The Night Crew

'What the fuck.'

'LAY ON THE FUCKIN' FLOOR,' Harper screamed, and the pistol began to shake and jerk, and A

Harper, gun fixed on Tony's head, fished a pair of open handcuffs out of his pocket and dropped them on Tony's face. 'Put them on. I want to hear them snap shut.' Tony put them on. The tall man was next: 'Thread ' em through Tony's, then snap 'em.'

'I'm just a lawyer.'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah. you fuckin' scum, you fuckin' lawyers. You fuckin' lay there.' The language had been stolen from Tarpatkin, but had a drug-fired sound to it, a crazy emotional edge. Harper stepped to the door and pushed it shutslammed it. Then he bent over the men, patted them down, found a cell phone in Tony's coat pocket, tossed it aside. To Tony: 'You got a dealer working the Westwood area. He was selling wizards down to the Shamrock Hotel last week.'

He was a street thug, A

'. I'm go

Then Harper, looking down at the lawyer, stepped back far enough that Tony couldn't see him, looked at the frantic lawyer, put one finger over his lips, pointed the gun at the floor beside the lawyer's head and fired once.

The lawyer jerked forward, convulsing with the muzzle blast, then fell back, understood instantly: He went limp and silent.

'NOW YOU BELIEVE ME?' Harper screamed.

'You'll fuckin' kill me anyway,' Tony screamed back. 'So fuck you.'

'Not before I peel your fuckin' skin off with a potato peeler I seen in your kitchen,' Harper said. Tony twisted, and Harper kicked him in the chest and Tony shouted, 'Stan, goddamn, are you dead? Stan, goddammit.' And Harper kicked him again, and A

Tony was thrashing against Stan's dead weight and Harper pointed the gun and Tony screamed, 'John Maran at the Marshall Hotel on Pico, for Christ's sake.'

Harper's voice went suddenly soft, and somehow more threatening. 'You better be telling me the truth,' he said. 'If you're not, I won't be coming back.'

'What?' Tony was confused.

'Get on your feet, lawyer.' Harper kicked the lawyer once, and the tall man rolled over, started to blubber. Tony shouted, 'You asshole, whyn't you say something.'

The lawyer, stooping over him, pulled down by the short play of the cuffs, shouted back, 'You crazy fuck, they were go

'You bullshit.' Tony tried to get up, but Harper pushed him down. 'Stay down.' And to the lawyer, 'Drag him over to the basement stairs.'

As the lawyer dragged Tony toward the stairs, A

The lawyer had followed this thought, but Tony hadn't: 'So fuck you,' Tony said.

'Tony.' the lawyer said.

'Fuck you, too, you fuckin' snotty Yale asshole.'

The lawyer took a deep breath, and said, 'Look, I'm trying not to wring your fat little neck, Tony.'

Tony was amazed: 'What'd you say?'

'I said, I'm trying not to wring your fat little neck, you dumb shit. What he's saying is, if he leaves us here, what're we go

Tony finally caught it, looked once around the blank walls of the basement, and turned to Harper, 'Hey, man.'

'Is Maran right?'

After a moment of judgment. 'No. Ask for Rik Maran. You ask for John Maran and. you won't get him.'

'Better be right,' Harper said.

They went up the stairs, A

'You sonofabitch, you scared my brains out,' A

'I was afraid you wouldn't go along.'

'Oh, bullshitwhat 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.'

A

'I know,' A

'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 A

'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,' A

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.'