Читать книгу Nina, the Bandit Queen - Joey Slinger - Страница 10

What came out of all the visionary stuff whirling around in Nina’s head was her theory that if they collected a huge enough amount of money and donated it to rebuilding the school pool, other people might feel the urge to donate some of their own. There is an official, financial term for what she imagined would kick-start this outpouring of generosity — it’s called seed money — but she had never heard of such a thing and neither had anybody else she talked to about it. Some people went so far as to scoff.

“You’re nuts,” JannaRose said.

On top of that, if they could somehow collect enough money to get the pool going again, wouldn’t people naturally start paying attention to them? Enough attention that maybe they could get somebody to talk to the ice cream company? Somebody like the mayor?

“Really fuckin’ nuts.”

If Nina had never heard of seed money, she never thought of the money they’d need to get the project rolling as bank robbery money, either. Anybody could raise money any way that suited them. It just happened that this was the only one that fit her skill set. But it wasn’t until JannaRose started hinting that it would be nice if Nina’s brother’s plan for when he got out of jail included a position that Ed Oataway might fill that the idea of acquiring the necessary money by robbing a bank began jumping up and down in the back of her mind, demanding attention. Filling such a position would get Ed out of hock with the parent company for the Pontiac a whole lot faster than the only other obvious way, which was stealing a bunch of cars from people who didn’t want them stolen. Suspecting where that would lead and not wishing to see her family broken apart caused JannaRose to slam things so hard that Nina could hear it across the street. Nina figured that was probably why JannaRose was doing it, but she also couldn’t help but think that behaving like that would be out of character for JannaRose unless things looked quite a bit worse than usual.

As far as Nina could see, the idea of Frank robbing anything was idiotic. It wasn’t necessarily that he was too dumb — he was smarter than Ed Oataway. Even she had to admit that much. But robbery wasn’t his style. Nina always believed that people gravitated to whatever they were intended to do the way quarters and dimes and so on gravitated through the right holes in those machines that sort coins at the supermarket. It was why Frank leaned toward selling driveway resurfacing to old people and then disappearing with their downpayments. If he’d wanted to squeeze out of them the rest of the money they’d agreed to pay, he’d have had to come back with a barrel of used crankcase oil to brush on the driveway so it looked decent until it dried, by which time he’d have vanished with all their money.

But for this he’d have needed a truck, and if there was one thing that ranked up there with the Law of Gravity in SuEz, it was the situation when it came to trucks. The situation was that anybody in SuEz who had a truck had stolen it in the last hour or so, and the only thing they’d be interested in was selling it — not using it to do something else. A truck was a short-term proposition. Besides that, there would have been the hard work required to brush the fake stuff on some old fart’s driveway, and Frank could live without hard work every bit as well as he could live happily with just their downpayments. Sometimes he’d branch out into landscaping — design and construction. The deal there was the same as driveway resurfacing, especially the part where he told them how it would increase the value of their property. This particularly appealed to people who were going to have to sell soon and move into an old folks’ home. The same business fundamentals were involved: extremely low overhead and a minimum of labour and physical risk.

Frank never cared any more for risk that Ed Oataway did. D.S. used to say that was why Frank never would have made it in legitimate business, where some customer would beat the shit out of you without any warning and you’d be sent home with no compensation, until you were healthy enough to go back to work. According to D.S., if the economy had as many downturns as he did personally, people would still be getting their groceries by sneaking up behind them and hitting them with a rock. When he first said that, Nina was on the verge of remarking, “Would you run that by me again?” but by then she’d been around D.S. long enough to realize life was too short.

It was Frank’s negative attitude toward risk that made Nina think bank robbery was an extremely strange venture for him to undertake. But anybody who thought her opinion on this would have any effect on Frank’s plans, or Ed’s for that matter, was entirely out of touch. Frank had never been even slightly interested in his sister’s opinion about anything, or anybody else’s that she could think of. And Ed had by now definitely decided that Nina couldn’t be a bigger pain in the ass if she was triplets, and the only thing he was interested in hearing from her ever again was maybe a cry for help when a great big hole opened up in the ground and swallowed her and she disappeared forever. “I wouldn’t lift a fuckin’ finger,” he told D.S.

D.S. said that was entirely up to Ed. After getting a face-full of hubcap that night, he’d decided that whatever was going on between Ed and Nina was their business and he was better off staying out of it.

Then again, Frank had been locked up for three years, and who could say? Something could have happened to him the way it apparently sometimes did in jail. Nina didn’t know many people other than Ed and Frank who had ever done time. They weren’t all over the place in SuEz the way they were in the towers, where D.S. used to say there were three kinds of folks: the ones who just got out of jail; the ones who were in jail at the moment — probably this was the reason so many of the apartments were unoccupied; and finally the ones who were trying to think of something they could do that would get them sent to jail. Down where he and Nina and the girls lived, everybody was generally too busy doing whatever it took to get through the day to spend the time necessary to put together the sort of deal that would get the police tactical squad introducing itself by asking them to lean their hands against the wall and spread their legs. The chances of that weren’t quite as long as any of them entering their yacht in the next America’s Cup, but pretty close. Criminal-type things did occur, of course, but they were almost always unpremeditated.

Nina said in those cases jail amounted to a big time out. Everybody got a chance to cool off, on top of which a convict could treat the time behind bars as a developmental experience, during which they could catch up on the movies they’d missed since the TV got stolen from their house. And there were some people who just plain benefited from the routine that went with being locked away. She looked straight at Merlina when she said this, although Merly believed it was because she was the only other person in the family who realized that her sisters didn’t know the meaning of responsibility.

