Ask the Parrot

“So now you unlock us out of here.”

Lindahl didn’t move. He kept gazing at the duffel bags, as though still trying to remember Bill’s last name, then looked sidewise at Parker and said, “You killed him, didn’t you?”

“No,” Parker said. “Why would I have to?”

“I brought you here, I brought you into all this. But you don’t belong in this—with these people. I keep thinking about Fred.”

Parker needed to get out of here, but Lindahl was going through some sort of crisis and would have to be waited out. “What about Fred?”

“He’s going crazy. He killed that man, and it’s driving him crazy.”

“I think he was a little crazy before that,” Parker said. “Maybe because of his son, or I don’t know what. He killed a man who wasn’t a threat to him or anybody else.”

“He should have turned himself in. It was only to save you.”

“It would have been bad for him to turn himself in. It wouldn’t make him less crazy to wind up doing time.”

“It wouldn’t be on his conscience now,” Lindahl said, “and that man wouldn’t be up . . . They’d find his family. He’d get a burial.”

“Maybe. Tom, what we have to do now is get these bags out of here, and then it’s all over.”

“If you killed Bill,” Lindahl said, “you’ll kill me, too.”

“Tom,” Parker said, “you don’t kill somebody unless you have to. It puts the law on you like nothing else. Worse than what we’ve been having.”

“Where is he?”

Parker frowned at him. This was taking too long. “Bill is handcuffed on the floor in the security office, along with the other one, Max.”

“You had handcuffs?”

“The security office had handcuffs. Tom, snap out of this now. We’ve got to get out of here.”

Lindahl looked toward the door, as though he meant to go to the security office, to see for himself if his old friends Bill and Max were alive in there, but then he shook his head and said, “You get to imagine different ways, different ways it can go.”

“The way it’s going,” Parker said, “we get out of here now.”

Lindahl took a deep breath. “You’re right,” he said, and moved toward the doorway, taking keys from his pocket.

4

Parker waited in the safe room doorway as Lindahl carried his keys to the alarm box beside the garage door at the end of the corridor. One key opened the box, and a second switched off the alarm.

This was the alarm that would have made it necessary for them to come back down here after removing the money, shutting the door from the inside and reactivating the alarm, then retracing their route to the other door, so that a light wouldn’t flash in security. Now that Parker had had to deal with the guards in security, it didn’t matter any more if that light flashed on. A simpler operation but more hurried.

Lindahl, finished with the alarm, opened the garage door, and there was the ramp, leading upward to ground level, where his Ford waited beyond the locked chain-link gate. Parker watched Lindahl start up the ramp to get his car, then he turned back to pick up one of the duffel bags and carry it out of the safe room. When he reached the outer room, Lindahl was back, too soon, without the car and looking worried.

“Something wrong,” he said, half a whisper.

Parker put the duffel on the floor. “What?”

“There’s another car up there,” Lindahl said. “A gray car. It’s backed up against the rear bumper of my Ford. I don’t see anybody in it.”

“No, he’s not in it,” Parker said. “If he backed his car against yours, that’s so he can watch the driver’s side. He’s up there on the left somewhere, in the dark, in a place where he can watch both the door where we came in and the driver’s side of his car. We have to go one way or the other to get out of here, and he knows it.”

“But who?” Lindahl peered at Parker as though it had become harder to see him. “Do you know who it is?”

“Cory Dennison.”

“Cory! What the hell’s he doing here?”

“Looking for our money.” Parker took a step toward the ramp but didn’t go up it.

Lindahl said, “Isn’t Cal with him?”

“No, it’s just Cory, but that’s enough.”

Lindahl shook his head. “Cory and Cal are always together, they don’t do things on their own.”

“This time,” Parker said, “it’s just Cory.”

Lindahl stared at him, trying to frame some question. Parker waited for him, then said, “Is there something you