The Night Crew

by John Sandford

  Anna shook her head at the invitation: ‘‘I don’t think so,’’ she said. ‘‘I want to get back home, take a bath. I smell like a . . . dead guy. I’ve got it in my nose.’’

  Jason had worked with them on and off for two years— they’d probably been out with him once a month, perhaps a little more often. Say, thirty times, Anna thought, a few hours each time. He was good at it: he had an artistic eye, knew how to frame a shot and wasn’t afraid to stick his face into trouble.

  His main shortcoming was a lack of focus: he would get caught by something that interested him—might be a face, or visually tricky shot, and lose track of the story.

  Anna cleaned up the house for a half-hour, bored, on edge and depressed all at once, and finally dragged two old Mission chairs into the back and began sanding the paint off. She’d found them in a yard sale, in reasonable condition, and figured she’d make about nine million percent profit on them, if she could ever get the turquoise paint off them.

  The work was fiddly, dull, but let her think about Jason: not puzzling out the murder, not looking for connections, just remembering the nights he’d spent in the back of the truck— the decapitated woman on Olympic; the crazy Navajo with the baseball bat in the sex-toy joint, the pink plastic penisshaped dildos hurtling through the videotape like Babylonian arrows coming down on Jerusalem.

  She grinned at that memory: stopped grinning when she remembered the fight at the Black Tulip, when the horseplayers had gone after the TV lights. Or the time they taped the two young runaways, sisters, looking for protection on Sunset, the fifty-year-old wolves already closing in . . .

  At seven o’clock, with the daylight fading, she quit on the sanding, went inside, made a gin and tonic. The TV was running in the background, as it always was, and as she turned to go back outdoors, she saw the tape of the guy being hit by the pig. He was getting more than his money’s worth, she thought, and grinned at the sight. Then: Jason got that shot . She stopped smiling and, still smelling of the paintstripper, carried the drink out to the canal-side deck and dropped into a canvas chair.

  ‘‘Anna.’’ Her name came out of the sky.

  She looked up, and saw Hobart Page looking down from his second-story sundeck next door. ‘‘We’re having

  margaritas. Come on up.’’

  ‘‘Thanks, Hobie, but, uh, I had a friend die. I just want to sit and think for a while.’’

  Another voice: Jim McMillan, Hobie’s live-in. She could see his outline against the eastern sky. ‘‘Jeez. You okay?’’

  ‘‘Yeah, yeah. Bums me out, though,’’ she said.

  ‘‘Well, come over if you need company.’’

  She’d just finished the drink when the phone rang—the home phone, the unlisted number. Creek or Louis, maybe her father, or one of a half-dozen other people, she thought.

  But it was the cops: ‘‘Ms. Batory . . . Lieutenant Wyatt.’’

  ‘‘You’re working late,’’ Anna said.

  ‘‘We’re just wrapping up here,’’ he said.

  ‘‘Wrapping up? Did you find out who did it?’’

  ‘‘Afraid not. We did locate his apartment, not much there. Unless we get a break, we’re not gonna be able to do much with it . . . it looks like dope, or just random.’’

  ‘‘So you’re giving up?’’

  ‘‘No—but right now, we’ve got nothing,’’ Wyatt said. ‘‘We checked out the ShotShop and I think he might have been killed there. He could’ve been dropped right out the back window into the water, and the window was unlocked, which it wasn’t supposed to be.’’

  ‘‘Was there any blood? He was pretty beat up . . .’’

  ‘‘Not visible blood, but there was a roll of photo paper in the back—you know, one of those printed scene things?’’

  ‘‘Yeah . . .’’

  ‘‘Anyway, the owner said it was back there, half unrolled, and now it’s gone. Maybe he was killed on the paper, and the paper was thrown out the window. It would’ve sunk . . . So we’ve got crime scene guys looking for blood, and checking around to see if the paper’s under the pier, but even if we find it, it won’t be much. We’re looking for anyone who saw anything, but we haven’t found anyone so far.’’

  ‘‘Did you talk to the fishermen out there? There are always a few . . .’’

  ‘‘Yeah, yeah, and we’ll talk to more of them tonight. But listen—I didn’t call to update you. We found O’Brien’s next of kin, an aunt and uncle out in Peru, Indiana. I don’t think they’re too well off, but, uh . . . They’d like to talk to you.’’

