Nina, the Bandit Queen (16 page)

Jarmeel Tolbert got terribly upset when his followers started to burn down the churches of other religions. He had more or less expected that being in space and getting probed would have made everybody calm and peaceful and enthusiastic about doing good work in the community, the way it had with him. He wouldn’t have believed anybody who might have predicted a religion of violence would spring from it.

By the time the total got to nine, something else was upsetting him. The police were starting to notice a pattern to the fires and to some other things that were going on. Not all the churches burned right down. The first did, that big Presbyterian one in South Chester, and so did a couple of the Baptists, but a lot of the fires were put out before doing much damage — there were sprinklers, or somebody saw the flames and phoned in an alarm. The Inter-Church Dialogue Crew, which was the committee that handled the burnings, went all the way downtown one night to set the Catholic cathedral on fire, but they couldn’t get anything to catch at all. Some of them took this as a sign from on high, or even higher, to steer clear of Catholic churches until they heard otherwise.

The police determined that in every instance arson was involved or attempted. At the cathedral, combustible materials along with posters from Jarmeel’s church were discovered lying around the singed vestry door. There was a great deal of pressure on the police chief and the mayor to do something.

Compounding the problem was that the Inter-Church Dialogue Crew believed in leaving behind a statement of who they were and what they were up to, otherwise what was the point? They chose to do this symbolically, and the symbol they came up with showed an alien space ship flying through the sky, and below that a naked person bent over with a probe that to the non-initiated looked quite a bit like a mechanical duck approaching the naked person’s rear end. A halo over the spaceship signified the close relationship between the aliens and God. However, people who didn’t grasp the symbolism thought it looked like a bigoted pervert had drawn something dirty on the floor near where the fires had been set or on a wall outside. This would have driven the police chief to get personally involved in solving these crimes, if he wasn’t already appalled by the halo, which was an affront to his profoundly Christian beliefs, and by the mechanical duck, which offended the most cherished community standards.

Jarmeel was also touched personally. From the outset, several of his followers had made critical remarks about his qualifications to lead the religion he had founded, based on the haziness of his recollection of having been probed. They whispered that in his case it might have been more of a spiritual experience. But it wasn’t until they noticed how nervous he was about the fires that they no longer mostly made these comments behind his back.

They demanded a trial by fire. Jarmeel would come with them the next time they went to burn down an enemy church and do the actual deed himself while they stood around bearing witness and going “Hoooom, hoooom.” Jarmeel thought this was an awful idea, and not just because there was a chance he might get caught. It was awful because he would get caught for sure. His fingerprints would be all over everything, and they’d be instantly identifiable. In the army he’d been fingerprinted when he got clearance to handle the classified materials such as brake fluid that the aliens probed out of him. And he’d been fingerprinted when he got arrested before the court-martial. It would take the police two minutes to track him down.

And there would go his welfare cheque.

How would he be able to feed his three children who had been abandoned by their mothers and left with him?

The thing about true religious believers is that when it comes to their leader, they don’t take no for an answer, so he had no choice. He had to disappear completely. And not alone, either. He took his kids with him. To get around this obstacle, his followers not only left the mechanical duck symbol at the next fire they set, they tacked dozens of copies of a message around the scene that read, “My name is Jarmeel Tolbert and I am the Blessed Founder of Nearer My God. It was my destiny to burn down this vile place where the defilers of God’s interstellar love fulfill their obscene desires.” There was a lot more along that line, but this was all the arson squad needed to get on his case. His followers were eager to get their hands on him, too, and Jarmeel was more worried about them, because unlike the police, they were completely deranged.

But his situation wasn’t the result of anything he’d done. As far as he was concerned, his liberty, life, and family were jeopardized only because Nina had got him involved when she started raising money to fix some swimming pool or other.

On the other hand, her brother had gotten hold of 1.18 million dollars and then died tragically. Jarmeel had also heard that in order to fix this swimming pool, Nina was leading a big crusade to find that money.

That’s when a word popped into Jarmeel’s simmering brain. The word was “apparently.” Because what if it wasn’t true that she hadn’t found the money? What if the truth was that she apparently hadn’t found it? What if now she was only pretending to search for it? What if this was because she had already found it?

Fuck her.

