Ask the Parrot p-23 Read online

  Ask the Parrot

  ( Parker - 23 )

  Richard Stark

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Richard Stark

  All rights reserved.

  Mysterious Press

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.mysteriouspress.com.

  First eBook Edition: June 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-6964-5

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  BY RICHARD STARK

  The Hunter

  The Man with the Getaway Face

  The Outfit

  The Mourner

  The Score

  The Jugger

  The Seventh

  The Handle

  The Damsel

  The Rare Coin Score

  The Green Eagle Score

  The Dame

  The Black Ice Score

  The Sour Lemon Score

  Deadly Edge

  The Blackbird

  Slayground

  Lemons Never Lie

  Plunder Squad

  Butcher’s Moon

  Comeback

  Backflash

  Flashfire

  Firebreak

  Breakout

  Nobody Runs Forever

  ONE

  1

  When the helicopter swept northward and lifted out of sight over the top of the hill, Parker stepped away from the tree he’d waited beside and continued his climb. Whatever was on the other side of this hill had to be better than the dogs baying down there at the foot of the slope behind him, running around, straining at their leashes, finding his scent, starting up. He couldn’t see the bottom of the hill any more, the police cars congregated around his former Dodge rental in the diner parking lot, but he didn’t need to. The excited yelp of the dogs was enough.

  How tall was this hill? Parker wasn’t dressed for uphill hiking, out in the midday October air; his street shoes skidded on leaves, his jacket bunched when he pulled himself up from tree trunk to tree trunk. But he still had to keep ahead of the dogs and hope to find something or somewhere useful when he finally started down the other side.

  How much farther to the top? He paused, holding the rough bark of a tree, and looked up, and fifteen feet above him through the scattered thin trunks of this second-growth woods there stood a man. The afternoon sun was to Parker’s left, the sky beyond the man a pale October ash, the man himself only a silhouette. With a rifle.

  Not a cop. Not with a group. A man standing, looking down toward Parker, hearing the same hounds Parker heard, holding the rifle easy at a slant across his front, pointed up and to the side. Parker looked down again, chose the next tree trunk, pulled himself up.

  It was another three or four minutes before he drew level with the man, who stepped back a pace and said, “That’s good. Right there’s good.”

  “I have to keep moving,” Parker said, but he stopped, wishing these shoes gave better traction on dead leaves.

  The man said, “You one of those robbers I’ve been hearing about on the TV? Took all a bank’s money, over in Massachusetts?”

  Parker said nothing. If the rifle moved, he would have to meet it.

  The man watched him, and for a few seconds they only considered one another. The man was about fifty, in a red leather hunting jacket with many pockets, faded blue jeans, and black boots. His eyes were shielded by a billed red and black flannel cap. Beside him on the ground was a gray canvas sack, partly full, with brown leather handles.

  Seen up close, there was a tension in the man that seemed to be a part of him, not something caused by running into a fugitive in the woods. His hands were clenched on the rifle, and his eyes were bitter, as though something had harmed him at some point and he was determined not to let it happen again.

  Then he shook his head and made a downturned mouth, impatient with the silence. “The reason I ask,” he said, “when I saw you coming up, and heard the dogs, I thought if you are one of the robbers, I want to talk to you.” He shrugged, a pessimist to his boots, and said, “If you’re not, you can stay here and pat the dogs.”

  “I don’t have it on me,” Parker said.

  Surprised, the man said, “Well, no, you couldn’t. It was about a truckload of cash, wasn’t it?”

  “Something like that.”

  The man looked downhill. The dogs couldn’t be seen yet, but they could be heard, increasingly frantic and increasingly excited, held back by their handlers’ lesser agility on the hill. “This could be your lucky day,” he said, “and mine, too.” Another sour face. “I could use one.” Stooping to pick up his canvas sack, he said, “I’m hunting for the pot, that’s what I’m doing. I have a car back here.”

  Parker followed him the short climb to the crest, where the trees were thinner but within a cluster of them a black Ford SUV was parked on a barely visible dirt road. “Old logging road,” the man said, and opened the back cargo door of the SUV to put the rifle and sack inside. “I’d like it if you’d sit up front.”

  “Sure.”

  Parker got into the front passenger seat as the man came around the other side to get behind the wheel. The key was already in the ignition. He started the car and drove them at an angle down the wooded north slope, the road usually visible only because it was free of trees.

  Driving, eyes on the dirt lane meandering downslope ahead of them, the man said, “I’m Tom Lindahl. You should give me something to call you.”

