Ask the Parrot

by Richard Stark

  Last night? Brian looked from the hardcase to Suzanne, who didn’t even look worried, much less scared, and he thought, What about last night? Now there was some other story here, and he wasn’t in on it.

  She said, “No, I just drive by, on my way home. Sometimes he can’t sleep, and, if that happens, he’ll sit out on his porch with the light on and I stop and we talk awhile. He knows I’ll be there and it makes it easier for him, so these days he’s sleeping more than he used to. Last night when I went by he was asleep in front of the television set, so that was fine, so I just went on home. I suppose that’s when you broke in and stole his gun.”

  For Christ’s sake, Suzanne, Brian thought, leave it alone. But the hardcase didn’t mind. He just shrugged and said, “He didn’t seem to use it much.” Then he switched those cold eyes to Brian, considered him a minute as though he might decide after all he was the kind of pest you might as well shoot, and said, “When did you decide?”

  “To be a hero?” Brian, beyond embarrassment, shrugged and looked away. “When I did it.”

  The truth was, it had grown in him. The customer had come in the door, had given him two twenties and said he was at pump number three, and went out again. Brian had gone back to the brake drum repair he meant to finish before four o’clock closing time, and as he’d worked, his wandering mind gradually put together that customer’s face with one of the two Wanted posters he’d put in his desk drawer because he hadn’t wanted to throw away something given to him by the troopers but on the other hand didn’t want to put those two faces on the wall to be an irritation and a distraction all the time. In very short order, the two faces had blended into one and he’d known the customer out there pumping gas was one of the bank robbers everybody was looking for. Driving Tom Lindahl’s car, so God knows what had happened to Tom.

  What to do about the bank robber? He’d decided it was a toss of the dice. If the guy pumped his forty bucks’ worth and drove away, then the next time Brian stepped into the office he’d call the state troopers and tell them he believed he’d just seen one of the bank robbers in Tom Lindahl’s car, and leave it up to them to catch the fellow. But if he came back in for change, that would be a message to Brian from On High that it was up to him to do the citizen’s arrest thing himself. He had his little automatic in the drawer, and the sequence seemed simple: pull out the gun, hold the robber, call the troopers, wait.

  Well, that sure worked out well, didn’t it?

  The hardcase must have been thinking the same thing, because he next said, “You’d have done better to wait till I was gone, then call the law.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Brian said. “If you’d used up the forty and didn’t come back in, that’s what I was gonna do.”

  “Well, then, Brian,” the hardcase said, “that should use up your stupidity for today, shouldn’t it?”

  “I sure hope so.”

  “So if I tell you to call your wife and say you’re gonna be late, don’t hold supper, might be nine or ten o’clock, you aren’t going to be cute, are you?”

  “Well, I never do that,” Brian said. As long as he was relatively safe, he wanted to go on being relatively safe. “If I say that to her,” he explained, “she’ll know something’s wrong, I won’t have to try anything cute.”

  The hardcase waved that away, shaking his head and the pistol, focusing Brian’s attention. “You got an important customer,” he said, “or a close friend, somebody’s got an emergency, got to drive to a wedding somewhere tomorrow, you’ve really got to get his car done.”

  Surprisingly, Suzanne spoke up at that. “Dr. Hertzberg,” she said.

  The hardcase looked at her. “Who’s that?”

  She said, “He treats a lot of the people around here. My grandfather.” She looked at Brian. “And you.”

  “I suppose,” Brian said. And he realized she was right, it was plausible.

  The hardcase studied him, thinking about it. “If your wife doesn’t buy it,” he said, “I can’t leave you two here.”

  “I know that,” Brian told him. “Suzanne’s right, Dr. Hertzberg’s the one man I’d stay here for, work late. All right, I’ll call her.”

  “Good. Suzanne, you stay where you are. Brian, get up and sit at the desk, and make every move slow and out in the open.”

