Nina, the Bandit Queen (17 page)

To show how the virus of suspicion about Nina and the missing bank loot could spread very subtly and in ways that were painful to her, it helps to begin with a flashback.

When she heard about the junkyard dog, she woke D.S. and gave him grief for killing it. Not even slightly impressed that the dog’s death was unintentional, she left the room. D.S. fell back asleep.

The flashback goes like this:

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?”

Remember that?

So D.S. went out and started prying at the wreck. Since Ed Oataway was keeping an eagle eye on everything concerning Nina, he came over to find out what was going on this time. “We never looked in the spare tire,” D.S. said. So Ed started prying, too. When they finished, they delivered their news.

“There isn’t?” she said.

Nina could get a skeptical tone in her voice, and it sounded like if there was no spare tire it was D.S. and Ed’s fault.

“And there never was one, either,” D.S. said.

“What do you mean?” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye.

“He means there never was one,” Ed smiled, because this time he had Nina right where he wanted her. “That’s what he means.”

“Yup,” D.S. said. “Nope.” As if he could hardly believe it himself.

“What do you do if you get a flat?”

Ed handed her an enormous aerosol can.

Nina looked at the label. Fix-a-Flat. “What the fuck is this?”

“You attach it to the valve and spray it in,” he said. “It’s full of pressurized air and some kind of gunk that plugs the leak and pumps the tire up again.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Ed didn’t say anything, because he thought so, too. Even D.S. did. Nina shook her head and went back in the house, reading the label.

She put the can on the kitchen table. The table was blocking the doorway so people who weren’t looking where they were going wouldn’t walk into the kitchen and fall straight into the cellar, since there was no floor left out there. She picked up the can and gave it a shake.

After not thinking about anything in particular for awhile, she gave it another shake.

Then she shook it real hard.

Getting the bottom off was quite easy. When she hacked at the edge with the wobbly old carving knife, she worried that a blast of pressurized air and gunk would blind her, but there was no pressurized air in the can any more, and no gunk either. She squinched her eyes and looked inside. She whapped it against her palm a couple of times. Then, with her thumb and forefinger, she tweezered out an envelope. A plain ordinary white envelope.

That was full of money.

More money than she had ever seen in one place.

All in one hundred dollar bills.

Just looking at them made her heart pound. She took a deep breath and started counting. And when she finished, her heart was pounding in an entirely different way. And she knew one thing for sure.

Frank had been fucked.

Totally.

Completely.

Thoroughly fucked.

“Christ,” she said.

There were seventy-five one hundred dollar bills. Seven thousand, five hundred dollars. The cash down payment on the fifteen thousand he supposedly was to get for pretending to rob the bank. She had no way of knowing this, of course. But there was no way she could avoid sensing something quite a bit like it, the same as she sensed that in the bank they had just pretended to give him the loot. That they had filled the Nike bag with cut-up newspapers or something and handed that to him instead. He didn’t even get to collect the rest of the money they had promised him for the job.

“What a fuckin’ moron.” She thought she was saying it about Frank until it occurred to her that it ran in the family.

On the other hand, here she had seven thousand, five hundred dollars to put toward fixing the swimming pool. It didn’t cheer her up even a little bit.

“That fuckin’ Ed Oataway,” D.S. roared. Nina was so startled she nearly peed her pants. He’d come in the front door without her realizing it. Her mind must have wandered off, probably because she didn’t want to think about what all had happened. “He doesn’t have even the slightest sense of humour,” D.S. said. He’d been telling a bunch of the latest jokes he’d thought up, and Ed hadn’t laughed at any of them. “Can you believe it?” he boomed, stopping right behind her. She felt panicky. She scooped the envelope and the cash and the Fix-a-Flat can and the bottom of the can up under her T-shirt. Then, bent over, she squeezed past D.S. and went into the john yelling that she was sorry, but she was in a hurry.

D.S. narrowed his eyes as the bathroom door slammed. “The fuck was that all about?” he said.

Ed Oataway could have told D.S. what it was all about. It was all about acting suspiciously. But JannaRose had no idea what was going on with her husband when she noticed he was sneaking around, following her everywhere. Nina noticed it, too, because everywhere JannaRose went, they went together.

