The Night Crew

them, listening hard. ‘‘There’re cars on the way, we got maybe a minute by ourselves. Maybe two minutes.’’
    Anna said, ‘‘Where’s that Three truck? Weren’t they still out?’’
    ‘‘They were drifting down south after that chase,’’ Louis said. ‘‘They’re way the hell down by Huntington Beach. They’re out of it.’’
    Anna said, ‘‘Jason, I want you tight on the guy. Creek will pull back a bit, get the full jump, if he goes. But I wanna see his face . . .’’
    ‘‘You got it, sugarbun,’’ Jason said.
    Creek showed his teeth: ‘‘Sugarbun?’’
    Jason grinned at him: ‘‘Me’n Anna getting intimate.’’
    ‘‘Yeah?’’ Creek glanced at Anna, who rolled her eyes.
    ‘‘Me’n Anna doing the thing,’’ Jason said. He was almost talking to himself, looked as though he might giggle. He was wound, his eyes big: He liked the movement, maybe too much. He was talented: might go big in Hollywood someday, Anna thought, if he didn’t blow his brains out through his nose. ‘‘Doin’ the thing,’’ he muttered.
    ‘‘Shamrock,’’ Anna said, and pointed. Ahead, a twentystory green-glass-and-steel building showed a bright green neon shamrock at the top. And Jason, who’d crawled between the seats, spotted the jumper: ‘‘There he is! He’s toward the bottom, like five or six stories up, you can see him . . .’’
    He pointed, and Anna noticed that his hand had a tremor: not the trembling of excitement, but the jerk of a nerve breakdown. She glanced at his stark, underfed face: Christ, she thought, he’s back on the crank.
    She turned away from his straining face, and looked where he was looking. Five stories, Anna counted: And there he was. The would-be jumper wore dark pants and a white shirt. From a block away, in the lights that bathed the outside of the building, he looked like a fly stuck to a sheet of glass. ‘‘Get us there, Creek,’’ Anna said, breathlessly.
    They were doing seventy-five, the wheels screaming, right up to the hotel, then Creek hammered the brake and cut sideways and they went over the curb again and Jason spilled out, running toward the hotel with his camera.
    The man on the ledge had his back to a sheet of plate glass, his arms spread. The ledge, Anna thought, wasn’t more than a foot wide—she could see the tips of his shoes.
    ‘‘Guys, I’m gonna try to get up there,’’ Anna said into her mike as she dropped from the truck. ‘‘You’re gonna be on your own for a minute: Jason, I want face .’’ She sprinted toward the hotel’s front entrance, the Nagra flapping under her arm.
    Hotels didn’t want to know about media. As far as hotels were concerned, no media was good media. Anna had two options. She could try to sneak in, but that took time. Or she could run. She ran forty miles a week on the beach and if the stairs were placed right, no hotel security man in California could catch her.
    She hit the glass doors and went through the lobby like she was on a motorcycle. Two bellmen huddled at the reception desk with a couple of clerks, and one of the bellmen saw her and just had time to turn, to open his mouth and shout, ‘‘Hey,’’ when she was past him. The elevators were straight ahead, and a brass plaque with an arrow pointing to the right said Stairs .
    She took the stairs. Ran up one flight, two, then a man shouting again, from the bottom, ‘‘Hey . . .’’ Third floor, not even breathing hard. Anna got off at the fourth: There’d be security on the fifth floor, and the desk people might have called them. She ran into the hall on the fourth floor, looked right and left, decided that the right end would be the far end of the hotel. There should be another flight of stairs that way.
    She ran down the hall, now aware of her heart pounding in her chest, turned a corner past a niche with Coke, ice and candy machines, to another stairway. She pulled open the door, looked up and down, heard nothing and ran up to Five. She took three seconds, two long breaths, pulled off her headset, shoved it with the Nagra up under her jacket in back, held it with one hand and sauntered into the hallway.
    Halfway down, three older men—security, probably—stood outside an open doorway. A dozen kids were scattered up and down the hall, a few of them talking, most just looking down at the open door. All the kids were dressed up, the boys in suits and ties, the girls in pink-and-blue party dresses, all with the stark white