Nina, the Bandit Queen (15 page)

So Nina told him how the insurance worked with money that got stolen from banks.

Ed Oataway didn’t like anything about this.

Nina couldn’t even say what led her to realize the puzzle had a missing piece, other than her obsessive inability to make her mind stop poking through the car. She could still see every bit of it, no matter how tiny. Everything it was made of was thin. Even the seats. The seats were hardly thicker than linoleum. There wasn’t a part of anything that wasn’t like that. She knew because she had knocked on and poked at every single thing.

Every. Single. Thing.

Knocked on it and poked at it.

Every cylinder and cranny.

Knocked it.

Poked it.

Every … single …

“Where’s Ed?”

JannaRose just about jumped out of her teeth. She was dozing with her chin on her fist when Nina burst into her kitchen.

“Ed? Why?”

“No fuckin’ way,” Ed said when JannaRose told him why.

To be fair, that was his first reaction. It was also his second and third and all the other reactions he had after Nina found where he was hiding and explained how urgent it was for him to steal the Porsche again.

It didn’t matter. His reaction never mattered. And it wasn’t because Ed was pussy-whipped and had to do whatever his wife decided that it never mattered. He was pussy-whipped, all right, but his reaction never mattered because as far as Nina was concerned he was an idiot, and his wife always agreed with whatever Nina said.

Originally he thought it was ridiculous to imagine they would find the money in the car. Now he wasn’t so sure. Stealing it had made him feel that he kind of had a stake in the outcome. Sort of a commitment to seeing things all the way through. And if Dipshit’s wife ended up being as big a lunatic as she clearly was, and if there was some lunatic chance the money was where she now decided it was, why not go along with it? What did he have to lose? Who knew but some of that cash might trickle down into his hands. Which would only be right, of course, considering that his dead best friend was a prick who had tried to screw him out of his fair share.

And this time he had a chance to work out a plan that was solid as a rock, because it was based on inside knowledge he’d gained the first time. For instance, when the lobby was packed with firefighters and security guards, he’d stuck out. Not this time, though. Not dressed in a firefighter’s coat and helmet he’d rented from a safety supply company. And unlike the last time, he didn’t have to call in a false alarm. This time there happened to be a real alarm prompted by a real fire. It was so utterly unexpected that he was stumble-foot stupefied by the sight of firefighters racing into the building and almost forgot to get his firefighter-rigged ass across the street and race in with them. That’s when it became clear that his new plan was a good one only as far as it went, which wasn’t far enough to take into account a major consideration that everybody but Ed Oataway always did: how truly short he was. Fortunately, if he only came up to the elbows of most of the firefighters, and if the smallest helmet the safety supply had kept joggling down over his eyes so he couldn’t see where he was going, there was so much smoke and confusion that nobody paid any attention. There were a whole lot more firefighters, and they were in an even cheerier mood than the last time when it was a false alarm. They were pumping their fists and asking each other if they knew what was burning. Something in the wiring maybe, since besides smoke, so many sparks were whooshing out of the ceiling that each new arrival shouted, “Holy Johnson! Take a look at that mother!”

Ed, doing his best to appear as enthusiastic as the firefighters he squeezed his way through, had just pushed open the door to the garage when the purple blazers went haywire.

“It’s him!”

“Who?”

“That little fucker again! There he goes!”

Closed-circuit TVs showed a short guy in a coat so long he kept tripping over it holding a firefighter’s helmet with both hands to keep it from tipping over his eyes as he ran down the stairs.

“I’ve had enough of his bullshit!” shouted one of the blazer guys, pulling an automatic pistol out of his shoulder harness. “This is the last time the little car-stealing cocksucker steals a car on my shift.”

“Fuckin’ right!” yelled another purple-blazer who was looking at the TV monitors when he took off after Ed and as a result ran flat-out into the gun-wielding security guard, causing him to fire a bullet into the ceiling. Nobody had any idea what it hit up there, but now the sprinklers went off, adding a cascading downpour to the scene. Heedless of their personal safety, the firefighters pushed forward to see what the shooting was all about. It wasn’t every day they got a combo of a real fire and gunfire at the same time, something they definitely did here, since the sparks had caused the whole ceiling to shimmer with flame.

