The Night Crew (6 page)

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, the 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.
After the excitement of the prowler, she’d tried to go back to bed; not because she was sleepy, but because she felt she ought to. She never got up until noon, at the earliest.

But she hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d gone to bed too early, under the influence of the booze, and the chase had gotten her cranked up.

So after lying awake for an hour, she got up, showered, went downstairs, ate breakfast—and got sleepy. She fought it for a while, and finally, at eight o’clock, crashed on the couch. When she got up, three hours later, she felt like her mouth was full of fungus. Off to a cranky start: and trying to figure out the funeral made her even more cranky.

Since the case involved murder, and was believed to involve drugs, the medical examiner wanted to get tissue tests back before releasing the body for cremation. She should call back, she was told, every day or two.

For how long?

‘‘Well, you know . . . whatever it takes,’’ the clerk said.
The cops had no similar problems with Jason’s apartment. They had taken out two cardboard cartons of paper, and that was it. A sleepy Inglewood police sergeant, a fax from the Odums in his hand, gave her the keys.

‘‘We’re all done with it,’’ he said.

‘‘Are you really working hard on this?’’

He yawned and rubbed his eyes, causing her to yawn in sympathy. ‘‘Yeah, yeah,’’ he said. ‘‘We are, but it’s basically a Santa Monica case. Nothing happened down here.’’

She borrowed the cop’s phone to call Wyatt, at Santa Monica, and as she waited for the transfer, frowned at the fax from the Odums. They had a fax? Did everybody have a fax?

‘‘Yeah, Wyatt . . .’’

‘‘I’m down in Inglewood. Are you doing anything up there?’’

Wyatt talked for a couple of minutes, and Anna decided that he wasn’t doing much.

‘‘There’s nothing to go on,’’ Wyatt said. ‘‘Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything—we had a guy out on the pier all last night, talking to the fishermen, and he came up
with exactly zero. We don’t have anything back from the lab yet, so we’re not even sure that’s where he was killed. And the most likely motive involves the worst anonymous ratshit dopers in the whole goddamn country. So I don’t know what more to do. Keep talking to his friends. Like your pal, Creek.’’

‘‘Creek’s okay,’’ Anna said.

‘‘He did time for dope,’’ Wyatt said. ‘‘He was dealing big-time, is the word.’’

‘‘He was smuggling, not dealing. And he quit cold. He hasn’t had anything stronger than Jack Daniel’s since he got out.’’ She could hear him yawn, and it irritated her: ‘‘Maybe you need a nap,’’ she suggested.

Wyatt ignored the sarcasm. ‘‘Yeah, I could. And Pam backs you up on Creek, by the way. She went out to talk to him.’’

‘‘Pam? Your partner?’’

‘‘Yeah.’’ Anna half-smiled, and even on the phone, Wyatt picked up the vibration.

‘‘Why? He’s a Romeo or something?’’

‘‘Not exactly. He does have an effect on . . . a certain kind of woman.’’

‘‘What kind?’’

‘‘The anal, blazer-wearing, Herme`s-scarf owning, powersunglasses type, with no kids.’’

‘‘Huh. Like you.’’

Anna almost started, then grinned into the phone: she’d deserved it. Wyatt continued, ‘‘Pam’s got a collection of Herme`s, but no kids.’’

‘‘Big surprise,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Good-bye.’’

‘‘Hey, wait . . .’’

He wanted to talk more about Pamela Glass; Anna wasn’t in the mood.

• • •

From the Inglewood police station, Anna headed over to Jason’s apartment. The apartment was a neat, four-building complex surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence. She took the car through a narrow access gate, which a sign said would be locked at midnight; the sign had been over-painted with gang graffiti. She glanced at her watch: already three o’clock. She had to move. Creek and Louis would be at her house in two hours, ready to roll.

She left the car in a guest parking slot, and headed into the complex. A dozen people sat in lawn chairs around a swimming pool, drinking beer, talking in the fading sunlight. Old Paul Simon tinkled from a boom box, ‘‘Still Crazy After All These Years.’’

