The Night Crew

felony, we break into somebody’s office and fuck him up and he’s an innocent bystander.’’
    ‘‘Not especially innocent,’’ Anna said. ‘‘But we do have a few felonies behind us.’’
    Harper said, ‘‘Yeah, we do. And if we’re not very careful, they’re gonna start catching up with us.’’ He fed the car into a U-turn, and started back toward the hills. Anna sat up that night; took her gun out of her pocket and spun the cylinder, dumped the shells, dry-fired it at the TV, when the TV was on. Reloaded, looked at it. Waited, for something, not knowing what.
    Jake sat up with her for an hour or two, then went to bed. ‘‘You’ve got to get some sleep,’’ he said.
    ‘‘How?’’
    He looked at her, shrugged. ‘‘If you decide to go out, wake me up. I want to come along. If he’s identified me, he could know we’re out here. So we’ve got to take it easy.’’
    ‘‘Okay.’’
    He pointed a finger at her: ‘‘I swear to God, if you leave without waking me up, I’ll kick your ass.’’ The dawn came slowly, first a false lightening, then a darkness again, then the real dawn, a great, unhappy light, like an old piece of newsprint being pushed over the mountains to the east.
    Anna was sitting in an easy chair, maybe asleep, the gun in her lap, when Jake came out and called her: ‘‘Anna?’’
    Her eyes either opened, or were already open—she didn’t know, it didn’t seem like her mind had ever stopped. ‘‘Yeah?’’
    ‘‘Jesus, did you get any sleep at all?’’
    ‘‘I don’t know,’’ she said. She felt wooden. She pushed herself out of the chair, went out to the kitchen, with Harper trailing behind. ‘‘Coffee?’’
    ‘‘I’m gonna try to get a couple more hours. Why don’t you come in and lay down?’’
    ‘‘Jake, jeez.’’
    ‘‘Give me ten minutes to put you to sleep. Just come on in . . .’’
    She followed him back to the bedroom, pulled off her shirt and jeans and bra, pulled on one of his t-shirts and lay down. He snuggled behind her, said, ‘‘Close your eyes.’’
    ‘‘Jake . . .’’
    ‘‘Just close them, okay? Ten minutes.’’
    She could feel his arm around her waist, the tops of his thighs on the bottoms of hers. She opened her eyes briefly, with difficulty, to look at the clock, and saw the glint of the gun on the nightstand; and closed her eyes again. The phone woke her.
    She startled upright, felt Jake’s arm come off her, looked at the clock: She’d been down for four hours. Her mouth tasted like old features taken off a tar road.
    Jake was saying, ‘‘Yeah . . . Aw, man, where . . . all right.’’
    When he hung up, she rolled over on her back and looked for him, caught his eyes trying to look away. ‘‘China?’’
    ‘‘Yeah. She’s dead. They found her body out in Glendale. That was Wyatt, and . . .’’
    ‘‘What?’’
    ‘‘She’s pretty cut up.’’
    Anna jumped out of bed: ‘‘Let’s get over there.’’
    ‘‘Anna.’’
    ‘‘I need to see this,’’ she insisted.
    ‘‘Why?’’ he asked, exasperated.
    ‘‘Because. So get dressed.’’ Because she was storing it up. Because she was holding on to these crimes, all these insults, squeezing them into herself. She drove: Jake was so reluctant that she finally got the keys and climbed into the front seat, and he caught up and piled into the passenger side, and she took them over the hills and east into Glendale. On the way, she called Wyatt, got switched around, and was finally left with a promise that he’d call her. He did, five minutes later:
    ‘‘Where are you?’’
    ‘‘On the way.’’
    ‘‘I don’t think you should.’’
    ‘‘I can identify her,’’ Anna said. ‘‘I saw her twelve hours ago. Are you there?’’ she asked.
    ‘‘On the way.’’
    ‘‘See you there.’’ And she rang off, before he could object.
    ‘‘There’’ was a cluster of vehicles with light bars, a halfdozen men looking down a highway embankment: something she saw every night, now harsher in the light of day.
    Wyatt hadn’t arrived yet—she didn’t recognize any of the cops at the scene. They waved her on down the road, but she stopped, and when the cop came up, she said, ‘‘We’re supposed to meet Detective Wyatt here, from Santa Monica. He’s on the task force: I talked to China last night, the woman you think is down there. He wanted me to see if I could identify her.’’
    ‘‘Okay . . . just pull up to the head of the