The Night Crew

the L.A. sheriff’s department. Nine years, never liked it much: I finally went off to law school because the police work was driving me nuts.’’
    ‘‘What happened with you and your wife?’’
    ‘‘Ah, you know . . . We just couldn’t keep it together. First I was on the street all the time, then I got sent to vice and I was hanging out with dopers and hookers . . .’’
    ‘‘Mess around a little?’’
    ‘‘Never. But you start to reflect the culture. Sometimes I think I scared her. Or disgusted her,’’ he said. ‘‘Then I started going to law school full time, and then I moved up to homicide, Christ, I was so busy I never saw either her or the kids . . .’’ And he carefully opened up Anna, again, as he had in the car: got her to talk about her mother, her brother, her father.
    ‘‘Pretty normal family, until Mom died,’’ Anna said. ‘‘ After that: I don’t know. It just seemed like everybody started to work themselves to death . . . We still had some good times, but overall, there was a pretty grim feeling to it. When I go back now . . . I don’t want to stay.’’
    ‘‘Did your brother teach you to drive? Like tonight?’’
    Anna laughed: ‘‘My dad used to fix Saabs as a sideline— we’d have six or seven Saabs sitting around the house at any one time. I started driving them when I was a kid—I mean, like really a kid, when I was seven or eight. My dad and my brother used to run them in the enduro races at the county fair, I’d pit crew . . .’’
    ‘‘Sexism,’’ Harper said.
    ‘‘Severe sexism,’’ she agreed. ‘‘Once . . . my dad always took me up to Madison for my music lesson, but one time, in the summer, he’d cut hay when it was supposed to be dry all week, and the next thing you know this big line of thunderstorms popped up over in Minnesota. You could see them coming on the TV radar, and he was running around baling and he just didn’t have time to take me. So when he was out in the field—I was so mad—I jumped in this old Saab and drove in myself. I was ten, I had to look through the steering wheel to see out the windshield. My music teacher didn’t see me coming, and I got through the lesson, but she saw me drive away and she freaked out and called the cops and called my dad . . .’’ She laughed at the memory: ‘‘He never missed another lesson, though.’’
    ‘‘Ten?’’ he asked.
    ‘‘Yup. I can drive a tractor, too. And a front-end loader.’’
    ‘‘If you could do plumbing and welding, I’d probably marry you,’’ he said.
    And they necked a little more, until he shifted uncomfortably and said, ‘‘We either stop now, or we . . . keep going.’’
    ‘‘Better stop,’’ Anna said. She hopped off his lap, leaving him a little tousled and forlorn. She laughed, and said, ‘‘You look harassed.’’
    ‘‘A little,’’ he said, and again, some underlying source of amusement seemed to rise to the surface of his eyes.
    She turned and headed for the stairs. ‘‘No rattling of doorknobs, okay?’’
    ‘‘Okay,’’ he said, watching her go. She was on the stairs when he called after her, ‘‘You weren’t thinking about this other guy, were you? This Clark weasel-guy?’’
    ‘‘No . . . no, I wasn’t, and he’s not a weasel,’’ she said. And, in fact, the name ‘‘Clark’’ had never touched her consciousness. But it did that night.
    Sitting on Harper’s lap had aroused her—hadn’t turned her into a blubbering idiot, but she’d liked it, a lot—and in her sleep, she relived a night with Clark, pizza and wine and a little grass. And Clark, talking, touching her, turning her on . . .
    She rolled and twisted, and woke a half-dozen times, listening: but nobody touched a doorknob.

fourteen

    The next morning they bumped around the kitchen, not talking much but jostling each other, eating toast, looking at the blue morning sky, touching; working up to something.
    Then Wyatt called for Harper. Harper took the phone from Anna, listened a while, said quietly, ‘‘Thanks, man . . . let me know.’’
    ‘‘What?’’ Anna asked.
    ‘‘The Malibu cops went over to Tony and Ronnie’s place after the shooting and the woman up there—you could hear her screaming at me?—anyway, she ran out the back and threw a bag of dope over the hill.’’ He picked up his putter and twirled it like a baton.
    ‘‘Over the hill? Down where you were?’’
    ‘‘Yeah. She was trying to get rid of it—she