Ignoring the firefighters, the blazer guys, including the one who’d fired the shot, did what police officers who moonlight as security guards always did when shooting started, and climbed under their desks. Under his, the senior purple-blazer had an inspiration. Pointing toward several TV screens, he yelled, “
Somebody on the scene is impersonating a firefighter!”

“What?” There were cries of furious disbelief as the firefighters stopped congratulating each other for being first responders at the dooziest alarm in memory and gathered around the monitors.

“There!” the security guard said, as Ed Oataway, from several angles, scurried through the garage. “See!”

“
He’s impersonating a firefighter!
” firefighters shouted.

“The little cocksucker!” gasped other firefighters, standing stone still in amazement as Ed stripped off his firefighter’s gear and scrunched into the racy yellow car. “He should be hung by his little fuckin’ nuts!

“Stop him!” they chorused. “He’s trying to escape!” They all raced out of the building and jumped aboard their trucks, but the last they saw of Ed was a closed-circuit shot of the yellow car going off the top of the exit ramp three feet above the ground. Nevertheless they raced around town for a couple of hours to work off their rage.

Their departure had left the purple-blazers all alone in the immense lobby with flames boiling over their heads.

“Call 911,” one yelled.

“I did,” another yelled. “I got an answering machine.”

While Ed still hollered “Holy shit!” when he touched the gas, it was just force of habit. He was starting to get used to the car’s surprises. And while this made him a bit more confident, there was no truth to Nina’s accusation that he started thinking he was the King Kong of the Freeways and decided to go joyriding. The route he picked actually was the most direct, except it didn’t help that the only one who took his side afterward was D.S., and he said there must have been some good reason for choosing it, because Ed wasn’t that kind of an asshole. He followed the shore expressway to the Parkway, intending to get off at the first exit, when the flashing lights showed up in his rearview. Since they were still a ways back, it gave him time to think, and that was part of the problem. Because he thought “Jesus!” In the car-stealing business, it’s a rule of thumb that if you’re at the wheel of a car you’ve just stolen, and police come from behind like that, they’re on to you.

He reacted instinctively.

He floored it.

Ed Oataway was wrong about the police. But not as wrong as he was about reacting that way. The Porsche had only just started spinning when the police car went past in such a blur that the cops didn’t even notice. And if they had, they’d have thought, stomp on the gas in a car as powerful as that and it almost doesn’t matter how fast you’re travelling, the wheels are going to lose their grip on the pavement. What did you expect?

It kept on spinning until it hit the guardrail, and Ed would have been grateful that this stopped the spinning if it hadn’t made the car flip over. Once it started flipping over, it went on doing it for quite some time.

Even the idea of this upset Ed Oataway’s stomach.

“What kind of a guy steals junk?” he asked.

“It’s your own fault,” JannaRose said.

Ever since piling the five-hundred-thousand-dollar Porsche into a ravine, he’d had the feeling that his support system wasn’t all that supportive. For instance, did he hear even one “Thank God you didn’t get killed!” when he survived the wreck? And scrambled up that ravine —
limped
up it? In the pitch dark? That ravine full of garbage and broken glass? With a leg that for all he could tell was broken? That he had to keep limping on for another half hour until he found a subway station? Did he even hear it from his
wife?

That was okay. Once he got hold of the money, she’d change her tune. Even that son of a bitch Frank would have changed his tune if he was still alive. It wouldn’t matter that he’d tried to beat Ed out of what he was entitled to. Frank couldn’t help himself when it came to things like that. It was the way he was. If people everywhere didn’t grow up thinking that way, they did in SuEz if they had any interest in surviving.

What kind of a guy steals junk? The lowest of the low. And he was being forced to do it. He had already been forced to push his car-stealing abilities beyond their natural limit, and had almost lost his life as a result. But there was no way he could have avoided that any more than he could get out of what he had to do now. Because what if that was where the 1.18 million really was? And what if he could grab the entire bundle and get a nice place for his family and him to live in? Like, was it his fault that Dipshit’s crazy fuckin’ wife had never thought to look inside the tires?

Quite apart from professional self-esteem, Ed Oataway had good reason to feel bad about stealing this particular piece of junk. Compared to the two times he’d stolen it before it got wrecked, there were a lot of complications. Locating it wasn’t one of them, though. When the cops and insurance company finished with the car, the computer at Elwell’s tracked down the wrecker it was hauled to and even identified the row it was piled in, and which pile it was on.

