The Night Crew (15 page)

‘‘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 shut—slammed 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, Anna thought: he was doing it perfectly. Maybe too perfectly. He moved to one side, put his foot on the lawyer’s chest.

‘‘. . . I’m gonna give you the convincer. I’m gonna shoot your lawyer here, free of charge. Just to show you that I’m
serious. Shoot him right in the fuckin’ brain, so you’re attached to a dead man, you can explain to the cops later, YOU FUCKIN’ CREEP . . .’’ He was shouting again, and the lawyer was screaming, ‘‘No, no, no,’’ trying to sit up, but pinned by his hands over his head and the weight of Tony on the cuffs.

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 Anna, out of sight, tried to wave him off, but he ignored her. He had the gun pointing at Tony’s head and he was shouting again, ‘‘ALL RIGHT, MOTHERFUCKER, I DON’T HAVE THE PATIENCE TO SKIN YOU ALIVE, SO I’M GONNA KILL YOU NOW. GOOD FUCKIN’ BYE . . .’’

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 gonna kill us, I saved our lives.’’

‘‘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, Anna noticed the cell phone, picked it up, put it in her pocket. In the basement, Harper put them on either side of a steel support pole and threaded the cuffs through. ‘‘Like I said, if there’s no John Maran at the Marshall Hotel on Pico, I ain’t coming back.’’

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 gonna do? Chew our arms off, like rats? We won’t break these handcuff chains or this pipe.’’

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, Anna first, and at the top, they peeled off the stockings. When Harper started past her to the
door, she set her feet and hit him in the solar plexus as hard as she could: Harper’s abdomen wasn’t his toughest part. He half caved in and took an involuntary step back, eyes wide, and wheezed, ‘‘Jesus, Anna . . .’’

‘‘You sonofabitch, you scared my brains out,’’ Anna whispered harshly, not even knowing why she was whispering. ‘‘I didn’t know what you were gonna do. You should have told me ahead of time.’’

‘‘I was afraid you wouldn’t go along.’’

‘‘Oh, bullshit—what 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.’’

Anna took out her cell phone, punched the speed dial for Louis. Louis was apparently sitting next to the phone: he
snapped it up halfway through the first ring. He’d been to see Creek; he didn’t want to think about it.

‘‘I know,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Is the laptop handy?’’

‘‘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 Anna repeated his directions to Harper. Then she dug in her pocket, pulled out Tony’s cell phone. ‘‘When you talk to this Rik Maran, tell him that a guy is bringing a box for him . . . that you’re at the courthouse, waiting for Tony to get out, is the only reason you’re answering the phone. Use the voice you used with Tony and the lawyer.’’

‘‘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,’’ Anna said, and punched off.

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.’’

Harper punched out without waiting for a reply.

Anna said, ‘‘I don’t know what I’m doing. If I had any brains, I’d bail out of this now. This whole thing is not right; we’re running in the wrong direction.’’

‘‘We don’t have any other direction,’’ Harper said. ‘‘This
is what we’ve got.’’ A few seconds later, he added, ‘‘You’re pretty smart, this phone thing. Thinking of it like that.’’
The Marshall Hotel was one of the older buildings on Pico, a four-story hollow cube with a brick front and stucco sides, outdoor walkways on the inside of the cube, and windows that looked like holes in an IBM punch card. The bottom floor had a small diner, a check-in desk, and an open courtyard with an above-ground pool and a patio, with a scattering of tables on the patio.

Anna went in first, wearing her sunglasses and a scarf as a babushka, walked through to the courtyard and took an empty table where she could see the desk. A waiter came over and she said, ‘‘A menu? And a white wine . . . Anything good.’’

Harper followed a minute later, carrying a briefcase. He stopped at the desk, exchanged a few words with the deskman, shook his head and walked out to the patio and took a chair near the pool, on the other side of a clump of palm.

