The Night Crew

to do. Had to get her to some light. Finally, afraid that she might be hurting her worse, she tugged and pulled Glass across the carpet. Glass remained inert, sometimes mumbling to herself.
    ‘‘How bad?’’ Harper whispered.
    ‘‘I don’t know. We need light.’’
    ‘‘Pull that desk around . . .’’
    Anna managed to move one of the desks enough to provide cover from the only window that Judge could see through: and turned on a light.
    Pam Glass had been terribly beaten: her nose was broken, her teeth were broken, one cheekbone was wrong, her lips were twice as big as they should be, and the color of fresh liver.
    ‘‘Aw, Jesus,’’ Anna said. But she could do nothing about it. ‘‘Let me look at your hip,’’ she said to Harper. Harper rolled, showed her a bullet hole passing through his jeans in his thigh just below his butt. There was no exit wound.
    ‘‘Not much blood,’’ she whispered.
    ‘‘Yeah, I don’t think it’s too bad, but Jesus, my leg just doesn’t want to work,’’ he said.
    ‘‘I’m gonna go look at Daly. Can you cover me?’’ And for just a tiny sliver of a second she thought how odd it was to be using the language of television cop shows: cover me. What did she know about cover? ‘‘I’ll go out on the porch.’’
    ‘‘Yeah. Turn off the light, first. And we gotta try the phones.’’
    ‘‘Daly first.’’
    Anna hit the light, waited for a second, then went through the door on her stomach while Harper sat in the door, scanning the dark, ready to fire at any sign of a muzzle blast.
    But the woman was dead: Anna knew it the moment that she touched her. She was already going cold, and had the peculiar stillness of those who’d gone on. But she grabbed the woman’s shirt, and pulled her back through the door.
    ‘‘Alive?’’ Harper whispered, as they pulled back.
    ‘‘No. I don’t think so.’’
    Anna slumped against a wall, and Harper touched the woman. ‘‘No, she’s gone.’’
    ‘‘Let’s get back to Pam.’’
    ‘‘Let’s get the phone . . .’’
    Glass’s breath was short, harsh, irregular. As Anna knelt over her, she blew a blood bubble, which burst on her bloodcrusted lips. Anna said, ‘‘She’s in trouble, Jake. We’ve got to get her to a hospital.’’
    Harper was already crawling across the office. He groped on top of the desk, found a phone, pulled it down, listened, said ‘‘Shit.’’
    ‘‘What?’’
    ‘‘Dead. He must’ve pulled wires somewhere. Probably outside the house.’’
    ‘‘We’ve got to get her out of here,’’ Anna said urgently. ‘‘We can’t wait. Jake—I think she’s dying.’’

thirty

    They sat for a moment, huddled over Glass, watching her breathe. Thinking. Anna asked, finally, ‘‘Can you walk?’’
    ‘‘I don’t know.’’ Harper looked around, found a blind spot where he couldn’t be seen, pushed himself up on the wall, tested the leg and nearly collapsed.
    ‘‘Maybe—but not very far. I could hop pretty fast.’’
    ‘‘Forget it,’’ Anna said. Then: ‘‘Here’s what we do. We’ve got to get him talking to us. Anything. Just get him talking. Then we’ll know about where he is, which side of the house. Then I’ll sneak out the other side, with your car keys. Once I’m away from the house, in the dark, he’ll never find me. And he doesn’t know where your car is. Once I’m in the car, I’ll come crashing up here—I’ll get as close to the back porch as I can without wrecking it. That’s five feet you’ll have to cross. Can you carry Pam that far?’’
    ‘‘Anna . . .’’ He was staring at her, unhappy. ‘‘Anna, I can carry her, but, Jesus, that’s crazy.’’
    ‘‘Can you think of anything else?’’
    He looked down at the linoleum, thinking. A few seconds later he said, ‘‘If we can figure out where the phone goes out, and where he is, if they’re different, I might be able to patch the wires.’’
    ‘‘Do you know anything about telephones?’’
    ‘‘No, but if he’s just cut the wires . . .’’
    ‘‘I don’t know if you can just put them back together,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Even if we find out where he is, and you can get out, he could move. If you’re just lying out there on the ground, messing with wires . . . you’d be dead. If I run, it doesn’t matter what he does once I’m out of here: he can’t catch me.’’
    ‘‘Christ.’’ He ran his hand through his hair, moved, groaned.
    ‘‘And if we