Nina, the Bandit Queen (14 page)

The next time he dropped by, it was Monday morning, and she was still asleep when he banged on the door. Not even the sun was up. To get the conversation going, he’d decided on a breezy approach: “Where’s that ice cream truck today?” he began. Like, had he shown them or what? As if the only reason he’d turned up on her porch was to prove that when he chased something off the street, it stayed chased off. But then, as she stood half-asleep in the doorway, not saying a word, he started outlining the real reason. How on two different days she’d shown up in videos at a downtown bank acting in a way that suggested she intended to rob it. Both times she got cold feet. Actually, and he sounded pleased to take such care with the fact, her feet hadn’t so much gotten cold the first time as vomited on. And he sounded far more pleased to tell her that nothing she’d done was a crime. Intending to rob a bank wasn’t, and neither was chickening out.

She still didn’t say anything. She hadn’t said anything much the last time, but this time it felt different, as if she wasn’t saying anything because she’d gone deaf. It was when this occurred to him that he glanced past her and realized the wall really was gone from the back of the house. Even more of it than the last time, when he thought he was seeing things. And even though he had a sweetheart of a line ready that went “So you had this flurry of robbery interruptus,” jacking around felt just too weird in the circumstances. Instead, he walked her carefully, step-by-step, through the case he was putting together.

It started with her two failures as a bank robber. Next came her brother getting out of jail. The day after that, her brother showed that at least someone in the family knew which side was up; he walked out of a bank with 1.18 million dollars. Later that day he got murdered. So his current whereabouts could be traced with ease. With the money, it was different. There was no sign of it. More than just no sign, no anything. It had disappeared like magic — poof! And there was something about this she should understand: Toole had been around long enough to know that if the crooks who murdered Frank had gotten hold of the money, it would have been mentioned here and there around town. It would be the same even if an entirely different bunch of crooks got hold of it, like, for instance, the crooks who set Frank up to pull off the robbery, if it turned out they were different than the crooks who murdered him. And let’s face it, some crooks had set him up. How many guys walk out of jail and right away make a score like that? On what happens to be a day the bank has an extra-large supply of cash? The sound of bundles of stolen cash sliding into crooks’ pockets is something people always heard in what Toole called the armed-robbery community. And when somebody heard a sound like that, next thing you knew, everybody in town heard about it.

But what was everybody in town hearing instead? Nothing. That’s right. Nothing at all. And all this nothing everybody was hearing started coming in loud and clear at almost exactly the moment that Nina stopped trying to rob banks, and her brother knocked one over, and the money he’d stolen disappeared, leaving nothing anybody could find but his sorry-assed corpse. And here’s what interested Toole as a police officer: was there some connection? Because while he was not a man of faith, if there was one thing he definitely didn’t believe in, it was magic.

So, there. He’d done it. Gone pointedly and specifically through the case he was assembling. Except there was a problem. He’d only done it in his head. He thought he was saying it to her, thought he was crushing her under the relentless weight of circumstances, but he wasn’t. What he’d been doing instead was staring slack-jawed at the space where the back wall once was, and the only thing he actually said out loud was, “What happened to your fuckin’ house?”

No sooner had he gotten those words out than the ice cream truck came around the corner up toward the towers, chittering and chattering and going tootletly. He looked at it. She leaned her head around the corner and looked at it. And it was because they were both looking at it that they both ended up being eyewitnesses. It was too far away for them to identify anybody, but they could make out a little boy about the size of Fabreece coming out of one of the apartment buildings holding some kind of stick. They could watch as he pointed the stick at the ice cream truck. They could hear BOOM! It was so loud it echoed off the towers — Boom, boom. Everybody around the truck ran away as fast as they could, leaving the little kid on the ground where he’d been knocked over backwards by the recoil. Nina and Toole were certain they could see a wisp of smoke curling out of the truck’s service window. The street was completely silent, but slowly, melting the silence like boiling water dripping on an ice cube, came the computerized announcements. Although it was still too far away for the cop to make the words out, he could get the pattering rhythm. Kids were having their names called and being told to hurry up and buy their ice cream treats or they would be in seriously bad trouble.

“Fuck me,” Toole said. He grabbed under his jacket and was down the steps and running up the street, waving his gun.

“Fuck me,” Nina said, her heart hammering so far up in her throat she could hardly swallow. The girls rushed out and clustered around her, with D.S. clumping behind them. “Fuck me! Did a bomb go off?” he said.

“Shotgun, sounded like,” Lady said.

