Ask the Parrot

3

Lindahl sat on the duffel bags, both of them full. The money trays were scattered around the open boxes, still full of small bills and coins. Lindahl seemed to be thinking hard, and it took him a second to realize Parker had come back. Then, startled, he jumped to his feet and said, “Is it me now?”

Parker looked at him. “Is what you?”

“I knew that guy,” Lindahl said. “I recognized the voice. He worked here forever. His name’s Bill.”

“That’s right.”

“Big man. I’ve been trying to remember his last name.”

Parker said, “You filled the bags. That’s good.”

Looking down at them, Lindahl said, “I tried to make it as even as I could, between them. If it matters.”

“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.