There were people who needed some of that cash immediately. And who was to say exactly how much they would need? Jarmeel was not a greedy man. It was just that the danger to his life and the lives of his children led him to calculate that 1.18 million was easily how much it could cost to get them somewhere safe and look after them very well when they got there.

As for getting his hands on it, Jarmeel was prepared to do whatever it took. After stashing his children in a secret location, he started to sneak around keeping his eye on Nina. He wore a disguise when he did this, but that wasn’t so much to keep Nina from realizing what he was up to. It was so the members of his former religion wouldn’t spot him and do whatever they believed their religion compelled them to do, such as lead him back to the fold. When he thought about that, his hair would break out in a sweat.

When Krystal Beach saw her ex-husband Rocky Beach’s dick on the floor of her ConGlom Couriers van, she laughed because she realized there had been a horrible accident — she had no idea what. And that she had been — she had no idea how — involved in it. It was the sort of laughter that would result when staggering confusion got mixed together with the feeling that is the biochemical equivalent of being aboard an airplane full of clowns when it crashed into a fireworks warehouse. It was kind of a nervous laughter.

Her previous ex-husband Bonallo didn’t know this when he heard it. He took it to mean Krystal had turned cruel and hard-hearted.

She’d heard that Beach wanted to reconcile with her, but she’d had no idea that in order to do this he’d started stalking her, and that when she was climbing aboard her van after making a delivery on the downtown side of the river, he saw his big chance. Unzipping his fly, he had run toward her, waggling his manhood yearningly. Without looking, without even realizing he was in the vicinity, she’d given the sliding door a firm shove that caused it, just as he got there, to slice across like the blade of a horizontal guillotine. Entirely unaware of his anguish, she had driven away.

When Bonallo saw this happen, his heart went out to Beach. Until that moment he had been too focused on his own romantic quest to notice that Beach was also stalking Krystal in the hopes of reconciling. The minute he saw Beach run waggling toward her van, he realized they shared a powerful common purpose. Never had he felt closer to another human being. It was as he knelt on the ground trying to comfort the dying Beach that Krystal came roaring back, slid the door open and flicked the dick out beside them with the toe of her sneaker. And roared off again. What Bonallo would remember more than anything was her hideous laughter. Never before could he have imagined Krystal making such an evil sound or inflicting such a fatal injury, not just on a fellow human being, but on her immediate past husband.

It turned out not to be totally fatal. At the hospital, the doctors stitched Beach’s dick back on as good as new, or almost anyway. When he peed, it came out at a ninety-degree angle to the left, so he had to stand sideways to the receptacle. In crowded men’s rooms this led to incidents that required him to do a lot of explaining. The important thing, though, was that the bond Bonallo and Beach formed led them to agree that nothing could be more perfect than both of them reconciling with Krystal. So they began stalking her as a team and were more than prepared to devote all their energies to this, because they were both on welfare and didn’t have anything else to do.

Krystal Beach had a hard time getting used to the idea that these things actually happened to her, but something else involving her was going on that she didn’t know about even slightly, and it was really strange.

When Kevin Olorgasele moved out of Nina’s cellar because it was so disgusting, he didn’t move too far. He wanted to be able to keep his eye on the White House’s agent in the Fort Knox gold deal, so he sized up the van she pretended to drive for a courier service and parked in front of her house every night. One of the things Kevin was taught early in his career with his country’s Finance Ministry was how to break into any kind of vehicle without leaving a mark, an approach that was considerably different than the one he’d employed before that, which was smashing a window with a rock. Her van was clean inside, and dry, and smelled one hundred per cent better than his last hiding place.

But he would never have chosen it if he knew how security-conscious ConGlom Courier Services was. The company wanted to make sure its drivers didn’t use the vans for their own sidelines after hours and had secretly equipped them with satellite sensors that showed where they were every minute. They could also detect unauthorized changes in the gross weight. That was why ConGlom inspectors were staking out Krystal’s van the next night and saw a black man climb into it with some blankets. He opened the rear door so easily, they were certain he had to be using Krystal’s own key.

After a couple of hours during which they witnessed no further developments, they drew their guns and used their master key to unlock the van. The man inside came at them hollering and scrambled past in such a windmilling flurry that they hardly got off more than a dozen shots before he disappeared into the darkness. When the security inspectors and the police reviewed the incident, everybody was disappointed that there were no signs of blood to show he had at least been wounded and would have provided a trail they could follow.

