Ask the Parrot

by Richard Stark

Parker said, “On the floor, both of you, over there. Facedown.”

  Neither moved. Max said, “There’s two of us.”

  “There could be none of you. You go on the floor without a bullet in you, or you go on the floor with a bullet in you. Now.”

  “Fourteen months, Max,” Bill said, and, stiffly lowered himself to the floor, having trouble getting down, and then having more trouble rolling onto his stomach.

  Max watched him, tense, not wanting the humiliation in front of this armed stranger, but finally realized there was no choice. He tried to be more graceful getting down, but failed, and finally lost his balance and landed on his bottom with a thump. Quickly, then, he scrambled around to lie prone, turning his face away.

  Parker said, “Where do you keep the cuffs?”

  “Fuck you,” Max told the carpet.

  Parker said, “I may have to tenderize you, friend.”

  Bill said, “They’re in the desk with the flowerpot on it, bottom side drawer.”

  Parker found them and tossed them onto the floor between the two guards. “Bill, you put them on Max.”

  Max was muttering, “Goddammit, goddammit, goddammit,” but he stopped when he sensed Bill getting up onto his knees. They all waited to see what Bill would do, which for a few seconds was nothing.

  Parker said, “That’s far enough up, Bill. Do it.”

  Bill was sheepish. “Sorry, Max,” he said as he clipped the cuffs onto the other man’s wrists, behind his back.

  “How do we let him do this, goddammit?”

  “He’s got the gun, Max.”

  “So do we!”

  “His is in his hand.”

  “Facedown, Bill,” Parker said, and quickly cuffed him, then placed two chairs between the men’s legs, to keep them from rolling over or moving around. With a last look at all the empty corridors and rooms on the monitor screens, he headed fast for the elevator.

  3

  Lindahl sat on the duffel bags, both of them full. The money trays were scattered around the open boxes, still full of small bills and coins. Lindahl seemed to be thinking hard, and it took him a second to realize Parker had come back. Then, startled, he jumped to his feet and said, “Is it me now?”

  Parker looked at him. “Is what you?”

  “I knew that guy,” Lindahl said. “I recognized the voice. He worked here forever. His name’s Bill.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Big man. I’ve been trying to remember his last name.”

  Parker said, “You filled the bags. That’s good.”

  Looking down at them, Lindahl said, “I tried to make it as even as I could, between them. If it matters.”

  “So now you unlock us out of here.”

  Lindahl didn’t move. He kept gazing at the duffel bags, as though still trying to remember Bill’s last name, then looked sidewise at Parker and said, “You killed him, didn’t you?”

  “No,” Parker said. “Why would I have to?”

  “I brought you here, I brought you into all this. But you don’t belong in this—with these people. I keep thinking about Fred.”

  Parker needed to get out of here, but Lindahl was going through some sort of crisis and would have to be waited out. “What about Fred?”

  “He’s going crazy. He killed that man, and it’s driving him crazy.”

  “I think he was a little crazy before that,” Parker said. “Maybe because of his son, or I don’t know what. He killed a man who wasn’t a threat to him or anybody else.”

  “He should have turned himself in. It was only to save you.”

  “It would have been bad for him to turn himself in. It wouldn’t make him less crazy to wind up doing time.”

  “It wouldn’t be on his conscience now,” Lindahl said, “and that man wouldn’t be up . . . They’d find his family. He’d get a burial.”

  “Maybe. Tom, what we have to do now is get these bags out of here, and then it’s all over.”

  “If you killed Bill,” Lindahl said, “you’ll kill me, too.”

  “Tom,” Parker said, “you don’t kill somebody unless you have to. It puts the law on you like nothing else. Worse than what we’ve been having.”

  “Where is he?”

  Parker frowned at him. This was taking too long. “Bill is handcuffed on the floor in the security office, along with the other one, Max.”

  “You had handcuffs?”