  “Oh, I will,” Brian promised, and did. His ribs gave him a few nasty jolts as he struggled upward, using the same corner of the desk for support that had earlier punched him, and when he was at last on his feet, he was breathing hard, as though he’d been running. The hard breaths were also painful, so he turned slowly and eased himself down into his desk chair, and then the pain receded and the breathing got easier.

  “Give me a minute to catch my breath,” he said, “think out what I want to say.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Brian looked over at Suzanne, and she was frowning at him with some sort of question in her eyes, but he couldn’t figure out what. He’d known her for years, a pleasant if somewhat bossy woman, a granddaughter of a neighbor, but he didn’t actually know her very well. He wasn’t the sort to chat up a divorced woman, living on her own the last few years, so when she frowned at him like that, her eyes full of some sort of puzzlement, he had no idea what she might be thinking, what it was she wanted to know.

  “Do it now.”

  “Oh,” Brian said, and looked at the phone. “Right.”

  Picking up the receiver, he noticed for the first time that some of the phone’s buttons were much dirtier than the others. His hands were always dirty when he was working here, so, of course, those buttons must be dirtier because the number he most often called was his own home, to speak to Edna.

  Yes; he tapped out the sequence on the dirtier buttons, and on the second ring Edna answered: “Three seven five two.”

  “Edna, it’s me. I gotta stay and work late tonight.”

  “Wha’d, you find a tootsie?”

  “Sure. We’re going to Miami Beach together.”

  “Without your supper? That’ll be the day.”

  “Well, that’s the thing. Dr. Hertzberg, you know, he’s gotta go to a wedding tomorrow down in Pennsylvania, he’s got some real coolant problems here in that clunker he drives, I promised I’d have it for him first thing in the morning.”

  “I’m doing chicken curry.”

  “It’ll reheat.”

  “Men. How late are you gonna be?”

  “Maybe nine, ten.”

  “Why not just trade him a new car?”

  “Listen, I’m not gonna argue with Dr. Hertzberg. He wants to go to that wedding.”

  She sighed, long and sincere. “And the man’s a saint, I know, I know. I’m not gonna reheat it with you, I’m gonna eat it when it’s ready and tastes like something.”

  He knew she wouldn’t, she’d wait for him, and he found himself hoping very hard she wasn’t going to have to wait forever. Just keep going along with the guy, just be grateful the guy was professional enough he didn’t start blasting away the first time he saw an amateur with a gun, and a little later on tonight that chicken curry, reheated or not reheated, would be the most tasty thing he ever ate in his entire life.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll get there just as soon as I can.”

  “Say hello to the good doctor for me.”

  “Oh, yeah, I will.”

  It wasn’t till he hung up that his hands started to tremble, but then they did a real dance. He was inside this sudden airless bowl here, and he’d made contact with the normal world outside the bowl, and it had shaken him much more than he’d guessed.

  The hardcase, standing over by the door, said, “That’s good, you did that fine.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Now I want the laces out of those boots.”

  “Sure,” Brian said, knowing what that meant. It meant, unless something brand-new went wrong, he was going to live through this.

  What he wore at the garage, because he was surrounded there by large, heavy, dirty
things in motion, some of them also sharp, was steel-cap-reinforced boots, laced up past the ankle. He bent now to strip the laces out of the boots, and the hardcase said, “You got a Closed sign?”

  “Over there, tucked in behind that file cabinet.”

  He went on stripping out the laces, and then the hardcase said, “You use this sign?”

  “Every night.”

  “It says ‘Closed’ on one side, ‘Open’ on the other. How come you don’t use the Open side?”

  “People know if I’m here.” The truth was, and Brian knew it, he didn’t use the Open side because he thought it sounded like an invitation for a whole lot of people to come in and chat and fill up his day; who needed it?

  The hardcase said, “Where do you put it? Window or door?”

  “It goes in the bottom right corner of the window. It slips in a space between the glass and the wood there. Here’s the laces.”

