Ask the Parrot by Richard Stark

Author:Richard Stark
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Criminals, Mystery & Detective, Fiction, Detective and mystery stories, Suspense, Crime, Suspense fiction, General, Parker (Fictitious character)
ISBN: 9780892960682
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Published: 2006-11-23T07:39:32+00:00

9

Six hours. Six hours from now, Parker and Lindahl could leave Pooley and head south to the racetrack, which would be shut and dark and ready for them when they got there. That wasn’t the problem; the problem was in the six hours.

Cory Dennison was out there somewhere, scheming, that was the first thing. He’d decided that, whoever Parker was, he was up to something the Dennison brothers would find interesting and should therefore be in on. So what would they do? Hang around the neighborhood? Watch Lindahl’s house and SUV, follow them if they left? All the way to the racetrack?

All right; somewhere along the line he’d have to neutralize the brothers. But in a way, they were less trouble than Fred Thiemann, because they were at least sane and more or less sensible and knew what they wanted. Thiemann was none of those. He was a loose cannon, not at all under his own control, only partly under his wife’s control. There was nothing Parker could do about him that wouldn’t make it worse. If Thiemann were to die, at Parker’s hands or his own or anybody else’s, Parker would just have to forget the racetrack and hope to clear out of this part of the world before the law arrived.

Because once the law was interested in Thiemann, they would also be interested in Thiemann’s partners in the manhunt. The wife would lead them to Lindahl, and that was the end.

What were the choices? He could tie up Lindahl right now, or shoot him if the man wanted to make trouble, and leave here in the SUV. He’d have the car’s registration and the new driver’s license belonging to William G. Dodd, and if stopped he’d say his friend Tom Lindahl had loaned him the car.

But if he did do that, and it turned out at the same time that Thiemann was eating his rifle, Parker would be on the road in a hot car and not know it. Or he could wait the six hours, ignoring the Dennison brothers and trusting Jane Thiemann to keep her husband in line, and the disaster would find him sitting here in Lindahl’s living room with his feet up.

Another car. He needed a car he could safely drive, a car he could show up in at the roadblocks. A car with paperwork that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, no matter what was happening back here in this neighborhood.

After the Dennisons left, Parker said, “I’ll drive down to the corner, put some gas in the car.”

Sounding bitter, Lindahl said, “Using some of the money you stole from that boy?”

Parker looked at him. “You got that wrong, Tom,” he said. “I didn’t take anything from that boy. I took some cash from a company has nine hundred stores. I needed the cash. You know that.”

“You had that gun all along?”

“I’ll be right back,” Parker said, and turned to the door.

“No, wait.”

Parker looked back and could see that Lindahl was trying to adjust his thinking. He waited, and Lindahl nodded and said, “All right.

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