Free Nina, the Bandit Queen by Joey Slinger Page B

because that’s the kind of guys they were, and because they had the kind of friends who took a peculiar delight in dealing with individuals who thought this wasn’t fair.
    There was one guy in there who made a good living as a headhunter for a number of outside organizations. He saw early on that Frank was presentable and sensitive to his environment and that he kept whatever was on his mind to himself without being a prick about it. The guy’s name was Herbert, and Herbert had a feeling that Frank would be an ideal prospect for one of his clients down the road. One thing he wrote in Frank’s file was that Frank had absolutely no ambition. What this indicated to Herbert was that he might not be bone dumb, which a lot of inmates figured he was, based on the crime he’d been sent up for. You could be smart as hell and not have any ambition; it just meant you fucked the dog to a different drummer.
    So Herbert listed him as a solo operator with no identifiable goals who could be valuable in an enterprise where you needed somebody you could count on to do what they’d been told and not be even slightly interested in getting creative. Frank actually made Herbert sad that his clients represented such a narrow range of employers. He could have made a ton of money selling him as one of those guys who read the news on TV. They always had truly exceptional haircuts. Herbert thought this was because they paid a great deal to get it cut that way, but here he saw Frank getting his hair cut by the same inmates who cut everybody else’s hair, and his haircut always looked like one of those anchormen haircuts. Until Frank came along, it had never occurred to Herbert that those haircuts he saw on TV were the result of some inner quality.
    When the opening for the job at the bank turned up a couple of months before he was due to get out, having done three of his eleven years, Frank figured it would be a snap. Walk in, wave the gun around in a threatening manner, grab a bank executive named Milner and put the gun to his head after firing a bullet into the ceiling so everybody in the place realizes it’s a real gun and he means real business. Milner’s personal assistant would make a big show of bustling around filling a gym bag with cash. The bank would have far more cash on hand than it usually did, because Milner would have ordered extra to supply the advance requests he had forged from a number of depositors who planned to make large withdrawals on the same day, coincidentally. When the bag was handed to him, Frank was to race out of the building and be driven to an arranged destination. Herbert was as confident about recommending him as he’d ever been about anybody. His long experience as a human resources consultant made it clear to him that here was one of those truly rare individuals. Not only could he be trusted, but when he got blown away after the loot was delivered, nobody would give a shit. He was just some fuckhead from SuEz with no connections.

Nine
    Since becoming a community activist, Nina had never worked without an accomplice. JannaRose had been right there beside her when she forced the ice cream truck to back down in front of her house. She’d been at her side when she’d launched her attack on the ice cream trucks in the parking lot at the ice cream factory. It was too bad she hadn’t been feeling better the day they scouted the downtown bank to see if it was suitable for robbing, but Nina understood how that could affect JannaRose’s views when it came to the next stage. Sometimes you do something when you’re not feeling well, and you don’t want to do it ever again because it’s associated in your mind with how you felt at the time.
    When Nina washed her runners out under the kitchen tap after JannaRose threw up on them, she noticed that the water ran out of the first one where the top part had come unglued from the sole. When she did the other one, it was the same. She hadn’t realized they were that