  “The security office had handcuffs. Tom, snap out of this now. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Lindahl looked toward the door, as though he meant to go to the security office, to see for himself if his old friends Bill and Max were alive in there, but then he shook his head and said, “You get to imagine different ways, different ways it can go.”

  “The way it’s going,” Parker said, “we get out of here now.”

  Lindahl took a deep breath. “You’re right,” he said, and moved toward the doorway, taking keys from his pocket.

  4

  Parker waited in the safe room doorway as Lindahl carried his keys to the alarm box beside the garage door at the end of the corridor. One key opened the box, and a second switched off the alarm.

  This was the alarm that would have made it necessary for them to come back down here after removing the money, shutting the door from the inside and reactivating the alarm, then retracing their route to the other door, so that a light wouldn’t flash in security. Now that Parker had had to deal with the guards in security, it didn’t matter any more if that light flashed on. A simpler operation but more hurried.

  Lindahl, finished with the alarm, opened the garage door, and there was the ramp, leading upward to ground level, where his Ford waited beyond the locked chain-link gate. Parker watched Lindahl start up the ramp to get his car, then he turned back to pick up one of the duffel bags and carry it out of the safe room. When he reached the outer room, Lindahl was back, too soon, without the car and looking worried.

  “Something wrong,” he said, half a whisper.

  Parker put the duffel on the floor. “What?”

  “There’s another car up there,” Lindahl said. “A gray car. It’s backed up against the rear bumper of my Ford. I don’t see anybody in it.”

  “No, he’s not in it,” Parker said. “If he backed his car against yours, that’s so he can watch the driver’s side. He’s up there on the left somewhere, in the dark, in a place where he can watch both the door where we came in and the driver’s side of his car. We have to go one way or the other to get out of here, and he knows it.”

  “But who?” Lindahl peered at Parker as though it had become harder to see him. “Do you know who it is?”

  “Cory Dennison.”

  “Cory! What the hell’s he doing here?”

  “Looking for our money.” Parker took a step toward the ramp but didn’t go up it.

  Lindahl said, “Isn’t Cal with him?”

  “No, it’s just Cory, but that’s enough.”

  Lindahl shook his head. “Cory and Cal are always together, they don’t do things on their own.”

  “This time,” Parker said, “it’s just Cory.”

  Lindahl stared at him, trying to frame some question. Parker waited for him, then said, “Is there something you want to know?”

  Lindahl thought about it, looking more worried than ever. Then he said, “There was a car behind me, for a while, might have been that one. Was that Cal and Cory?”

  “Yes.”

  “Together then, but just Cory now. Is Cal waiting somewhere else?”

  “No.”

  Lindahl nodded and looked away. Parker said, “What our problem is, he’s got us boxed in down here. We can’t waste a lot of time on this. If one of those guards has a wife that likes to call him late at night, what happens when she doesn’t get an answer?”

  Lindahl stopped worrying about Cal and turned to look up the ramp. “You’re right. If I go up there and push his car with mine . . .”

  “His car is in gear with the
emergency brake on. You know that’s what he’s going to do. The minute you start your engine, he’ll shoot you.”

  “But we have to get out of here.”

  “We will. The gate’s unlocked?”

  “Yes, but it’s still closed. I was unlocking it when I saw the other car.”

  “Turn off the lights down here,” Parker said, “and sit tight.”

  He started toward the ramp, but Lindahl said, “Wait.”

  “What is it?”

  “What if . . .” Lindahl gestured vaguely at the ramp.

  “What if Cory comes down, instead of me?”

  “Yes.”

  Parker nodded at the door to the corridor. “Go that way. You’ve got keys, lock doors behind you.”

  “My car.”

  “The guards have pistols,” Parker told him. “Get one and do your best. Lights out.”

  “Right.”

  As Lindahl switched off the lights, he was looking at that inner door.