  “Ed,” Parker decided.

  “Do you have any weapons on you, Ed?”

  “No.”

  “There’s police roadblocks all around here.”

  “I know that.”

  “What I mean is, if you think you can jump me and steal my car, you wouldn’t last more than ten minutes.”

  Parker said, “Can you get around the roadblocks?”

  “It’s only a few miles to my place,” Lindahl said. “We won’t run into anybody. I know these roads.”

  “Good.”

  Parker looked past Lindahl’s sour face, downslope to the left, and through the trees now he could just see a road, two-lane blacktop, below them and running para
llel to them. A red pickup truck went by down there, the opposite way, uphill. Parker said, “Can they see us from the road, up in here?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “They’ll get to the top in a few minutes, with the dogs,” Parker said. “They’ll see this road, they’ll figure I’m in a car.”

  “Soon we’ll be home,” Lindahl said, and unexpectedly laughed, a rusty sound as though he didn’t do much laughing. “You’re the reason I came out,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “The TV’s full of the robbery, all that money gone, I couldn’t stand it any more. Those guys don’t get slapped around, I thought. Those guys aren’t afraid of their own shadow, they go out and do what has to be done. I got so mad at myself—I’ll tell you right now, I’m a coward—I just had to come out with the gun awhile. Those two rabbits back there, I can use them, God knows, but I didn’t really need them just yet. It was you brought me out.”

  Parker watched his profile. Now that he was talking, Lindahl seemed just a little less bitter. Whatever was bothering him, it must make it worse to hold it in.

  Lindahl gave him a quick glance, his expression now almost merry. “And here you are,” he said. “And up close, I got to tell you, you don’t look like that much of a world-beater.”

  He steered left, down a steep slope, and the logging road met the blacktop.

  2

  The name on the town sign was Pooley, and it wasn’t much of a place. One minor intersection was controlled by a light blinking amber in two directions, red in the other two. A gas station stood on the corner there, along with a shut-down bank branch, a shut-down bar, and a shut-down sporting goods store. Twenty houses or so were strung along the two narrow roads of the town, three or four of them boarded up, most of the rest dilapidated. An old man slept in a rocker on a porch, and an old woman a few doors down knelt at her front-lawn garden.

  Lindahl drove straight through the intersection, then three houses later turned to the right into a gravel driveway next to one of the boarded-up houses. Behind the house, at the rear of the property, a three-car brown clapboard garage had been converted to housing, and that was where Lindahl stopped.

  “You go on in,” he said. “It isn’t locked. I’ll take care of my rabbits.”

  Parker got out of the Ford and walked over to what had originally been the middle garage door, now crudely converted to a front door next to a double-hung window covered on the inside by a venetian blind.

  He pushed open this door and stepped into a dim interior, where the smell, not strong, was cavelike, old dirt combined with some kind of animal scent. Then he saw the parrot, in a large cage on top of the television set. The parrot saw him, too, turning his green head to the side to do it, but didn’t speak, only made a small gurgling sound and briefly marched in place on its bar. The newspaper in the bottom of its cage was not new.

  The rest of the living room was normal but seedy, with old furniture not cared for. The television set was on, sound off, showing an antacid commercial.

  Lindahl’s anger was money-based. He wasn’t supposed to be needy, living like this, shooting rabbits to feed himself. Hearing about a big-scale robbery had made him angrier and depressed and self-hating; which meant there was something he should have done about the money he felt was rightfully his, but he hadn’t done it. And now he thought that talking with a bank robber would help.

  Parker spent the next five minutes lightly tossing the place: living room, bedroom, bath, kitchen, utility room with oil furnace. Three more rifles were locked to a wall rack in the bedroom, but there were no pistols. Lindahl lived here alone and didn’t seem to have much correspondence with anybody. He had a checking account with $273 in it, and wrote checks only for standard items like phone and electricity, plus ATM withdrawals for cash. A $1,756 deposit every month was labeled “dis”; disability?

  Lindahl would tell him why he’d rather talk to a bank robber than turn him in. Whatever the reason, right now Parker needed it. The only identification he carried was no good any more, now that the police had the car he’d rented with it. For the next couple of days, in this part of the world, it would be impossible to travel anywhere, even by foot, without having to show ID every once in a while.

  When Lindahl walked in, carrying his rifle and two white plastic bags, Parker was in the living room, seated on the chair that didn’t face the television set, leafing through yesterday’s local blat. From the headlines, it seemed to be all small towns around here, no cities.