Get it over.

Jason’s apartment was routine California stucco, tan, concrete steps going up to external walkways, rust stains running down from roof-edge gutters. The weather had been dry, but the walkways smelled like rain. Green, red, yellow and blue doors alternated down the walkways, an uninterested attempt at decor. Anna looked at the keys—237—found the door, a red one, looked around, waiting for somebody to object. Nobody did; she was alone on the walk. She had a little trouble with the key, finally got it to go and pushed inside.

Smelled carpet cleaner. He hadn’t been here long.

The apartment was nearly dark, the only illumination coming through the open door and a back window. The room she was in, the front room, was littered with empty pizza cartons, comic books, Big Gulp plastic cups. A
Playboy
and a
Penthouse
lay in the middle of the carpet. The cops had dumped everything, and left the litter where they dumped it. She left the door open, groped for the light switch, found it, flicked it. Nothing happened. Lights out.

‘‘Jeez,’’ she said. Her voice didn’t quite fill the room, and she paused, and thought,
What?
She stepped back and looked
out along the walkway, heard voices, a woman’s, then the deeper rumbling from a man.

Coming up the stairs. Still worried about being taken for an intruder, she pushed the door shut, stood for a moment in the gloom, waiting for her eyes to adjust. There’d be a circuit breaker somewhere, she thought. Probably in a closet or back in the kitchen.

The apartment was almost
too
quiet: like the ghost of Jason had muted all the little normal sounds, the creeping subliminal pitter-patter of cockroaches, warping of wood, flaking of paint. She pushed the feeling away and headed toward the small kitchen nook:
Find the light
.
He got her as she stepped into the kitchen.

He was off to the right, next to a small dinette table.

Anna was looking the other way, sensed him a fraction of a second before he was on her, started to turn, started to say something, to cry out . . .

He threw a large hand over her mouth, wrapped a heavy arm around her chest, tripped her with a sweeping leg, and they lurched back into the living room and hit the floor, Anna on the bottom. The impact took her breath away for a second, and she thrashed frantically, trying to get an arm loose, trying to get her feet working, trying to kick, but he was very strong, very professional: he’d done this before.

The arm around her chest tightened and he pulled her head back and said, close by her ear, ‘‘If you scream, I’ll punch your lights out. If you stop kicking I’ll let you breathe. C’mon . . .’’ They thrashed for another moment, but he’d wrapped a leg around her legs and she felt as though she were fighting an anaconda.

And he said, ‘‘C’mon, goddammit, I don’t want to hurt you, I just want you to shut up. If you’ll shut up, nod.’’

Exhausted, sweating, scared, she relaxed, involuntarily,
and nodded and he said, ‘‘I swear to God, if you scream, I’m gonna bust you in the mouth.’’

And he took his hand away from her mouth.

She drew a breath to scream, reconsidered: ‘‘Let me go,’’ she said, trying to look at him. She started thrashing again, trying to turn, but he held her. All she could see was his chin.

‘‘We’re gonna go like this over to the couch, and I’m gonna sit you down. I’ll be right in front of you and if you yell I’ll hit you. I want to be clear about that.’’

‘‘All right, all right.’’ Not hurt yet.

‘‘Here we go.’’ He rolled, and pried one arm around behind her, caught her fingers in a hold, and she thought,
Cop,
and said, aloud, ‘‘That hurts.’’

‘‘Not much,’’ he said. ‘‘Not yet, but it will if you put a move on me.’’

‘‘Are you a cop? You sound like a cop.’’

‘‘No.’’ He’d released her legs, got his knees under himself, and slowly pushed up to his feet, pulling Anna along, past a cable reel that Jason was using as a coffee table. Then he pushed her and twirled her at the same time, she found herself staggering uncontrollably backward, until the couch hit her calves and she fell back onto it. He was right there, his face obscured in the gloom, a fist an inch from her chest.

‘‘What’s your name?’’ he asked.

‘‘Let me out of here.’’

