The Night Crew

Harper’s abdomen wasn’t his toughest part. He half caved in and took an involuntary step back, eyes wide, and wheezed, ‘‘Jesus, Anna . . .’’
    ‘‘You sonofabitch, you scared my brains out,’’ Anna whispered harshly, not even knowing why she was whispering. ‘‘I didn’t know what you were gonna do. You should have told me ahead of time.’’
    ‘‘I was afraid you wouldn’t go along.’’
    ‘‘Oh, bullshit—what haven’t I gone along with?’’
    ‘‘Well, anyway, we got the name,’’ he said, trying to straighten up. He got going again, and led the way out the back, across the patio and down the hill. And when they got to the car, he avoided her eyes, but said again, ‘‘We got the name.’’
    ‘‘Yeah, we’ve had four names. We’ve been on a name safari all week and we haven’t gotten anything but a chain letter,’’ she snarled at him over the top of the car. ‘‘We haven’t found out anything.’’
    He got in the car and she climbed in, still furious, and pulled the safety belt down and snapped herself in, and sat with the palms of her hands flat on her thighs.
    ‘‘You gotta pretty mean punch.’’
    ‘‘Don’t patronize me,’’ she spat back. ‘‘Don’t try to humor me; just shut up.’’
    They eased out of the driveway, down the hill; the ocean looked as green and lazy as ever, as though it didn’t know, she thought, that Creek was coughing up lung tissue. Halfway into town, Harper broke the unpleasant silence to say, ‘‘We’ve got to find a phone book somewhere, and figure out where this hotel is.’’
    Anna took out her cell phone, punched the speed dial for Louis. Louis was apparently sitting next to the phone: he snapped it up halfway through the first ring. He’d been to see Creek; he didn’t want to think about it.
    ‘‘I know,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Is the laptop handy?’’
    ‘‘Yeah?’’
    ‘‘Punch up the Marshall Hotel on Pico and route us there from the PCH up in Malibu. And give me the number.’’
    ‘‘Just a sec.’’ He took more than a second, but less than a minute, and Anna repeated his directions to Harper. Then she dug in her pocket, pulled out Tony’s cell phone. ‘‘When you talk to this Rik Maran, tell him that a guy is bringing a box for him . . . that you’re at the courthouse, waiting for Tony to get out, is the only reason you’re answering the phone. Use the voice you used with Tony and the lawyer.’’
    ‘‘What?’’
    She repeated it as she punched the number for the Marshall Hotel into her own phone. When the clerk at the hotel answered, she said, ‘‘You have a Mr. Rik Maran as a guest. I’d like to speak to him.’’
    ‘‘Just a moment . . .’’
    Maran came on ten seconds later, his voice, dry, reedy, like he might have spent a childhood in Oklahoma, a long time ago: ‘‘This is Rik . . .’’
    ‘‘Call Tony now, on his cellular,’’ Anna said, and punched off.
    A minute later, Tony’s phone rang, and Harper picked it up. ‘‘He ain’t here . . . who’s this? Okay. We’re at the courthouse, we got a big problem, but I ain’t got time to talk about it. There’s a guy coming over, he’s got a box for ya . . . I can’t talk, this fuckin’ thing’s a radio, man.’’
    Harper punched out without waiting for a reply.
    Anna said, ‘‘I don’t know what I’m doing. If I had any brains, I’d bail out of this now. This whole thing is not right; we’re running in the wrong direction.’’
    ‘‘We don’t have any other direction,’’ Harper said. ‘‘This is what we’ve got.’’ A few seconds later, he added, ‘‘You’re pretty smart, this phone thing. Thinking of it like that.’’ The Marshall Hotel was one of the older buildings on Pico, a four-story hollow cube with a brick front and stucco sides, outdoor walkways on the inside of the cube, and windows that looked like holes in an IBM punch card. The bottom floor had a small diner, a check-in desk, and an open courtyard with an above-ground pool and a patio, with a scattering of tables on the patio.
    Anna went in first, wearing her sunglasses and a scarf as a babushka, walked through to the courtyard and took an empty table where she could see the desk. A waiter came over and she said, ‘‘A menu? And a white wine . . . Anything good.’’
    Harper followed a minute later, carrying a briefcase. He stopped at the desk, exchanged a few words with the deskman, shook his head and walked out to the patio