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
“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.
