Ask the Parrot

by Richard Stark

  As they slowed, Parker said, “You’ll talk.”

  “I know.”

  The trooper who bent to Lindahl’s open window was an older man, heavyset, taken off desk duty for this emergency and not happy about it. Lindahl told him his name and his membership in Hickory Rod and Gun, and that they were on their way to St. Stanislas to join the search.

  The trooper stepped back to look in the rear side window at the rifles on the floor and said, “Whole county’s filling up with untrained men with guns. Not how I’d do it, but nobody asked me. You got your membership card?”

  “In the Rod and Gun Club? Sure.” Reaching for his wallet, Lindahl sounded sheepish as he said, “It’s a little out of date.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” the trooper said. “Doesn’t have a photo, anyway.” He nodded at the card Lindahl showed him, without taking it, and said, “Leave it on the dashboard so if you’re stopped again they’ll know who you are.”

  “Good idea.” Lindahl put his membership card on top of the dashboard where it could be seen through the windshield.

  The trooper, sour but resigned, stepped back and said, “Okay, go ahead.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  They drove on, through hilly country, still mostly forested, many of the trees now changing to their fall colors, crimson and russet and gold. There were apple orchards, darkly red, and scruffy fields where dairy cows had once grazed, now mostly vacant, though here and there were groups of horses or sheep or even llamas. The houses were few and old and close to the ground.

  They climbed awhile, the road switching back and forth through the partly tamed forest, then came to a town with a sign reading St. Stanislas and a steep main street. What they were headed for was not a church, but an old Grange Hall, its clapboard sides painted a medium brown too many years ago, with the metal signs of half a dozen fraternal organizations on stakes along the roadside out front.

  A dozen cars were already in the parking lot beside the building, and Lindahl put the Ford in with them. They got their rifles, then walked over to where a group of men milled around the closed front door. They were mostly over fifty, hefty and soft, and they moved with checked-in excitement.

  Lindahl knew all of these people, though it was clear he hadn’t seen any of them for some time. They were pleased to see him, if not excited, and pleased to meet Parker as well, introduced as an old friend of Lindahl’s here on a visit.

  Parker shook hands with the smiling men who were hunting him, and then a state police car arrived and two uniformed men got out, the younger one an ordinary trooper, the older one with extra braid and insignia on his uniform and hat.

  This is the one who went up on the steps leading to the Grange Hall and turned around to say, “I want to thank you gentlemen for coming out today. We have two very dangerous men somewhere in our part of the world, and it’s an act of good citizenship to help find them and put them under control. You’ve all heard on the television the crime they committed. They didn’t kill anybody, but they caused a great deal of property damage and put three armored-car employees in the hospital. The weapons they used are banned in the United States. We don’t know if they’re still carrying those weapons, or if they might have others as well. We do know they were armed and are extremely dangerous. We ask that no one go off by himself, but always have at least one other person from your group in sight. If you come across one or both of these fugitives, do not try to apprehend them yourselves. These are professional criminals, desperate men facing long prison sentences, and they have no reason not to shoot you down if you get in their way. If you believe you’ve found them, get that information to us or to some other authority at the earliest possible moment. Try to keep them in sight, and do not under any circumstances exchange gunfire with them. Trooper Oskott has artist’s drawings of the two men that we’ll pass among you, and then your club president, Ben Weiser, will describe to you the area we’d like you to patrol. Ben?”

  Ben Weiser was a man in his sixties, as overweight as most of the rest of them, with absolutely no hair on the top of his head but very long gray hair down the sides and back, covering his ears and his collar, so that he looked like a retired cavalry scout. As Trooper Oskott moved among the group, handing out sheets of copy paper, Weiser said, “It’s nice to see just about everybody here, and even an extra volunteer, Ed Smith over there, brought to us by Tom Lindahl, so I guess that makes up for all the times Tom didn’t show up. Glad you’re here, Tom. Welcome to Hickory Rod and Gun Club, Ed.”

