They both peered at the houses on the left, inching along, until Ellis said, “Movement back there.”
There was a boarded-up empty house at that point, with a driveway next to it and what looked like a garage in back. Duckbundy braked, swiveled the spotlight, and clicked it on. In the sudden glare, a man down there by the garage, with a rifle in his right hand, was just getting into a black Taurus. Something wet glistened on the barrel of the rifle as the man spun around, glaring into the light, clutching the rifle now with both hands.
Ellis had the microphone in his palm and carried it with him as he stepped out to the roadway.
He didn’t. He screamed something, gibberish, something, and then he did bring the rifle up.
Between them, the troopers fired eleven shots. Any three would have done the job.
10
What do you call a parrot? Does it have to start with “P”? Polly Parrot; Peaches Parrot. Penitentiary Parrot; not good. Greeny Parrot.
There was less traffic tonight, and fewer roadblocks. It seemed to Tom the authorities no longer believed they had the fugitives trapped; they were just going through the motions.
How was Ed going to get there, without a car and without an ally? Or had he somehow phoned someone, while Tom was away from the house, and arranged to meet with another professional like himself, another hard man, who would come with him to Gro-More to help in the robbery? And get what out of it?
Tom’s share, of course.
He could still pull over, at any open gas station, and call the state troopers to tell them where they could find one of the men they were looking for. Unless Ed had left the house almost immediately after Tom.
But it didn’t matter; he wasn’t going to stop. It was too late to change anything now, too late to decide to do something other than this.
Different cars appeared in his rearview mirror, and some passed him because, with all this fretful thinking inside his head, he couldn’t keep up to his normal speed, but poked along at probably ten miles an hour below his regular average. There was a gray Volkswagen Jetta in his mirror for miles, somebody else as poky as he was, but then he came to another of the rare roadblocks, and after that pause, the Jetta was gone, and for some miles his mirror was dark.
He next became aware of other traffic when a different car’s lights appeared well behind him, coming on fast. This one was pretty much a speed demon, who tailgated Tom a mile or so and then, at the next passing zone, roared on by him like a freight train. In Tom’s headlights, as it raced away, he could see it was a black Infiniti, a faster, more powerful car than his, soon out of sight up ahead.
Perry Parrot? Ed Parrot? Madonna Parrot? William G. Dodd Parrot?
What if he doesn’t show up? What if, after all this, I get there and I never see Ed Smith again? What if he’s gone from my life just as abruptly as he came into it?
There would be a relief in that, but Tom knew it wasn’t the right question. The question was, if Ed Smith disappeared, could Tom do it himself, come back with
Tom didn’t believe it. If he got there, and waited half an hour and Ed never appeared, he knew damn well what he’d do. He’d turn tail. He was still the same gutless wonder he’d always been. He needed Ed Smith to give him a backbone. He hated that he needed the man, but he knew it was true. Even after all this, he wouldn’t be able to take the track’s money on his own.
Do I want him to show up? Do I want this thing to happen, or do I want an excuse just to go back to my crappy little house and vegetate in there forever? Which do I want, which do I really want?
Like the parrot’s name, he just didn’t know.
11
Suzanne woke to the patter of pebbles on her window. Annoyed, not wanting to be awake, she thought, Who would be pestering me at this hour? What time is it, anyway?
Suzanne opened her eyes to utter madness. Instead of the silent dark of her own hushed peaceable room, she was seated upright in some harshly angular place of bands of hard glare that sliced down across full crowded banks of blackness. Light above, dark below, black on all sides—a window?
“Oh! My God, what’s—”
Another shock. The voice was male, low, intense, guttural, and not at all friendly. It silenced Suzanne like a hand clapped against her mouth, long enough for the sharp bite of the boot lace around her wrists to bring memory crashing back, with all its terror and all its humiliation.
How could she not have realized that it was the bank robber they’d run into? She had been just so full of her normal assumption, for so many years, that as she moved through the world she was simply going to be mistreated, or ignored, or dealt with unfairly, that when a man suddenly appeared in front of her to wave a gun around and tie people up like political prisoners, then march off without a single word of explanation, it had somehow been
And now that it had happened? She’d been so locked up in her own feelings of mistreatment, expectations fulfilled, that it hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder who that man might be or why he would act in such a