The main complication was Dipshit. He was standing beside the pile the mangled Porsche was on, having just climbed down from the towtruck the Elwells had been kind enough to lend them. And he was saying in a voice that made Ed go all shivery in his intestines, “Oh Christ, Oh God, Oh sweet Jesus, help me!” This complication actually went back to when Ed was informed that Dipshit would be going along with him. It could be it was to make sure he didn’t do anything so crazy that it almost led to the death of the dream, like the last time. But even though he noticed that everybody was being careful not to so much as hint at such a thing, he doubted it. The idea that Dipshit might keep somebody from doing something crazy was
totally
crazy. Ed Oataway could even think of a dozen other reasons D.S. was with him, but once you examined them and threw away the ones that were bullshit, there was only one left, so it had to be the real one. Dipshit was sent on the junkyard job because it would irritate Ed. That’s all there was to it.

And did he ever, going on about Christ and God and Jesus in a way that wasn’t only irritating, it was scary. Ed quietly let himself out the driver’s door and tiptoed around the front of the truck, only to stop cold at the sight of Dipshit with a horrible expression of terror on his face.

Then whatever it was that was terrifying D.S. lunged at Ed!
And Ed started groaning “Christ” and asking for help from Jesus, the same as Dipshit had.

A thoughtful person might have asked, “They were in a junkyard. They didn’t expect there would be a junkyard dog, for God’s sakes?” or “They cut through the lock on the gate in the middle of the night and drove in with a towtruck to steal a wreck and they didn’t think the junkyard dog would maybe notice?” Fair enough, but what these questions really show is that the person who might have asked them wasn’t the slightest bit familiar with D.S. Dolgoy or Ed Oataway.

The dog was a German shepherd, but all black. When it lunged, it also kind of lurched, so besides being attack-trained, it could be it also had rabies. Drool ran in globs from its jaws.

“Run!” Ed yelled.

“If I run, it’ll get me!”

“Jump in the truck!”

“If I try to jump in the truck, it’ll get me!”

The dog lurched again. It was close enough that they could get a good look at its eyes. Its eyes looked like it wasn’t right in the head.

“We’re fucked!” D.S. wailed.

“We’re fuckin’ dead!

“
Oh God, it’s …
”

Early the next morning Nina started to realize that somebody had unscrewed all the screws that held the world together and thrown them away. The crumpled heap that had once been the yellow Porsche squatted in the middle of her front walk. The street was quiet, no sign of the ice cream truck. Now that it only travelled with a police escort, it often didn’t come by until noon. Things didn’t get any noisier when a black Cadillac eased to a stop, the driver’s window opened, and the Elwell twins peered out. If looks could kill, the one they gave her would have left nothing but a plywood urn full of ashes on the front steps where she was sitting. They’d never come by before, and she wondered if maybe Ed Oataway hadn’t taken back the towtruck they’d been kind enough to lend them for last night’s job. Maybe he’d taken off with it the way the average SuEz resident would have. It turned out it wasn’t that, though. It turned out to be far worse.

“We are disappointed,” they said. “We cannot emphasize how disappointed we are in you.”

“In me?” Why her? Except she knew it was only because of her that they’d loaned Ed the towtruck.

“Yes. Because of what happened as a result of the crime you committed,” L. Roy said, unless it was L. Ray. It was difficult to tell which was which in the shadowy front seat of the Caddy.

“Or arranged to have committed,” the other one said.

“Instigated. Which is a crime in itself.”

“Be that as it may. We are not sitting in judgement. We are simply expressing our utter disapproval of you and your associates because wanton violence —”

“— against dumb animals —”

“— against our four-legged friends, no matter how small or large their IQ proves to be is —”

“— deeply offensive to us. Deeply and personally. So offensive that —”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Nina had come down to the curb so she could hear exactly what they were saying. It was so strange that she grabbed hold of the hair on each side of her head. It didn’t sound like one of the Elwells’ joking-around routines. For one thing, they weren’t laughing.

“About the dog getting shot to death?” one of them said indignantly.

“The junkyard dog?” the other said.

“Not that we intend that as a slur on the poor beast. It is a job description. Junkyard dog was its trade. And as such, it was attempting to do its faithful and honourable duty when the thugs you —”

“— when your thugs blew its hard-working head off.”