“What would you know about anything?” Merlina wasn’t about to let whatever was happening keep her from stomping her sister into place.

“Sounded like a shotgun!” Ed Oataway shouted from across the street.

“More than you fuckin’ do,” Lady said to Merly, and pushed her off the side of the porch.

By the time Sergeant Toole got there, police cars and ambulances were arriving with their sirens going. Over them, JannaRose’s voice rose trembling. “Whoever thought it would lead to shooting and killing? Oh God, oh God.” Nina leaned her head against the doorframe and closed her eyes.

The strange thing was that hardly two hours later Mayor Gladly Bradley arrived. Investigators were still crawling all over the scene, and yellow tape had been put up to keep spectators back. He stood in the empty space in front of the truck, and while reporters and TV cameras crowded around him, he took a bullhorn and spoke to everybody in the neighbourhood, appealing for calm. It was terribly important that they all stay calm. The appeal was a personal one, from him to the residents of SuEz. But he was also speaking on behalf of the whole city. Everyone who lived there — would they please stay calm. Please don’t let their emotions get the better of them. Let patience and reason prevail. And calm. Everybody should please see it in their hearts to do this.

It was strange because everybody wondered what he was talking about. That’s because everybody was already about as calm as it was possible to be. If they were a little more keyed up than they would have been on an average weekday morning, it was because it was a change from what they’d grown used to. Obviously they were all surprised that a little kid had dug his father’s shotgun out of a closet and opened fire. And there was a bit of argument having to do with the kid being so small and the gun so big. Some people swore he’d been aiming at the ice cream truck driver in the serving window, but he couldn’t control where he was pointing and ended up assassinating the right front tire by accident. Others said no, he’d intended to take the tire out from the start and, what with being only seven years old, he’d done a good job. But these conversations never reached a point that could be described as even faintly heated.

The strangest thing, though, was that when he finished getting his picture taken and shaking hands with people around the truck, Mayor Bradley marched down the street to Nina’s house and banged on the door. TV cameras followed him the whole way, but neither Nina nor anybody else she knew ever saw any of the pictures. She and D.S. and the girls were in the middle of the street when this happened, and since she couldn’t push through the TV people, she had to holler, “Can I help you, sir?” It took Gladly Bradley a minute to find out who was yelling at him, but as soon as he did, he marched down the steps and shook her hand.

“Mrs. Dolgoy,” he said, “it is a terrible day for the city when it starts with violence as it has this sad morning. But what very few of your fellow citizens realize is that you and your family have lately been victims of violence quite apart from this. And,” the mayor said, “as a result you suffered a grievous personal loss. I want you personally to know that you and your husband, D.S., and your four daughters have your mayor’s deepest sympathies, and the entire city’s as well.” Then he gave her a big hug and headed back through the crowd.

When he arrived in SuEz that day, it was the first time anybody Nina knew had ever seen him except on TV. When he left, nobody could think of anything that ever happened that made less sense. Except for Robbie Toole, and to him it made more sense than he cared for. Nina, though, wasn’t thinking about whether it made sense or it didn’t. That’s because she was thoroughly pissed off. She’d just had the perfect chance to say something to the mayor about fixing the swimming pool, and the thought never crossed her mind.

Down in the cellar, Colonel Kevin Olorgasele of the Nigerian Finance Ministry couldn’t understand any of it. He only began to catch on when the policeman showed up again that evening to ask the woman what the mayor had said about her brother. That was when Kevin actually realized that the guy was a policeman, and this was because he’d started using the same tone that Kevin used when he was putting the screws to somebody without quite bringing his heel down so hard on their toes that they would walk with a limp for a month. What he got to hear was the speech Sergeant Toole had intended to deliver that morning, before all the interruptions, with the cop adding that if she knew where the money was and kept the information to herself, then she and all her children were fuckin’ doomed. It was the first time he’d ever heard a police officer speak that way to a white woman, except on the shows on Nigerian TV from England and the United States.

It was also the first time he’d heard a real live woman talk to a police officer the way she did. “You must be fuckin’ insane,” she’d said. “If I had that fuckin’ money, do you think I’d still be in this fuckin’ house that somebody is tearing down around my children, and scaring the living shit out of them? Do you think I’d be anywhere near it? What am I, a complete fuckin’ moron? If you were any kind of a cop, you’d be protecting us, not threatening us, you fuckin’ asshole.”

