The Night Crew

the mouthpiece. ‘‘Did I hear that right? You laughed at us.’’
    ‘‘So I’m sorry now,’’ the Witch shouted back. ‘‘Name the price.’’
    ‘‘Network price,’’ Anna said. She sipped at the soup. ‘‘Three thousand for the package. Plus two grand for the cats.’’
    ‘‘Fuck that,’’ the Witch said. ‘‘Network for the package, okay, but the cats we did, we did with our own crew.’’
    ‘‘C’mon, c’mon,’’ Anna shouted. ‘‘I’m making a point here.’’
    ‘‘So’m I . . . Five hundred for the cats.’’
    ‘‘I’m serious, we don’t need you. Network plus a thousand for the cats.’’
    ‘‘Deal,’’ the Witch said. ‘‘I want to see the fuckin’ pictures in ten fuckin’ minutes.’’ She slammed down the receiver.
    • • •
    Anna called the truck, and spoke to Louis. ‘‘Send it to Three.’’
    ‘‘How much you get?’’
    ‘‘Four thousand—I got a thousand for the cats.’’
    Louis said, ‘‘Examonte, dude,’’ and repeated the price to Creek, whose laughter filled the background. Anna grinned and said, ‘‘We’re dropping thirty-five thousand bucks in the pot—that’s three times the record.’’
    Creek shouted at the phone, ‘‘We might as well quit, we’ll never do this again.’’
    ‘‘How’re the radios, Louis?’’ Anna asked.
    ‘‘Good. Nothing happening.’’
    ‘‘Call me.’’
    Anna hung up with Creek still laughing about the money. She’d wait until Creek had dropped Louis, and there was no chance of recovering for a quick run. Good stuff sometimes broke just at dawn, although the regular station trucks would be out prowling around fairly soon. Waiting for bed, Anna trailed by the Steinway, touched a few keys, yawned, flipped through the sheets for Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor. She’d been trying to clarify the fingerwork in the fast passages.
    She didn’t sit down—her head wasn’t quite right yet. She put the music on the piano, said hello to a couple of plants, enjoyed the quiet. Went into the utility room and got a plastic watering can and filled it.
    Barefoot, humming to herself—something stupid from Les Mise ´rables that she couldn’t get out of her mind—Anna took the watering can out to the porch, and started watering the potted plants. Geraniums, and some daisies: plants with an old-fashioned feel, bright touches in the shade of the jungle.
    Back inside, she refilled the can and walked through the house, checking with two fingers the soil in a hundred more plants: some of them were named after movie stars or singers, like Paul, Robert, Faye, Susan, Julia, Jack. Most were small, from a desert somewhere.
    On a broken-down Salvation Army table, the first piece of furniture she’d bought in California, she kept a piece of Wisconsin: a clump of birdsfoot violets, dug from the banks of the Whitewater River, and a flat of lilies-of-the-valley. Just now, the lilies-of-the-valley were blooming, their tiny white bell flowers producing a delicate perfume that reminded her of the smell of dooryard lilacs in the Midwestern spring.
    Behind the California tan, Anna was a Midwestern farm kid, born and raised on a corn farm in Wisconsin.
    The farm was part of her toughness: She had a farm kid’s lack of fear when it came to physical confrontation. She’d even been in a couple of fights, in her twenties, in the good old days of music school and late-night prowls down Sunset. As she climbed into her thirties, the adrenaline charge diminished, though her reputation hadn’t: The big guys still waved to her from the muscle pen on the beach, and told people, ‘‘You don’t fuck with Anna, if you wanna keep your face on straight.’’
    The toughness extended to the psychological. Farm kids knew how the world worked, right from the start. She’d taken the fuzzy-coated big-eyed lambs to the locker, and brought them back in little white packages.
    That’s the way it was. Anna finished watering the plants, yawned again, and stopped at the piano. Liszt was hard. Deliberately hard. Her home phone rang, and she turned away from the piano and stepped into the small kitchen and picked it up. This would be the sign-off from Louis and Creek: ‘‘Hello?’’
    ‘‘Anna: Louis.’’
    ‘‘All done?’’
    ‘‘Yeah, but I was talking to a guy at Seventeen about the animal rescue tape. I don’t know what they did, but it sounds a little weird.’’
    ‘‘Like how, weird?’’ Anna asked.
    ‘‘Like