Nina, the Bandit Queen (18 page)

Somebody tipped off the cops.

D.S. certainly didn’t tell anybody he had the murder weapon. He didn’t even know it was a murder weapon. Not that he wouldn’t have loved to tell absolutely everybody that somebody had stuck an artificial arm on the back seat of the abandoned car he was sleeping in if the subject happened to come up. He would have said something like, “People always give me the finger, but this is the first time they gave me all of them. Plus the hand and the arm.” That’s why most people tried to avoid having subjects come up with D.S. Besides, finding something like that ditched in an abandoned car you were sleeping in hardly counted as interesting in SuEz. It had to be a whole lot worse than that for anybody even to notice.

Other things were going on that got him wondering, though. One was Jarmeel waking him up by banging on the window of the car. Jarmeel was dressed sort of like Zorro and shouting that he wished Nina would give him a shitload of that stolen money she had so he could take his kids someplace that was safe from the religious maniacs who were chasing him. Another was Krystal coming up to him when he was looking for a place to take a leak saying that if it hadn’t been for his wife, she wouldn’t be out of work and broke. For that reason alone, shouldn’t Nina give her some of her brother Frank’s loot to help her get back on her feet?

Something that impressed him was JannaRose yelling from across the street that Ed Oataway was at least entitled to a fair share of it. Was that too much to ask? D.S. thought she looked weird when she did this, like somebody had shoved the third rail from the subway up her ass and turned on the juice.

It was a good thing he wasn’t the kind of person who automatically thought that where there’s smoke there was fire. He said exactly that to Nina, but without letting on that it had to do with what everybody was telling him about her.

They had to have been tipped off. Otherwise it was impossible to explain all the undercover cops who thought nobody on the street knew that’s what they were or that they were watching the car D.S. slept in, six of them per shift, twenty-four hours a day. But when nobody came near it for a week, and even though the doors weren’t locked, one of them smashed a window with the butt of his gun and grabbed the arm. Then the car got towed.

Pretty soon word started going around that a warrant was out for D.S.’s arrest.

When Nina tried to discuss this with JannaRose, she found she couldn’t. JannaRose just stood there, not saying anything. This pissed Nina off. “Why are you standing there like that?” she said.

“Like what?” JannaRose said real fast, hardly moving her lips.

“What the fuck is going on around here?”

“Nothing!” JannaRose said even faster. “You’ll have to excuse me. I forgot something.” She ran into her house.

“You’ll have to excuse me?” Nina said this to herself three or four times and shook her head.

“Ahem!” a voice said. “Ahem!” Nina turned. D.S., in his blond wig, had stuck his head around the corner of their house.

“Come here.” He looked around to make sure nobody was watching.

“What do you want?” She stayed where she was.

“Come
here!
”

“What do you
want?
”

“They’re trying to arrest me for murdering that welfare inspector,” he said. “The one with the artificial arm you hacked off that spied on us through the bedroom window.”

“I know. What are you going to do?”

“Make a run for it.”

“You should turn yourself in. You didn’t kill him.”

“Who’s going to believe me? So I’m getting out of here, and if someday they catch me, I’ll plead innocent.”

“Good,” she said. “For sure they’ll believe you then.”

“But if I’m going to get away, I’ll need a lot of money. Give me some … please.”

“I haven’t got any money. You know that.”

“Don’t fuck me around,” D.S. said. “I don’t have time to put up with your shit. Everybody knows you’ve got Frank’s 1.18 million, and right now,” he said, “I need a bunch of it. You hear me?”

“I haven’t got it, D.S. Believe me. I don’t know where it is.”

He edged toward her. She backed up a step, two steps. He ran to grab her then realized he was out in the open where anybody could jump him.

“You held out on me,” he snarled.

She hurried up the street, checking over her shoulder. So D.S. was after her, too. That made everybody. Everybody she knew believed she had the money, along with how many others she didn’t know. She never would have thought D.S. would act like this after all they’d meant to each other. On the other hand, she would have thought he would if she’d thought about it. Like, it wasn’t as far from impossible as anything she could imagine. When you got right down to it, if anybody was going to be bone-fuckin’ stupid enough to figure she had Frank’s loot, it would be D.S. So it was going to occur to him sooner or later. And when it did, he was bound to want her to give it to him, even if he didn’t happen to be desperate to get away from the police. Not because he was greedy or anything like that. Or selfish. It was just the kind of person he was.

