This one started to rise when he saw Parker, then settled back again when his partner came in. Looking at the partner, he said, “Bill? Whatchu got here?”
“He was in the safe room.”
“He what?” Now he did get up from the desk and frowned at Parker but kept talking to his partner. “What’s he doing in there?”
“Says he’s trying to find the way out. Says he went asleep in the john.” Pointing at the monitors, he said, “You see him on any of the screens?”
“I saw you, that’s all.” Now he did speak to Parker: “How’d you get in there?”
“Walked.”
He didn’t like that. “Don’t get snotty with me, fella.”
“I told this guy,” Parker said with a gesture at Bill, “I fell asleep, I woke up, I’m trying to get out of here. Everything’s locked.”
“Except the safe room,” said Bill. “How d’ya like that?”
“I don’t,” the second one said, and to Parker he said, “You got anybody with you?”
“I didn’t see anybody,” Bill said.
“When I sleep in the men’s room,” Parker said, “I sleep alone.”
The second one was getting steamed. He glared at Parker a long minute, then said, “I may have to tenderize you.”
“We’d better call the troopers,” Bill said.
“We’ll get to that,” his partner said. Still glaring at Parker, he pointed at the top of his desk and said, “Empty your pockets.”
“Sure.” Parker took the automatic out of his pocket and showed it to them as he stepped to the left, so he could see them both. “Is this good enough?”
“God damn you—” The second one was red-faced now and angrier than ever. He moved as though to come around the desk.
“Max! Jesus, Max, fourteen months, remember?”
That stopped Max, or at least slowed him down. “What a hell of a thing you brought me,” he said.
Parker said, “On the floor, both of you, over there. Facedown.”
Neither moved. Max said, “There’s two of us.”
“There could be none of you. You go on the floor without a bullet in you, or you go on the floor with a bullet in you. Now.”
“Fourteen months, Max,” Bill said, and, stiffly lowered himself to the floor, having trouble getting down, and then having more trouble rolling onto his stomach.
Max watched him, tense, not wanting the humiliation in front of this armed stranger, but finally realized there was no choice. He tried to be more graceful getting down, but failed, and finally lost his balance and landed on his bottom with a thump. Quickly, then, he scrambled around to lie prone, turning his face away.
Parker said, “Where do you keep the cuffs?”
“Fuck you,” Max told the carpet.
Parker said, “I may have to tenderize you, friend.”
Bill said, “They’re in the desk with the flowerpot on it, bottom side drawer.”
Parker found them and tossed them onto the floor between the two guards. “Bill, you put them on Max.”
Max was muttering, “Goddammit, goddammit, goddammit,” but he stopped when he sensed Bill getting up onto his knees. They all waited to see what Bill would do, which for a few seconds was nothing.
Parker said, “That’s far enough up, Bill. Do it.”
Bill was sheepish. “Sorry, Max,” he said as he clipped the cuffs onto the other man’s wrists, behind his back.
“How do we let him do this, goddammit?”
“He’s got the gun, Max.”
“So do we!”
“His is in his hand.”
“Facedown, Bill,” Parker said, and quickly cuffed him, then placed two chairs between the men’s legs, to keep them from rolling over or moving around. With a last look at all the empty corridors and rooms on the monitor screens, he headed fast for the elevator.
3
Lindahl sat on the duffel bags, both of them full. The money trays were scattered around the open boxes, still full of small bills and coins. Lindahl seemed to be thinking hard, and it took him a second to realize Parker had come back. Then, startled, he jumped to his feet and said, “Is it me now?”
Parker looked at him. “Is what you?”
“I knew that guy,” Lindahl said. “I recognized the voice. He worked here forever. His name’s Bill.”
“That’s right.”
“Big man. I’ve been trying to remember his last name.”
Parker said, “You filled the bags. That’s good.”
Looking down at them, Lindahl said, “I tried to make it as even as I could, between them. If it matters.”
“So now you unlock us out of here.”
Lindahl didn’t move. He kept gazing at the duffel bags, as though still trying to remember Bill’s last name, then looked sidewise at Parker and said, “You killed him, didn’t you?”
“No,” Parker said. “Why would I have to?”
“I brought you here, I brought you into all this. But you don’t belong in this—with these people. I keep thinking about Fred.”
Parker needed to get out of here, but Lindahl was going through some sort of crisis and would have to be waited out. “What about Fred?”
“He’s going crazy. He killed that man, and it’s driving him crazy.”
“I think he was a little crazy before that,” Parker said. “Maybe because of his son, or I don’t know what. He killed a man who wasn’t a threat to him or anybody else.”
“He should have turned himself in. It was only to save you.”
“It would have been bad for him to turn himself in. It wouldn’t make him less crazy to wind up doing time.”
“It wouldn’t be on his conscience now,” Lindahl said, “and that man wouldn’t be up . . . They’d find his family. He’d get a burial.”
“Maybe. Tom, what we have to do now is get these bags out of here, and then it’s all over.”
“If you killed Bill,” Lindahl said, “you’ll kill me, too.”
“Tom,” Parker said, “you don’t kill somebody unless you have to. It puts the law on you like nothing else. Worse than what we’ve been having.”
“Where is he?”
Parker frowned at him. This was taking too long. “Bill is handcuffed on the floor in the security office, along with the other one, Max.”
“You had handcuffs?”
“The security office had handcuffs. Tom, snap out of this now. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Lindahl looked toward the door, as though he meant to go to the security office, to see for himself if his old friends Bill and Max were alive in there, but then he shook his head and said, “You get to imagine different ways, different ways it can go.”
“The way it’s going,” Parker said, “we get out of here now.”
Lindahl took a deep breath. “You’re right,” he said, and moved toward the doorway, taking keys from his pocket.
4
Parker waited in the safe room doorway as Lindahl carried his keys to the alarm box beside the garage door at the end of the corridor. One key opened the box, and a second switched off the alarm.
This was the alarm that would have made it necessary for them to come back down here after removing the money, shutting the door from the inside and reactivating the alarm, then retracing their route to the other door, so that a light wouldn’t flash in security. Now that Parker had had to deal with the guards in security, it didn’t matter any more if that light flashed on. A simpler operation but more hurried.
Lindahl, finished with the alarm, opened the garage door, and there was the ramp, leading upward to ground level, where his Ford waited beyond the locked chain-link gate. Parker watched Lindahl start up the ramp to get his car, then he turned back to pick up one of the duffel bags and carry it out of the safe room. When he reached the outer room, Lindahl was back, too soon, without the car and looking worried.