Krystal got fired. This infuriated her, and she began searching around SuEz until she caught sight of Kevin, who fit the description of the man her former employer accused her of giving free access to the van. He was also one of the goat-men she’d seen hanging around her house. When she jumped on his back and started pounding him with her fists, Bonallo and Beach saw an ideal chance to get back on her good side. But just as they started beating up the person she was attacking, another person came leaping into the fight. At first nobody paid any attention, because in SuEz it wasn’t unusual for an innocent bystander to join in a brawl just because it was there, then, just when everybody was punching and kicking for all they were worth, the fight abruptly stopped. That was because Kevin finally got a good look at the man who was battling for no reason the other participants could see — and his jaw dropped. He backed away. He couldn’t believe his eyes.
The interloper was J. Ridgeway Mbunzu!
His beloved colleague. The partner he was sure was dead.

He’d been shot. His body was thrown out a window on the twenty-fourth floor of one of the towers at The Intersection. Kevin was there when it happened. He’d witnessed the whole thing.

For his part, when Ridgeway came upon his principal asset, Ms. K. Beach, getting mugged, he sprang to her rescue and concentrated totally on protecting her. But at the exact instant Kevin got a good look at Ridgeway, Ridgeway realized that
one of the guys he was fighting was his old partner Kevin!

But Kevin was dead!

There was no question! Because Ridgeway had seen exactly the same thing happen to Kevin as Kevin had seen happen to him! He’d been right there. He’d seen Kevin’s body get thrown out the twenty-fourth-floor window.

Now here was each one’s dearest and most trusted friend —
alive again
!

They were overjoyed. There was a lot of, “I say, this is rather unbelievable!” and “
Ra
-ther!”

They were also stunned, because, just as Kevin had, once Ridgeway accepted his partner’s death as an inescapable fact, he decided to turn the disaster into an opportunity and get his hands on the White House ingots and keep them for himself. The only difference was that he didn’t know about the 1.18 million dollars that Kevin saw as a potential bonus. Who wouldn’t be stunned when his share of possible billions was suddenly reduced by half?

As these tumultuous emotions jumbled their thoughts, one thing did emerge clearly. Since they were reunited, it would be appropriate to replace the original goat. And they both thought:
the original goat!
And they started to laugh.

It must have been the goat’s dead body!

They threw their arms around each in the hilarity of it all.

That crazy man! Throwing a dead goat out of the window!

That was when Bonallo and Beach realized the assholes they’d been protecting Krystal from weren’t paying attention and started beating them up again. It snapped Kevin and Ridgeway back to the immediate moment. Their training as colonels in the dreaded Finance Ministry clicked in, and they began to work together like the team they’d been for so long. But this didn’t count for zip when Krystal picked up an exhaust pipe that was lying by the curb and hammered Kevin and then Ridgeway over the head with it. Bonallo and Beach stomped on the fallen Nigerians until there was nothing left of them but a bloody mess. Then Krystal told her ex-husbands that if they didn’t fuck off and leave her alone, she would hammer them over the head with the exhaust pipe, too. So they ran for it.

Despite all this, Krystal was still furious. She had lost her job. She hated welfare. She hated that she would have to go on it. She hated that it would take months for her to start getting it. She hated that she couldn’t live without it. Then she saw a glimmer of hope: Nina’s 1.18 million. Where was it? Ever since that wreck showed up on her front walk, Nina had stopped searching for it. Could it possibly be because she’d found it? But if she had, everybody in SuEz would know. Those morons Dipshit and Ed Oataway and JannaRose wouldn’t have been able to keep it a secret. Unless … unless they didn’t know! What if she’d kept it a secret from them, too, the bitch.

Fuck her.

If there had been a time in Krystal’s life when she really needed to get rich quick, this was it. Nina wouldn’t know what hit her by the time she got finished.

If every part of Kevin and Ridgeway’s bodies was dripping blood, and if every bone was broken, they were at least together again. Standing up was impossible. But, tugging and pulling at each other, they managed to drag themselves into the cellar where Kevin had hidden before. They climbed down through the busted-out window and burrowed under some rubble. Weary. Barely alive. But at least safe.

They thought.