The Night Crew

a good deal.’’
    Glass blew hair out of her face and her shoulders drooped, as if her blood pressure had just dropped fifty points. And she said, ‘‘You needed something from me?’’
    ‘‘I just needed to talk to you about your partner.’’
    ‘‘Huh?’’
    ‘‘I think he’s the guy we saw up here, that we chased. I think he was trying to check on you.’’
    The other woman’s eyes defocused for a few seconds, then she nodded briskly and said, ‘‘Yeah. Damn.’’
    ‘‘So . . .’’
    ‘‘I’ll talk to him,’’ Glass said. Then she grinned ruefully and said, ‘‘Men really do come from another planet, you know?’’ Anna was ready when she went back into the parking garage: but nothing happened. Nothing. The garage was so silent that no television movie in history could have resisted the moment: the killer and Anna would be there, toe to toe, and Anna would kill him.
    Or something.
    She was barely prepared for nothing at all. In the car, she went back to her house, parked nose-in to the garage, left the engine running. Hobie called down, ‘‘Offer’s still open,’’ and she yelled, ‘‘Thanks, Hobie, but I’m out of here.’’
    She sat in the house for a moment, then walked through the kitchen and checked the lock on the canal-side door, and then went back through the house and out, locked the front and drove back out.
    She thought this way: If the killer was watching her, he couldn’t watch from within the canal area. The road through the district was one-way, and narrow, and nobody could wait on it without being noticed. He’d watch either the entrance or the exit, and pick her up coming or going.
    All right. Let him pick her up.
    She touched the gun in her pocket.
    When she told him on the phone that she was going to kill him, it wasn’t idle chatter. If she could get him in the right place, she’d do it.
    But she’d have to handle it carefully.
    She liked Jake a lot, liked everything about him—or, at least, thought she could straighten out the parts of him that weren’t quite right. A snip here, a tuck there, and he’d be presentable. But she liked his looks, his attitude, the way he lived.
    But she didn’t quite understand, deep in her heart, why he hadn’t killed the dealer in the hotel. She would have.
    So if she was going to stir this killer out of his muck . . . Jake couldn’t know.

twenty-two

    Harper was sitting in a lawn chair in front of his house, a hardcover book by his heel, in an attitude of waiting . He pushed himself out of the chair when Anna pulled up, and sauntered around the car.
    ‘‘Long time,’’ he said. ‘‘Did you get your head straight?’’
    ‘‘About some things,’’ she said. She stood on her tiptoes, gave him a peck on the lips, feeling guilty for not telling him that she was trolling for the killer. More guilty—this was odd—because he smelled kind of good. She said, ‘‘Creek’s walking around.’’
    ‘‘Excellent.’’ Harper, nice guy, seemed genuinely pleased. ‘‘Listen, I’ve had a few thoughts.’’
    ‘‘Let’s go around back. I’ve been itching to fire the gun again.’’
    His eyebrows went up: ‘‘Your violent streak is showing.’’
    She grinned at him: ‘‘I’ve just been carrying it everywhere, and . . . I don’t know, I’ve just got the urge to pull the trigger.’’
    Harper got the earmuffs and a couple of Coke cans and they walked side by side out to the gully. ‘‘We didn’t spend enough time with Catwell, Jason’s friend at Kinko’s,’’ he said. ‘‘I figured out this much: either it’s a coincidence that this killer shows up the day after Jason is killed, or . . .’’
    He waited for her to fill in the blank, but she couldn’t think of anything. ‘‘Or what?’’
    ‘‘Or,’’ he said, ‘‘it’s not. A coincidence.’’
    ‘‘Gosh. You’re just like Einstein.’’
    He held up a finger, his face serious: ‘‘Listen. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Maybe it is—I’ve got some ideas about that, too—but I don’t think so. So let’s take them one at a time.’’
    ‘‘Go ahead.’’
    ‘‘If it’s not a coincidence, then the killer fixed on you between the time you picked up Jason, and the time Jason ran off.’’
    ‘‘Okay.’’ She was amused by his lawyerly dissection.
    ‘‘In that time, you only did two things,’’ he said. ‘‘You went to the animal rights raid and you went to where Jacob was. So you probably picked up