The Night Crew

by John Sandford

  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.’’

  ‘‘Something—but 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 noparking 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 house—or Tony and Ronnie’s, or whatever it was—looked 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 way—we’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 Mediterraneanmodern, 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 tobacco—cigars, Anna thought. The basement was empty except for a pile of cardboard appliance boxes at the bottom of the stairs—boxes 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 in—the beds were unmade—but neither the bedrooms nor the adjoining baths showed much in the way of personal effects— nothing feminine—and only the most basic shaving and washing supplies.

  They found nothing of special interest—no 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 else—this 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 this—too 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 MOTHERFUCKERS, 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 shut—slammed 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, MOTHERFUCKER, 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 it 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, bullshit—what 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.’’