The dollar amount Kevin heard them mention was 1.18 million. To speak the way he had, the police officer had to be interested in acquiring it for himself, while the sister of the dead thief sounded perfectly reasonable. If she had the money, she would have moved back to her family’s village in the country, built a mansion, and owned many goats. It would also explain why whoever was tearing her house down was doing it: they believed the money was hidden here. Maybe it still was. And if nobody else had found it so far, why shouldn’t he be the one to do it? It was always a good strategy to have a secondary target, and the best thing about the one he’d just lucked into was that nobody in Nigeria had any idea it existed. At the same time, nobody in Nigeria had any idea that the team sent out to acquire the White House gold had encountered one or two setbacks.

With both targets hanging close at hand like big ripe mangoes, it filled him with sadness that his beloved and respected colleague J. Ridgeway Mbunzu was no longer alive to share in the increasingly handsome potential benefits. So profound was his sadness that he laughed out loud and began examining the cellar for a hiding spot that might have been missed by whoever else was after the money, pausing only to puke now and then because the smell hadn’t dissipated, despite the holes in the walls and the breeze blowing through.

The way things were going, he was feeling more at home every minute, but he did think he should find a place to live that was less stressful.

Ed Oataway didn’t like the looks of this.

Nina pointed at what she’d written down when she was in Elwell’s. He wouldn’t even touch the piece of paper. “That’s her, though, isn’t it?” she said.

“How would I know?” Ed said.

“Maybe because that’s where you drove him when he got out.”

Dipshit’s wife was already bad enough without her getting smartass. His own wife didn’t seem to mind, though. “Good guess!” JannaRose said, giving Nina a thumbs up.

“It was her car.” Nina tapped the piece of paper. “After the fake robbery, he was driving it around.”

Ed didn’t like the looks of this because it gave him the feeling that something really bad was coming his way.

“So?” he said.

“So I need you to steal it.”

So, he was wrong. What was coming his way wasn’t really bad, it was horrible. How many of these vehicles were there in the whole city — two? Maybe not even that. Maybe just this one. A Porsche Carrera GT. Bright fuckin’ yellow!

“A car like that,” JannaRose said, “it’s worth …?”

“New, five hundred thousand,” Nina said.

“You’re out of your fuckin’ mind,” Ed said. But he shook his head when he said this, because he honestly didn’t think she was out of her mind. He thought she was fuckin’ insane.

“No,” Nina said. “The Elwells told me.”

“I mean about me stealing it.”

Ed had been in high-rise apartment buildings before, of course. Sometimes business took him into and out of the towers up at The Intersection two, three times a day. But forty floors that had balconies with patio chairs and tables and nothing else on them such as piles of all the furniture and stuff that didn’t fit into the apartment? With nothing on the ground like empty beer cans that had been thrown over the railings? Right along the shore? A place like this he had never been inside, much less cased.

On the other hand, stealing cars was his business. He was a professional. If he didn’t steal cars, he and JannaRose would be living on nothing but two welfare cheques, and their kids would be eating nothing but potato chips which, as far as he could tell, was all Dipshit’s ever got. But then again, the cars he stole were cars the owners wanted him to steal. Stealing them didn’t require him to sneak around and go undetected the way this one did. The owner gave him a key. He made a copy of it. He gave the original back to the owner. Only one thing about this bothered Ed from a professional point of view. That was if the owner waved when he drove away. It made him feel undignified. Like some kind of dickhead. Anyway, the idiot owner then waited a reasonable time before calling the cops, and did they give a shit? A nine-year-old Chevy? Then the owner called the insurance company. The insurance company would be really irritated, but nobody cared about insurance companies’ feelings. And they couldn’t refuse to pay on the grounds that the idiot owner had lost the key and some thief found it and used it to steal the vehicle.

It was a nice little business that catered to people with real needs.

But a five-hundred-thousand-dollar Porsche?

Not even a drug dealer needed such a thing. Frank’s girlfriend, what was she doing with it? He looked the building up and down. Maybe she was good at her work. When that thought whizzed around in Ed Oataway’s brain, the sexual overtones made him feel nauseous. He tried to avoid thoughts with sexual overtones because he worried that impulses might get loose inside him and ruin what he had going for him and his family: a nice little business. One of the nicest things about the business was it kept him out of trouble. In fact, the only trouble he’d been in lately was a direct result of Dipshit’s lunatic wife. Now here he was skulking around some whore’s building because of her.