  5

  Pistol in his hand, Parker went up the ramp in the darkness, stopping by the closed gate to wait for his eyes to adjust. There was no moon right now, but many high stars that gave the world a slight velvet gray illumination. Beyond the chain-link gate, he could see the bulk of Lindahl’s black SUV and beyond that the gray Jetta. A number of parked track vehicles were an indistinct mass to the left, along the wall beyond the end of the clubhouse. To left and right, the wall curved away into darkness.

  Parker knew this area was a large enclosed trapezoid with this end of the clubhouse as its narrow edge, and eight-foot-high wooden walls curving out from it to meet the main wooden wall that surrounded the property. Inside the wall, there was nothing but grass and dirt, except for those vehicles parked to the left. So that’s where Cory would be.

  There was no way to be silent when opening the gate. A U-shaped metal bar had to be lifted out of the way. The noise it made was small but sharp; Cory would have heard it.

  The gate was built in two sections, hinged at the far sides. Parker pulled open the right side just far enough so he could slip through, then went to the ground in front of the Ford and made his way, prone, leftward past the car, then straight out toward those parked vehicles, crawling forward with the gun out ahead of himself. If he were to move to left or right, there was a chance Cory could see his movements against the white wall or the white end of the clubhouse. As long as he kept that bulk of the two cars and the gate behind him, there’d be nothing to make him a silhouette.

  The world was absolutely silent, except for the tiny scuffing sounds he made as he moved across the weedy ground. Then, out ahead, he heard a metallic click, and an instant later a pair of headlights flashed on.

  It was some sort of big vehicle, the headlights higher than on a car, pointed at an angle to his right, but with plenty of leftover glare to show him on the ground, midway between the trucks ahead and the gate behind.

  Parker shot the nearer headlight, then rolled to his right, closer to the beam, as he heard an answering shot from out in front and the smash of a car window behind him. Prone again, he shot out the second headlight, then rolled back to his left as Cory fired twice more, still shooting too high, the way most people do when they’re firing at something below them.

  Cory didn’t waste any more ammunition. Parker got his elbows underneath himself, then pushed up to his feet and ran forward at a crouch. The headlights had spoiled his night vision for a few seconds, but they would have done the same for Cory.

  The rear doors of an ambulance. The vehicle with the headlights had been facing outward and was down to the right. Parker moved around the left side of the ambulance, came to the wall beyond it, and stopped. He looked left and right but saw nothing against the wall. He waited and listened.

  Silence. Cory was still in here somewhere, in this collection of vehicles. If he was smart, he’d stay in one place and wait for Parker to move, knowing Parker would have to move, he couldn’t still be stuck in here at daybreak.

  Cory wouldn’t have been inside the vehicle with the lights but would have reached in through an open side window to switch them on. Probably he’d had to stand on an exterior step of the thing, which was why it had been a few seconds before he’d started firing, the time he’d needed to step back down to the ground.

  Would he still be over there, near that vehicle? Had he seen Parker’s run? Would he have any idea where Parker was now?

  Time to move. Keeping his back against the wooden wall, Parker sidled leftward. Next past the ambulance was a pickup truck, also facing this way, then a two-wheeled horse trailer tilted forward, and then a small fire engine, facing out.

  Was this the thing with the lights? The next vehicle was another pickup, facing outward, but too small to be the one with those lights.

  Parker went down prone behind the fire engine and looked under the vehicles to see if he could find Cory’s feet. No; Cory wasn’t in the immediate area of the fire engine, and farther away it was impossible to see anything.

  He was getting back up on his feet when another set of headlights flashed on, farther to the left. He turned toward them, but almost instantly the lights switched off again, making the darkness darker than before.

  So Cory hadn’t known where Parker was, and now knew he had to be in here among the vehicles. Parker started toward where the headlights had flashed, and abruptly heard running.

