Ask the Parrot

by Richard Stark

  Parker didn’t see what difference it made, but let it go, saying, “You want me to drive?”

  “God, yes,” Lindahl said. “I got stopped three times going down, by the way, and twice coming back. I’m ready to not drive for a while. But just give me five minutes.”

  “Fine.”

  Lindahl turned toward the bedroom, then turned back, with a sudden sunny smile on his face. “I’m really going to do it,” he said. “Even when I left here, I still wasn’t sure, but the minute I saw the place I knew. It’s been a weight on me, and now I’m getting rid of it.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yes. And it was a good thing we met,” Lindahl said. “Good for both of us. Give me five minutes.”

  TWO

  1

  A billboard ahead on the right read

  GRO-MORE RACING

  Next Right

  “That’s the main gate,” Lindahl said. “We don’t want that. You keep going, about another quarter mile, there’s a dirt road on this side.”

  The dashboard clock read 12:42. In the last hour, William G. Dodd’s new driver’s license had been inspected by two state troopers at roadblocks and found acceptable; which of course, was more likely at night than by day.

  On the drive down, Lindahl had alternated between a kind of buzzing vibrancy, keyed up, giving Parker little spatter-shots of his autobiography, and a deep stillness, as he studied his newly changed interior landscape, as mute as his parrot.

  The main gate, when they drove past it, was a broad entry with parking lots to right and left, a line of entry booths, and the wide hulk of the clubhouse beyond. Large curved iron gates built around stylized outlined shapes of bulls were closed over the entrance. A few dim lights showed here and there in the clubhouse.

  Parker said, “Who’s in there now?”

  “Two guards. That’s the security office, that light way over to the right. There used to be just one guard at night, but then they found out the guy would usually fall asleep, so now it’s two.”

  “Do they patrol? Make rounds?”

  “No, they’ve got monitors in the security room, cameras and smoke detectors here and there in the clubhouse and the paddocks, burglar alarms on the ground-floor doors and windows.”

  “Are the guards armed?”

  “Oh, sure. Handguns in holsters. They’re in uniform, they work for a security company, that part is all contracted out. Here’s where we turn.”

  The turn was a narrow dirt road unmarked except for a Dead End sign. Parker drove slowly, trying to see into the darkness to his right where the track would be. “Is that a wall?”

  “Wooden wall, eight foot high, runs the whole perimeter. This road is used to bring horses in and out, supplies, ambulance when they need one. Up ahead here, turn right to the gate.”

  “Can they see these headlights?”

  “No, there’s nobody around in there except the guards in the security office. Those other lights are just for the fire code.”

  This gate was plain chain-link, eight feet high like the wall stretching away to left and right. Parker stopped just before it, the headlights shining through the chain-link fence onto the white clapboard end wall of the clubhouse. Tall white wooden fences angled out from the corners of the clubhouse at front and back, curved to meet the perimeter wall at some distance to both sides, making a large enclosed area, part blacktop, part dirt. A number of trucks and pickups and horse vans were parked along the wall to the left, with an ambulance and a fire engine along the wall to the right.

  Opening his door, Lindahl said, “I’ll turn off the alarm, then I can unlock the gate.”

  “Isn’t there a security camera along here?”

  “No,” Lindahl said. “They only watch the inside and the paddocks. They’re not worried so much about break-ins as fire. Or somebody wanting to hurt the horses. I’ll be a minute.”

  Parker waited as Lindahl opened a metal box beside the gate, punched numbers onto the pad in there, then took a full ring of keys from his pocket, selected one, and opened the padlock securing the gate. He opened it wide, then gestured for Parker to follow him. He walked confidently in the headlight glare toward the clubhouse, then turned to wave to Parker to stop in front of more chain-link fence, this making a kind of three-sided cage extending out from the middle of the clubhouse wall.

  Coming around to the driver’s door, Lindahl said, “Leave the engine and lights on a minute, I want you to see this.”

