The Night Crew

color.’’
    ‘‘Okay.’’ A flat okay. Not skeptical, but not necessarily buying it, either. ‘‘So you say he went that way . . .’’
    The new cops put her back in the squad car and started tracing the path of the shooter, walking down Dell with their flashlights. She watched until the phone rang. She snapped it open, and said, ‘‘Yes?’’
    Harper: ‘‘Couldn’t wait to hear my voice again, huh?’’ He said it lightly.
    ‘‘Creek’s been shot.’’ Silence. She tried again. ‘‘Creek’s been . . .’’
    ‘‘Christ, the guy’s going through a psychotic break, the shooter. How bad is he? Creek?’’
    ‘‘Pretty bad, I think. He couldn’t talk when they put him in the ambulance.’’
    ‘‘Where are you?’’
    ‘‘In a cop car, by my house, on Linnie. We were walking up to the truck.’’
    ‘‘Fifteen minutes,’’ Harper said, and he was gone. He was almost a half hour, not fifteen minutes, rolling up in the growing light of dawn. He spotted Anna in the cop car and started toward her, but the cops walled him away. They argued for a while, and she saw him show one of the cops a card: but this cop apparently didn’t need legal advice, and shook his head.
    ‘‘You’ve got to go back downtown,’’ one of the uniforms said a moment later. ‘‘I understand you’ve already been there tonight.’’
    ‘‘Yes.’’ She looked past him at Harper, who was arguing with another cop, his hair flopping into his eyes as he talked. ‘‘Why can’t I talk to that man?’’
    ‘‘We want to get a statement from you before you talk to anyone else. You have a right to see your lawyer if you want, but they’ll tell you about that downtown,’’ the cop said. He looked back at Harper: ‘‘He used to be a cop.’’
    ‘‘Homicide,’’ Anna said.
    ‘‘Used to be,’’ the cop said. So she did it all over again: talked to cops, a different shift, fresher, just up, three of them this time. Dictated a statement, impatient, worried about Creek. Demanded information about Creek: he was alive, they told her, should be okay. The detectives in the unit were beginning to gather around her.
    ‘‘This guy is . . . this guy is berserk,’’ a detective named Samson told her.
    ‘‘You remember that case down in Anaheim?’’ asked another cop. ‘‘The guy would stalk these people for weeks, then slash them, then he started killing them? When was that? That was like this.’’
    ‘‘Guy’s dead, though,’’ Samson said.
    ‘‘Yeah? When did that happen?’’
    ‘‘I don’t know—I heard it. He hung himself in prison.’’
    ‘‘Besides, it’s more like that one over in Downey, the kid with the Taurus wagon,’’ said a third cop. ‘‘Man, I couldn’t believe he’d do them right in the wagon. Told his mother the blood was some kind of fertilizer for a greenhouse . . .’’
    ‘‘Yeah, I remember. Whatever happened to him? He used both a gun and a knife, didn’t he?’’
    ‘‘Can I go?’’ Anna asked.
    • • •
    Harper was waiting in the same spot where he’d waited the night before, in the hall near the exit.
    ‘‘Creek’s in the OR at L.A. General,’’ he said. ‘‘He’s got three bullets still in him, twenty-twos. If it’d been almost anything else, he’d be dead.’’ They were walking at speed, heading for the door. They hit it with a bang and were into the street, side by side.
    ‘‘The face isn’t bad, just barely caught some skin, in and out. No nerve damage, nothing,’’ Harper said. ‘‘The problem is with the chest. One tore a hole in his left lung and collapsed it; another one went between two ribs and rattled around behind his heart.’’
    ‘‘Oh, God.’’ Standing on the street, she started to cry, one hand to her face. Harper draped an arm around her shoulder and pulled her head into his chest: ‘‘Listen, the docs down there are good.’’
    ‘‘I had the gun in my pocket, I couldn’t get it out.’’
    ‘‘Well, you can’t . . .’’
    ‘‘He was right there,’’ she said, pointing at a parking meter, trying to make him see it. ‘‘The guy was right there, he said my name. I had the gun, but I couldn’t get it out . . .’’
    She started to cry again and he squeezed her head in tight: he smelled of clean sweat and deodorant, his arms felt like bricks. She let herself go for a moment, leaning into the comfort of the man, then pushed back, wiped tears with the back of her hand. ‘‘Let’s go see