The Night Crew

by John Sandford

  ‘‘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 was a 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 out.

  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 tuna—but 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 fishwhacker 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 was 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 thorn—and then, further down his back, three more of them. ‘‘Sit still,’’ she said. ‘‘I need tweezers.’’

  The thorns took 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 know, 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: 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 sideline— we’d have six or seven Saabs sitting around the house at any one time. I started driving them when I was a kid—I 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 field—I was so mad—I 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 her—hadn’t turned her into a blubbering idiot, but she’d liked it, a lot—and 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.

  fourteen

  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 asked.

  ‘‘The Malibu cops went over to Tony and Ronnie’s place after the shooting and the woman up there—you 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 it—she 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, somewhere—they’re still going through the paper, looking for an address.’’

  ‘‘And they’re all arrested.’’

>   ‘‘All but Tony. Turns out Tony didn’t live there—he lives up the hill—so 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.