The Elwell in the passenger seat beckoned Nina closer and turned up the radio. “Give a listen to this,” he said. It was Mayor Gladly Bradley, sounding as if his head was on fire. He was raging about “viciousness” and “callousness” and “criminals that would shoot down a dog in the commission of a crime. A brave, selfless dog,” he roared, “that worked for a living. They shot it. Killed it dead as dead can be. And if that doesn’t call for the death penalty with a capital D and a capital P, then why the hell do we bother having a death penalty anyway?”

“Hear that?” an Elwell said. “Awhile ago he called it ‘heinous.’”

“Not often you get to bandy a word like heinous around,” his brother said. “But give the man credit, he —”

“— can bandy to beat the band.”

“He’s a one-man bandy. It was the first thing we heard when we woke up.”

“Drove straight over here to tell you that we disapprove. And that herewith and hereinafter we no longer care to be associated with you or your associates in any way, shape, or form. And request that in future you take your business —”

“Your nasty business —”

“Yes!”

“Your
heinous
business —”

“Exactly. In future, you take your vile business elsewhere. And a very good morning to you, sir.”

Whichever Elwell it was who said that said it to a chunky man who had double-parked a blue Solara convertible and was approaching the Porsche’s remains with a smile so big, it made Nina think he was going to break into a dance. “And farewell to you, madam,” the Elwell said to Nina.

Detective Toole grunted “Morning” without bothering to look at the Caddy as it crept away. He glanced at Nina, though, and his smile got even bigger. He circled the wreck as if it was some kind of famous statue and this was the first time he’d seen the genuine article.

“Never thought of you as the dog-shooting type,” he said after awhile, his voice filled with sunshine, and this really mystified Nina, because all she’d been able to think when the Elwells and the mayor were going on about it was “Huh?”

“Must’ve taken me about eight seconds,” Toole said, not bragging — more like he thought it was funny it took him so long. “I was drinking my tea in bed, when who comes on the clock radio but our esteemed mayor in an absolute state — an absolute
state
— about a noble dog that had been murdered in the courageous performance of its duty. Then the news came on and said the only thing apparently missing as a result of the break-and-entry at the junkyard where the dog got shot was a wrecked car. Believe it or not, a wrecked
Porsche
. Yellow.” With his car key he scraped a couple of flecks of paint off the wreck. “Now I am always interested in crimes that are of special interest to the mayor, and what do I find when I search the records a little bit? I find that the wreck was reported stolen
before
it was a wreck. And then
it turned back up
. And then
it got stolen again!
Almost,” Toole said, “like something strange was going on. Does it sound like that to you?”

Nina stared at the ground.

“I also discovered,” he continued, “that it is registered to, and was repeatedly stolen from the parking spot of, a woman named Junetta Solito, whose address is —” he clutched his forehead as if he was going to faint “—
whose address is the same one your deceased brother Frank gave as a fowarding address when he got out of prison!
And the second time it was stolen it ended up in a ravine beside the Parkway. And,” Toole said, “when I drop around here to see if maybe you can help me understand these things, what do I find in front of your house?” He gave the wreck a couple of raps with his knuckles. “The strangest thing of all.”

He raised his eyebrows as if he was interested in hearing what she had to say about all this, but he wasn’t really, because he carried on before she got a chance to let him know that she wasn’t going to say a word.

“I find it interesting,” the cop said, “fascinating even, from an investigative point of view, that a cheap-shit asshole conman like Frank Carson was on such close personal terms with a woman of such considerable means — the owner of one of the most expensive apartments in the city, for instance, and a five hundred thousand dollar Porsche Carrera GT. And that shortly after he meets his grisly end, no sign can be found of the 1.18 million dollars he stole in a put-up job at the main downtown branch of the Great Big One National Bank. Then,” Toole said, “not long after that, the automobile in question begins leading an extremely adventurous life, ending up —” he gave the wreck a little kick with the toe of his shoe “— ending up in hardly better condition than your brother. And I can only speculate that somehow he informed you that the money was stashed in the car. But I’m presuming your first search turned up squat. Then you thought of something you’d overlooked.” He spread his arms and looked surprised to see the sliced-up rubber all over the sidewalk. “I’m presuming the tires. And was the money in those tires? Wait, don’t tell me! I’ve worked the thing out this far, let me see if I can take it right through to the end.