“What’s his problem?” Nina said after a week or so, because she worried that Ed thought JannaRose had a boyfriend. She would have said something earlier, but she didn’t want to put JannaRose on the spot in case she did have a boyfriend and was hanging out with Nina to make it look to Ed as if everything was normal.

“Why are you following me around?” JannaRose said when Ed came in that night.

He looked at her as if she was out of her mind. “I’m not following you around,” he said.

Since she’d seen him doing it, and so had Nina, she said that was a big fat lie. This hurt Ed’s feelings. Was it his fault that she was always with Nina? How was he supposed to find out where Nina hid the money if he didn’t follow her everywhere? If JannaRose didn’t believe this, all she had to do was follow him when he stormed out indignantly and did what he’d started doing whenever Nina wasn’t out and he wasn’t following her.

He circled her house.

And it was on one of those circles that he collided with somebody who was peeking through a crack in the wall. Ed had no idea who it was, but the other person was pissed off. “What the fuck are you doing on my turf, you son of a bitch?” he hissed. “Go find your own fuckin’ welfare queen.”

Ed still didn’t realize it was the welfare inspector, or that the inspector had taken it for granted that whoever bumped into him was an inspector from some other branch of the welfare department. Competition had become so fierce that welfare inspectors no longer reported what they found, because their reports would attract a whole lot of inspectors from other branches who wanted to get in on the action. The welfare inspector who’d made the original discovery would end up squeezed out. It’s why they were mostly happy just to get on the nerves of the people they spied on and make their lives miserable. So it was understandable that he started punching Ed Oataway in the nose.

Ed had never won a fight in his life, except that time he’d whanged D.S. in the face with a hubcap, and D.S. said that wasn’t a fight anyway, it was a discussion. He always disappeared the minute things got physical. This time, though, it was different. He disappeared, but not for days the way he usually did. He only disappeared long enough to run to the pile of stuff behind his house that included the back door of Dipshit’s kitchen, and to scrabble around under it to find a suitable weapon. As soon as he grabbed something that felt right, he ran back to where whoever attacked him was peeking through the crack in the wall again, quite relaxed because as far as he was concerned he’d chased away the bastard who was trying to horn in on his case. And this time it would be a fairer fight, because while the welfare inspector only had one arm, Ed Oataway now had three.

He’d first found the other one when he was snooping behind Dipshit’s house the night Nina threw it at the bad-tempered home wrecker digging the hole by the foundation, and it seemed to him like the kind of thing he could pawn.

Sneaking up behind the welfare inspector, he poked him on the shoulder. “Who you calling a fuckhead?” he said, making the inspector jump and angering him because he’d never called anybody a fuckhead in his life. Spinning around, he swung his only available fist and caught Ed Oataway between the eyes. After he stood back up, Ed clonked his antagonist over the head with the artificial arm. He clonked him so hard that he sank to his knees, where Ed kept on clonking him until he stretched out flat on the ground and stayed there.

Ed had been in such a rage that he didn’t realize what he’d grabbed from his pile in the dark was the artificial arm. As far as he was concerned, it was simply an object with enough heft to do the job. He’d had no idea that the individual fighting him was a welfare inspector. He didn’t know the welfare inspector only had one arm. And so there was no way he was aware that it was the welfare inspector’s other arm he used to knock him cold. It was just the way things worked out.

And when he threw the artificial arm back on the pile in his yard, it never crossed his mind that the welfare inspector hadn’t moved — that he’d just kept on lying there. He was still lying there the next morning when Nina noticed him. She knew who it was because of his plastic windbreaker and assumed that he’d been tired after spying on her all night and had fallen asleep. A couple of hours later, she noticed he was gone.

That was because when the welfare inspection branch he worked for didn’t get a call from him at the end of his shift telling them everything was in order, they sent somebody out to check. And when they found him unconscious they took him to the hospital. He never emerged from a coma that had been induced by severe brain injuries, and a couple of days later he died. The marks on his head showed he’d been beaten with an artificial arm. When the artificial fingerprints were examined, they showed it had been his own artificial arm, the one he’d lost in the scuffle with Nina.

