Then he lost it: Anna felt her own fingers tightening, looking for purchase, felt her own muscles involuntarily trying to balance. He hung there, but with nothing to hold on to, out over the air, until with a convulsive effort, he jumped.

And he screamedAnna hadn't seen the scream, hadn't picked it up. Maybe he hadbeen trying for the pool.

Anna and the night crew had been there for the pictures, not as reporters: Anna had gotten only enough basic information to identify the main characters. She left it to the TV news staff to pull it together. At Channel Seventeen, the job went to an intense young woman in a spiffy green suit that precisely matched her spiffy green eyes:

'. identified as Jacob Harper, Junior, a high-school senior from San Dimas who was attending a spring dance at the Shamrock, and who'd rented the room with a half-dozen other seniors. Police are investigating the possibility of a drug involvement.'

As she spoke, the tape ran again, in slow motion, then again, freezing on the boy's facenot a man, Anna thought, just a child. He hung there in midair, screaming forever on Jason's tape. The Madsons, from Tilly, Oklahoma, were also shown, but their faces at the window were cut into the jump, so it appeared that the Madsons were watchingas they had been, though not when the tape was shot.

At the end of the report, the tape was run again, and Anna recognized the symptoms: They had a hit on their hands.

Too bad about the kid, but. she'd learned to separate herself from the things she covered. If she didn't, she'd go crazy. And she hadn't seen the jump, only the aftermath, the heap of crumpled clothing near the pool. Less than she would have seen sitting at her TV, eating her breakfast, like a few million Angelenos were about to do.

Anna drifted away from the television, sat at the piano and started running scales. Scales were a form of meditation, demanding, but also a way to free herself from the tension of the night.

And she could keep an eye on the television while she worked through them. Five minutes after the report on the jump, the blonde anchor, now idiotically cheerful, said something about animal commandos, and a version of the animal rights tape came up.

The tape had been cut up and given a jittery, silent-movie jerkiness, a Laurel-and-Hardy quality, as the masked animal rights raiders apparently danced with the squealing pig, and dumped the garbage can full of mice. Then the Rat was bowled over by the pigthey ran him falling, crawling, knocked down again; and falling, crawling and knocked down again: they had him going up and down like a yo-yo.

The guards, who'd come and gone so quickly, had been caught briefly by both Creek and Jason. Now they were repeatedly shown across the concrete ramp and up the loading dock; and then the tape was run backward, so they seemed to run backward. Keystone Kops.

The tape was funny, and Anna grinned as she watched. No sign of the bloodied kid, though. No matter: he'd get his fifteen seconds on another channel.

'Good night,' Anna said, pointed the remote at the television and killed it.

She worked on scales for another ten minutes, then closed the lid of the piano, quickly checked on the back to see that the yellow dehumidifier light wasn't blinking and headed up to the bedroom.

In the world of the night crew, roaming Los Angeles from ten o'clock until dawn, Anna was tough.

In more subtle relationships, in friendly talk from men she didn't know, at parties, she felt awkward, uneasy, and walked away alone. This shyness had come late: she hadn't always been like that.

The one big affair of her lifealmost four years long, now seven years pasthad taken her heart, and she hadn't yet gotten it back.

She was asleep within minutes of her head touching her pillow. She didn't dream of anyone: no old lovers, no old times.

But she did feel the space around herself, in her dreams. Full of friends, and still, somehow. empty.

Chapter 3

The two-faced man hurried down the darkened pier, saw the light in the side window, in the back. He carried an eighteen-inch Craftsman box-end wrench, the kind used in changing trailer-hitch balls. The heft was right: just the thing. No noise.

He stopped briefly at the store window, looked in past the Closedsign. All dark in the sales areabut he could see light coming from under a closed door that led to the back.

He beat on the door, a rough, frantic bam-bam-bam-bam-bam.

'Hey, take an aspirin.' The two-faced man nearly jumped out of his shoes. A black man was walking by, carrying a bait bucket, a tackle box and a long spinning rod.

'What?' Was this trouble? But the fisherman was walking on, out toward the end of the pier, shaking his head. 'Oh, okay.'

He must've been beating on the door too hard. That's what it was. The man forced a smile, nodded his head. Had to be careful. He balled his hand into a fist and bit hard on the knuckles, bit until he bled, the pain clearing his mind.

Back to business; he couldn't allow himself to blow up like this. If there were a mistake, a chance encounter, a random cophe shuddered at the thought. They'd lock him in a cage like a rat. He'd driven over here at ninety miles an hour: if he'd been stopped, it all would have ended before he had her.

Couldn't allow that.

He tried again with the door, knocking sedately, as though he were sane.

Light flooded into the interior of the store, through the door at the back. The man knocked again. Noticed the blood trickling down the back of his hand. When did that happen? How did he.?

The door opened. 'Yeah?'

The boy's eyes were dulled with dope. But not so dulled, not so far gone that they didn't drop to his shirt, to the deep red patina that crusted the shirt from neckline to navel, not so far gone that the doper couldn't say, 'Jesus Christ, what happened to you?'

The two-faced man didn't answer. He was already swinging the wrench: the box end caught the boy on the bridge of the nose, and he went down as though he'd been struck by lightning.

The two-faced man turned and looked up the pier toward the street, then down toward the ocean end. Nobody around. Good. He stepped inside, closed the door. The boy had rolled to his knees, was trying to get up. The man grabbed him by the hair and dragged him into the back.

The doper was wrecked. As in train wreck. As in broken. As in dying.

Even through the layers of acid and speed, he could feel the pain. But he wasn't sure about it. He might wake up. He might still say, 'Fuck me; what a trip.' He had done that in the past.

This stuff he'd peeled off the slick white paper, this was some bad shit. Abad batch of chemicals, must've got some glue in there, or something.

He wasn't sure if the pain was the real thing, or just another artifact of his own imagination, an imagination that had grown up behind the counter in a video store, renting horror stories. The horror stories had planted snakes in his minds, dream-memories of bitten-off heads, chainsaw massacres, cut throats, women bricked into walls.

So Jason suffered and groaned and tried to cover himself, and frothed, and somewhere in the remnant of his working brain he wondered: Is this real?

It was real, all right.

The two-faced man kicked him in the chest, and ribs broke away from Jason's breastbone. Jason choked on a scream, made bubbles instead. The man was sweating and unbelieving: Jason sat on the floor of the shack, his eyes open, blood running from his mouth and ears, and still he said nothing but, 'Aw, man.'

The man had been hoping for more: he'd hoped that the doper would plead with him, beg, whimper. That would excite him, would give him the taste of victory. That hadn't happened, and the heavy workkicking the boy to death had grown boring. The boy didn't plead, didn't argue: he just groaned and said, 'Aw, man,' or sometimes, 'Dude.'