The Night Crew

she’d died in an automobile accident when Anna was six. She could still remember the melancholy, almost gothic circumstances of the funeral at the small Baptist church, and the slow procession to the tiny graveyard down the dusty gravel road: how bright and warm the day had been, the red-winged blackbirds just beginning to flock, one particular bird perched on a cattail, looking her in the eye as the procession passed . . .
    Death and music . . .
    Anna was the best pianist at the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee, the year she graduated. She moved to UCLA, and the year she took her MFA, she was one of the best two or three in the graduate school. Not good enough. To make it as a concert pianist, she would have had to have been the best in the world, in her year and a year or two before and after. As it was—one of the best at UCLA—she got session gigs; movie music.
    She still played the hard stuff, out of habit, and, really, out of a kind of trained-in love. But in her one last semiregular gig, Sunday nights at the Kingsborough Hotel, she played a dusty, romantic, out-of-date jazz.
    Her mother’s music: they’d played a piece of it at her funeral, and all those Wisconsin farm folks had thought it was a wonderful thing. Too early, half-drunk, Anna went to bed.
    Alcohol never brought sleep.
    Instead, it released unhappy images from some mental cage, and they prowled through her dreams, kicking old memories back to life. From time to time, half-awake, she’d imagine that she’d just groaned or moaned. At three in the morning, she woke up, looked at the clock, felt herself sweating into the sheets.
    At three-fifteen, she heard a noise, and was instantly awake. The noise had a solid reality to it.
    Not a dream noise.
    Anna slept in a pair of Jockey underpants. She slipped out of bed, groped around for a t-shirt that she’d tossed at a chair, but hadn’t found it when she heard the noise again. She moved silently to the head of the stairs, listened.
    Tik-tik . . . scrape.
    Back door , she thought. Definitely real. She was getting oriented now, stepped to the nightstand, found the phone. When she picked up the receiver, the dial lighted and she pushed a speed-dial button. Two rings and a man answered on the other end: Jim McMillan, from next door, groggy with sleep. ‘‘What?’’
    ‘‘Jim, this is Anna. We got one: he’s right outside my back door.’’
    ‘‘Holy cow.’’ Then she heard him speak to Hobie: ‘‘It’s Anna, she’s got one outside her back door,’’ and Hobie: ‘‘Okay.’’
    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