Ask the Parrot

“All right, Suzanne, stand straight, wrists crossed behind you.”

“I don’t want somebody to tie me up.”

“I tie you up, or I kill you. Kill you might be easier for both of us, you won’t be tense any more. I only do it this way because it gives the cops less motivation.”

The silence seemed to Brian to go on too long. If the guy shot Suzanne, wouldn’t he have to shoot Brian, too? The cops would already be motivated, anyway.

Suzanne, wake up! Don’t you know what we’ve got here?

But then the silence changed in quality, and it seemed to Brian he could hear the little sounds of the laces moving against flesh. No more discussion followed, no more argument; all to the good.

“All right, Suzanne, you’re gonna sit against the wall here, I’ll help you down. Fine. Legs out straight.”

Brian’s chair was on small casters that didn’t work very well, but he could push himself back from the desk and turn just enough to see Suzanne seated on the floor, back straight, against the side wall, and the hardcase now down on one knee in front of her, tying her ankles with a brand-new set of jumper cables. Finishing, he looked over at Brian and said, “That chair rolls. I don’t like that.”

“I’m sorry,” Brian said.

The hardcase got to his feet and went into the shop, where they heard him rummaging around. When he came back, he had some tools in his hands and a long roll of black electric tape. Putting it all on the desk, not saying anything else now, he moved Brian, chair and all, into the front right corner of the room, next to the door, with Suzanne on the floor to his other side. From here, of course, nobody out by the pumps looking in here would be able to see either of them.

The hardcase checked Brian’s wrists and must have been satisfied, because then he used the electric tape to tie Brian’s white-socked ankles to the chair legs, and used screwdrivers as chocks to keep the casters from moving. Finally he fastened the screwdrivers to the floor and the casters with more electric tape.

He was done with talking, apparently, and barely looked at them any more as he went about his work. Finished, he stepped back to look at what he’d done, while they both mutely watched. Then he went over to the key rack on the back wall, considered the keys and the identifying cards, and chose one. From where he sat, Brian thought he’d picked Jeff Eggleston’s Infiniti, the best car he had here right now.

That was all. The hardcase came over to open the door, figure out the push-button lock arrangement, and, without giving them a glance, he left. From his position, Brian couldn’t tell if he drove off in the Infiniti or Tom Lindahl’s SUV.

“The arrogance of that man!” Suzanne cried. “To do a thing like this to perfect strangers, no excuse, no reason, no— I’ve never seen such a horrible, horrible . . .” She couldn’t seem to figure out how to end the sentence.

“Suzanne,” Brian said, trying to be kindly, to calm her down, “who he is, the situation he’s in, he’s gonna do pretty much what he wants.”

Now Suzanne turned her outrage on Brian, as though it were all his fault (which it almost was). Voice dripping with scorn, caustically she demanded, “Oh, yes? Why? Is he supposed to be somebody famous?”

Brian stared at her. He thought, It’s gonna be a long night.

3

Cal glowered out his side of the windshield as Cory drove the pickup truck. “If he was the guy, we’d be dead now,” he quoted, twisting the words as though he wanted to spit. “That guy talks pretty big, Cory. We should of called his bluff right there.”

“That doesn’t do us any good.”

“Does me some good.” Cal looked around, and they were out in the country, Pooley well behind them. “Where we goin?”

“To Judy’s.”

Their sister, younger than them, living on her own since the guy she thought she was going to marry went into the navy instead. “What for?”

“To borrow her car.”

Cal scoffed. “Judy won’t give us her car.”

Watching the road, Cory said, “She won’t give it to you. She’ll loan it to me.”

“Why? What do we want with her little dinky car?”

“We have to have a different vehicle,” Cory told him, “because Tom and that other guy know this truck. They’ll see it in their rearview mirror, they’ll know just what we’re up to.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure, naturally,” Cal said, trying to pretend he’d thought of it himself, or at least might have. Then, needing to prove he could think of the details, too, he said, “But how you gonna get her to give it to you? You show up in this, you already got wheels, then you say, ‘Gimme your car,’ what are you gonna say? Because we’re gonna take down a bank robber?”

“I got a job interview,” Cory said.

Cal gave him a skeptical look. “What job interview?”

“I say I got a job interview. At that community college, in the computer arts department.”

“They already turned you down over there.”