  Parker took the two sheets the trooper handed him and looked at them while Weiser went on being folksy and another man went into the Grange Hall and came back out with an easel that he set up on the top step. The drawing of himself he’d seen before, on the television set in the diner before the law had arrived, attracted by his rental car. Nobody in the diner had looked from the screen to this customer among them and said, “There he is!” and nobody here in front of the Grange Hall turned to say, “Ed? Isn’t this you?”

  The other drawing, he knew, was supposed to be McWhitney, his partner back then, and if you knew McWhitney and had been told this was supposed to be him, you could see the similarities, but McWhitney himself could walk past this group right now and not one of them would give a second look.

  Artist’s drawings didn’t bother Parker. What bothered him was the four thousand dollars in traceable cash in his pocket and the lack of a usable ID. Until he replaced both of those, the best place for him was right here with the search party.

  “Tough-looking guys,” somebody said. “I’m not sure I want to find them.”

  That got a laugh, and then somebody else said, “Oh, I think Cory and me could take em, couldn’t we, Cory?”

  “I’ll hold your coat,” the one next to him said, and while that got its own laugh, Parker looked at the two of them, Cory and the one whose coat he’d hold.

  They were a little younger than most in the group, a little rougher-looking, both dressed in jeans and boots and dark heavy work shirts. They might have been brothers, with the same thick dark blond hair hanging straggly around their ears, the same easy slope of the shoulders. The one who thought he and Cory could take the fugitives had a black patch over his left eye, which inevitably gave him a piratical look, as though he were the tougher brother. With that eye, now, he peered around at the group, slightly challenging, watching out for somebody else he could take. His good eye brushed past Parker, and Parker looked away, not needing to be noticed too much.

  Meanwhile, up in front of them, Ben Weiser said, “Here’s a government survey map,” which somebody had put on the easel, but then had to hold there because otherwise the breeze would blow it off. Weiser then went on to describe what area they were expected to search in, saying things like, “You know the old Heisler place,” which they all did.

  Parker paid little attention to the details, because this wasn’t a part of the country he knew, but it was interesting to see the approach they had taken. They were guessing that the men they wanted would have left the main roads, and possibly the secondary roads as well, though why they should think bank robbers were woodsmen wasn’t clear. But the approach was to cover back roads and dirt roads and dead-end roads that weren’t used any more, and particularly to cover abandoned buildings, old farmhouses and barns, and even a railroad station up where a town no longer existed because its iron mine had given out more than a century ago.

  Which was where Parker would be searching, along with Tom Lindahl and Fred Thiemann. The decision had been made that the search parties should consist of groups of three, and Weiser explained the reason. If they did come across one or both of the fugitives, one of their group could go off to raise the alarm without leaving one man alone to keep the quarry in sight.

  The men, who had arrived here separately or in pairs, now sorted themselves into threes and headed for the cars. Lindahl’s SUV was roomier than Thiemann’s Taurus, so they’d use that, with Lindahl driving, Parker beside him as before, and Thiem
ann in back with the rifles.

  They joined the exodus from the Grange Hall parking lot, followed a couple of other cars for the first mile or so, and Lindahl explained, “This place we’re going to, called Wolf Peak, was a mining town way back when.”

  “Before the Civil War,” Thiemann put in from the backseat. “The whole Northeast was iron mines, but the Civil War used it all up.”

  “Wolf Peak went on till the end of the century,” Lindahl said, “with the tailings, and some lumbering, but the younger generations kept moving away, and when the railroad stopped going up there, around 1900, that was the end.”

  Thiemann said, “The houses were all wood, so they burned or rotted, but the railroad station was good local stone. The roof’s gone, but the walls are solid. I hunkered down in there myself once, out hunting and here comes a thunderstorm.”

  “There might be a couple other hidey-holes up around there,” Lindahl said, “but mostly it’s the railroad station.”