  “Put them on the desk. Suzanne, get up. Slow! Come over here, pick up one of those laces. Brian, put your hands behind your back. Suzanne, tie his wrists together and then tie them to the metal crossbar on the chair. Go ahead.”

  “I don’t know why you’re doing—”

  “Now.”

  Brian felt the rough movements of the shoelace wrapping around his crossed wrists as the hardcase said, “Not so tight the blood stops, but not loose. I’ll check it when you’re done.”

  “I was a Girl Scout,” she said. “I know knots.”

  It felt to him she was doing it pretty tight. Had he read in a book somewhere where people could defeat being tied up by tensing certain muscles here and there? Well, maybe somebody could.

  “All right, Suzanne, stand straight, wrists crossed behind you.”

  “I don’t want somebody to tie me up.”

  “I tie you up, or I kill you. Kill you might be easier for both of us, you won’t be tense any more. I only do it this way because it gives the cops less motivation.”

  The silence seemed to Brian to go on too long. If the guy shot Suzanne, wouldn’t he have to shoot Brian, too? The cops would already be motivated, anyway.

  Suzanne, wake up! Don’t you know what we’ve got here?

  But then the silence changed in quality, and it seemed to Brian he could hear the little sounds of the laces moving against flesh. No more discussion followed, no more argument; all to the good.

  “All right, Suzanne, you’re gonna sit against the wall here, I’ll help you down. Fine. Legs out straight.”

  Brian’s chair was on small casters that didn’t work very well, but he could push himself back from the desk and turn just enough to see Suzanne seated on the floor, back straight, against the side wall, and the hardcase now down on one knee in front of her, tying her ankles with a brand-new set of jumper cables. Finishing, he looked over at Brian and said, “That chair rolls. I don’t like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brian said.

  The hardcase got to his feet and went into the shop, where they heard him rummaging around. When he came back, he had some tools in his hands and a long roll of black electric tape. Putting it all on the desk, not saying anything else now, he moved Brian, chair and all, into the front right corner of the room, next to the door, with Suzanne on the floor to his other side. From here, of course, nobody out by the pumps looking in here would be able to see either of them.

  The hardcase checked Brian’s wrists and must have been satisfied, because then he used the electric tape to tie Brian’s white-socked ankles to the chair legs, and used screwdrivers as chocks to keep the casters from moving. Finally he fastened the screwdrivers to the floor and the casters with more electric tape.

  He was done with talking, apparently, and barely looked at them any more as he went about his work. Finished, he stepped back to look at what he’d done, while they both mutely watched. Then he went over to the key rack on the back wall, considered the keys and the identifying cards, and chose one. From where he sat, Brian thought he’d picked Jeff Eggleston’s Infiniti, the best car he had here right now.

  That was all. The hardcase came over to open the door, figure out the push-button lock arrangement, and, without giving them a glance, he left. From his position, Brian couldn’t tell if he drove off in the Infiniti or Tom Lindahl’s SUV.

  “The arrogance of that man!” Suzanne cried. “To do a thing like this to perfect strangers, no excuse, no reason, no— I’ve never seen such a horrible, horrible . . .” She couldn’t seem to figure out how to end the sentence.

  “Suzanne,” Brian said, trying to be kindly, to calm her down, “who he is, the situation he’s in, he’s gonna do pretty much what he wants.”

  Now Suzanne turned her outrage on Brian, as though it were all his fault (which it almost was). Voice dripping with scorn, caustically she demanded, “Oh, yes? Why? Is he supposed to be somebody famous?”

  Brian stared at her. He thought, It’s gonna be a long night.

  3

  Cal glowered out his side of the windshield as Cory drove the pickup truck. “If he was the guy, we’d be dead now,” he quoted, twisting the words as though he wanted to spit. “That guy talks pretty big, Cory. We should of called his bluff right there.”

  “That doesn’t do us any good.”

  “Does me some good.” Cal looked around, and they were out in the country, Pooley well behind them. “Where we goin?”

