The Night Crew

brown-paper grocery sack, with a rolled top, like a kid’s lunch bag.
    ‘‘Let’s go,’’ he said. Anna started toward the house, but he said, ‘‘This way—we’re just parking here.’’
    He was walking away from the house, up the hillside.
    ‘‘Where’re we going?’’
    ‘‘The next house up is Tony’s. There’s a pathway up here somewhere, through the plantings.’’
    ‘‘Your friends,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Do they know what you’re doing?’’
    ‘‘They think they do,’’ Harper said. He turned and looked down at her. ‘‘Listen, I sorta wish you weren’t here, but . . . I can use the help. My friends’ll help me out from a distance, because they know I’d never talk about it. But they won’t be here when the shit hits the fan and I might need somebody to be here.’’
    She shrugged: ‘‘So I’m here. If this is the jerk who shot Creek, who’s been chasing me around . . .’’
    ‘‘Probably not this guy,’’ Harper said. He started up the hill again, then pointed: ‘‘There’s the break in the brush, that’s the path . . . This isn’t our guy, but he knows our guy, I think.’’
    He took a few more steps up the hill, then stopped again. ‘‘Whatever happens here, you do two things: you don’t freak out, and you stand there with your gun and you watch everything and don’t say shit, no matter what happens. No matter what happens. If we bump into somebody, you’re this tough methedrine chick and you keep your mouth shut.’’ They climbed through a hedge and up the hill, Harper still carrying the sack, then broke into a grassy slope below a pool patio. The house, a white concrete Mediterraneanmodern, loomed over the patio. Harper never hesitated, but with Anna hurrying behind, climbed straight ahead, crossed the patio, took another key out of his pocket and pushed it into a back-door lock.
    ‘‘Alarms are off,’’ he said, as he turned the key. ‘‘No dogs.’’
    ‘‘Your friends tell you that?’’
    ‘‘Yeah. Don’t touch anything.’’ He stuck his head inside and hollered, ‘‘Hello? Anybody home? Anybody?’’ No answer. He took a few more steps into a red-tiled wet room: ‘‘Hello? Anybody home?’’
    The house answered with the silence of emptiness. ‘‘We’re okay,’’ he said. He unrolled the sack, took out a pair of yellow plastic household gloves and handed them to her. ‘‘Put these on.’’ She took the gloves and he took out a pair for himself, stuck the bag under an arm and pulled the gloves on, wiggling his fingers. ‘‘Good,’’ he muttered. He opened the sack again, took out a brown fabric wad, shook it into the recognizable form of two dark nylons and said, ‘‘For your head.’’ He pulled his on like a stocking cap, so that he’d pull it down over his face with one move.
    Then he opened the sack a last time, and took out a gun, a black revolver.
    ‘‘Jake?’’
    ‘‘Yeah. Now we both get one,’’ he said, and she felt the weight of the pistol in her pocket. ‘‘These are bad people . . . C’mon.’’
    ‘‘What’re we doing?’’
    ‘‘Look around the house. Probably won’t be much, but you can’t tell.’’
    The house might have been elegant, in a certain California-nouveau way, but it wasn’t. The furniture looked like it had been rented, complete with the phony modern graphics on the walls; the pale green carpets were stained and the exposed hardwood near one row of windows was raw and warped, as though the windows had been left open for several weeks, and rain had come in; and the curtains stank with tobacco—cigars, Anna thought. The basement was empty except for a pile of cardboard appliance boxes at the bottom of the stairs—boxes for TVs, stereos, computers, Xerox machines, satellite dishes, VCRs, an electric piano. ‘‘Haul the packing boxes to the top of the stairs and fire it down,’’ Harper said as he peered at the mess.
    The master bedroom contained a circular bed with a circular headboard and custom rayon sheets; it faced a projection TV. Beside the TV was a rack of porno tapes, along with a few Westerns and music videos. The chest of drawers held perhaps two hundred sets of Jockey underwear and almost nothing else. A dozen suits hung in a closet, along with a pile of blue boxes full of dry-cleaned shirts and more underwear. The other four bedrooms had been slept in—the beds were unmade—but neither the bedrooms nor the adjoining baths showed much in the way of