She kept out of sight the rest of the day. And she decided she’d better not sleep in the house that night. It turned out to be a smart idea.

Victor didn’t believe that Raoul had prospected for oil way up north in the Arctic regions. But he didn’t believe he’d been at Abu Ghraib or that he’d been an expert in torturing the prisoners there either. When he got right down to it, Victor didn’t think there was anything Raoul might say about himself he would ever believe, but those were the only two things he’d ever heard him say, so it was all he had to go on. Victor still didn’t believe his name was Raoul, either. What kind of an individual would go around with a name like Raoul? The same kind of individual who would barbecue Frank Carson’s guts when Carson was right in the middle of telling them where the money was. The way Victor saw things, it took a major asshole to do that. If Raoul ever called himself a major asshole, Victor would have believed him. So there actually was one thing Raoul could have said about himself that Victor would have believed. But then, it was the only thing he had proof of.

Raoul had phoned Herbert, the human resources consultant who had teamed the two of them up and given them the job of tracking down the loot from the fake robbery of the Great Big One National Bank, and filled him in on his expertise in using explosives to find oil. He told Herbert he believed it would work better than anything else when it came to locating the missing 1.18 million dollars in Carson’s sister’s house.

It was Herbert’s first departure from his normal way of doing business, which was supplying ex-convicts to contractors who needed certain work done. He was employing Victor and Raoul himself because he was going to get out of prison soon and thought that if he got hold of the money, he could use it as a stake in whatever line of work he went into as a civilian. Neither of them was a terrific example of the personnel he usually offered to clients, but Herbert hoped that if he put them together they would cancel out each other’s personality disorders. He also didn’t have a lot to choose from at the moment. Clients at both ends — looking for employers, and looking for employees — had been steering clear of him ever since his last bright prospect, Frank Carson, decided right in the middle of the Great Big One job to become an independent operator, and then went up in smoke.

If Raoul was absolutely convinced the money was under the cement floor in Carson’s sister’s cellar, and that nobody had found it because they didn’t have his expert knowledge of the latest seismic exploration techniques used in underground searches, and if he could do it, fine. That was how Herbert saw it. And if Herbert was prepared to sign off on such a stupid fuckin’ idea, that was all Victor needed to go along with it, because if they came out with nothing, what did it matter: he was on a retainer. And if they came out with the cash, he would disappear the hell out of there with all of it before Raoul’s body even stopped twitching. Victor figured blowing the asshole’s brains out the instant they saw the money was the best idea, because the scheme Raoul would have come up with to knock Victor off would be so totally fuckin’ complicated that by the time he got it underway, it would be too late.

Victor couldn’t believe anybody still lived in the house. All that was left standing were the living room, the bathroom, and part of one of the bedrooms, which was no longer connected to the other rooms. The stairs to the cellar only went halfway down. Victor looked things over down there, scraping at the floor with his shoe. “I can’t see where anybody has dug up any of this,” he said.

“You wouldn’t be able to tell,” Raoul said.

“What do you mean I wouldn’t?” Victor was getting a little tired of Raoul telling him what he wasn’t able to do. “I can see that nobody has dug into this fuckin’ floor since the concrete was poured, whenever the hell that was. So how’s he supposed to bury the money under it?”

“You forget he was a paving contractor.” Raoul flashed a smile that was even bigger than the one he’d been smiling.

“What?”

“That’s what Herbert said.”

“Herbert said he was a fuckin’ con man.”

Raoul’s smile got brighter still. “A fraudulent paving contractor can make anything look perfectly paved. It is a skill the good ones acquire.”

Victor closed his eyes. “You really do have —”

“What?”

But Victor decided it was the wrong time to say “snakes in your head” to somebody who had as many snakes in his head as this wacko.

“You really do have … this all worked out. I’m very impressed.”

“Think nothing of it,” Raoul said.

Back in the car, he handed Victor something that Victor took one look at and handed back so fast he hardly touched it. “This is the baby that will do the job for us,” Raoul said.