  Parker got out of the Ford and went with Lindahl to the fence. The outer side of it was another gate, and inside, a concrete ramp sloped down to a basement level, then went straight under the building, stopping at a featureless metal garage door tucked back about eight feet.

  “Inside there,” Lindahl said, “is the corridor, with the safe room on the left. The armored car backs down, they open the door, and they load on the boxes. Food deliveries go down there, too, and all kinds of supplies. But we have to get in a different way now, so you can turn the car off and we’ll go in that door over there.”

  The door was near the front corner of the clubhouse, solid wood with No Admittance stenciled on it. By the time Parker had left the Ford and walked over, Lindahl had this door, too, unlocked. “There’s no cameras until we come to the main corridor,” he said.

  Parker said, “I’d expect more security.”

  “Well, it’s a small track out in the country,” Lindahl said as he led the way down the dim-lit narrow corridor past closed doors. “It has two twenty-four-day meets, spring and fall, and it’s shut down the rest of the time. They’ve been wanting to sign on to a tote-board system so they could be open for betting at other tracks the rest of the year, but so far it hasn’t worked out. I think the population around here is too small. So the track never makes a whole lot of money, and there’s never once been a break-in in all these years. A couple times crazies tried to get at the horses, but nothing else. We go through here, it bypasses the main corridor.”

  Lindahl opened a door on the left, and they entered a broad low-ceilinged room with eight desks neatly spaced on a black linoleum floor. A fluorescent halo around a large wall clock gave illumination. Most of the desks were covered with papers and other items, including a leftover bacon and omelet breakfast on a green plastic plate.

  “This is where the accounts are kept,” Lindahl said, and pointed. “My office used to be— Damn!”

  He had bumped into the wrong desk, causing the breakfast to flip over and hit the floor facedown. Lindahl stooped to pick up the plate, but the omelet stuck to the black linoleum, which was now a black ocean, and that omelet the sandy desert island, with the solitary strip of bacon sticking up from it, slightly slumped but brave, the perfect representation of the stranded sailor, alone and waiting for his cartoon caption. On the floor, it looked like what the Greeks call acheiropoietoi, a pictorial image not made by a human hand.

  “I ought to clean that up,” Lindahl said, frowning down doubtfully at the new island.

  “A mouse did it,” Parker told him. “Drop the plate on it and let’s go.”

  “Fine.”

  Lindahl led the way across the room and out another door to another corridor that looked identical to the first. They went leftward, Lindahl still leading the way, Parker making sure to remember the route.

  Lindahl stopped where the corridor made a right turn into a wider hallway. Pausing, he leaned to glance around the corner, then said, “Take a look. See the camera?”

  Parker leaned forward. Some distance down the hall, on the opposite side, was a closed door with a small pebble-glass window and a pushbar. Mounted on the wall above the door was a light, aimed downward, flooding the immediate area and giving some illumination down as far as the end here. Above the light, just under the dropped ceiling, a camera was mounted on a small metal arm. The camera was at this moment pointed toward the other end of the hall but was moving, turning leftward toward the wall. As Parker watched, it stopped, hesitated, and began to turn back
in the other direction.

  Parker leaned back. “Tell me about it.”

  “It does a one-minute sweep, back and forth. Once it comes back in this direction and starts the other way, it looks down here for just a few seconds. After that, we have forty seconds to walk down the hall and through the door. That’s the stairwell; no cameras. We go down in the basement. Here it comes.”

  Lindahl waited, seeming to count seconds in his head, then looked around the corner and said, “Good.”

  They strode down the hall, the camera continuing to turn away from them. Lindahl pushed open the door, and Parker followed him through, to a stairwell of concrete flights of steps leading up and down. A small light mounted on the wall above the door illuminated this section of stairs.

