Parker didn’t see what difference it made, but let it go, saying, “You want me to drive?”
“God, yes,” Lindahl said. “I got stopped three times going down, by the way, and twice coming back. I’m ready to not drive for a while. But just give me five minutes.”
“Fine.”
Lindahl turned toward the bedroom, then turned back, with a sudden sunny smile on his face. “I’m really going to do it,” he said. “Even when I left here, I still wasn’t sure, but the minute I saw the place I knew. It’s been a weight on me, and now I’m getting rid of it.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes. And it was a good thing we met,” Lindahl said. “Good for both of us. Give me five minutes.”
TWO
1
A billboard ahead on the right read
GRO-MORE RACING
Next Right
“That’s the main gate,” Lindahl said. “We don’t want that. You keep going, about another quarter mile, there’s a dirt road on this side.”
The dashboard clock read 12:42. In the last hour, William G. Dodd’s new driver’s license had been inspected by two state troopers at roadblocks and found acceptable; which of course, was more likely at night than by day.
On the drive down, Lindahl had alternated between a kind of buzzing vibrancy, keyed up, giving Parker little spatter-shots of his autobiography, and a deep stillness, as he studied his newly changed interior landscape, as mute as his parrot.
The main gate, when they drove past it, was a broad entry with parking lots to right and left, a line of entry booths, and the wide hulk of the clubhouse beyond. Large curved iron gates built around stylized outlined shapes of bulls were closed over the entrance. A few dim lights showed here and there in the clubhouse.
Parker said, “Who’s in there now?”
“Two guards. That’s the security office, that light way over to the right. There used to be just one guard at night, but then they found out the guy would usually fall asleep, so now it’s two.”
“Do they patrol? Make rounds?”
“No, they’ve got monitors in the security room, cameras and smoke detectors here and there in the clubhouse and the paddocks, burglar alarms on the ground-floor doors and windows.”
“Are the guards armed?”
“Oh, sure. Handguns in holsters. They’re in uniform, they work for a security company, that part is all contracted out. Here’s where we turn.”
The turn was a narrow dirt road unmarked except for a Dead End sign. Parker drove slowly, trying to see into the darkness to his right where the track would be. “Is that a wall?”
“Wooden wall, eight foot high, runs the whole perimeter. This road is used to bring horses in and out, supplies, ambulance when they need one. Up ahead here, turn right to the gate.”
“Can they see these headlights?”
“No, there’s nobody around in there except the guards in the security office. Those other lights are just for the fire code.”
This gate was plain chain-link, eight feet high like the wall stretching away to left and right. Parker stopped just before it, the headlights shining through the chain-link fence onto the white clapboard end wall of the clubhouse. Tall white wooden fences angled out from the corners of the clubhouse at front and back, curved to meet the perimeter wall at some distance to both sides, making a large enclosed area, part blacktop, part dirt. A number of trucks and pickups and horse vans were parked along the wall to the left, with an ambulance and a fire engine along the wall to the right.
Opening his door, Lindahl said, “I’ll turn off the alarm, then I can unlock the gate.”
“Isn’t there a security camera along here?”
“No,” Lindahl said. “They only watch the inside and the paddocks. They’re not worried so much about break-ins as fire. Or somebody wanting to hurt the horses. I’ll be a minute.”
Parker waited as Lindahl opened a metal box beside the gate, punched numbers onto the pad in there, then took a full ring of keys from his pocket, selected one, and opened the padlock securing the gate. He opened it wide, then gestured for Parker to follow him. He walked confidently in the headlight glare toward the clubhouse, then turned to wave to Parker to stop in front of more chain-link fence, this making a kind of three-sided cage extending out from the middle of the clubhouse wall.
Coming around to the driver’s door, Lindahl said, “Leave the engine and lights on a minute, I want you to see this.”
Parker got out of the Ford and went with Lindahl to the fence. The outer side of it was another gate, and inside, a concrete ramp sloped down to a basement level, then went straight under the building, stopping at a featureless metal garage door tucked back about eight feet.
“Inside there,” Lindahl said, “is the corridor, with the safe room on the left. The armored car backs down, they open the door, and they load on the boxes. Food deliveries go down there, too, and all kinds of supplies. But we have to get in a different way now, so you can turn the car off and we’ll go in that door over there.”
The door was near the front corner of the clubhouse, solid wood with No Admittance stenciled on it. By the time Parker had left the Ford and walked over, Lindahl had this door, too, unlocked. “There’s no cameras until we come to the main corridor,” he said.
Parker said, “I’d expect more security.”
“Well, it’s a small track out in the country,” Lindahl said as he led the way down the dim-lit narrow corridor past closed doors. “It has two twenty-four-day meets, spring and fall, and it’s shut down the rest of the time. They’ve been wanting to sign on to a tote-board system so they could be open for betting at other tracks the rest of the year, but so far it hasn’t worked out. I think the population around here is too small. So the track never makes a whole lot of money, and there’s never once been a break-in in all these years. A couple times crazies tried to get at the horses, but nothing else. We go through here, it bypasses the main corridor.”
Lindahl opened a door on the left, and they entered a broad low-ceilinged room with eight desks neatly spaced on a black linoleum floor. A fluorescent halo around a large wall clock gave illumination. Most of the desks were covered with papers and other items, including a leftover bacon and omelet breakfast on a green plastic plate.
“This is where the accounts are kept,” Lindahl said, and pointed. “My office used to be— Damn!”
He had bumped into the wrong desk, causing the breakfast to flip over and hit the floor facedown. Lindahl stooped to pick up the plate, but the omelet stuck to the black linoleum, which was now a black ocean, and that omelet the sandy desert island, with the solitary strip of bacon sticking up from it, slightly slumped but brave, the perfect representation of the stranded sailor, alone and waiting for his cartoon caption. On the floor, it looked like what the Greeks call acheiropoietoi, a pictorial image not made by a human hand.
“I ought to clean that up,” Lindahl said, frowning down doubtfully at the new island.
“A mouse did it,” Parker told him. “Drop the plate on it and let’s go.”
“Fine.”
Lindahl led the way across the room and out another door to another corridor that looked identical to the first. They went leftward, Lindahl still leading the way, Parker making sure to remember the route.
Lindahl stopped where the corridor made a right turn into a wider hallway. Pausing, he leaned to glance around the corner, then said, “Take a look. See the camera?”
Parker leaned forward. Some distance down the hall, on the opposite side, was a closed door with a small pebble-glass window and a pushbar. Mounted on the wall above the door was a light, aimed downward, flooding the immediate area and giving some illumination down as far as the end here. Above the light, just under the dropped ceiling, a camera was mounted on a small metal arm. The camera was at this moment pointed toward the other end of the hall but was moving, turning leftward toward the wall. As Parker watched, it stopped, hesitated, and began to turn back in the other direction.