The Night Crew

The guard said, 'Yeah, he. hey, who are you guys?'

But he'd started to point, down the hall: the elevators were just around the corner.

'Elevators,' A

Harper was already hurrying toward the elevators, A

They turned the corner. Three elevators, one with the door open, waiting. Of the other two, one was on eight, coming down. The other was on two, stopping at three.

'Damn it,' Harper said. He looked around and A

'Yeah,' Harper grunted, but he went on past, into the corridor on three. Two nurses were talking at a work station, one with a phone in her hand, and looked up at them.

'Did a white-haired man.'

'No. Nobody came here. The guard just called.'

'Is Pam Glass still down in intensive care, the police officer?'

'I think so.'

They went that way, and A

'Yeah.' They turned the corner into the intensive care unit. Glass was standing next to Creek's bed; Creek's eyes were closed. No white-haired man.

'Nobody just came through here?' A

Glass shook her head. 'No. What.?'

Harper said, 'Tell them,' and ran back toward the stairs. A

'Yes.'

'Keep a hand on it, there's a guy,' and turned and ran after Harper. She caught him on the stairs and Harper glanced back at her, grunted, shook his head and kept circling down. They came out in a sub-basement, looked both ways, finally turned left, a shorter hall and an exit sign.

The exit led to an underground parking ramp: they hurried along the ramp, and Harper said, 'Get the gun out.'

A

'Yes, si, he went that way, one minute.' He pointed up the ramp to the street. They ran up the ramp and found. traffic.

Harper looked both ways, down at A

She shoved the gun back into her jacket and said, 'Yeah.'

Creek had been awake for a few minutes, had maybe recognized Glass, but maybe not: 'He was drifting,' Glass said. 'He thought he was on his boat.'

A

'No.' Harper disagreed. 'That move he madeI saw that two hundred times when I was a cop. Especially working dope. Someone sees you, figures you for the cops and he turns and splits. Runs in the front door, runs out the back. Just like that: and that's what he was doing.'

'I see it all the time,' Glass said.

'That's what it felt like,' A

Now he lay there, little of him visible other than his hair and oddly pale eyelids, breathing through a plastic mask, his breath so shallow, his life bumping along on the monitors overhead, like a slow day on a stock-market ticker.

Chapter 13

They left Glass and CreekGlass said she'd try to get Creek moved again, in case the white-haired man was a real threatand went back into the night, heading for the Philadelphia Grill.

'The guy was probably a doper,' Harper said, 'cause he moved so fast. Like a guy who's holding. He didn't stop to look us over, he didn't stop to see if we were coming after himhe just took off. And the way he went out, he must've already been in the hospital, because he knew about the parking ramp exit and how to get there in a hurry.'

'That worries me; he was scouting the place,' A

'Maybe notcould've been blond, could've been the light on his hair.'

'No. He was older. Fifties, anyway. The way he moved, I'm thinking.' She closed her eyes, letting the scene run through her mind. 'He saw us, he turned, he sort of groped for the door, he pulled it open, almost hit himself with it. He was a little creaky. Maybe even a little heavy. He wasn't a kid, though. He just moved like an older guy.'

'That doesn't fit the profile of any psycho I ever heard of,' Harper said thoughtfully. 'Maybe the guy in ChicagoGacey. He was sorta porky, and a little older than most of them. I think.'

'He's not what I expected,' A

'So we've got twopeople giving us a hard time?' He looked at her with thin amusement. 'And we can't find either one of them?'

The Philadelphia Grill was a baked-meatloaf-and-powered-potatoes place on Westwood, jammed into the lower corner of a colored-concrete building; it had a wraparound glass window, but the window was blocked with blinds pulled nearly shut.

Inside, the clientele seemed to hover over their coffee, arms circling the cups, as though somebody might try to take the coffee away from them; and they tended to look up whenever the door opened. The blinds, which blocked the view in, were open just enough that, from the inside, they could see out.

'There he is,' A

Tarpatkin looked like her idea of a crazy killer: his pitch-black hair, six inches long, streamed away from his narrow face, as though an electric current were ru

'Do you know him? Ever met him?' Harper said.

'No. I'd remember the face.'

'Then he's not the guy, because you know the killer, at least a little bit,' Harper said. 'Slide into the booth across from him; I'll get a chair.'

Tarpatkin watched them coming, eyes just over the top of the paper. His expression didn't change when A

'Mr Tarpatki

'Hello, A

'No, no, it's a gun,' A

'We'd show it to you, but in here'Harper looked around'somebody might get excited and we'd all start shooting.'

'What do you want?' Tarpatkin asked.

'Just need to talk,' Harper said.

'That's all you guys ever want,' Tarpatkin said. 'Talk. Then your ass winds up in jail.'

'What?' A

Tarpatkin caught it, and clouded up: 'If you assholes ain't cops, you can get the fuck out of my booth.'

'We're not cops, but I used to be, and I still know a lot of deputies,' Harper said. 'The thing is, you're caught right in the middle of a major murder case and the cops are freaking out. You can talk to us, off the record, or talk to them, on the record.'