There were closed circuit TV cameras everywhere. Five at least were aimed at the front door. At least as many on the ramp to the underground garage. There was a doorman in a purple blazer. Ed put him down as a moonlighting cop. Every now and then another guy in the same colour blazer came and shot the shit with him. Another moonlighting cop. Ed figured he was stationed at the desk in the lobby, or else another moonlighting cop who came out for a smoke from time to time was, and this guy was his backup. There were shifts of guys like this day and night. It made Ed feel unsure of himself. He’d spent a few years in places he figured were easier to break out of than this one would be to get into, and almost nobody ever broke out of those places. Since there was no doubt in his mind that all these moonlighting cops were heavily armed, there was only one thing he could think to do.

He went to a pawnshop.

There was something else that he noticed. Almost every day, and sometimes a couple of times a day or more, fire trucks came wailing down the street and into the driveway, and the firefighters rushed into the building. When an ambulance finally showed up, the firefighters came out and drove away. Ed figured that rich old farts who lived in the building would have had attacks of some kind, and the firetrucks managed to arrive before anybody else to do first aid. Whether these things he noticed gave him a good idea or a stupid idea, it didn’t matter. They at least gave him an idea, and he needed one.

“Fire! Fire!” he yelled into the payphone, having dialed 911. That was a break right there, finding a payphone when things had gotten so you were likelier to find a winning lottery ticket on the sidewalk. And when he finally got the 911 operator to calm down, he gave her the address. “Smoke is pouring out,” he shouted. “People are on their balconies calling for help. They’re waving sheets to get people’s attention. I see one guy that looks like he’s going to jump!”

In no time the driveway was full of fire trucks. More fire trucks were lined along the street. If what the firefighters encountered wasn’t exactly the scene Ed described to 911, they didn’t seem to care. There were more of them than usual because a fire had been reported, and a lot of them hadn’t seen each other for a long time, so everybody was glad to be there, no matter what the problem was. They poured into the building with joyful shouts and high-fives. And Ed, waving a camera, which was what he’d bought at the pawn shop, poured in with them, yelling, “Media! Media!” The camera was a cheapo, but it had an enormous Jesus flash attachment like the photographers had on TV, and every time he yelled “Media!” he hit the button, and everybody was just about blinded. The lobby was so full of firefighters that hardly anybody could move, and they were all yelling
Where’s the fuckin’ fire?
And the purple-blazers were all yelling
What fuckin’ fire?
It was the first they’d heard of any fuckin’ fire. The firefighters had on their helmets and a lot of them wore air tanks on their backs. A lot carried axes. The only person in the whole place who wasn’t firefighter- or purple-blazer-related was Ed Oataway with his camera yelling “Media! Media!” and going
Flash! Flash!

When they noticed this, all the firefighters started yelling at him to send them copies of the pictures so they could put them on the firehouse wall, but it made the purple-blazer guys forget the fire completely. “No media! No media!” they yelled every time Ed Oataway yelled “Media! Media!” Their problem was that they were all out in the middle of the lobby, jammed in by firefighters, while Ed was worming through the mob until he got behind the security desk, where he could hardly believe his eyes. There were maybe twenty-five or thirty TV screens, and he and his camera were featured live on five or six of them. It was really something to just be trying to do your job without anybody noticing and, wham! you turned out to be the star of the Ed Oataway Show!

Later on he thought it was too bad he hadn’t brought one of those Identi-Kits along so he could have left an official set of fingerprints in case any of his old friends in law enforcement couldn’t tell for sure who he was. He didn’t have time to worry about it then, because as soon as the purple-blazers realized the media asshole was behind the desk, they went really berserk. This reminded him that he wasn’t back there to wait for them to beat him to a bloody pulp. He was back there to push every button on the control panel as fast as he could, and while he had no idea what all else this did, the lobby lights went out and all kinds of alarms started going loud enough to loosen everybody’s fillings. Then he ducked along the wall to a door marked “Emergency Exit” and raced for the basement.

He raced around P1 and had just arrived on P2 when he saw the Porsche. A button on the key unlocked it, and he tried to climb in. He tried again. Climbing in wasn’t easy, because the car was so low-slung, it hardly came above his knees. And Ed was so low-slung that every single time D.S. saw him he remarked that it would take two Eds to make a full-sized runt, which caused Ed to want to pound Dipshit to liverwurst every time they ran into each other. Finally he squeezed himself in and turned the key.

The fuckin’ car exploded.