  ‘‘Me? What for?’’

  ‘‘I think they’d like you to make the arrangements for a funeral and so on . . .’’

  She rubbed the back of her neck: ‘‘Aw, jeez . . .’’

  ‘‘Well, you’re the only friend we can find,’’ Wyatt said. ‘‘There was nothing of value in his apartment—some electronic gear and an old bike, clothes. Anyway, I didn’t want to give them your unlisted phone number, but told them I’d ask you to call back.’’

  ‘‘All right, give me the number.’’

  Nancy Odum answered the phone in Peru and passed it off to her husband, Martin. Martin Odum said, ‘‘We don’t fly, and it’s a long way to come to get a stereo set. If you could handle the arrangements, we’d be happy to pay you somethin’ for your time.’’

  ‘‘No, that’s okay,’’ Anna said, thinking, No it’s not . She’d never arranged a funeral, and hoped she’d never have to.

  Martin Odum continued in the same glum tone: ‘‘His mother and father are buried here in Peru, we thought maybe . . . cremation? We could sprinkle the ashes on their graves. If that’d be okay with you.’’

  ‘‘I’ll take care of it,’’ Anna said. ‘‘He had a few hundred dollars coming from my company, I’ll use that for the cremation and to ship the remains. Uh, his stuff, do you want me to sell it? I don’t know how much I’d get, but I could send you whatever it is.’’

  ‘‘That’d be nice of you, ma’am.’’

  They worked out the rest of the melancholy details, the phones making funny satellite sounds; and the Odums sounded as morose as Anna felt. When they were done, she hung up, mixed another drink, thought about making it a double and did.

  Back outside, sitting in the canvas chair, she let her mind drift: and it drifted, under the influence of the alcohol, to the last funeral she’d been to, so long ago . . .

  Anna had grown up on a farm in south-central Wisconsin, a 480-acre corn operation that lay in the crook of the Whitewater River, not far from Madison.

  Her mother was a piano teacher, and she’d died in an automobile accident when Anna was six. She could still remember the melancholy, almost gothic circumstances of the funeral at the small Baptist church, and the slow procession to the tiny graveyard down the dusty gravel road: how bright and warm the day had been, the red-winged blackbirds just beginning to flock, one particular bird perched on a cattail, looking her in the eye as the procession passed . . .

  Death and music . . .

  Anna was the best pianist at the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee, the year she graduated. She moved to UCLA, and the year she took her MFA, she was one of the best two or three in the graduate school. Not good enough. To make it as a concert pianist, she would have had to have been the best in the world, in her year and a year or two before and after. As it was—one of the best at UCLA—she got session gigs; movie music.

  She still played the hard stuff, out of habit, and, really, out of a kind of trained-in love. But in her one last semiregular gig, Sunday nights at the Kingsborough Hotel, she played a dusty, romantic, out-of-date jazz.

  Her mother’s music: they’d played a piece of it at her funeral, and all those Wisconsin farm folks had thought it was a wonderful thing.

  Too early, half-drunk, Anna went to bed.

  Alcohol never brought sleep.

  Instead, it released unhappy images from some mental cage, and they prowled through her dreams, ki
cking old memories back to life. From time to time, half-awake, she’d imagine that she’d just groaned or moaned. At three in the morning, she woke up, looked at the clock, felt herself sweating into the sheets.

  At three-fifteen, she heard a noise, and was instantly awake. The noise had a solid reality to it.

  Not a dream noise.

  Anna slept in a pair of Jockey underpants. She slipped out of bed, groped around for a t-shirt that she’d tossed at a chair, but hadn’t found it when she heard the noise again. She moved silently to the head of the stairs, listened.

  Tik-tik . . . scrape.

  Back door , she thought. Definitely real. She was getting oriented now, stepped to the nightstand, found the phone. When she picked up the receiver, the dial lighted and she pushed a speed-dial button. Two rings and a man answered on the other end: Jim McMillan, from next door, groggy with sleep. ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘Jim, this is Anna. We got one: he’s right outside my back door.’’