In no time, Sergeant Toole was back on her porch telling her that a brutal murder had taken place right beside her house and that the murder weapon was an item she’d been connected with in official reports. An item that, as a matter of fact, she had chopped off the body of the future murder victim himself. Was that part of her long-term plan? To move up from shooting junkyard dogs to knocking off municipal civil servants?

After Nina told JannaRose about this latest Toole visit, and JannaRose mentioned it to Ed Oataway, it occurred to Ed that he was in possession of a murder weapon. The next thing that occurred to him was he better get rid of it quickly. The third thing that occurred to him was to leave it on the back seat of the car that D.S. had started sleeping in on a regular basis.

While the fate of the welfare inspector followed its tragic course, Ed took every opportunity to talk to JannaRose, and what he talked about was the money. The money and nothing else. He explained to her how he deserved a considerable chunk of it because of all he’d done for Frank at the time of the pretend robbery, but also during their life together as best friends. Not only did he deserve it, he knew where it was. Nina had it. Not only did Nina have it, she knew he’d never been paid for crashing into the getaway car. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was her pretending she didn’t have it because she didn’t want him to get what he was owed, much less receive his fair share. This didn’t surprise him, he told JannaRose. Nina was so much like her brother, he could hardly stand it. They never thought about anybody but themselves. In her case, she wanted to use the money to fix the swimming pool so everybody would start bowing down to her, and she’d get interviewed on television and could go around acting like the Queen of Fuckin’ England, which she thought she already was from everything he could see.

But this would be impossible if Dipshit found out she had the money, because he would go killer-gorilla crazy. This was another reason she was keeping it secret. Because Dipshit would never let her throw money away on something as idiotic as a swimming pool.

“He always said he was happy for her to do whatever she wanted with the money she raised,” JannaRose said.

“Sure, but that was when it never occurred to anybody that she’d get any. Once he finds out that she got some after all, and especially when he finds out how much she got, and that she’s hiding it from him and from everybody else — there’s going to be blood on the fuckin’ moon.”

JannaRose didn’t believe a single thing Ed Oataway told her. She had never been closer to another human being than she was to Nina. It was more than if they were sisters. It was like they had their own reality show on TV and they were on it together all the time, sending the same thoughts and feelings out to all their viewers. When they did this, the viewers could see it was love and respect for each other that made both of them beautiful and strong. If Nina had that money — if she had even one cent of it — okay, there could possibly be certain circumstances that might make it impossible for her to tell JannaRose. For instance, if her life was in danger. But it didn’t matter, because if she did have it she wouldn’t have to
tell
JannaRose. Because JannaRose would be able to
tell
she had it. And so far she couldn’t. So Nina couldn’t. So she didn’t.

“Explain that again for me, will you?” Ed said.

He did get JannaRose thinking, though, and what she thought was that no matter how sure you might be, with some people you could never tell.

She started to watch Nina as closely as possible to see if there was anything different about her. Anything like maybe having 1.18 million tucked away somewhere and not telling her closest friend. She started being around all the time instead of just most of the time. She never took her eyes off Nina for one second, and when she wasn’t able to keep her eyes on her friend, she followed her right to the bathroom door and waited for her to come out. Then she whipped into the bathroom to see if anything had been rearranged. And little by little, it became apparent that something was definitely going on. One thing she noticed in particular was that Nina started looking up all of a sudden and saying, “Why the fuck are you staring at me?”

“I’m not staring.”

“You are so.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’ve been keeping my eye on you and caught you.”

JannaRose would have looked astonished if she hadn’t been taking care not to let on that anything surprised her.
Why was she keeping an eye on me?
she wondered. Was Nina nervous about something? Was it because she had something to hide? Was it possible she was worried that she’d do something that would give herself away and somebody would notice? It must be she felt guilty about something. Why else would she be doing it?

“You don’t honestly think she’s got the money,” JannaRose said to Ed.

He gave her a look like the last drop of sanity was seeping out of her mind.

It made JannaRose feel sad. “I guess it could be that it’s — you know —”

“True?”

“— possible.”

“Fuckin’ definite is what it is.”

JannaRose sat there not looking at anything, not moving. “Shit,” she said.