The Night Crew

didn’t think, until later that day, that for two hours after the poisoning, the poison bottle—an iodine bottle that he’d emptied to take the chlordane—was still in his pocket. If anyone had suspected poisoning, he would have convicted himself.
    And it didn’t occur to him until after he’d dumped the bottle in a trash barrel that he hadn’t wiped it for fingerprints.
    Nor did he consider for almost a month that the chlordane bottle where he’d gotten the poison was still in his parents’ garage with the other pesticides.
    Eventually, he thought of it all, and the two faces agreed: He’d been lucky to get away with it.
    Mrs. Garner lived, and returned to class, although her memory was never as good as it should have been. Her science was never as good. The other teachers were told that she might have accidentally poisoned herself with one of the compounds that sat around the science room, odd powders in small vials, not all identified; and they pitied her as her hands shook when she tried to grade papers or to write.
    The two faces watched her for the rest of the year, and for all of his last year in high school. Proud of their handiwork. Tempted to finish it.
    But too smart.
    The inner face retracted, went back to the small cruelties. The outer face matured, and learned even better how to mask the inside. As two-face grew older, he had some women, but none that he really wanted. He got the leftovers, the losers. The ones he wanted sensed the wrongness about him, and turned away.
    Then came Anna. The look of her, the sound of her.
    She was his woman, always had been. He didn’t know exactly why, didn’t realize that his first view of her reminded him of his first glimpse of Mrs. Garner, but there wasn’t any doubt, never the slightest, from the first time he’d seen her amongst the others, heard them talk about her. She’d turned the key in him, and the inner face had gone outside. Had dealt with his rivals. One to go.
    He still processed those images through his imagination: like Anna herself, the images excited him, turned him on, as did the memories of Mrs. Garner. O’Brien and MacAllister, thrashing in their own blood. The inner face fed on the blood, swelled with it.
    And Anna must feel it, somewhere in her soul. Or would feel it, when she was no longer surrounded by these others.
    Two-face and Anna were fated to be together . . .
    He fantasized: Anna bent over the bathroom counter, her buttocks thrust toward him, the sinewy structure of her spine and the soft sheets of her back muscles . . .
    Then Anna turned and spoke to him.
    He edited frantically: she couldn’t see him, how could she speak to him? He edited, but she persisted, and she said:
    ‘‘. . . talking to Les and he said the guys at Seventeen are going to ditch their overnight monitoring guy and the guys in the truck are gonna have to do their own, like with one scanner.’’
    Another voice: ‘‘Oh, that’s horseshit.’’
    The editing broke down, snarled, crashed: and the twofaced man suddenly came back. He was sitting in the dirt with a fender next to one cheek and a hedge next to the other. He had a .22 pistol in his hand.
    The voice was real. And so was Anna.
    He pushed himself up, and stepped out.
    ‘‘Anna?’’

ten

    Harper pushed and Anna weakened: he was having an effect on her. Creek could stay, she decided.
    ‘‘But you’ve got to give me space,’’ she told Creek, when Harper had gone. ‘‘You can’t follow me around the house. You can’t fix anything.’’
    ‘‘Maybe I could do some painting,’’ Creek suggested, peering around the front room.
    ‘‘No painting,’’ Anna said. ‘‘No fix-up, no clean-up, no hedge-trimming. You sleep, you watch TV. We eat, we go to work.’’
    He grumbled about it, but agreed. ‘‘I’m gonna have to repark the truck . . .’’
    ‘‘You’ve got the truck? I thought Louis dropped you off.’’
    He shook his head: ‘‘I put him in a cab—the truck’s down the block.’’ The dead-end streets between the canals were too narrow for the truck to maneuver. When they had to stop momentarily at Anna’s, they’d leave it at the intersection of Linnie and Dell, usually with Louis to watch it.
    ‘‘If it’s there when Linkhof gets up, he’ll call the cops and get it towed.’’ Linkhof was the antisocial neighbor.
    ‘‘Yeah. I can ditch it at Jerry’s. The cook’ll be there, he can see it out the window.’’
    Anna nodded. ‘‘All right.