She was trapped: a bad idea that she'd ridden too far, and now it was too late to get out. So she crouched, tense, and Harper pulled the nylon over his face, and waved a hand at her, and she pulled hers down. Then Harper took the gun out of his pocket and they waited.

Tony came through the door and he was shouting when he came through: 'You don't tell me that shit, you don't tell me, you just fuckin' well better.' He was a short, paunchy man in his late thirties, wearing a gray dress suit, a striped tie over a blue silk shirt; the man with him was tall, thin, with a mustache, a deep tan and a black leather briefcase; in good shape, like a serious tennis player. When Harper, with the mask and gun, stepped out of the office, his double-take spun Tony around in midsentence.

'If either one of you fuckin' move, I'm gonna blow your fuckin' heart right through your fuckin' spine,' Harper growled. His gun, held in both hands, was pointed at Tony's chest. 'Lay down on the floor, on your backs, heads toward each other, top of your head toward the top of his head, arms stretched out so they overlap.'

'What the fuck.'

'LAY ON THE FUCKIN' FLOOR,' Harper screamed, and the pistol began to shake and jerk, and Anna could see him chewing on the nylon mask; if he was acting, he was terrific. If he wasn't, he was crazy. 'LAY DOWN, YOU MOTHER FUCKERS, OR I'LL.' Saliva and anger seemed to choke him and he gnashed at the nylon, and suddenly his teeth broke through and he ran three steps toward Tony, the gun poking out at Tony's forehead, and Tony screamed back, 'No, no, no.' and the two men got shakily down on the floor, lying on their backs, arms stretched over their heads.

Harper, gun fixed on Tony's head, fished a pair of open handcuffs out of his pocket and dropped them on Tony's face. 'Put them on. I want to hear them snap shut.' Tony put them on. The tall man was next: 'Thread ' em through Tony's, then snap 'em.'

'I'm just a lawyer.'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah. you fuckin' scum, you fuckin' lawyers. You fuckin' lay there.' The language had been stolen from Tarpatkin, but had a drug-fired sound to it, a crazy emotional edge. Harper stepped to the door and pushed it shutslammed it. Then he bent over the men, patted them down, found a cell phone in Tony's coat pocket, tossed it aside. To Tony: 'You got a dealer working the Westwood area. He was selling wizards down to the Shamrock Hotel last week.'

He was a street thug, Anna thought: he was doing it perfectly. Maybe too perfectly. He moved to one side, put his foot on the lawyer's chest.

'. I'm gonna give you the convincer. I'm gonna shoot your lawyer here, free of charge. Just to show you that I'm serious. Shoot him right in the fuckin' brain, so you're attached to a dead man, you can explain to the cops later, YOU FUCKIN' CREEP.' He was shouting again, and the lawyer was screaming, 'No, no, no,' trying to sit up, but pinned by his hands over his head and the weight of Tony on the cuffs.

Then Harper, looking down at the lawyer, stepped back far enough that Tony couldn't see him, looked at the frantic lawyer, put one finger over his lips, pointed the gun at the floor beside the lawyer's head and fired once.

The lawyer jerked forward, convulsing with the muzzle blast, then fell back, understood instantly: He went limp and silent.

'NOW YOU BELIEVE ME?' Harper screamed.

'You'll fuckin' kill me anyway,' Tony screamed back. 'So fuck you.'

'Not before I peel your fuckin' skin off with a potato peeler I seen in your kitchen,' Harper said. Tony twisted, and Harper kicked him in the chest and Tony shouted, 'Stan, goddamn, are you dead? Stan, goddammit.' And Harper kicked him again, and Anna, out of sight, tried to wave him off, but he ignored her. He had the gun pointing at Tony's head and he was shouting again, 'ALL RIGHT, MOTHER FUCKER, I DON'T HAVE THE PATIENCE TO SKIN YOU ALIVE, SO I'M GONNA KILL YOU NOW. GOOD FUCKIN' BYE.'

Tony was thrashing against Stan's dead weight and Harper pointed the gun and Tony screamed, 'John Maran at the Marshall Hotel on Pico, for Christ's sake.'

Harper's voice went suddenly soft, and somehow more threatening. 'You better be telling me the truth,' he said. 'If you're not, I won't be coming back.'

'What?' Tony was confused.

'Get on your feet, lawyer.' Harper kicked the lawyer once, and the tall man rolled over, started to blubber. Tony shouted, 'You asshole, whyn't you say something.'

The lawyer, stooping over him, pulled down by the short play of the cuffs, shouted back, 'You crazy fuck, they were gonna kill us, I saved our lives.'

'You bullshit.' Tony tried to get up, but Harper pushed him down. 'Stay down.' And to the lawyer, 'Drag him over to the basement stairs.'

As the lawyer dragged Tony toward the stairs, Anna noticed the cell phone, picked it up, put in her pocket. In the basement, Harper put them on either side of a steel support pole and threaded the cuffs through. 'Like I said, if there's no John Maran at the Marshall Hotel on Pico, I ain't coming back.'