  “To Judy’s.”

  Their sister, younger than them, living on her own since the guy she thought she was going to marry went into the navy instead. “What for?”

  “To borrow her car.”

  Cal scoffed. “Judy won’t give us her car.”

  Watching the road, Cory said, “She won’t give it to you. She’ll loan it to me.”

  “Why? What do we want with her little dinky car?”

  “We have to have a different vehicle,” Cory told him, “because Tom and that other guy know this truck. They’ll see it in their rearview mirror, they’ll know just what we’re up to.”

  “Oh. Yeah, sure, naturally,” Cal said, trying to pretend he’d thought of it himself, or at least might have. Then, needing to prove he could think of the details, too, he said, “But how you gonna get her to give it to you? You show up in this, you already got wheels, then you say, ‘Gimme your car,’ what are you gonna say? Because we’re gonna take down a bank robber?”

  “I got a job interview,” Cory said.

  Cal gave him a skeptical look. “What job interview?”

  “I say I got a job interview. At that community college, in the computer arts department.”

  “They already turned you down over there.”

  “I know they did, and so does Judy.” Cory nodded at the road ahead, agreeing with himself. “So what I tell Judy, I got another interview over there, this time I’m not gonna dress like a farmer and I’m not gonna show up in some pickup truck. I’m gonna dress like a guy teaches computer arts, and I’m gonna show up in Judy’s nice Volkswagen Jetta. I’ll tell her, and it’s true, I’ll even run it through the car wash first.”

  “Judy’s down on me, you know,” Cal pointed out. “If she sees me, she’s gonna say, ‘What are you taking that bozo to college for?’”

  Cory laughed. “You’re right,” he said. “I can’t have you in the truck when I get there. It’s got to be just Judy and me.”

  “So whadaya gonna do with me while you’re off bullshitting Judy?”

  “There’s that diner about a mile before her place,” Cory reminded him.

  “Randall’s.”

  “That’s the one. I’ll let you off, you have a cup of coffee—”

  “Or a beer.”

  “Make it a cup of coffee. We gotta be sharp tonight, Cal.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll make it coffee. And you go off to Judy by yourself.”

  “And come back with the Jetta.”

  “And that so-called tough guy won’t have an idea in the world we’re sitting right on his ass.”

  “Right.”

/>   Cal frowned at the windshield, struck by a sudden thought. “What if they’re already gone when we get back?”

  “Whatever they’re gonna do,” Cory assured him, “they won’t start in on it until after dark.”

  And that also made sense. Cal nodded at the road awhile, thinking, then said, “What do you suppose they’re up to?”

  “We’ll find out when we see them do it,” Cory said, and that was the end of that conversation until they reached the diner, a sprawling place that had originally been a little railroad car type of greasy spoon, but then kept adding on dining rooms and kitchens and bigger neon signs out front until now it looked more like an Indian casino than a place to eat. It was at the intersection of the smallish state road they were on and a bigger U.S. highway, and was always pretty full, though the food wouldn’t bring anyone back.

  Cory stopped near the entrance and said, “I’ll be maybe half an hour.”

  “I’ll sit by the window,” Cal told him as he opened his door.

  “Just have coffee, Cal, okay?”

  “Sure, sure. Don’t worry about me.”

  Cal got out, Cory drove away, and Cal went into the diner, where he had a cheeseburger, onion rings, and a beer.

  4

  Usually Fred spent Sunday afternoons in fall and winter watching football games by himself in the living room while Jane read in the enclosed back porch that was a greenhouse in summer and the best view of the outside world in winter. Today, though, when she got home from Tom Lindahl’s place with the rifle, though Fred was in the living room as usual, the television set was off and he was just sitting there, in his regular chair, slumped, not even looking toward the set but downward, past his knees at the carpet on the floor, brooding. He barely lifted his head when she walked in, trying to be chipper, saying, “I never knew this thing was so heavy.”