The Night Crew

anything.’’
    ‘‘Whadda we got?’’ Creek asked, interested now.
    ‘‘We got a dead dope dealer,’’ Harper said.
    Anna stopped: ‘‘Have you called the cops?’’
    ‘‘No. I will, soon as you’ve gone through.’’
    ‘‘The cops could put you in jail for not calling in right away,’’ Anna said.
    ‘‘Yeah, maybe, but I’ve got bigger problems than that. Come on. Maybe you want to bring a camera?’’
    He said it in a cheap way, and Anna said, ‘‘Shove it.’’
    While Louis waited with the radios, Harper led them up the walk. The door was just ajar, a light on inside, and Harper took a ballpoint pen out of his pocket and pushed the door open with the butt end of it. ‘‘Don’t touch the door, don’t touch anything.’’
    ‘‘Was the door open when you got here?’’
    ‘‘Yeah, and the light was on,’’ he said as they stepped across the threshold. ‘‘As soon as I got in, I knew . . .’’
    ‘‘Aw, jeez,’’ Anna said. The smell hit her, and she flinched away from it. Old blood and human waste, mixed up and curdling.
    ‘‘Flies,’’ Harper said absently, tilting his head back. Anna looked up, saw hundreds of bluebottle flies clustering around the light. ‘‘Back here.’’
    He led the way to a bedroom with mustard-colored walls and Rolling Stone covers thumbtacked to the walls. But the main attraction was a man who, at first glance, looked like a grotesque German Expressionist painting, muscles and blood exposed, everything gone black. He’d been handcuffed to the bed, his feet tied with ripped sheets. He was nude except for a pair of briefs, face up, and gagged. He’d been cut to pieces with a knife.
    And not quickly, Anna thought. The face looked as though the skin had been peeled off. A halo of blood surrounded the head, as if it had been violently shaken back and forth. So he’d been alive for the peeling . . .
    ‘‘Christ, what is this, what’re we here for?’’ Creek asked. ‘‘We’ve seen this shit . . .’’
    ‘‘Yeah, so’ve I,’’ Harper said. He looked at Anna. ‘‘You know him?’’
    ‘‘Even if I did, I’m not sure I’d recognize him,’’ she said. ‘‘But I don’t think so.’’
    ‘‘Name is Sean MacAllister,’’ Harper said. ‘‘Been busted three times on minor drug stuff, once with O’Brien in the car . . .’’
    Anna was nodding: ‘‘Jesus, we do know him. Sean, oh my God . . .’’
    Harper was going on: ‘‘. . . The bust never got to trial because there was some problem with the stop. O’Brien lived here for a couple of weeks, between apartments.’’
    ‘‘I don’t know—we never picked up Jason here. Are you sure that’s him?’’ As she said it, she had to turn away.
    ‘‘Pretty sure,’’ Harper said. ‘‘His billfold was still in his pocket.’’
    ‘‘So what do you want from us? Why don’t you just call the cops?’’ Creek asked.
    ‘‘I wanted you to look at this,’’ Harper said. He was standing next to the bed, and he pointed to the man’s bare chest. A knife rip crossed it from armpit to armpit.
    ‘‘What?’’ Anna asked.
    ‘‘Read it,’’ Harper said.
    ‘‘Read it?’’
    She and Creek edged closer. She couldn’t see it, but Creek could: he looked at her suddenly and she said again, ‘‘What?’’
    ‘‘Says ‘Anna,’ ’’ Creek said, almost to himself.
    And then she saw it: her name in carved flesh. ‘‘My God.’’ She stood in shock for a moment, then turned to Harper: ‘‘Why?’’
    ‘‘I don’t know.’’ He was watching her closely. ‘‘He was a small-time dealer, that’s about all I know.’’
    ‘‘Your son’s dealer?’’
    ‘‘I don’t know. I hope not. I tracked him through your pal O’Brien.’’ He looked around the room. ‘‘All I found was a little grass. Nothing else.’’
    ‘‘No dots,’’ Anna said, and he nodded. She looked at the grotesquerie again, the muscle mass that had once been human, the Anna, and she turned away from the bed, suddenly felt as though a hand had been clapped over her mouth, suffocating her: ‘‘I gotta get out of here.’’

eight

    Harper and Creek followed her outside, and Anna held her head over the picket fence and gagged. Nothing came up but a stream of saliva. After a moment, she turned back to the two men: ‘‘Sorry.’’
    ‘‘So you didn’t know the guy,’’ Harper said, a statement, not a question.
    ‘‘Not except to nod to. I never met Jason’s friends,