Read Online Nina, the Bandit Queen by Joey Slinger - Free Book Online

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