The Night Crew

'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 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 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 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 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 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.'

Anna frowned, took the pistol out of her jacket pocket, flicked out the cylinder, spun it once, looking at the little undimpled primers. 'We talked to two guys, really, at the animal rights raid,' she said, snapping the cylinder shut. 'One of them was wearing a mask, but he had this voice. I was thinking, maybe someday he could go on TV. Jesus, this guyit could be him! I mean, he was a little strange, his attitude, I didn't pay much attention because we run into lots of strange people.'

'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,' Anna said. 'He was crying about getting a bloody nose.'

'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 Anna pulled down the earmuffs and pointed the gun at one of the cans. Then a thought struck her and she pulled the muffs back and said, 'I just thought of something else.'

'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 Anna pointed the pistol at the first can, jerked the trigger. She missed by two feet.

'Settle down,' she said aloud. She relaxed, brought the pistol up, fired again and the can flipped up the dirt wall, and clattered back down again, a neat hole punched in the center of the white C-for-Coke. Anna pulled the muffs up and said, 'I just thought of something else: He had this pig and it knocked him down.'

'I saw that,' Harper said. 'He must've been humiliated.'

'Yeah.' She pulled the muffs back down, emptied the gun. She hit the cans twice more, and the rest of the shots were bunched around them.

'You ain't going to the Olympics,' Harper said, as she shucked the empty shells out. 'But they'd all hit between the nipples.'

'That's all I need,' she said, reloading. She stopped with a shell still in the palm of her hand and said, 'You said if it wasn't a coincidence, all of this startingyou said you had some ideas about that, too.'

'One thing at a time,' Harper said.

She pushed the last shell home. 'Let's go find this guy.'

Louis found him, running down names on the letterhead press release.

'His name is Steven Judge. He and two or three more of them live at what they call the Full Heart Sanctuary Ranch, and it's not far from where you are,' Louis said. 'It's up in Ventura, just on the other side of the Santa Susanas.'

'Half an hour,' Harper said, when Anna told him. He glanced at his watch: 'We've got time.'

The countryside of Southern California was rarely empty, not this close to L. A. and the coast, but the Full Heart Ranch was on a gravel road up a washed-out dirt canyon, about as isolated a place as could be found. The sign at the entrance to the canyon was neat and businesslike, a metal plaque that said, 'Full Heart Ranch', and below that, in smaller letters, 'Animal Sanctuary'. A hundred feet up the trail was another sign, this one resembling the signs in national forests, yellow burnt-in letters on brown-painted boards: 'Welcome. Please register at the ranch house. Do not leave your car before registeringsome of our animals are sensitive to the scent of humans.'