‘‘What’s your fuckin’ name?’’

‘‘Fuck you.’’ He didn’t seem frightening, somehow. ‘‘Let me out of here.’’

‘‘In a minute. Gimme your arms.’’

‘‘What?’’

‘‘Gimme . . .’’ He grabbed one hand, and she tried to jerk free, but he put a hand on her forehead and said, ‘‘Sit still, goddammit.’’

‘‘What do you want?’’

‘‘Needle tracks.’’

What?
She stopped fighting, and a penlight clicked on. He turned her arm wrist up, and played the beam down her forearm.

‘‘Other arm.’’

She turned her other arm up, and he looked it over, then shined the light into her eyes, dazzling her.

‘‘What’s your name?’’ he asked again.

‘‘Fuck you. Who are you? What the hell are you doing here?’’

‘‘You oughta watch your mouth,’’ he said. ‘‘And it’s none of your business. You sit right there. If you start to get up . . .’’

‘‘Yeah, I know, you’ll beat me up.’’

He sounded embarrassed: ‘‘Yeah.’’

He was groping around on the floor, keeping his eyes on her, but not until he moved back to her did she see that he’d picked up her purse. He popped it open and dumped it on the wire-reel table, shined the penlight on it and stirred through it.

Anna’s purse was small, and there wasn’t much: a billfold, a comb, a lipstick, a roll of Clorets, a handful of change, a couple of ripped-in-half movie tickets. He opened the billfold and looked at her driver’s license. She still couldn’t see his face, and the light, held chest high, made it more difficult.

‘‘Anna Batory,’’ he said. He looked up from the license. ‘‘You were with the TV crew.’’

She wasn’t going to be raped, she decided; probably not beaten up. The guy had a hard force about him, but not the hyped energy that produced an attack. And he knew about her: ‘‘Yeah, I’m with a video crew.’’

‘‘You shot the video on Jacob Harper.’’

‘‘Who?’’ Now she was confused.

‘‘Jacob Harper—the kid who tried to fly off the Shamrock.’’

‘‘Oh. Yeah, we were there.’’ What did the jumper have to do with Jason’s apartment?

‘‘Where’d Jason O’Brien get his dope?’’

‘‘I don’t know . . .’’

‘‘C’mon, he worked for you, you’ve got a key to his apartment.’’

‘‘He didn’t work for me; he was a part-time guy, like once a month. And the cops gave me the key.’’

‘‘The cops.’’ After a moment’s silence, he asked, ‘‘Why would they do that?’’

‘‘Because nobody wants his body. I’m supposed to take care of funeral arrangements and there’s nothing more here that the cops want.’’

‘‘Huh.’’ He stood up, looked around in the gloom and said, ‘‘Damn it.’’

‘‘You hurt me,’’ Anna said. She was getting a feel for him. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her. ‘‘You could have broken my arm.’’

‘‘Ah, shut up,’’ he said. ‘‘You’re not hurt and we both know it.’’ Then: ‘‘Your boyfriend’s a doper.’’

‘‘What?’’

‘‘This guy Creek.’’

‘‘He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my partner. He hasn’t done any dope for ten years.’’

‘‘Bullshit. He’s got no job, he lives in a nice apartment at the Marina and he’s got a yacht.’’

‘‘No job? I’ll tell you what, pal, we’re out there two hundred and fifty nights a year . . .’’

‘‘Yeah, some Tinkertoy fuckin’ movie wannabees with cameras, for Christ’s sake.’’

Now she was getting hot: ‘‘Yeah? We grossed better than three hundred and fifty thousand last year. Me’n Creek and
Louis took home better than ninety apiece, after expenses. How much’d you make?’’

‘‘That much? Ninety?’’ Surprise.

‘‘Yeah.’’ She would have sulked, if she thought she could have afforded to. But she had to stay on top of him.

Another moment of silence, then he was moving away from her. Over his shoulder he said, ‘‘Fuckin’ L.A., you goddamn people are a bunch of ghouls, you know that?