The Night Crew

guys going . . . we need a skirmish line . . .’’
    By the time Anna was dressed, fifteen neighborhood men, a half-dozen women and two cops had walked the street, and found nothing at all. Anna walked with them as they checked again, knocking at every door.
    ‘‘Like smoke,’’ Pak said. ‘‘Must’ve swum the canal.’’ When the last house was checked, they gathered at Pak’s, wallowing in the scent of testosterone. Pak started a stream of instant coffee coming out of the microwave, and Pop-Tarts from the toaster; Logan, the old Vietnam vet, was saying, ‘‘Like this night in fuckin’ Dong Ha, man, pop-pop-pop a fuckin’ firefight in the front yard, my garage is all shot to shit . . .’’
    He did seem pleased, Anna thought.
    The debriefing—party—at Pak’s lasted an hour, and everybody went to look at the broken glass on Anna’s back porch. The intruder had used masking tape to tape off one pane in the multi-pane window, then used pressure to punch out a hole. Anna made a brief report to the two cops, who seemed more interested in Pak’s coffee and Pop-Tarts. Larry Staberg brought his jigsaw and a piece of plywood over, cut out a shape to fill the small broken windowpane, and nailed it in place.
    ‘‘Pretty much good as new,’’ he said, as his wife rolled her eyes at Anna.
    ‘‘Good until I get it fixed,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Thanks, everyone.’’
    As the party broke up, Logan said to someone else, as he walked away from Anna, ‘‘When I heard him firing, it sounded like a twenty-two, but the holes in my garage are bigger than that, maybe thirty-eights . . .’’ When she heard ‘‘twenty-two,’’ a small bell dinged in the back of Anna’s mind, but she forgot about it on the way upstairs. She wouldn’t sleep much during the rest of the night, but as much as she turned the whole episode over in her head, she never put the .22 used by the dark man together with the .22 used on Jason.
    Not then.

six

    Late afternoon.
    The day felt like it had gone on forever. Anna was a night person. A full day in the sun left her feeling burned, dried out, and the midday traffic magnified the feeling. At night, Los Angeles traffic was manageable. If she had to drive during the day all the time, she’d move to Oregon. Or Nevada. Or anywhere else. In the small red Corolla, half a car length ahead of a cannibalistic Chevy Suburban, walled in by a daredevil in a brown UPS truck, she felt like she was trapped in a clamshell, and she was the clam. After the excitement of the prowler, she’d tried to go back to bed; not because she was sleepy, but because she felt she ought to. She never got up until noon, at the earliest.
    But she hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d gone to bed too early, under the influence of the booze, and the chase had gotten her cranked up.
    So after lying awake for an hour, she got up, showered, went downstairs, ate breakfast—and got sleepy. She fought it for a while, and finally, at eight o’clock, crashed on the couch. When she got up, three hours later, she felt like her mouth was full of fungus. Off to a cranky start: and trying to figure out the funeral made her even more cranky.
    Since the case involved murder, and was believed to involve drugs, the medical examiner wanted to get tissue tests back before releasing the body for cremation. She should call back, she was told, every day or two.
    For how long?
    ‘‘Well, you know . . . whatever it takes,’’ the clerk said. The cops had no similar problems with Jason’s apartment. They had taken out two cardboard cartons of paper, and that was it. A sleepy Inglewood police sergeant, a fax from the Odums in his hand, gave her the keys.
    ‘‘We’re all done with it,’’ he said.
    ‘‘Are you really working hard on this?’’
    He yawned and rubbed his eyes, causing her to yawn in sympathy. ‘‘Yeah, yeah,’’ he said. ‘‘We are, but it’s basically a Santa Monica case. Nothing happened down here.’’
    She borrowed the cop’s phone to call Wyatt, at Santa Monica, and as she waited for the transfer, frowned at the fax from the Odums. They had a fax? Did everybody have a fax?
    ‘‘Yeah, Wyatt . . .’’
    ‘‘I’m down in Inglewood. Are you doing anything up there?’’
    Wyatt talked for a couple of minutes, and Anna decided that he wasn’t doing much.
    ‘‘There’s nothing to go on,’’ Wyatt said. ‘‘Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything—we had a guy out on the pier all last