  Spreading himself comfortably across the backseat, Thiemann said, “What I’m guessing about these robbers, I’m guessing they’re city people, and they aren’t gonna know what it means to try to hide out in a place like this.”

  Parker said, “How’s that?”

  “People like Tom and me,” Thiemann said, “we been here generations, it’s like we got our grandparents’ memories mixed in with our own. We know this chunk of the planet Earth. No city person’s gonna know a city like we know these hills. A stranger tries to move through here, tries to hide out in here, somebody’s gonna see him and say, ‘That fella doesn’t belong.’ You can’t hide around here.”

  “I see what you mean,” Parker said.

  Leaning forward a little, Thiemann said, “Where you living these days, Ed?”

  “Chicago,” Parker told him. “I don’t know it very well.”

  Thiemann grinned. “You know what I mean, then,” he said, and sat back.

  Their road trended mainly uphill, and a few miles later crossed a larger road, where a police presence had been set up. The trooper this time, a younger one than the first, walked over, saw Lindahl’s membership card on the dash, and waved them through. Grinning, he called, “Happy hunting!”

  A few miles later Lindahl made a left onto a road, a two-lane blacktop in crumbling condition, that angled steeply up. “There’s a couple houses just up ahead,” he said, “that they keep the blacktop for. After that, it’s dirt.”

  “Shake the teeth right out of your head,” Thiemann commented.

  He was close to right. After the second small occupied house, the woods settled in closer on both sides, the hill grew even steeper, and the surface they drove over was more corrugation than road. Lindahl drove slowly, trying to steer around the deepest holes.

  Parker said, “Was the railroad line near the road? I don’t see any sign of it.”

  “They pulled up the tracks for scrap during World War Two,” Lindahl told him. “It’s only a couple more miles now.”

  First there were stubs of wall, stone or brick, in among the tree trunks on both sides of the road, then a couple of collapsed wooden buildings, crumpled down to a third of their original height, and then, ahead on the right, the railroad station, squat and long, roofless, with narrow tall window sockets and remnants of a concrete skirt around its base. Maple and cherry trees had grown up inside the station, some taller than the roofline. The woods on this slope were so thick that only narrow angles of sunlight reached the ground, like spotlights that had lost the performer they were supposed to follow.

  Whatever level parking area had once existed around the station was long overgrown. Lindahl simply stopped on the rutted road in front of the building, and all three got out. Thiemann carried his rifle, a bolt-action Winchester 70 in .30-06, while Lindahl opened the left rear door and took out both of the other rifles. Parker walked around the front of the Ford, held his hand out, and after a second, Lindahl, with a strong and mistrustful frown, gave him the Marlin.

  Vines covered part of the building, including hanging down over the doorless front entrance. “You want to be careful with that,” Thiemann said, pointing toward the doorway. “That’s poison ivy.”

  “There’s probably wider doors around back,” Lindahl said, “for freight.”

  They walked around the building, and there was really nothing at all any more to say what it had originally been, no platforms, no railbed, no rotting luggage carts. The place might have started, long before, as a temple in the jungle.

  One of the doorways on this side was broad, and clear of vines. They stepped through, and Thiemann pointed to the left, saying, “That’s where I hunkered down that time, waiting for the storm to go away.” Then he peered more closely at that corner and said, “What’s that?”

  They moved into the building, toward the left corner, and a little stack of old cloth had been piled there, ragged old blankets and towels. It looked like a mouse nest, but it had been put together by a man.

  “You’re not the only one got out of the storm here,” Lindahl said. Looking up, he said, “It’s the best protected spot, I guess, with those tree branches.”

  Bracing himself with his rifle butt against the root and dirt floor, Thiemann squatted down and felt the pile of cloth with his left palm. Solemn, wide eyed, he looked up and mouthed, just barely loud enough to be heard, “Warm.”

  Lindahl stared at Parker. His hands were clenched tight on his rifle, the way they’d been the first time Parker had seen him, on the hill ahead of the dogs.

  Parker said, “Heard the car coming.”