  ‘‘Holy cow.’’ Then she heard him speak to Hobie: ‘‘It’s Anna, she’s got one outside her back door,’’ and Hobie: ‘‘Okay.’’

  Jim said to Anna, ‘‘We’ll call the cops and start the web. You lay low.’’ A little excitement in his voice now.

  ‘‘Yeah. Be careful.’’

  Life in Venice was getting better, but there’d been some tough times; still were. Their version of the Neighborhood Watch was a little heavier-duty than most, knowing that the cops would always take a while to get there. Jim would start a calling tree, which would branch out over the surrounding two blocks, and in five minutes there’d be people all over the street.

  But she had to get through the five minutes.

  Anna had both a handgun and a fish-whacker in the bedroom. There’d be people around, so she went for the whacker, which she kept against the back side of the chest of drawers. On the way, in the dark, she stepped on the t-shirt, picked it up, pulled it over her head. She found the whacker . . . and heard a windowpane break.

  Quietly. Like somebody had put pressure against it to crack it, and then tried to pick out the pieces—but at least one piece had fallen onto the kitchen floor.

  Damn them . They’d hurt her house.

  Anna went to the stairs, began to creep down. The whacker was made of hickory, looked like a dwarf baseball bat, and was meant to put ocean game fish out of their misery. Creek had drilled out the business end, melted a few ounces of lead sinker on his barbeque grill and poured the lead into the bat. If anyone was hit hard with it, surgery would follow.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Anna heard another piece of glass crack. She moved to the open arch between the living room and the kitchen, risked a quick peek. The obscure figure of a man hovered outside the back window, three feet to the right of the door. He’d done something to the window, and had then broken out a piece. As she watched, a hand came through the broken pane, and a needle-thin ray of light played across the inside of the door. He was trying to see the lock.

  Even if the posse arrived in the next couple of minutes, she didn’t want to be trapped inside the house with some crack-smoked goof. She bunched herself in the arch, eight feet from the door. The hand with the light disappeared, and then, in the near darkness, she saw another movement. He was reaching far inside, trying to get to the deadbolt. She waited until the hand was at the door, then launched herself across the room, one big step with the whacker already swinging, and

  Whack!

  Hit too high, and caught the window frame and the arm at the same time. And as she swung, she screamed, ‘‘Get out!’’ and raised the whacker again, but the man outside groaned and jerked his arm back through the window, tearing out more glass.

  She heard him step once heavily on the porch, a running step, and then a heavy-duty spotlight caught him from a neighbor’s yard across the canal, and someone yelled, ‘‘There he is.’’

  Anna stepped to the door and flipped on the porch light, and at the same time, someone yelled, ‘‘He’s going west,’’ and someone, from the front of the house, ‘‘There he is, Larry, there he is.’’

  Anna ran through the house to the front door and out, down the short sidewalk to the street—ten yards away, a man in jeans and a black jacket was running away from her, along the edge of the street. He was hurt, she thought: something funny in the jerky way he held his left arm.

  Pak Hee Chung, the Korean businessman from across the street, ran out of the front of his house carrying a shotgun, saw Anna and shouted, ‘‘Get back inside,’’ and then fired the shotgun in the air, a three-foot flame erupting from the gun as the muzzle blast shook the street.

  The man in black, now thirty yards away, spun, crouched. Anna shouted, ‘‘Pak, he’s got a gun,’’ just as the man fired, four quick pok-pok-pok-pok shots, and Pak fumbled the

  shotgun and went down on his stomach.

  ‘‘Gun,’’ Anna screamed. ‘‘He’s got a gun.’’

  Hobie ran out of the house behind her and shouted, ‘‘Get out of the way.’’

  Anna ran back a few steps and turned to look at the man in black, now running again, forty yards, and Hobie opened up with a handgun, five fast shots into the night. The man kept going, turned the corner. There was a flash of lights, another searchlight, somebody screamed, ‘‘Stop or I’ll shoot,’’ and again she heard the pok-pok-pok and a louder bang-bang.

  Pak was on his feet again, running down the narrow street, apparently unhurt, and for no apparent reason, fired the shotgun into the air again. Again the lightning flash and the muzzle blast rattling the neighborhood.

  Like her dad’s twelve-gauge, Anna thought in an instant of abstraction. She found herself on her knees, looking up the street.