“It looks like a fuckin’ bomb,” Victor said.

“Now here, my friend,” Raoul said, “is another example of you not being familiar with the state of the art. It is a seismic charge —”

“Isn’t that a stick of dynamite?” Victor pointed nervously at something long and skinny wrapped in what looked like red waxed paper. It stuck out each end of the device.

“— and is designed to send precisely calibrated vibrations deep into the earth. The echoes from these vibrations will be picked up by these sensitive microphones” — he held up a Baggie full of round black things — “that I will plant around the site to transmit the signals from the seismic echoes to this computer.” He patted a laptop. “Any unusual formation under the concrete will be delineated, and that will be the thing we’re after.”

“Is it a fuckin’ stick of dynamite or isn’t it?” Victor said.

“In this instance,” Raoul beamed, “not having had time to acquire the specialized charges used in petroleum exploration, I have been obliged to use this somewhat cruder material. But there’s no need to be afraid of it. Unless an electrical charge is applied to the detonator —” he pointed to a thing that had wires coming out of it “— dynamite is completely inert. You could hit it with a hammer. You could even,” he said, lighting up so much that Victor wanted to shield his eyes, “you could even eat it and not do yourself the slightest harm. Would you care to taste a little bit and see?”

“Fuck you,” Victor said.

The only person who was ever in the house any more was a woman they took to be Carson’s sister who sometimes slept on the living room couch. Tonight, though, there was no sign of her. They climbed down inside with tiny flashlights and cleared a space in the middle of the cellar floor. That was where Raoul placed the seismic device. He connected a switch to the detonator wires. He put a bunch of microphones around the walls and ran wires from these to the laptop.

They climbed out and moved back a ways. “Now I’ll just give it a little prune juice,” Raoul said.

“Like you used to say at Abu Ghraib,” Victor said, getting dazzling glints of Raoul’s smile from the streetlights.

“What?” Raoul said. “We never said anything like that in Iraq. It was a term that was used exclusively while exploring the Arctic petroleum fields.” And he turned the switch.

It wasn’t loud.

Not much more than a thump.

There weren’t any flames.

Victor felt the thump under his feet, but it didn’t jolt him around or anything.

Then the entire rest of the house crashed down into the basement.

A gigantic whoosh of dust rose up, turning the night foggy, dimming the streetlight, and when it finally cleared they saw that the whole cellar was piled with the walls and floor and roof and all the other stuff that collapsed into it, piled entirely full, like a swimming pool filled to the brim with trash. If the loot did happen to be buried under the floor, now it was buried under the floor and an enormous heap of beams and slivery boards and plumbing and shingles.

Raoul typed at the laptop. “I’m not getting a reading,” he said. “Very strange.”

“You fuckin’ cocksucker,” Victor said.

“Hmmmmm,” Raoul said, as if trying to figure out if some calculation had been overlooked. He shone his flashlight on the switch to see whether it might be wired incorrectly.

But the “Hmmmmm” was the last sound he ever made, because Victor pulled a gun out of his pocket, stuck the end of it in Raoul’s ear and pulled the trigger.

The police came the next day after somebody noticed his body lying beside where the house used to be. Since the Dolgoy family had abandoned it, nobody bothered to phone 911, even though when it fell down Ed Oataway called JannaRose to come and see. Nina’s daughters followed her out the front door, and Fabreece and Gwinny started crying, but Lady told them Nina wasn’t in the wreckage, so they shouldn’t worry. They said they weren’t worried about Nina; they knew full well that she wasn’t in it when it happened. They were crying because the only home they had was gone. Lady told them to suck it up. It wasn’t like there weren’t lots of other places around just as good.

It didn’t take long to identify the body, and it turned out his name really was Raoul. But it was more than a year before anybody discovered the other two dead people. That was when the foundation was dug out so apartments could be built. Kevin Olorgasele and J. Ridgeway Mbunzu of the Nigerian Finance Ministry, having just been reunited after believing each other was dead, and having been severely beaten, were just starting to get a little of their strength back when Raoul exploded his seismic device and the house fell on top of them. They never really got a chance to form a good impression of what life was like in this country.