Maran came out a few seconds later, looked around, spotted Harper and his briefcase, and went that way. Anna watched him and dug into her memory: Maran was sandyhaired or blond, but the hair was cut so tightly to his head that she couldn’t tell. His face was skeletal, his body wraithlike, his gestures tired, almost languid. He looked like one of the late, hard self-portraits of Vincent Van Gogh, and she thought: AIDS. Maybe. But he moved smoothly enough, he wasn’t shaky, as she’d expect if he were dying.

She’d never seen him before, she was quite certain of that.

She took out her cell phone and called Tony’s number, heard it ring thirty feet away. Harper answered, and she said, ‘‘I don’t know him—I’ve never seen him.’’

‘‘Okay. Stay where you are. We’ll be right back.’’

‘‘Where’re you going?’’ she asked, alarmed.

But he’d rung off. A moment later, on the other side of the patio, Maran and Harper headed toward the hotel.

She had only a moment to think about it, but something in the way Harper moved brought her out of her chair. She took just a second to drop a twenty on the table, to keep the waiter off her back, and followed them. They stepped inside an elevator and as the doors closed, Anna stopped, watched the indicator light. The light stopped on three . . .

She turned the corner, started down toward a gift shop, swerved into a stairwell and started running. Ten seconds later, she stood at the door on the third floor, pushed carefully through, listened . . . and heard a door shut down the hallway.

But where, exactly? The doors on the hall were identical, the hallway carpet unexpectedly thick, sound-deadening. She walked slowly down the hall, listening: took a small notebook out of her purse, and a pen; if somebody came along, she’d stop and write in it, as though she were making a note.

But there was nobody in the hall, nothing but silence and the smell of old tobacco smoke.

And then an impact.

Not a sound, exactly, more of a feel; then a sound, muffled, anguished, and another impact. Up ahead, somewhere . . . she hurried down the hall now, but as quietly as she could, listening. Where was it coming from . . .

She passed a door. A possibility. Listened. Another impact, a groan: No. Somewhere ahead, the next room.

Another impact, an animal sound, a wounded animal. Across the hall now. Another. She pressed her ear to the door: and with the next impact, she could feel it.

She tried the knob: locked. Hit the door with her fist. ‘‘Jake! Jake! Jaaake!’’ Her voice rising. She’d scream it, if she had to.

The knob turned under her hand, and Jake was there, on
the other side, a dazed, crazy look in his eyes. He held what appeared to be a broken chair leg. One hand was covered with blood, and there were spatters of blood on his golf shirt.

‘‘Ah . . .’’ she said, involuntarily. She put a hand on his chest and pushed, and he stepped back, and she went into the room.

Maran was on the floor, face up, bleeding from the nose: he was conscious, but just barely. There was no blood at all on his upper body, but his legs looked wrong. He looked like a paraplegic whose legs had withered . . .

Anna shut the door and said, ‘‘What’d you do?’’

‘‘Hit him,’’ Harper said. He seemed confused, uncertain of where he was.

‘‘Is he gonna die?’’ She looked toward the phone.

‘‘No, I just . . .’’ He drifted away, and she caught his arm and squeezed.

‘‘What? Jake?’’

‘‘Broke his legs,’’ he said. He looked at the chair leg in his hand. ‘‘A lot.’’

‘‘So let’s get out of here,’’ Anna said. Maran was trying to roll, but there was no leverage in his hips and legs, and he flailed weakly, futilely. He tried to turn himself with his arms, and he moaned again.

‘‘Call an ambulance,’’ Harper said.

‘‘We can do that outside,’’ she said, and she pushed Harper toward the door. Harper dropped the chair leg. Anna said, ‘‘God, wait a minute,’’ carried the leg to the bathroom and quickly, carefully rubbed it down with a towel, then dropped it in the bathtub and turned the hot water on it.

‘‘Now,’’ she said.

Harper followed her dumbly through the door, down the stairs, out past the gift shop. She stopped him at a bank of phones, dialed 911, and said, ‘‘There’s a man hurt really bad in room three-thirty-three at the Marshall Hotel on Pico. Hurt
really bad. Better get an ambulance here fast.’’

On the street, she could taste the bile at the back of her throat: ‘‘That the guy?’’ she asked. She looked up at him, his eyes clearing a bit, and then at the blood splatters on his shirt.