  Then Hobie was there, next to her in his pajamas, fumbling shells into a revolver. ‘‘Goddamn,’’ he said excitedly, ‘‘I just shot the shit out of Logan’s garage. Don’t tell them it was me, huh? Let them think it was the asshole, Logan’d like that anyway.’’

  ‘‘Yeah . . .’’

  Pak ran back, still carrying the shotgun: ‘‘Everybody okay?’’

  ‘‘What happened to the guy?’’ Anna asked.

  ‘‘I don’t know. Everybody was shooting, nobody got hit. Bet we scared the shit out of him, huh?’’ He looked back up the street and suddenly laughed wildly, a long scary cackle, and Hobie and Anna looked at each other. This was something new . . .

  Then three more men came running around the corner at the end of the street, one of them carrying a rifle; they stopped when they saw Pak, Hobie and Anna.

  ‘‘Who’s that?’’ the rifleman shouted.

  ‘‘Pak and Hobie and Anna,’’ Hobie yelled back.

  ‘‘Everybody okay?’’

  ‘‘Yeah . . .’’

  ‘‘He came back that way—you see him? He’s stuck down Linnie.’’

  ‘‘Didn’t see him this way.’’

  ‘‘Get the guys up here, get the guys up here . . .’’

  ‘‘Better get off the street,’’ Pak said. ‘‘Anna, lock yourself inside. We’ll get a line set up and dig him out of here.’’

  ‘‘Be careful,’’ Anna said. She looked down at her bare legs. ‘‘I better go put some pants on.’’

  Pak said, ‘‘You’re okay with me,’’ and jacked another shell into the shotgun and grinned.

  Hobie was standing behind Pak and he winked at Anna, while Anna blushed and said, ‘‘I’ll be back in a second,’’ and Pak yelled, ‘‘Get those guys going . . . we need a skirmish line . . .’’

  By the time Anna was dressed, fifteen neighborhood men, a half-dozen women and two cops had walked the street, and found nothing at all. Anna walked with them as they checked again, knocking at every door.

  ‘‘Like smoke,’’ Pak said. ‘‘Must’ve swum the canal.’’ When the last house was checked, they gathered at Pak’s, wallowing in the scent of testosterone. Pak started a stream of instant coffee coming out of the microwave, and Pop-Tarts from the toaster; Logan, th
e old Vietnam vet, was saying, ‘‘Like this night in fuckin’ Dong Ha, man, pop-pop-pop a fuckin’ firefight in the front yard, my garage is all shot to shit . . .’’

  He did seem pleased, Anna thought.

  The debriefing—party—at Pak’s lasted an hour, and everybody went to look at the broken glass on Anna’s back porch. The intruder had used masking tape to tape off one pane in the multi-pane window, then used pressure to punch out a hole. Anna made a brief report to the two cops, who seemed more interested in Pak’s coffee and Pop-Tarts. Larry Staberg brought his jigsaw and a piece of plywood over, cut out a shape to fill the small broken windowpane, and nailed it in place.

  ‘‘Pretty much good as new,’’ he said, as his wife rolled her eyes at Anna.

  ‘‘Good until I get it fixed,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Thanks, everyone.’’

  As the party broke up, Logan said to someone else, as he walked away from Anna, ‘‘When I heard him firing, it sounded like a twenty-two, but the holes in my garage are bigger than that, maybe thirty-eights . . .’’ When she heard ‘‘twenty-two,’’ a small bell dinged in the back of Anna’s mind, but she forgot about it on the way upstairs. She wouldn’t sleep much during the rest of the night, but as much as she turned the whole episode over in her head, she never put the .22 used by the dark man together with the .22 used on Jason.

  Not then.

  six

  Late afternoon.

  The day felt like it had gone on forever. Anna was a night person. A full day in the sun left her feeling burned, dried out, and the midday traffic magnified the feeling. At night, Los Angeles traffic was manageable. If she had to drive during the day all the time, she’d move to Oregon. Or Nevada. Or anywhere else. In the small red Corolla, half a car length ahead of a cannibalistic Chevy Suburban, walled in by a daredevil in a brown UPS truck, she felt like she was trapped in a clamshell, and she was the clam.