The lawyer had followed this thought, but Tony hadn't: 'So fuck you,' Tony said.

'Tony.' the lawyer said.

'Fuck you, too, you fuckin' snotty Yale asshole.'

The lawyer took a deep breath, and said, 'Look, I'm trying not to wring your fat little neck, Tony.'

Tony was amazed: 'What'd you say?'

'I said, I'm trying not to wring your fat little neck, you dumb shit. What he's saying is, if he leaves us here, what're we gonna do? Chew our arms off, like rats? We won't break these handcuff chains or this pipe.'

Tony finally caught it, looked once around the blank walls of the basement, and turned to Harper, 'Hey, man.'

'Is Maran right?'

After a moment of judgment. 'No. Ask for Rik Maran. You ask for John Maran and. you won't get him.'

'Better be right,' Harper said.

They went up the stairs, Anna first, and at the top, they peeled off the stockings. When Harper started past her to the door, she set her feet and hit him in the solar plexus as hard as she could: Harper's abdomen wasn't his toughest part. He half caved in and took an involuntary step back, eyes wide, and wheezed, 'Jesus, Anna.'

'You sonofabitch, you scared my brains out,' Anna whispered harshly, not even knowing why she was whispering. 'I didn't know what you were gonna do. You should have told me ahead of time.'

'I was afraid you wouldn't go along.'

'Oh, bullshitwhat haven't I gone along with?'

'Well, anyway, we got the name,' he said, trying to straighten up. He got going again, and led the way out the back, across the patio and down the hill. And when they got to the car, he avoided her eyes, but said again, 'We got the name.'

'Yeah, we've had four names. We've been on a name safari all week and we haven't gotten anything but a chain letter,' she snarled at him over the top of the car. 'We haven't found out anything.'

He got in the car and she climbed in, still furious, and pulled the safety belt down and snapped herself in, and sat with the palms of her hands flat on her thighs.

'You gotta pretty mean punch.'

'Don't patronize me,' she spat back. 'Don't try to humor me; just shut up.'

They eased out of the driveway, down the hill; the ocean looked as green and lazy as ever, as though it didn't know, she thought, that Creek was coughing up lung tissue.

Halfway into town, Harper broke the unpleasant silence to say, 'We've got to find a phone book somewhere, and figure out where this hotel is.'

Anna took out her cell phone, punched the speed dial for Louis. Louis was apparently sitting next to the phone: he snapped it up halfway through the first ring. He'd been to see Creek; he didn't want to think about it.

'I know,' Anna said. 'Is the laptop handy?'

'Yeah?'

'Punch up the Marshall Hotel on Pico and route us there from the PCH up in Malibu. And give me the number.'

'Just a sec.' He took more than a second, but less than a minute, and Anna repeated his directions to Harper. Then she dug in her pocket, pulled out Tony's cell phone. 'When you talk to this Rik Maran, tell him that a guy is bringing a box for him. that you're at the courthouse, waiting for Tony to get out, is the only reason you're answering the phone. Use the voice you used with Tony and the lawyer.'

'What?'

She repeated it as she punched the number for the Marshall Hotel into her own phone. When the clerk at the hotel answered, she said, 'You have a Mr Rik Maran as a guest. I'd like to speak to him.'

'Just a moment.'

Maran came on ten seconds later, his voice, dry, reedy, like he might have spent a childhood in Oklahoma, a long time ago: 'This is Rik.'

'Call Tony now, on his cellular,' Anna said, and punched off.

A minute later, Tony's phone rang, and Harper picked it up. 'He ain't here. who's this? Okay. We're at the courthouse, we got a big problem, but I ain't got time to talk about it. There's a guy coming over, he's got a box for ya. I can't talk, this fuckin' thing's a radio, man.'

Harper punched out without waiting for a reply.

Anna said, 'I don't know what I'm doing. If I had any brains, I'd bail out of this now. This whole thing is not right; we're running in the wrong direction.'

'We don't have any other direction,' Harper said. 'This is what we've got.' A few seconds later, he added, 'You're pretty smart, this phone thing. Thinking of it like that.'

The Marshall Hotel was one of the older buildings on Pico, a four-story hollow cube with a brick front and stucco sides, outdoor walkways on the inside of the cube, and windows that looked like holes in an IBM punch card. The bottom floor had a small diner, a check-in desk, and an open courtyard with an above-ground pool and a patio, with a scattering of tables on the patio.

Anna went in first, wearing her sunglasses and a scarf as a babushka, walked through to the courtyard and took an empty table where she could see the desk. A waiter came over and she said, 'A menu? And a white wine. Anything good.'

Harper followed a minute later, carrying a briefcase. He stopped at the desk, exchanged a few words with the deskman, shook his head and walked out to the patio and took a chair near the pool, on the other side of a clump of palm.

