Ask the Parrot

9

Six hours. Six hours from now, Parker and Lindahl could leave Pooley and head south to the racetrack, which would be shut and dark and ready for them when they got there. That wasn’t the problem; the problem was in the six hours.

Cory Dennison was out there somewhere, scheming, that was the first thing. He’d decided that, whoever Parker was, he was up to something the Dennison brothers would find interesting and should therefore be in on. So what would they do? Hang around the neighborhood? Watch Lindahl’s house and SUV, follow them if they left? All the way to the racetrack?

All right; somewhere along the line he’d have to neutralize the brothers. But in a way, they were less trouble than Fred Thiemann, because they were at least sane and more or less sensible and knew what they wanted. Thiemann was none of those. He was a loose cannon, not at all under his own control, only partly under his wife’s control. There was nothing Parker could do about him that wouldn’t make it worse. If Thiemann were to die, at Parker’s hands or his own or anybody else’s, Parker would just have to forget the racetrack and hope to clear out of this part of the world before the law arrived.

Because once the law was interested in Thiemann, they would also be interested in Thiemann’s partners in the manhunt. The wife would lead them to Lindahl, and that was the end.

What were the choices? He could tie up Lindahl right now, or shoot him if the man wanted to make trouble, and leave here in the SUV. He’d have the car’s registration and the new driver’s license belonging to William G. Dodd, and if stopped he’d say his friend Tom Lindahl had loaned him the car.

But if he did do that, and it turned out at the same time that Thiemann was eating his rifle, Parker would be on the road in a hot car and not know it. Or he could wait the six hours, ignoring the Dennison brothers and trusting Jane Thiemann to keep her husband in line, and the disaster would find him sitting here in Lindahl’s living room with his feet up.

Another car. He needed a car he could safely drive, a car he could show up in at the roadblocks. A car with paperwork that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, no matter what was happening back here in this neighborhood.

After the Dennisons left, Parker said, “I’ll drive down to the corner, put some gas in the car.”

Sounding bitter, Lindahl said, “Using some of the money you stole from that boy?”

Parker looked at him. “You got that wrong, Tom,” he said. “I didn’t take anything from that boy. I took some cash from a company has nine hundred stores. I needed the cash. You know that.”

“You had that gun all along?”

“I’ll be right back,” Parker said, and turned to the door.

“No, wait.”

Parker looked back and could see that Lindahl was trying to adjust his thinking. He waited, and Lindahl nodded and said, “All right. I know who you are, I already knew who you were. I shouldn’t act as though it’s any of my business.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s hard,” Lindahl said. “It’s hard to be around . . .”

The sentence trailed off, but Parker understood. It’s hard to be around a carnivore. “It won’t be for long,” he said.

“No, I know. And I wanted to tell you,” Lindahl hurried on, obviously in a rush to change the subject, “you don’t want to go to that gas station on the corner. Go out to the right, eight miles, there’s a Getty station. A straight run there and back.”

“But this guy’s right here. He’s open on Sunday, I saw the sign.”

“You don’t want to go there,” Lindahl insisted. “He charges ten, fifteen cents more per gallon than anybody else.”

“How does he get away with that?”

“He doesn’t,” Lindahl said. “The only people that stop there are tourists or lost.”

“Then how does he make a living?”

“Social Security,” Lindahl said. “And he sells lottery tickets there, that’s mostly what people go to him for. A lot of people around here are nuts for the lottery. And he also does some repair work on cars.”

“I saw some cars there, I didn’t know if that meant he fixed them or sold them.”

“He fixes them, he’s a mechanic,” Lindahl said. “That’s what he mostly used to do, somewhere down in Pennsylvania. He worked for some big auto dealer down there. When he retired, he came up here and bought that station, because his wife’s family came from around here somewhere.”

“But why charge so much for gas?”

“Just crankiness,” Lindahl said. “He’s a loner, he likes working on engines and things, listening to the radio in his station.”

“Is he a good mechanic?”

“Oh, yeah.” Lindahl nodded, emphatic with it. “He’ll do a good job on your car, and he won’t cheat you, he’s fair about that. That part he takes pride in. I’ve taken my own car to him, and he’s been fine. What it is, he’ll fix your car, but he doesn’t want to talk to you. I think he likes cars more than people.”

“What’s his name?”

“Brian Hopwood. But you don’t want to go there.”

“No, I’ll stay away from him,” Parker said. “I don’t need somebody cranky, that overcharges. The Getty station, you say, eight miles that way.”

“That’s what you want,” Lindahl agreed.