If he’d taken the time beforehand, it might have occurred to him that Frank’s girlfriend, and where she lived, and what kind of car she owned — that somebody like that could easily have the type of associates who, for one reason or another, would wire dynamite to her ignition. But he never gave it a thought until that instant, and what he thought then was Goodbye Ed Oataway! Then he discovered he was still alive. He was astonished. The car hadn’t exploded, it was just very loud. “Five hundred thou,” he said, “and you can’t hardly get into it, and you can’t hardly see out of it, and you can’t hear yourself fuckin’ think.”

As the garage door was opening, two of the purple-blazer security guys showed up in his rearview, running and hollering, so when it was open enough to slip under, he tromped on the gas. And nothing happened. This scared him so much he thought he was going to shit in his drawers. Except not exactly nothing happened. The engine screamed, the spinning tires churned out clouds of smoke, but the car just sat there.

“Back off, backoff, backoffbackoffbackoff!” If he could have heard himself, that’s what he would have heard himself saying. And that’s what he did. He lifted his foot. Then, with hardly even a toenail, he barely touched the accelerator.

“
Jesus Fuckin’ Christ!
”

Coming off the top of the exit ramp three feet in the air scared him so much, he thought he was having a stroke.

“For one thing,” he told D.S. in a talking fit induced by his adventure, “there is the normal excitement that goes with stealing a car instead of just pretending to. It is always very stimulating. Add to this the realization that the vehicle I have stolen is totally uncontrollable. When a light turned green, I wasn’t just across the intersection before the other cars, I was halfway down the fuckin’ next block and standing on the brakes trying to get the fuckin’ thing to stop for the next fuckin’ traffic light. Which,” he said, “I would arrive at with all four wheels still going in a straight line if I was lucky, which I wasn’t several times.”

You wouldn’t have known Ed Oataway had any fuses left that weren’t blown by the time he finally arrived at the garage Nina had found. Since it was almost falling down and nobody had used it for years, she figured nobody was likely to pay attention to them being there, and D.S. said he was sure nobody would unless they happened to wonder why the Indianapolis 500 had just pulled in.

Nina and JannaRose poked at the car for most of the day. D.S. said they reminded him of a movie he once saw about some cops who got hold of a vehicle belonging to some crooks, and how the cops had a bunch of mechanics take it apart with cutting torches so they could find the heroin in it. Then they put it back together, and the crooks never realized their stash had been lifted. “In case you haven’t noticed,” Nina said, “not only are me and JannaRose not a bunch of mechanics, we don’t even have a pair of fuckin’ pliers.”

They couldn’t even find a place anybody could hide much of anything, and 1.18 million would take up quite a bit of space unless, as D.S. pointed out, it was in million-dollar bills. Every part of the car was made of such thin pieces, you could hardly hide a five-dollar bill without making a bulge, and one thing Nina could see all too clearly was that there were no bulges anywhere.

It was depressing. She had discovered all these terrific clues: the car key. Where the car was. The business about Frank doing something to it at Elwell’s. If he wasn’t there hiding the loot in it, then driving it to Elwell’s and whatever he did there didn’t make any sense. That was the most depressing part of all: thinking she had figured it out. Then discovering she hadn’t. Not even slightly.

“Maybe somebody got to it first,” D.S. said.

“Could be.” Nina sighed as if she finally realized why so many people called him Dipshit. “Especially if it was wrapped in Saran Wrap and lying on the seat.”

“Right!” D.S. said, poking her in the shoulder for emphasis.

“Now what?” JannaRose didn’t say this the way somebody might say, “All right! We’ve done Step A and Step B. I guess Step C is next. What is it again?” She said it the way somebody would who knew everything imaginable had been tried, and since the only choice left was to jump off a bridge over the Parkway, then they better get started. It was a fair ways off.

But this time it was her turn to be wrong. Nina had a definite “Now what?” in mind, and when she told her what it was, JannaRose’s eyebrows whizzed right up into her hairline. “Really?” she said.

That’s not what Ed Oataway said when he got a chance to discuss it with Nina. “Did you know that you’re completely fuckin’ insane?” was what he said.

“It’s got to,” she said.

“What do you mean it’s got to?”

“Get taken back.”

“I meant
why
does it? What if you found the money in it?”

“It would still have to. It’s stolen property.”

“I know it is. I’m the one that stole it, remember? But it’s worth maybe a hundred thou if we can find a buyer. You could put that toward the pool.”

“It’s not right to fix the pool with that kind of money.”

“What about Frank’s loot then?” Ed hauled back and pointed a finger at her. “How come you don’t give a fuck about it?”