The Night Crew

A

Glass gri

'Yeah. jeez.' A

'Why? I feel okay.'

'Cause I want to take Pam away for a few minutes, and I don't want you dropping dead while we're gone.'

'You'd rather have me laying dead in bed?'

'Yeah, as a matter of fact. Then it wouldn't be my fault for not telling you to lay down.'

Creek shook his head, not following the logic, but sat on the bed, and finally pulled his legs up.

'Stay there,' Glass said.

'Arf, arf,' Creek said. 'Like the family dog. Stay, Fido.'

In the hall, Glass said, smiling but intent, 'I've been wanting to talk to you.'

'About Creek.'

'Yes. Right now, if you crooked your finger, he'd come ru

A

'Why didn't. you know.'

'He came along at the wrong time, and by the time I was, you know, ready for something. it was too late. We'd been sort of. brotherly-sisterly for too long.'

'He never tried to.' They were both fumbling for words, as though they were creating a special Creek vocabulary,'. develop anything?'

'Not directly. Creek looks like a bear, and he's been to jail, and the Marines, and all thatbut he's sensitive. He usually knows what I'm thinking before I do, and if you guys last, he'll get that way with you.'

'He already is, a little.'

A

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 gri

A

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 ru

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 wouldn'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 himor, 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.

Chapter 22

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 A

'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 guiltythis was oddbecause 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 gri

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 isI've got some ideas about that, toobut 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 the guy at one of those places. We've assumed it was with Jacob, because of the drugs. We were probably wrong.'

A

'All right,' Harper said. 'Where do we look him up?'

'I don't knowJason was the contact. But I could find out.'

Harper was absently juggling the empty Coke cans: 'Okay. But before we get too enthusiastic. you said there were two guys at the animal rights raid.'

'Yeah,' she nodded, thinking about it. 'The other one, he was just a kid, kind of wimpy.'

Harper found a dirt ledge for the cans, and set them up. 'I saw him on TVyou mean the kid who tried to fight them off.'

'Not a violent type, like me,' A

'Doesn't sound like our guy,' Harper agreed. He pointed at her plastic muffs: 'Pull down your earmuffs, you're too young to lose your hearing.'

Harper stuck his fingers in his ears, and A

'Yeah?' He took his fingers out of his ears.

'Creek noticed that there was only one guy on the raid, all the rest were women. And they were, I don't know, kind of busty. Creek said it looked like a harem.'

'So maybe the guy's a freak.'

'God.' She pulled the muffs down again, and Harper stuck his fingers back in his ears and A