Free Nina, the Bandit Queen by Joey Slinger Page A

said. “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter that we’re the only ones wearing sweats.”
    “What’re you talking about?”
    “About you standing here in the middle of the sidewalk not moving.”
    The crowd flowed around them as if the women had been in that exact spot for years and everybody was used to them.
    “I’m fine,” JannaRose said. This could be considered an odd thing for anybody to say who had been with Nina on what Nina had said was going to be a scouting expedition to the lot where the ice cream company parked its trucks, making it sound as if the only thing she had in mind was checking it out. When they were getting on the subway at The Intersection, Nina had kept calling this morning’s expedition a scouting expedition, too.
    “Are you going to be sick?”
    “No.”
    “Then come on.”
    JannaRose threw up. She stared at her dripping hand as if it was the most repulsive thing she’d ever laid eyes on. Then she looked at the puddle on the sidewalk. “I’m fine,” she said.
    A minute later they were through the front doors. The bank’s security videotapes would show, just inside the lobby, two thirtyish women of less than average height and more than average weight, although only Nina was thirty. JannaRose was four years younger.
    The one in the dark blue sweats with the white piping and the maroon T-shirt was standing facing the one in the light green sweats and light green T-shirt, holding her by both shoulders. The one in the light green sweats had her head down and was shaking it sadly. The one in the blue sweats appeared to be talking earnestly to her. The one in the green sweats threw up on the shoes of the one in the blue sweats. The one in the blue sweats looked at her shoes and threw both hands in the air. Then she dragged the one in green sweats back through the front door and out of camera range.
    When JannaRose backed out on her, it left Nina with no choice but to press ahead on her own. If she didn’t, the swimming pool wouldn’t get fixed and her daughters wouldn’t have any outlet apart from the usual ones available to girls in their part of town. But it wasn’t as if she didn’t have a lot of other things she could be doing, such as getting squared away with the welfare department.
    “Welfare giveth, and sometimes welfare taketh away even more than —”
    “Blow it out your ass, D.S.”
    “What’d I do now?”
    “Nothing.” Big time. Not a single goddamn thing.
    Whether Nina was right when she said her brother couldn’t rob a bank really didn’t matter. The bank he would be dealing with had been pre-robbed the same way a TV dinner is pre-cooked, and any bank robbing skills he might or might not have had were irrelevant. If the loot had been a TV dinner instead of 1.18 million in cash, his job amounted to taking it out of the oven when it was ready and jumping into a getaway car with it.
    That he had the talent to do this had been noticed in prison, where Frank turned out to be something he’d never been on the outside — a solid citizen. This probably wasn’t surprising when you consider that for the first time in his life he didn’t have to worry about making a living. Not that he’d ever worried about it, but in prison the pressure was cranked down to zero. Naturally he had to be careful about a few things. Making eye contact with other inmates when it wasn’t appropriate, for example, could lead to a spectrum of possibilities running from the fatal to an invitation to get romantically involved that you had to accept even if you would rather die, which you might if you didn’t. It was good for him that he couldn’t be bothered to deal drugs, which would have angered drug dealers, and that he had enough good manners not to win too much at poker, because there were inmates who resented it if they were the ones who lost. Added to that were inmates who got interested in big winnings even if they never played the game, but considered themselves entitled to a cut