The Night Crew

blinking and headed up to the bedroom.
    In the world of the night crew, roaming Los Angeles from ten o’clock until dawn, Anna was tough.
    In more subtle relationships, in friendly talk from men she didn’t know, at parties, she felt awkward, uneasy, and walked away alone. This shyness had come late: she hadn’t always been like that.
    The one big affair of her life—almost four years long, now seven years past—had taken her heart, and she hadn’t yet gotten it back.
    She was asleep within minutes of her head touching her pillow. She didn’t dream of anyone: no old lovers, no old times.
    But she did feel the space around herself, in her dreams. Full of friends, and still, somehow . . . empty.

three

    The two-faced man hurried down the darkened pier, saw the light in the side window, in the back. He carried an eighteeninch Craftsman box-end wrench, the kind used in changing trailer-hitch balls. The heft was right: just the thing. No noise.
    He stopped briefly at the store window, looked in past the Closed sign. All dark in the sales area—but he could see light coming from under a closed door that led to the back.
    He beat on the door, a rough, frantic bam-bam-bambambam.
    ‘‘Hey, take an aspirin.’’ The two-faced man nearly jumped out of his shoes. A black man was walking by, carrying a bait bucket, a tackle box and a long spinning rod.
    ‘‘What?’’ Was this trouble? But the fisherman was walking on, out toward the end of the pier, shaking his head. ‘‘Oh, okay.’’
    He must’ve been beating on the door too hard. That’s what it was. The man forced a smile, nodded his head. Had to be careful. He balled his hand into a fist and bit hard on the knuckles, bit until he bled, the pain clearing his mind.
    Back to business; he couldn’t allow himself to blow up like this. If there were a mistake, a chance encounter, a random cop—he shuddered at the thought. They’d lock him in a cage like a rat. He’d driven over here at ninety miles an hour: if he’d been stopped, it all would have ended before he had her.
    Couldn’t allow that.
    He tried again with the door, knocking sedately, as though he were sane. Light flooded into the interior of the store, through the door at the back. The man knocked again. Noticed the blood trickling down the back of his hand. When did that happen? How did he . . . ?
    The door opened. ‘‘Yeah?’’
    The boy’s eyes were dulled with dope. But not so dulled, not so far gone that they didn’t drop to his shirt, to the deep red patina that crusted the shirt from neckline to navel, not so far gone that the doper couldn’t say, ‘‘Jesus Christ, what happened to you?’’
    The two-faced man didn’t answer. He was already swinging the wrench: the box end caught the boy on the bridge of the nose, and he went down as though he’d been struck by lightning.
    The two-faced man turned and looked up the pier toward the street, then down toward the ocean end. Nobody around. Good. He stepped inside, closed the door. The boy had rolled to his knees, was trying to get up. The man grabbed him by the hair and dragged him into the back. Jason was wrecked. As in train wreck. As in broken. As in dying.
    Even through the layers of acid and speed, he could feel the pain. But he wasn’t sure about it. He might wake up. He might still say, ‘‘Fuck me; what a trip.’’ He had done that in the past.
    This stuff he’d peeled off the slick white paper, this was some bad shit. A bad batch of chemicals, must’ve got some glue in there, or something.
    He wasn’t sure if the pain was the real thing, or just another artifact of his own imagination, an imagination that had grown up behind the counter in a video store, renting horror stories. The horror stories had planted snakes in his mind, dream-memories of bitten-off heads, chainsaw massacres, cut throats, women bricked into walls.
    So Jason suffered and groaned and tried to cover himself, and frothed, and somewhere in the remnant of his working brain he wondered: Is this real? It was real, all right.
    The two-faced man kicked him in the chest, and ribs broke away from Jason’s breastbone. Jason choked on a scream, made bubbles instead. The man was sweating and unbelieving: Jason sat on the floor of the shack, his eyes open, blood running from his mouth and ears, and still he said nothing but, ‘‘Aw, man.’’
    The man had been hoping for more: he’d hoped that the doper would plead with him, beg, whimper. That would