  The window in this pickup’s driver’s door was shut, but the door wasn’t locked. Parker pulled it open, causing more light as the interior bulb went on, and switched on the headlights, to see Cory running as fast as he could toward the gate and the ramp. He dove around the far end of the Ford as Parker fired at him, just too late.

  Parker slapped off these headlights, slammed the pickup door, and trotted after Cory, calling, “Tom! Get back!”

  When he reached the gate, he stopped to listen. Not a sound from down there. Had Lindahl managed to get deeper into the clubhouse, locking doors after himself, or was Cory now moving around inside the building? Or was Cory waiting down there in the darkness for Parker to come after him?

  Parker crouched low and slid over in front of the Ford, which would keep him invisible from down below. He waited, and still heard nothing, and gradually became aware that the darkness down there wasn’t absolute. The lights were still on in the corridor beyond that room, and they gleamed a faint dark yellow through the thick glass of the small window in the door.

  The gate was still slightly open, the way he’d left it. He sidled through, waited, inched forward. Infinitely slow, he traveled in a deep crouch down the ramp, left hand on the tilted concrete floor behind him, right hand holding the pistol out in front, eyes on that dim rectangle of light, hoping to see someone pass across in front of it.

  As he advanced, he took shallow silent breaths through open mouth. He listened for any sound that would tell him where Cory was, but heard nothing.

  At the bottom of the ramp, he stayed in the crouch, left hand now on the floor in front of himself. The duffel bag he’d brought in here from the safe room would be ahead and to his left; he moved toward it, always keeping his eye on that dim-lit window.

  He had the bag. Turning slowly, bracing himself, he sat on it, knees wide, forearms on legs, hands and gun hanging downward. There was very little time to waste here, but there was time enough for this. He would wait, and Cory would reveal himself, and Parker would kill him. He would wait, and Lindahl would come back and make some sort of disturbance, flushing Cory out, and Parker would kill him.

  The small rectangular amber gleam high up in the door was like a window in a castle far up a mountainside. Parker watched it, and breathed evenly, and permitted his body to relax, and waited.

  6

  Ed! Ed! You down there?”

  Maybe ten minutes had gone by, no more than that, the two of them silent in the dark, and all at once this urgent hushed call came down from the top of the ramp. Lindahl, not in the clubhouse, after all, but up there, outside, by
the gate and the two cars.

  Parker kept his eye on the yellow window in the door as he sat up straighter, gun hand now resting atop his right knee. If Lindahl was outside, he’d made his way all around to that other door, the one they’d come in. If he’d done that, wouldn’t he have gone to look at the guards along the way, to see if they were alive or dead, and to take their guns? And if he’d done all that, he must not have left this room when Parker called the warning to him but earlier, the instant Parker had gone up the ramp and out of his sight. And he would have done that because he’d already had plans for the guards’ guns.

  Defensive plans, or a double cross?

  “Ed! Where the hell are you?”

  “Come down.” It was Cory said that, from the other side of the black room, making his voice sound rough, indistinct.

  But he hadn’t sounded like Parker, because Lindahl up there at the top of the ramp said, with a quick quaver in his voice, “Who’s that? Cory, is that you?”

  There was a long pause, and then Cory called, in his own voice, “Yes. Come down.”

  Parker aimed at that sound, but it didn’t go on long enough. If he couldn’t be sure of his shot, he wouldn’t take it.

  Lindahl wasn’t coming down. Instead, he was saying, “Where’s Ed?”

  “He killed my brother.” Again too short to home in on.

  “I know that,” Lindahl said. “Did you kill him, Cory?”

  Another long pause. “Yes.”

  “Cory, listen,” Lindahl said. “You don’t have any complaint against me, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with him and Cal. It made me sick when he told me about it.”

  No response from Cory; what response could he make?

  Lindahl said, “Cory, come on, turn on the light down there, let’s figure out what to do here.”

  “Where is it?”

  “You see the window lit in the door there, to your left? It’s just beyond that, on the left side of the door.”