Ask the Parrot

“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.”