The Night Crew

him.’’ ‘‘You’re his sister,’’ Harper muttered as they pushed through the emergency room door. The place smelled like all emergency rooms, a combination of alcohol and raw turkey.
    Anna nodded, and five seconds later, at the desk, she said to a nurse, ‘‘My brother was shot and they brought him here. Can you tell me where he is?’’
    Her distress came through: the nurse never questioned her. ‘‘He’s still in surgery,’’ he said, tipping his head down the hall. ‘‘There’s a waiting room . . .’’
    ‘‘Can anybody tell us how he is?’’
    The nurse shook his head: ‘‘He should be all right, if he’s in good shape, and they say he is. That’s the best thing.’’
    ‘‘How . . . are they operating right now?’’
    The nurse glanced up at a clock: ‘‘They have been for almost two hours.’’
    ‘‘Oh, Jesus.’’ The tears started again and Harper steered her toward the waiting area. Anna wasn’t good at waiting, and Harper was worse.
    While she sat, remembering the attack, and the days before it—all going back to Jacob’s leap, and Jason’s death—he read an aging copy of Modern Maturity , the sports section of a three-day-old USA Today , and a coverless Time .
    A man with a bad hand cut came in, and Harper went over to talk about it, until a nurse shooed him away. He walked around and jingled change in his pocket, got coffee for the two of them. Three or four times, he went to the desk, came back with nothing new. He put his feet up, tried to sleep and failed.
    An hour after they arrived, Pam Glass walked in, her face haggard. She was wearing one of her power suits, with an Herme`s knotted at the throat, but the rims of her eyes were red with stress and tears.
    ‘‘Why didn’t anybody call me?’’ she asked Anna. ‘‘How is he?’’
    Anna said, ‘‘Where? We didn’t know . . . he’s still in surgery.’’
    ‘‘He was supposed to call me this morning and he didn’t and I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.’’ She was not quite babbling. ‘‘I didn’t hear from him and I went in and Jim said he’d been shot, I was getting a cup of orange juice and Jim came over and said Creek was shot . . .’’
    ‘‘You better sit down,’’ Harper said. He introduced himself and said, ‘‘I saw you a couple of days ago, I was in talking to Jim.’’
    ‘‘Oh, yeah . . .’’ she said vaguely. She looked back toward the operating suite: ‘‘What have you heard?’’
    ‘‘Not much: he’s hurting. And he’s been in there a while.’’ ‘‘Oh, my God . . .’’
    Anna was watching her; and watching her, knew that Creek had made a connection with the woman. Nothing forced here, no sense that Creek was a fling for her. She liked him, a lot. And Anna liked her, for that. Anna sat on a too-soft chair with her legs curled beneath her, and stared, running mental movies of her time with Creek. Glass tried to read a Times; Harper wandered.
    ‘‘Look,’’ Harper finally said to Anna. ‘‘We’re not gonna do your pal any good sitting around.’’
    ‘‘I’m not leaving until I know how he is,’’ Anna said.
    ‘‘Neither am I,’’ Glass said.
    Harper pulled a chair out of the line beside Anna’s, and faced it toward her. ‘‘What have you been doing the last couple of days?’’
    The question had a rhetorical sound to it, and Anna shrugged and opened her mouth and Harper cut her off: ‘‘I’ll tell you what. You’ve been shuttling around from one bunch of cops to another. Santa Monica, L.A., Venice, these guys up in Burbank, whoever they were . . .’’
    ‘‘North Hollywood . . .’’
    ‘‘Whatever. And you know what? All those cops are hoping that somebody else’ll get this guy, because they ain’t got squat, and they don’t have enough time to chase him with everything else they gotta do.’’
    ‘‘We’re chasing him,’’ Glass said grimly.
    ‘‘C’mon,’’ Harper said to her. ‘‘How many hours will you put on it? The only reason L.A. tolerates me running around is because I used to work there, and they’re hoping I might turn something up and call them. They just don’t have the time.’’
    ‘‘They’ll make the time,’’ Anna said grimly. ‘‘The only reason this guy isn’t a big story is that nobody’s paid attention to him. If I want them to pay attention, they will.’’
    ‘‘Oh, bullshit,’’ Harper said. ‘‘How’re you gonna do that? You can’t . . .’’
    ‘‘You