“Well, whatever it might be,” Lindahl said. “If I don’t like it, I can say no, and we don’t do it.”
“You’re right,” Parker told him. “You can always say no.”
“Good. We understand each other.” Lindahl nodded at the windshield. “Lights out there.”
They had met only the occasional other moving car, this time of night, but up the road ahead of them now were the unmistakable lights of another roadblock. Those roadblocks would be in position all night tonight, and maybe tomorrow night, too.
The law was looking for two men, possibly separate but possibly together, so any car out late at night with two men in it attracted their interest. Also, with so little traffic out here on the rural roads in the middle of the night, the guys on duty were getting bored. For the first time, Parker and Lindahl were asked to step out of the Ford while the troopers did a quick flashlight scan of the interior. They weren’t patted down, though, and once again Parker’s new license was accepted without question.
They were the only car at the roadblock, and when they left it, driving north into darkness, that cluster of lights in the rearview mirror was still the only illumination to be seen. Lindahl kept twisting around to look back at those lights, and it wasn’t until they disappeared that he spoke again. “I guess you have an idea of what to do. About the track, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“I think it must be different from mine.”
“Parts of it.”
“Which parts?”
“In the first place,” Parker said, “we don’t take those metal boxes with us. There’s no reason to lug all that weight around.”
“The money’s gotta be in something.”
“Is there a mall around where you are? Someplace open on Sunday?”
“About forty miles away,” Lindahl said, “over toward Albany.”
“Tomorrow,” Parker told him, “you drive over there. Get two duffel bags. You know what I mean, big canvas bags.”
“Like the army uses.”
“That’s right.”
Lindahl shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “You saw how much money was there.”
“All we want is the big bills,” Parker told him. “Nothing under a ten. And no change.”
“Oh.” Nodding slowly, Lindahl said, “I guess that makes sense.”
“And also get two pairs of plastic kitchen gloves.”
“For fingerprints; fine. Anything else?”
“No, that’s all we’ll need. And fill the gas tank, it’s getting low.”
“Sure.” Lindahl was quiet for a minute, but then he frowned and said, “Why do I have to do all this tomorrow? There’s closer places I can go to on Monday.”
“Because we’re taking the money tomorrow night,” Parker said.
3
No!” Lindahl was deeply shocked. “That’s no good! We won’t have any time at all to get away!”
“In the first place,” Parker said, “let’s get rid of that thirty-six-hour fantasy of yours. You can’t go on the run, because you can’t hide. Where do you figure to be, thirty-six hours later? Oregon? Where do you sleep? Do you go to a motel and pay with cash? A credit card places you, and the law by then is watching your accounts. So do you pay cash? The motel wants your license plate number. Oh, from New York State?”
“Jesus.”
“Anywhere you go in this country, everybody’s on the same computer. It doesn’t matter if you’re across the street or across the country, as soon as you make any move at all, they know where you are. You gonna try to leave the country? You got a passport?”
“No,” Lindahl said. He sounded subdued. “I’ve never traveled much.”
“Not a good time to start,” Parker told him. “You can’t run away, you don’t know those ropes. So instead of being the guy that did it and you’re thumbing your nose and they’ll never get you, you’re the guy that didn’t do it, and you’re staying right there where you always were, and sure, let them go ahead and search, and you were home in bed last night same as any other night, and you don’t spend any of that cash for a year. You want to pull the job and not do time for it? That’s how.”
“That’s all . . .” Lindahl shook his head, gestured vaguely in the air in front of himself, like someone trying to describe an elephant to a person who’d never seen one. “That’s different from what I had in mind. That isn’t the same thing.”
“You want two things,” Parker reminded him. “Or so you said. You want revenge. And you want the money.”
“Well,” Lindahl said, and now he seemed a little embarrassed, a little sheepish, “I kind of wanted them to know.”
“Because you were gonna disappear.”
“But you say I can’t do that.”
Parker said, “You aren’t used to the life on the other side of the law. There’s too many things you don’t know, too many mistakes you can make. You can have your money, and you can have your revenge, and maybe even a couple of your old bosses think you maybe did it, but they can’t prove it, and you and your parrot just go on living the way you did before.”
“That’s not what I had in mind,” Lindahl said again. “What I had in mind was, I don’t live like this any more. I don’t shoot rabbits for my dinner. I don’t curl up in that crappy little house and never see anybody and everybody knows I’m that crazy hermit and nobody gives a shit about me.”
“You did it for four years,” Parker reminded him. “You can do it one year more. A little less. Next July, you tell a few people you’re going on vacation, you’re driving somewhere. Then you take the money and you go wherever you want to go—”
“Someplace warm.”
“That’s up to you. When you get there, you start a checking account, you put a couple grand of your cash in it every few weeks, you rent a place to live, you drive back up here, pack your stuff, tell whoever you’re paying your rent to that you decided to retire someplace warm, and there you are.”
Lindahl was quiet for a long while as Parker drove, the headlights pushing that fan of pale white out ahead of them, moving through hilly countryside, sleeping towns, here and there a night-light but mostly as dark as when the continent was empty.
Finally, with a long sigh, Lindahl said, “I think I could do that.”
“I think so, too.”
“It’s like hunting, I see that. In some ways, it’s like hunting. The main thing you have to be is patient. If you’re patient, you’ll get what you want.”
“That’s right.”
“I’d have to— If that’s what we do, I’d have to hide the money. I mean, really well, where they wouldn’t find it. Where nobody would find it.”
“I’ll show you where,” Parker said.
Surprised, Lindahl said, “You already know a place?”
“But the other thing you’ve got to do,” Parker told him, “is get rid of those metal bank boxes. You don’t need them, and you don’t want any lawman to come across them, because you don’t have any answers to those questions.”
“You’re right,” Lindahl said. “I didn’t think about them. They’re just in the furnace room, stacked in the corner.”
“Wipe your fingerprints off.”
“They’re still in the black plastic bags, from when they were thrown away in the Dumpster. I just left them that way.”
“That’s good. Take them with you tomorrow, find another Dumpster, maybe at this mall you’re going to, get rid of them in a way that they won’t come back.”
“All right, I can do that.” Curious, half turning in his seat, Lindahl said, “You really know where to hide the money?”
“In the boarded-up house in front of you.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lindahl said. “I don’t think it’d be easy to get in there. Not without making a mess.”
“I’ve already been inside,” Parker told him. “It’s all set up. I’ll show you tomorrow.”