Nina, the Bandit Queen
Page 23
The instant Gladly Bradley had run to the back of the bus and Carlo jumped aboard, Nina herded her girls behind Carlo’s back and out the door. They ran until the shooting stopped, and the next thing they knew they were standing beside the Elwell’s tow truck with its yellow lights flashing as if there had been a traffic accident and they were looking for customers. L. Roy and L. Ray were telling the police that Nina hadn’t stolen the school bus after all. There had been a clerical error. Somebody in middle management got overexcited when they saw it wasn’t in the yard and called 911. To tell the truth, they had loaned it to the Dolgoys so they could go down to the beach for a swim. Little did the Elwells dream what might happen as a result.
Then they told Nina they were retiring from the service centre and, out of gratitude to her for being so community-spirited, and because of their affection for her late brother Frank, they were letting her have the tow truck for her own personal use for as long as she wanted.
“What?” Nina kept saying.
“What?” Even the cops were saying it.
But the Elwells said they’d cleared everything with their attorneys, led the sisters over to the truck, and boosted them into it. Because it had four doors and a back seat, they all fit in with room to spare.
“Now get the hell out of here,” L. Ray said to Nina.
“While the getting’s good,” L. Roy said.
“And this is as good as it’s ever going to get.”
“Don’t listen to him,” L. Roy said. “He says that to all the girls.”
Nina didn’t leave right then, though. She parked the truck out of the way a bit and told her daughters to be quiet. She wanted to make sure. And before long, a police department hauler hooked on to the school bus, pulled it up on its flatbed, and drove off with it, the tires still a little blacker than they had been.
“There,” she said.
Then they got the hell out of there. For a long time nobody spoke. For one thing, nobody but Nina knew she had the seventy-five hundred dollars socked away that her brother Frank had hidden in the tire-repair can and, what with one thing and another, it didn’t occur to her to mention it. For another, it never occurred to anybody that they were about to get into the tow-truck business until Nina asked, out of the blue, “I wonder how you tow something with one of these?”
“Ask Lady,” Merlina said.
Lady had been leaning forward studying the dashboard with its dials and buttons and switches and toggles and levers and police-radio scanners. She looked very intense. “It’s so not a problem,” she said.
Copyright © Joey Slinger, 2012
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