Ask the Parrot

3

No!” Lindahl was deeply shocked. “That’s no good! We won’t have any time at all to get away!”

“In the first place,” Parker said, “let’s get rid of that thirty-six-hour fantasy of yours. You can’t go on the run, because you can’t hide. Where do you figure to be, thirty-six hours later? Oregon? Where do you sleep? Do you go to a motel and pay with cash? A credit card places you, and the law by then is watching your accounts. So do you pay cash? The motel wants your license plate number. Oh, from New York State?”

“Jesus.”

“Anywhere you go in this country, everybody’s on the same computer. It doesn’t matter if you’re across the street or across the country, as soon as you make any move at all, they know where you are. You gonna try to leave the country? You got a passport?”

“No,” Lindahl said. He sounded subdued. “I’ve never traveled much.”

“Not a good time to start,” Parker told him. “You can’t run away, you don’t know those ropes. So instead of being the guy that did it and you’re thumbing your nose and they’ll never get you, you’re the guy that didn’t do it, and you’re staying right there where you always were, and sure, let them go ahead and search, and you were home in bed last night same as any other night, and you don’t spend any of that cash for a year. You want to pull the job and not do time for it? That’s how.”

“That’s all . . .” Lindahl shook his head, gestured vaguely in the air in front of himself, like someone trying to describe an elephant to a person who’d never seen one. “That’s different from what I had in mind. That isn’t the same thing.”

“You want two things,” Parker reminded him. “Or so you said. You want revenge. And you want the money.”

“Well,” Lindahl said, and now he seemed a little embarrassed, a little sheepish, “I kind of wanted them to know.”

“Because you were gonna disappear.”

“But you say I can’t do that.”

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.