“Good.”
Parker looked past Lindahl’s sour face, downslope to the left, and through the trees now he could just see a road, two-lane blacktop, below them and running parallel to them. A red pickup truck went by down there, the opposite way, uphill. Parker said, “Can they see us from the road, up in here?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“They’ll get to the top in a few minutes, with the dogs,” Parker said. “They’ll see this road, they’ll figure I’m in a car.”
“Soon we’ll be home,” Lindahl said, and unexpectedly laughed, a rusty sound as though he didn’t do much laughing. “You’re the reason I came out,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“The TV’s full of the robbery, all that money gone, I couldn’t stand it any more.
Parker watched his profile. Now that he was talking, Lindahl seemed just a little less bitter. Whatever was bothering him, it must make it worse to hold it in.
Lindahl gave him a quick glance, his expression now almost merry. “And here you are,” he said. “And up close, I got to tell you, you don’t look like that much of a world-beater.”
He steered left, down a steep slope, and the logging road met the blacktop.
2
The name on the town sign was Pooley, and it wasn’t much of a place. One minor intersection was controlled by a light blinking amber in two directions, red in the other two. A gas station stood on the corner there, along with a shut-down bank branch, a shut-down bar, and a shut-down sporting goods store. Twenty houses or so were strung along the two narrow roads of the town, three or four of them boarded up, most of the rest dilapidated. An old man slept in a rocker on a porch, and an old woman a few doors down knelt at her front-lawn garden.
Lindahl drove straight through the intersection, then three houses later turned to the right into a gravel driveway next to one of the boarded-up houses. Behind the house, at the rear of the property, a three-car brown clapboard garage had been converted to housing, and that was where Lindahl stopped.
“You go on in,” he said. “It isn’t locked. I’ll take care of my rabbits.”
Parker got out of the Ford and walked over to what had originally been the middle garage door, now crudely converted to a front door next to a double-hung window covered on the inside by a venetian blind.
He pushed open this door and stepped into a dim interior, where the smell, not strong, was cavelike, old dirt combined with some kind of animal scent. Then he saw the parrot, in a large cage on top of the television set. The parrot saw him, too, turning his green head to the side to do it, but didn’t speak, only made a small gurgling sound and briefly marched in place on its bar. The newspaper in the bottom of its cage was not new.
The rest of the living room was normal but seedy, with old furniture not cared for. The television set was on, sound off, showing an antacid commercial.
Lindahl’s anger was money-based. He wasn’t supposed to be needy, living like this, shooting rabbits to feed himself. Hearing about a big-scale robbery had made him angrier and depressed and self-hating; which meant there was something he should have done about the money he felt was rightfully his, but he hadn’t done it. And now he thought that talking with a bank robber would help.
Parker spent the next five minutes lightly tossing the place: living room, bedroom, bath, kitchen, utility room with oil furnace. Three more rifles were locked to a wall rack in the bedroom, but there were no pistols. Lindahl lived here alone and didn’t seem to have much correspondence with anybody. He had a checking account with $273 in it, and wrote checks only for standard items like phone and electricity, plus ATM withdrawals for cash. A $1,756 deposit every month was labeled “dis”; disability?
Lindahl would tell him why he’d rather talk to a bank robber than turn him in. Whatever the reason, right now Parker needed it. The only identification he carried was no good any more, now that the police had the car he’d rented with it. For the next couple of days, in this part of the world, it would be impossible to travel anywhere, even by foot, without having to show ID every once in a while.
When Lindahl walked in, carrying his rifle and two white plastic bags, Parker was in the living room, seated on the chair that didn’t face the television set, leafing through yesterday’s local blat. From the headlines, it seemed to be all small towns around here, no cities.
Parker looked up at the door opening, and Lindahl said, “I’ll just take care of this and wash my hands,” and went on through to the kitchen. Parker heard the water run, and then Lindahl came back, now carrying only the rifle, loose in one hand. “One more thing,” he said, and went into the bedroom, and Parker heard the click as the rifle was locked into its place on the wall.
Now at last Lindahl came out to the living room and sat down on the left side of the sofa. “I’ve been trying to think how to tell you,” he said. “I’m not used to talking to people any more.”
He stopped and looked over at Parker, as though waiting for a response, but Parker said nothing. So Lindahl made his sour chuckle and said, “I guess you’re the same.”
“You have something to tell me.”
“I’m a whistle-blower,” Lindahl said, as though he’d been planning some much longer way to say it. “My wife told me not to do it, she said I’d lose everything including her, and she was right. But I’m bullheaded.”
“Where did you blow this whistle?”
“I worked for twenty-two years at a racetrack down toward Syracuse,” Lindahl said, “named Gro-More. It was named after a farm feed company went bankrupt forty years ago. They never changed the name.”
