Ask the Parrot

Parker said, “You aren’t used to the life on the other side of the law. There’s too many things you don’t know, too many mistakes you can make. You can have your money, and you can have your revenge, and maybe even a couple of your old bosses think you maybe did it, but they can’t prove it, and you and your parrot just go on living the way you did before.”

“That’s not what I had in mind,” Lindahl said again. “What I had in mind was, I don’t live like this any more. I don’t shoot rabbits for my dinner. I don’t curl up in that crappy little house and never see anybody and everybody knows I’m that crazy hermit and nobody gives a shit about me.”

“You did it for four years,” Parker reminded him. “You can do it one year more. A little less. Next July, you tell a few people you’re going on vacation, you’re driving somewhere. Then you take the money and you go wherever you want to go—”

“Someplace warm.”

“That’s up to you. When you get there, you start a checking account, you put a couple grand of your cash in it every few weeks, you rent a place to live, you drive back up here, pack your stuff, tell whoever you’re paying your rent to that you decided to retire someplace warm, and there you are.”

Lindahl was quiet for a long while as Parker drove, the headlights pushing that fan of pale white out ahead of them, moving through hilly countryside, sleeping towns, here and there a night-light but mostly as dark as when the continent was empty.

Finally, with a long sigh, Lindahl said, “I think I could do that.”

“I think so, too.”

“It’s like hunting, I see that. In some ways, it’s like hunting. The main thing you have to be is patient. If you’re patient, you’ll get what you want.”

“That’s right.”

“I’d have to— If that’s what we do, I’d have to hide the money. I mean, really well, where they wouldn’t find it. Where nobody would find it.”

“I’ll show you where,” Parker said.

Surprised, Lindahl said, “You already know a place?”

“But the other thing you’ve got to do,” Parker told him, “is get rid of those metal bank boxes. You don’t need them, and you don’t want any lawman to come across them, because you don’t have any answers to those questions.”

“You’re right,” Lindahl said. “I didn’t think about them. They’re just in the furnace room, stacked in the corner.”

“Wipe your fingerprints off.”

“They’re still in the black plastic bags, from when they were thrown away in the Dumpster. I just left them that way.”

“That’s good. Take them with you tomorrow, find another Dumpster, maybe at this mall you’re going to, get rid of them in a way that they won’t come back.”

“All right, I can do that.” Curious, half turning in his seat, Lindahl said, “You really know where to hide the money?”

“In the boarded-up house in front of you.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lindahl said. “I don’t think it’d be easy to get in there. Not without making a mess.”

“I’ve already been inside,” Parker told him. “It’s all set up. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

“You’ve been in there? My God.”

“In case it would turn out to be a bad idea to be in your house,” Parker said.

“I’ll have to see this.”

Parker said nothing to that, and they drove in silence another while. It was well after four in the morning by now, and it would be after five before they got where they were going. And then Lindahl had a lot to do tomorrow.

“You know,” Lindahl said about fifteen minutes later, “now it is real. When I first went back to the track, and looked at it, and realized I was still goddam mad about what happened and still wanted to get back at them, I thought then it was finally real, but it wasn’t. It was still my fantasy, riding off into the west like somebody in the movies. Like Fred Thiemann saying we were a posse, only without the horses. That was his fantasy, and it sure bit him on the ass, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” Parker said.

“And my fantasy would have done the same thing. So now, for the first time, it really is real.”

Lindahl looked out at the darkness and smiled. Parker didn’t tell him anything.

4

When they drove past the boarded-up house, coming into Pooley at last, Lindahl frowned at it and said, “You really got in there.”

“We’ll look at it tomorrow,” Parker said. “We both need sleep.”

It was nearly five-thirty in the morning, false dawn smudging the sky up to their right, suggesting the silhouettes of hills. The only lights showing in the town were down at the intersection, the streetlight and blinker signal and night-lights of the gas station.