Maran came out a few seconds later, looked around, spotted Harper and his briefcase, and went that way. Anna watched him and dug into her memory: Maran was sandy-haired or blond, but the hair was cut so tightly to his head that she couldn't tell. His face was skeletal, his body wraith-like, his gestures tired, almost languid. He looked like one of the late, hard self-portraits of Vincent Van Gogh, and she thought: AIDS. Maybe. But he moved smoothly enough, he wasn't shaky, as she'd expect if he were dying.

She'd never seen him before, she was quite certain of that.

She took out her cell phone and called Tony's number, heard it ring thirty feet away. Harper answered, and she said, 'I don't know himI've never seen him.'

'Okay. Stay where you are. We'll be right back.'

'Where're you going?' she asked, alarmed.

But he'd rung off. A moment later, on the other side of the patio, Maran and Harper headed toward the hotel.

She had only a moment to think about it, but something in the way Harper moved brought her out of her chair. She took just a second to drop a twenty on the table, to keep the waiter off her back, and followed them. They stepped inside an elevator and as the doors closed, Anna stopped, watched the indicator light. The light stopped on three.

She turned the corner, started down toward a gift shop, swerved into a stairwell and started running. Ten seconds later, she stood at the door on the third floor, pushed carefully through, listened. and heard a door shut down the hallway.

But where, exactly? The doors on the hall were identical, the hallway carpet unexpectedly thick, sound-deadening. She walked slowly down the hall, listening: took a small notebook out of her purse, and a pen; if somebody came along, she'd stop and write in it, as though she were making a note.

But there was nobody in the hall, nothing but silence and the smell of old tobacco smoke.

And then an impact.

Not a sound, exactly, more of a feel; then a sound, muffled, anguished, and another impact. Up ahead, somewhere. she hurried down the hall now, but as quietly as she could, listening. Where was it coming from.

She passed a door. A possibility. Listened. Another impact, a groan: No. Somewhere ahead, the next room.

Another impact, an animal sound, a wounded animal. Across the hall now. Another. She pressed her ear to the door: and with the next impact, she could feel it.

She tried the knob: locked. Hit the door with her fist. 'Jake! Jake! Jaaake!' Her voice rising. She'd scream it, if she had to.

The knob turned under her hand, and Jake was there, on the other side, a dazed, crazy look in his eyes. He held what appeared to be a broken chair leg. One hand was covered with blood, and there were spatters of blood on his golf shirt.

'Ah.' she said, involuntarily. She put a hand on his chest and pushed, and he stepped back, and she went into the room.

Maran was on the floor, face up, bleeding from the nose: he was conscious, but just barely. There was no blood at all on his upper body, but his legs looked wrong. He looked like a paraplegic whose legs had withered.

Anna shut the door and said, 'What'd you do?'

'Hit him,' Harper said. He seemed confused, uncertain of where he was.

'Is he gonna die?' She looked toward the phone.

'No, I just.' he drifted away, and she caught his arm and squeezed.

'What? Jake?'

'Broke his legs,' he said. He looked at the chair leg in his hand. 'A lot.'

'So let's get out of here,' Anna said. Maran was trying to roll, but there was no leverage in his hips and legs, and he flailed weakly, futilely. He tried to turn himself with his arms, and he moaned again.

'Call an ambulance,' Harper said.

'We can do that outside,' she said, and she pushed Harper toward the door. Harper dropped the chair leg. Anna said, 'God, wait a minute,' carried the leg to the bathroom and quickly, carefully rubbed it down with a towel, then dropped it in the bathtub and turned the hot water on it.

'Now,' she said.

Harper followed her dumbly through the door, down the stairs, out past the gift shop. She stopped him at a bank of phones, dialled 911, and said, 'There's a man hurt really bad in room three-thirty-three at the Marshall Hotel on Pico. Hurt really bad. Better get an ambulance here fast.'

On the street, she could taste the bile at the back of her throat: 'That the guy?' she asked. She looked up at him, his eyes clearing a bit, and then at the blood splatters on his shirt.

'He sold the stuff to Jacob and his friends. He didn't know Jacob, but he described the whole bunch of them.'

'Jason?'

'He had no idea who Jason was.'

'Maybe he was lying,' Anna said.

'No. Christ, he was bragging about it. I asked him if he'd seen the kid who tried to fly off the Shamrock, and he was laughing about it in the elevator. You know what he told me? He sold to the kids because "That's my market". That's what he said, like he was some kind of toy-company executive.'

'Ah, God.'

'"That's my market", for Christ's sake. That was in his roomthat's when I hit him in the face. He was still smiling when he went down.'

'Jake.'

'I feel like I should have strangled the miserable little motherfucker,' Harper said bitterly, as they got to the car. He looked back up the street.

'I wish I'd killed him.'

'So why'd you want the ambulance?' He looked at her, shook his head: 'Because I'm fucked up.'