Ask the Parrot

3

Or it could be,” Parker said, “you’re just not that dumb.”

Lindahl frowned at him. “In what way?”

“You go in there some night,” Parker said, “three in the morning with your truck and your keys and your inside knowledge, and you load the truck up with their cash, and when they find the cash gone next morning, nothing broken into, what’s the first thing they say? They say, ‘Do we have a disgruntled ex-employee around here?’”

“Oh, I know that,” Lindahl said, and laughed at himself, shaking his head. “That was a part of the whole idea. It wasn’t just the money I wanted, was it? It was revenge. I want them to know I got back at them, and not a goddam thing they can do about it.”

“You’re just gonna disappear.”

“It’s happened.”

“Less than it used to,” Parker told him. “Right now I’m sitting here listening to you instead of getting to some other part of the country because I don’t have any safe ID.”

“Well, you stirred them up,” Lindahl said. “You robbed their bank.”

“Robbing their track will stir them up, too.”

“Let me tell you the idea,” Lindahl said. “The way the track operates, the losers pay the winners, so the track never has to start off with cash. They take in enough from the first race to pay the winners, plus some more, and go from there. The track take is about twenty percent, that’s the piece I’m after. At the end of the day, the cash and the credit card slips are all put in boxes and on carts, and the carts ride down to the basement in the freight elevator. They’re wheeled down the corridor to what they call the safe room, because it’s all concrete block, no windows, and only the one door that’s metal and kept locked. Just past that is the door to the ramp that comes up to ground level at the end of the clubhouse. That door is kept locked, and the gate at the top of the ramp is kept locked. Monday through Friday, the armored car comes an hour after the track closes, backs down the ramp, loads on the day’s take. Saturday and Sunday they don’t come at all, and they don’t show up until eight Monday morning, when they pick up the whole weekend’s take.”

“So your idea,” Parker said, “is go in there Sunday night.”

Lindahl shook his head. “Saturday night,” he said. “Those boxes are heavy. Once the pallet is put down there on Saturday, it isn’t touched again till Monday morning. I go in there Saturday night with boxes look just like their boxes, because I know their boxes. I take the full ones, I leave the empty ones. Now I’ve got thirty-six hours before anybody knows anything. How far could I get in thirty-six hours, spending only cash, leaving no trail?”

Everybody leaves a trail, but there was no point explaining things to Lindahl, since it was all a fantasy, anyway. Parker might be able to make use of Lindahl’s access if things were quieter around here and if he could collect a string of two or three sure guys, but there was no way for Lindahl himself to reach into that particular fire and not get burned.

It wasn’t Parker’s job to tell an amateur he was an amateur, to remind him of things like a driver’s license, license plates, fingerprints, or the suspicions created by spending cash in a credit card economy. So he said, “You gonna take the parrot with you?”

Lindahl was surprised at the abrupt change of subject, and then surprised again when he saw it wasn’t a change of subject, after all. “I never thought about that,” he said, and laughed at himself again. “Be on the lookout for a man and a parrot.” Turning to look at the parrot as though he’d never noticed it before, he said, “That’s who I am these last few years, isn’t it? Who else is gonna get a parrot that doesn’t talk?”

“Not at all?”

“Not a word.”

Lindahl studied the parrot an instant longer, while the bird cocked his head to study Lindahl right back, then gave that up to start rooting under its feathers with its beak, eyes wide and blank as the buttons on a first Communion coat.

Turning back to Parker, Lindahl said, “That’s how little I’m interested in talk, the last few years. I better not take him, but that’s no hardship. I’ll do fine on my own. I won’t start any conversations. Is that one of yours?”

Lindahl had nodded at the television set. Parker leaned forward to look to his right at the screen, and filling it was some old mug shot of Nick Dalesia, who had been one of his partners until just now. Nicholas Leonard Dalesia it said across the bottom of the screen.

So they had Nick. That changed everything.

“You want the sound on?”

“We know what they’re saying,” Parker said.

Lindahl nodded. “I guess we do.”

A perp walk showed. Dalesia, wrists cuffed, head bowed, looking roughed up, moved in jerky quick steps from a state trooper car across a broad concrete sidewalk to the side entrance of a brick building in some county seat where this was the courthouse up front and the jail around on the side. New York State Police, so Nick, too, hadn’t gotten very far. As many uniformed state troopers as could do it squeezed into the picture to hustle Nick along from the car to the building.

Parker leaned back, not looking at the set. Three of them had pulled the job and stowed the cash away rather than try to get it through the roadblocks. It was a given that if one of them got nabbed, that one would turn up the cash as a way to make his legal troubles a little easier. You might give up your partners, too, if you knew enough about them. Give the law anything you could if you were the first grabbed. Otherwise, don’t get grabbed at all, because there was nothing left to trade.

So the money was gone. It had been a rich haul, but now it was gone, except for the four thousand in Parker’s pocket, and he still had to work his way out of this minefield. He said, “You say the meet’s going on now, at this track of yours?”

“Two more weeks,” Lindahl said, “then shut down until late April.”

“So there’s three Saturdays left, today and two more.”

“We couldn’t do it tonight,” Lindahl said, looking startled.

“We can go there tonight,” Parker told him. “A dry run, see if it’s possible.”

Lindahl looked both eager and alarmed. “You mean, you’d work with me on this?”

“We’ll look at it,” Parker said.