  They went downstairs one flight to the bottom of the stairwell, where an identical door had an identical light over it. Lindahl said, “This is a little tricky, because if I open the door when the camera’s faced straight across the hall, the guards might see the light change on their screen, so hold on.”

  He bent down to the small window, cheek against the glass and head angled back as he squinted up and out. “I can just see it when— Oh, good. Right now.”

  He opened the door and immediately walked briskly to the right. Parker followed. The end of the hall down here was very close, closer than upstairs, with a metal fire door in it. As he walked, Lindahl chose another key from his ring, quickly unlocked the end door, and stepped through. Following him, Parker looked back and saw the camera still turning away.

  Once this door was closed, the space they were in was completely without light. “I don’t want to turn the light on in here,” Lindahl said, “because the camera might see it, around the door edges, I don’t know for sure. Hold on.”

  Parker waited, leaning against the closed door. He heard Lindahl shuffle away, then sounds of a key in a lock and a door opening, and then lights went on, ceiling fluorescents, in a room on the right.

  Lightspill showed him the space he was in. Empty, and longer than wide, it had a concrete floor, concrete-block walls, and a windowless metal garage door at the far end, certainly the same one he’d seen from outside.

  A forklift truck stood in the near right corner. When Parker moved to the room Lindahl had illuminated, the doorway was a little taller and wider than average, to accommodate the forklift. Lindahl was now fastening the gray metal fireproof door to a hook in the concrete floor, to keep it open.

  This would be the safe room, a windowless square low-ceilinged space in concrete block painted a flat gray. To the left, half a dozen smallish oblong metal boxes stood on a mover’s pallet. Each box was marked with the logo Gro-More Racing in white letters on its long sides. Metal shelves on the right contained more of the boxes plus the kind of sectioned tray inserted into cash register drawers, and a toolkit and some miscellaneous supplies.

  Lindahl said, “You see the setup.”

  “Yes.”

  “The track owns the boxes, so the empties always come back here. Every once in a while, one gets dented or the hinges warp, and they throw it out. They’re careful, they put them inside black plastic bags in the Dumpster.”

  “But you know how it works,” Parker said. “So you’ve been taking them home.”

  “I have seven.” Lindahl’s pride in his accomplishment immediately gave way to self-disgust. “I was brilliant,” he said. “I worked it all out, every damn thing but coming down here and actually doing the deed.”

  Parker said, “You figured to move that stuff in your Ford?”

  “No, that wouldn’t work, I know that much.” Lindahl shrugged. “For that, I need a little truck, like a delivery truck.”

  “Do you have one of those?”

  “No, I’d rent it.” Then Lindahl grinned at Parker, almost defiantly, and said, “Yeah, I know, just one more thing to tell the police I’m the one did it. But I don’t care if they know, I’m long gone. I’d even leave the truck and the empty boxes at my place, because I won’t be coming back.”

  That was true. Parker said, “Anything else to show me?”

  “No, this is it, only we’ve got to go back out the way we came in. If you open that door to the ramp from outside, it flashes a light in security. You have to switch off the alarm on this side, and then open it. And then, if you close it and don’t re-alarm it, the light in security goes on, anyway. So when we do it, next Saturday, if we do it—well, when we do it, we have to go in and out the same way, drive the truck out, come back in, lock up, switch the alarm on, walk around and up the stairs and out. Anything else you want to see?”

  Parker pointed at the metal boxes on the pallet. “They locked?”

  “No need.”

  “Open one.”

  “Sure.”

  The lids were two long flat metal pieces, accordion-hinged to the long sides of the boxes. Lindahl went to one knee in front of the pallet and lifted open the two parts of the lid, which was apparently pretty heavy. Inside, cashier drawer inserts like the ones on the shelves were stacked, it looked like three deep, but these were full of cash; paper money sorted into compartments from the left, coins to the right.

  “These things really weigh,” Lindahl said as he closed the lid and got to his feet.

  “They look it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “How much is in there, usually, on a Saturday night?”