  Parker looked up at the door opening, and Lindahl said, “I’ll just take care of this and wash my hands,” and went on through to the kitchen. Parker heard the water run, and then Lindahl came back, now carrying only the rifle, loose in one hand. “One more thing,” he said, and went into the bedroom, and Parker heard the click as the rifle was locked into its place on the wall.

  Now at last Lindahl came out to the living room and sat down on the left side of the sofa. “I’ve been trying to think how to tell you,” he said. “I’m not used to talking to people any more.”

  He stopped and looked over at Parker, as though waiting for a response, but Parker said nothing. So Lindahl made his sour chuckle and said, “I guess you’re the same.”

  “You have something to tell me.”

  “I’m a whistle-blower,” Lindahl said, as though he’d been planning some much longer way to say it. “My wife told me not to do it, she said I’d lose everything including her, and she was right. But I’m bullheaded.”

  “Where did you blow this whistle?”

  “I worked for twenty-two years at a racetrack down toward Syracuse,” Lindahl said, “named Gro-More. It was named after a farm feed company went bankrupt forty years ago. They never changed the name.”

  “You blew a whistle.”

  “I was a manager, I was in charge of infrastructure, the upkeep of the buildings, the stands, the track. Hired people, contracted out. I was nothing to do with money.”

  “So whatever this is,” Parker said, “you shouldn’t have known about it.”

  “I didn’t have to know about it.” Lindahl shook his head, explaining himself. “What we had was a clean track,” he said. “The people working there, we were all happy to be at a clean track. There’s a thousand ways for a track to be dirty, but only one way to be clean, so when I found out what they were doing with the money, it just hurt me. It was like doing something dirty to a member of my own family.”

  The strain of getting his point across was deepening the lines in his face. He broke off, made erasing gestures, and said, “I need a beer. I can’t tell this without a beer.” Rising, he said, “You want one?”

  “No, but you go ahead.”

  Lindahl did, and when he was seated again, he said, “What they were doing, they were hiding illegal campaign contributions to state politicians, running them through the track. Laundering them, you might say.”

  Parker said, “How would that work?”

  “A fella goes to the track, he bets a thousand dollars on a long shot on every race, he drops eight thousand that day. Just that day. That money stays in the system, because he did it with credit cards, but a lot of little penny ante bets from other people disappear. Bets made with cash. So the guy didn’t give the politician the eight thousand, he just lost it at the track, but a little later it shows up in a politician’s pocket.”

  “The horses gave it to him.”

  “That’s about it,” Lindahl agreed. “When I found out about it, I was just stunned. We never had dope at the track, we never had fixed races, we never had ringers, we never had the mob, and now this. I talked to one of the execs, he didn’t see the problem. They’re just helping out some friends, nobody from the track is making any money off it. This is just trying to get around some of those stupid pain-in-the-ass regulations from Washington.”

  “Makes it sound good,” Parker said.

  “But it isn’t good.” Lindahl swigged beer. “This is just corruption everywhere you look,
the politicians, the track, the whole idea of sports. I talked it over with my wife, we talked about it for months, she told me it was none of my business, I’d lose my job, I’d lose everything. We never had a lot of money, she said if I threw our life away she wouldn’t stick around. But I couldn’t help it, I finally went to the state police.”

  “You wear a wire?”

  “Yes, I did.” Lindahl looked agonized. “That’s the part I really regret,” he said. “If I just said look, this is going on, then I’m just the guy who saw it is all. But the prosecutors leaned on me, they got me to help them make their case. And then, at the end, the politics was just too strong for them, it all got swept under the carpet, and nothing happened to anybody but me.”

  “You knew that was going to happen.”

  “I suppose I did,” Lindahl said, and drank some more of his beer. “They talked me into it, but I suppose I talked myself into it, too. Thinking it was best for the track, can you believe that? Not best for me, best for some goddam racetrack named after cow feed, I should have my head examined.”

  “Too late,” Parker said.

  Lindahl sighed. “Yes, it is,” he said. “Everybody told me don’t worry, there’s whistle-blower laws, they can’t touch you.” He gestured with the beer bottle, indicating the room. “You see where I am. My wife was true to her word, she went off with her widowed sister. I haven’t had a job for four years. I get a little disability from when a horse rolled over me, years ago, I don’t even limp any more, but I’m the wrong age and the wrong background and in the wrong part of the country to find anybody to hire me to do anything. Even flipping burgers, they don’t want somebody my age.”