  Thiemann stood. “He’s nearby, then.” He was excited, almost giddy, but trying hard to hide it, to seem mature and professional.

  Lindahl, speaking mostly to Parker, said, “Do you guess he’s armed?”

  “Not if he was trying to get through roadblocks.”

  “If he’s holed up in here,” Thiemann said, “he isn’t getting through any roadblocks.”

  Parker knew this wouldn’t be McWhitney they’d found, but had no reason to say so. “Could be somebody else,” he said.

  Thiemann scoffed at that. “Way the hell up in here?”

  “Could be you, once.”

  Thiemann shook his head, getting irritated at having his fantasy poked at. Pointing at the pile of cloth, he said, “I didn’t make myself a bunk, and”—finger pointing skyward—“there’s no thunderstorm. So let’s take a look at what we got up here.”

  They left the station, Thiemann going first at a half-crouch, rifle ready in both hands in front of himself. Outside, he stopped and looked across the space where the tracks would have been, and into the woods. He had become very still, all eyes and ears, studying that wild land over there, sloped steeply down to the right, clogged with low shrubs in among the narrow trunks of the second-growth forest.

  Parker and Lindahl waited, a pace behind Thiemann, and after a long minute Thiemann took a backward step toward them, without looking away from the woods. “You see where I’m looking.”

  Ahead, and just to the right. Parker and Lindahl looked there, too. Parker didn’t know if Lindahl saw anything, but he didn’t; just more shrubs and more trees.

  “Little branches broken on that multiflora there,” Thiemann murmured. “That stuff’s miserable to get through. See how he forced his way?”

  “You know, I do,” Lindahl said. “Very good, Fred.”

  “Not that different from hunting a deer.” Thiemann nodded at the woods. “You two flank me left and right, I’ll go through where he went through.”

  They set off slowly, Lindahl giving Parker one quick worried look behind Thiemann’ s back, but then concentrating on the terrain ahead.

  The land was broken, tilted, full of rocks; very slow going. There was no way to be quiet about it, their feet crunching on old leaves and fallen branches, their bodies shoving branches out of the way. They moved about ten yards forward, and when Parker looked back, the lower part of the station building was already obscured by the u
ndergrowth, only the uneven roofline still visible. It wouldn’t take long to get lost in here.

  “Freeze!”

  That was Thiemann, a dim uncertain shape through the woods to Parker’s left.

  A sudden loud rustle and clatter ahead of them was someone running, running desperately through the unforgiving forest.

  “Fred, hold it!” That was Lindahl, invisible beyond Thiemann, sounding panicky.

  “Halt, goddammit!” Thiemann again.

  The sound of the shot was a dead flat crack in the open air, like two blocks of wood slapped together, without echo.

  “Fred, don’t!”

  Too late; there was one hoarse scream, and then a great turbulence on the forest floor. Parker moved forward toward that thrashing. To his left, Thiemann moved more cautiously, bent low.

  Whatever had been hit was now lunging around out there, agitating the shrubbery, making a racket. Parker got to him in time to see the blood still bubble from the hole in the man’s back, the color of wine, the thickness of motor oil. The man, facedown on the leaves and branches, jerked his arms and legs as though swimming through the woods.

  And then he stopped. The blood from the hole in his back bubbled less, and pulsed to an end as Thiemann arrived, panting as though he’d run a mile. He stared at the man on the ground as intently as if he’d just given him birth. His voice hoarse, he said, “Which one is he?”

  “Neither,” Parker said.

  Lindahl came to join them, from farther to the left. “How is he?”

  “Dead,” Parker said.

  Thiemann was trying to get the artist’s drawings out of his pocket without letting go of his rifle. “Damn,” he said. “Damn! Tom, hold this a sec.”

  Lindahl took Thiemann’s rifle, and Thiemann got out the two papers, unfolded them, and went down on one knee beside the dead man. He was clearly reluctant to touch the body, but had to turn the head in order to see the face.

  “He’s not one of them,” Parker said.