  “Probably more than a hundred thousand, less than one-fifty.”

  Parker nodded. Enough to keep him moving.

  Lindahl, proud and anxious, said, “So what do you think?”

  “It looks good.”

  With a huge relieved smile, Lindahl said, “I knew you’d see it. You ready to go?”

  “Yes.”

  On their way out, up the stairs from the basement, Lindahl said, “You know, I know why you wanted me to open that box. You didn’t want your fingerprints on it.”

  “That’s right,” Parker said.

  2

  Parker didn’t speak until they were well away from the track, headed north, and then he said, “If we’re going to do this, you’ll have to do what I say.”

  “You’re the pro, you mean.”

  “I care whether I get arrested or not.”

  “Oh, I care,” Lindahl said. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have some kind of death wish over here. If those bastards catch me and put me in jail, they’ve beat me again. I don’t want that. I’m not going to jail, trust me, that’s not going to happen.”

  “You’d rather die first.”

  Lindahl grimaced, trying to work out an answer to that, and finally said, “Would you give up?”

  “I don’t want them on my tail,” Parker said. “That’s the point.”

  “They were on your tail. When I first saw you, they were right down the hill behind you.”

  “It’s fresh in my memory,” Parker assured him. “That’s why, if we go ahead and do it, we do it my way, and you don’t argue.”

  “But I can say no, I guess,” Lindahl said. “I can say no, I don’t want to do that, and then we don’t do it. Like if you say, ‘Now we go kill the two guys in security,’ I can say no, and we don’t do it.”

  “I’m not out to kill anybody,” Parker said. “It only makes the heat worse.”

  “Well, whatever it might be,” Lindahl said. “If I don’t like it, I can say no, and we don’t do it.”

  “You’re right,” Parker told him. “You can always say no.”

  “Good. We understand each other.” Lindahl nodded at the windshield. “Lights out there.”

  They had met only the occasional other moving car, this time of night, but up the road ahead of them now were the unmistakable lights of another roadblock. Those roadblocks would be in position all night tonight, and maybe tomorrow night, too.

  The law was looking for two men, possibly separate but possibly together, so any car out late at night with two men in it attracted their interest. Also, with so little traffic out here on
the rural roads in the middle of the night, the guys on duty were getting bored. For the first time, Parker and Lindahl were asked to step out of the Ford while the troopers did a quick flashlight scan of the interior. They weren’t patted down, though, and once again Parker’s new license was accepted without question.

  They were the only car at the roadblock, and when they left it, driving north into darkness, that cluster of lights in the rearview mirror was still the only illumination to be seen. Lindahl kept twisting around to look back at those lights, and it wasn’t until they disappeared that he spoke again. “I guess you have an idea of what to do. About the track, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think it must be different from mine.”

  “Parts of it.”

  “Which parts?”

  “In the first place,” Parker said, “we don’t take those metal boxes with us. There’s no reason to lug all that weight around.”

  “The money’s gotta be in something.”

  “Is there a mall around where you are? Someplace open on Sunday?”

  “About forty miles away,” Lindahl said, “over toward Albany.”

  “Tomorrow,” Parker told him, “you drive over there. Get two duffel bags. You know what I mean, big canvas bags.”

  “Like the army uses.”

  “That’s right.”

  Lindahl shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “You saw how much money was there.”

  “All we want is the big bills,” Parker told him. “Nothing under a ten. And no change.”

  “Oh.” Nodding slowly, Lindahl said, “I guess that makes sense.”

  “And also get two pairs of plastic kitchen gloves.”

  “For fingerprints; fine. Anything else?”

  “No, that’s all we’ll need. And fill the gas tank, it’s getting low.”

  “Sure.” Lindahl was quiet for a minute, but then he frowned and said, “Why do I have to do all this tomorrow? There’s closer places I can go to on Monday.”

  “Because we’re taking the money tomorrow night,” Parker said.