The Night Crew

Like that fish. He didn’t look like he’d ever been alive.’’
    ‘‘You know who he hung out with,’’ Creek said. ‘‘You give those kids enough time, they’ll kill you. Fuckin’ crazy Hollywood junkie crackheads.’’
    Anna looked up at him, nibbled her lip. She didn’t want to tell him that she’d given his name to the cops, but she had to. He had to be ready. ‘‘Listen, I had to make a statement to the cops. We might have been the last people who saw Jason alive, except for the killer. I told them about Jason using the crank and the other stuff, ’cause it might be relevant.’’
    Creek exhaled, threw his head back and looked at the Windex at the top of the mast. ‘‘Wind is shit today,’’ he said. And: ‘‘They’ll be coming to see me.’’
    Anna nodded. ‘‘That’s why I stopped by. They wanted the names of everybody on the crew with Jason,’’ she said. ‘‘I think we ought to bag it tonight, maybe for a couple of days.’’
    ‘‘Fine with me. I’ve got work to do on the boat,’’ Creek said. He flopped his arms, a gesture of resignation. In the bad old days, Creek had run boatloads of grass up from Mexico. He’d never been caught with a load, but at the end, the cops had known all about him, and when he’d been tripped up with a dime bag, they’d used it to put him in Chino for three hard years. He considered himself lucky.
    ‘‘If this was Alabama, I’d still be inside,’’ he said. He hadn’t smuggled or used drugs in a decade, but if the cops ran his name as a member of the night crew, they’d get a hit when his name came up: and they’d be around. ‘‘You better get in touch with Louis.’’
    ‘‘Already did, on the phone,’’ Anna said. ‘‘But I wanted you to know they’ll probably be coming around. I woulda lied to them . . .’’
    ‘‘Nah, they would of caught you, and then they woulda wondered why you were lying.’’ He grinned at her: ‘‘You want to go out and sit in the sun?’’
    On the afternoons when Creek wasn’t working, he’d crank up the Honda outboard, motor out of the marina into the Pacific, raise just enough sail to carry him out a bit further, then back the jib, ease the main, lash the tiller to leeward and drift, sometimes all night, listening to the ocean.
    Anna shook her head at the invitation: ‘‘I don’t think so,’’ she said. ‘‘I want to get back home, take a bath. I smell like a . . . dead guy. I’ve got it in my nose.’’ Jason had worked with them on and off for two years— they’d probably been out with him once a month, perhaps a little more often. Say, thirty times, Anna thought, a few hours each time. He was good at it: he had an artistic eye, knew how to frame a shot and wasn’t afraid to stick his face into trouble.
    His main shortcoming was a lack of focus: he would get caught by something that interested him—might be a face, or visually tricky shot, and lose track of the story.
    Anna cleaned up the house for a half-hour, bored, on edge and depressed all at once, and finally dragged two old Mission chairs into the back and began sanding the paint off. She’d found them in a yard sale, in reasonable condition, and figured she’d make about nine million percent profit on them, if she could ever get the turquoise paint off them.
    The work was fiddly, dull, but let her think about Jason: not puzzling out the murder, not looking for connections, just remembering the nights he’d spent in the back of the truck— the decapitated woman on Olympic; the crazy Navajo with the baseball bat in the sex-toy joint, the pink plastic penisshaped dildos hurtling through the videotape like Babylonian arrows coming down on Jerusalem.
    She grinned at that memory: stopped grinning when she remembered the fight at the Black Tulip, when the horseplayers had gone after the TV lights. Or the time they taped the two young runaways, sisters, looking for protection on Sunset, the fifty-year-old wolves already closing in . . .
    At seven o’clock, with the daylight fading, she quit on the sanding, went inside, made a gin and tonic. The TV was running in the background, as it always was, and as she turned to go back outdoors, she saw the tape of the guy being hit by the pig. He was getting more than his money’s worth, she thought, and grinned at the sight. Then: Jason got that shot . She stopped smiling and, still smelling of the paintstripper, carried the drink out to the canal-side deck and dropped