“In the meantime,” he said, “let me advise you of your rights. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to try to get away with the money. You have the right to try to stay beyond my reach if you do try to run away with it. And you have the right to hand it over to me no questions asked.

“I’ll give you —” he was still holding up the fingers he’d counted out her rights on “— some time to make up your mind.”

He walked across to the blue convertible. As he was about to climb in, he looked back and pointed at the wreck. “SuEz,” he said, “has got to be the only part of town where something like that on the sidewalk is an improvement.”

“What do you mean we shot the dog?” D.S. wasn’t at his sharpest. He’d only gotten to sleep about an hour after they finally decided that one thing was for sure — there was not 1.18 million in those tires. There was nothing in them, times four.

Sergeant Toole’s car wasn’t out of sight when Nina steamed into the living room where D.S. was snoring on the busted old couch because he’d been too tired to go and climb into one of the cars along the street, where he usually slept. She kicked his foot and shouted, “You fuckin’ moron.”

And now he was denying it. “It’s on the fuckin’ radio,” she yelled.

“What’s on the fuckin’ radio?”

“That you shot the fuckin’ junkyard dog.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The Elwells are mad as fuckin’ hell. That cop’s been here.”

“You’re fuckin’ nuts.”

“The Elwells have animal cruelty issues. And the cop heard the mayor and came around and saw the wreck on the front walk.”

D.S. pulled a pillow over his face. “This is too much,” he groaned.

“You’re too much.” Nina turned to leave. “None of this would be going on if you hadn’t shot that dog!”

“Jesus!” D.S. yelled. This was it as far as he was concerned. This was the limit. He couldn’t stand it one second more. He threw off the pillow and got really sarcastic. “We shot the dog? Yeah? Yeah? What with? I mean what fuckin’
with
? Do we have a gun? Did we have a gun? Have we ever had a gun? Where do I keep this gun? Up my fuckin’ ass? So what did I shoot the dog with?” He pointed his finger at Nina and wiggled his thumb. “My finger? Blam, blam, blam! And it fell down dead?” He made like he was blowing smoke out of the barrel of a gun.

Nina stopped in the doorway. “So what happened then?” Her voice was very low.

D.S. didn’t say anything.

“Was there a dog? Did something happen to it?”

D.S. drooped his head. Because the first thing the dog did, after it lurched at Ed Oataway, was lie down, open its jaws even wider, and give its head a shake.

“It’s yawning,” Ed said. He couldn’t believe it.

“It’s a fuckin’ killer,” D.S. said. “It wants us to drop our guard.”

“No. It’s just real old and real tired.”

“So what the fuck do we do?”

“Load the wreck and get the fuck out of here.”

When he heard this, D.S. sagged with relief and yawned so deeply, his whole body shuddered. “See,” Ed said, “it’s catching.” And they were both in the truck, with Ed backing out, when D.S. felt something.

“What?” Ed said.

“What?” Nina said.

D.S. stared at his knees on the couch. “Like a bump.”

“A bump?”

D.S. kept staring at his knees.

“A bump?”

D.S. mumbled something.

“What?” Nina said.

Then he said something that wasn’t quite as much of a mumble.

“
You ran over it?
” Nina said it as if she wanted to make sure that’s what she actually heard.

“I guess it got up from where it was the last time we noticed it, lay down under the truck and went to sleep.”

“
You ran over the junkyard dog?
”

“It was an accident.”

“It was an accident,” she said. “Good! Good! That will calm everybody down. Vicious thieves didn’t shoot the hero dog. They ran over it instead. Accidentally. I’m sure the cop will come right back and say he’s sorry he bothered us.”

“What about the Elwells?”

“D.S.,” Nina said. “Get some rest, okay? Your brain is overworked. It needs to take some time off.”

D.S. looked at the ceiling, wondering just what the hell she meant by that. It wasn’t like her to give him a lot of sympathy. Except he didn’t wonder about it for very long, because hardly a minute went by before he was snoring again. And hardly another minute went by before she was back in the doorway yelling at him.

“Where’s the spare tire?” she was yelling.

“What?” D.S. mumbled. “What? What?”

“The spare tire for the Porsche,” Nina said. “I never saw it. Did you?”