Frank was as good-looking as the guys in those Bud Light commercials. What he wasn’t, however, was anywhere near as ambitious as even the Bud Light guys. This was another thing that made his plan to hold up a bank sort of curious, because from the way Ed talked, it sounded as if there was more to it than simply getting out of jail and sticking up some branch in a plaza the way a person might if they happened to be walking by one and it occurred to them that since they were broke, they might as well whip in and rob it.

The only time he ever had anything like ambition, it had led directly to winning what D.S. called a full scholarship to Hard-Time U. He wouldn’t have landed in jail if he hadn’t gotten involved with a woman who was remarkable for a number of reasons that would also include, when he got out, being the registered owner of a five-hundred-thousand dollar Porsche sports car. To show how much he loved her — and this was maybe the most remarkable thing about this woman, because before meeting her, Frank was always entirely satisfied to let his girlfriends show how much they loved him — anyway, to show his love for her, he felt obliged to improve his financial standing. This led him to become a major operator, contracting to do high-end condominium developments, pave and landscape them, the whole deal. But other than make the numbers he quoted bigger, he didn’t even slightly change the approach he’d used to fleece old retired people. That’s why it didn’t take the individuals who were bankrolling these projects long to start asking themselves what was up with this guy. Unless he was some kind of mental case who was so far off his meds that he was flying at an altitude where even birds couldn’t breathe, then somebody must be shaking them down. And for some reason or other, whoever it was had sent this wiener to put his foot in the door. What made it really confusing was that they couldn’t figure out how this scheme Frank was fronting was supposed to pay off for whoever was behind it, because, as their accountants said when they got them to look at the estimates he’d given them, the whole thing was too stupid for words.

Was Nina surprised? When it rained, did her roof leak? The way she looked at it, Frank was lucky he never got too many ideas, because whenever he came up with one, he’d just go with it. For instance, he’d never bothered to figure out that the difference between dealing with these people and with the old farts who made up his former clientele was that he should avoid irritating these people in any way at all. In fact, he should go to great lengths to keep them from feeling even a tiny itch.

Nina said this was because of the way he processed information. When something useful blew into his head, there was no place for it to land, so it just blew around for awhile and blew out again, like a candy wrapper. The big money in these deals was unaware of this, however, and until Frank showed up, they were under the impression that they had paid off all the necessary interests so nobody would try to muscle in on their ventures. For their part, the necessary interests were under the impression that they were the only necessary interests, so they could relax, since the only thing they had to think about was how they could muscle the big money out and take over for themselves.

Every one of these people had concluded that Frank was pissing in their soup.

Men of this calibre had long since put violence behind them as a business technique except as a last resort, but who wanted to use violence against some guy with nothing more than a smile and a shiny suit when the organization behind him was so mysterious they couldn’t even get a read on it and might risk everything in a fruitless bloodbath?

These days, instead of violence, they used lawyers, but what good were lawyers when, far from being able to identify this guy’s backers, all they could find out was that he appeared out of and disappeared back into the stink and misery of SuEz? So the only thing left for them was to turn the matter of Frank Carson over to the courts. Several of these individuals got in touch with the senior police officers they kept on retainer for various purposes such as corporate and government relations. The charges these police officers came up with in turn were so obviously trumped up that the judge couldn’t help but assume that the accused must have done something extremely wrong. Whoever was fucking him up the ass had a lot of influence, and why else would they have gone to this much trouble? On those grounds, eleven years seemed about right.

When Ed Oataway got back from visiting the penitentiary and mentioned Frank’s plans, the things that began to cross Nina’s mind were quite understandable when you consider that her familiarity with her brother and his shortcomings went back to the day he was born, and then take into account the astounding things she was starting to discover about her own capabilities. She was so wrapped up in working out all the implications that she sat on the porch for ages the next morning, her legs dangling over the side, and didn’t even notice the ice cream truck rolling toward her.

“Cassie,” it was blaring, “you didn’t buy that Marshmallow Whizzard we had for you yesterday. That makes us very, very sad, because we made it for you and nobody else. You don’t really want us to be sad, do you Cassie?”

And, “Leo Lee Roy, you told us yesterday you didn’t have any money to pay for your Mount Ever-Ice. And we told you to go and talk to your mama and tell her how embarrassed you would be when everybody on the street finds out why she’s too cheap to buy you a treat. Here, we brought a brand-new one for you today. We sure hope you’re ready this time.”

And, “Trafford? We don’t see you. Are you hiding, Trafford? Get out here and get this Devil’s Frost-D-Lite. You don’t want us to take your name off our list, do you? If we do that you’ll never be able to get back on it. You’ll be gone forever.”

She didn’t even look up when her girls came out to watch heaven on wheels go rolling by. Not even when Merlina said “Mom?” — which was something the others urged her to do every time the truck came along, because she had a gift for saying it in a way that made Nina feel like the most useless mother who ever lived, so useless it was hard to understand why the authorities didn’t put her children out for adoption.

This time Nina didn’t even hear her. It was because that way-down-deep-inside-her spirit that had guided her into the ice cream company parking lot — and had led her, she now finally realized, to do what she’d done in the confrontation with the ice cream truck in front of her house — it was because that same spirit that made her breath get so short and her skin tingle like her nerves were full of static electricity was speaking to her again, only with a whole lot more determination than it had those other times.

“That fuckin’ moron,” the spirit was saying, referring to her brother Frank Carson. “That fuckin’ moron could never rob a bank.”

Then it paused. And cleared its throat to make sure it had her undivided attention. And when it saw she was listening with every single part of her body, it said, very pointedly, “But I could.”