Nina, the Bandit Queen. Joey Slinger

      Dedication

      For Peter Slinger, and Garth Graham,

       and the Relentless Spirit of Big Trout Lake

      One

      Nina Carson Dolgoy pulled at the back of her T-shirt to make sure it wasn’t stuffed into the waistband of her sweats when she came out on the porch. That’s what everybody in her family called it, even though it didn’t have a roof or anything. It was just flat concrete with holes in the corners where there once were posts that held up some kind of railing. The railings and everything had been stolen before Nina and D.S. and the girls moved in, and D.S. said it was good that they had been, because it would have been way too crowded if everybody was out there at once and the sides weren’t wide open. What had never gotten stolen were the old broken-down washer and dryer that he and Nina hauled onto it from where somebody had left them in the hall, blocking the front door. This had made it almost impossible to push the door open when Nina noticed the house was vacant and decided they might as well live there. It was getting dark when she spotted it, and she was relieved because they’d been looking for a new place ever since the men with the bulldozer and the man from the city had showed up that morning and chased them out of their old house.

      They didn’t have to break in. The door didn’t have a lock or even a knob, just those two clunky old white machines propping it closed. Later on, when D.S. would look around the porch, he’d say what a shame it was that somebody hadn’t come along and snatched the washer and dryer, because they hardly left room on the porch for anybody, but almost two years had passed since he and Nina stacked them out there, and he was beginning to think nobody was ever going to.

      The sky was getting light enough that Nina could see the outlines of the high-rise apartment towers up at The Intersection. Down here, in the part of town people called SuEz, it was still too shadowy to see much of anything. Nothing seemed to be moving anyway. Certainly not anything that might have made the weird-kind-of-music noise or the barking noise she heard. The noises hadn’t wakened Nina — the heat had. Except, when she thought about it, the heat had kept her awake all night. Except, from the way she felt, it was like she’d been awake forever and was going to stay that way. So she hauled herself out of bed and went to see what was going on. It wasn’t like she had anything better to do.

      Across the street, JannaRose was out of her house, too. She was standing between parked cars with her head to one side, listening. The noises came again, louder now. Skittery music. Then something that sounded like barking. JannaRose flipped her hands palms-up: Beats me. She tipped her head back and closed her eyes. She stood like that for so long, it was as if she’d dozed off. Then she said, “It’s gotta be —”

      Nina beat her to it. “Cops.”

      JannaRose opened one eye. “— an ice cream truck.” Not that she looked proud of her answer. What would an ice cream truck be doing out at this time of day? At this time of day on a school day?

      “Cops.”

      “What about the music?”

      Not long after they’d met, Nina’d told JannaRose her theory about cops. “If there are two ways to do something,” she’d said, “the sensible way and the completely fuckin’ stupid way, the cops will pick the one that makes you think they only take their heads out of their asses so they can blow their nose.” It turned out to be the sort of thing that both women believed.

      So Nina had an answer to the music question. “Undercover cops,” she said. “They’re using an ice cream truck to sneak up on some gangster’s house.”

      “Freeze, assholes!” JannaRose squared into a two-fisted stance, pointing her finger at Nina.

      “Mr. Freezee, assholes!” Nina said, aiming back.

      It was too hot to laugh. It was too hot to bullshit around. The women drooped. SuEz would have too except it was already drooped about as much as it was possible to droop and had been for as long as anybody could remember. It was pronounced the same as the canal in Egypt and ended up called that because it’s the southwest end of the part of the city called South Chester. South Chester takes in everything up as far as The Intersection, where the subway station is, and the high-rise apartment towers. North of that, it’s just plain Chester. Over a long period it got so everybody just called the southwest end “Southwest,” and in time this got mumbled into sounding like it was SuEz. Then it got spelled that way.

      It was regarded by the people who lived there as the worst part of town, mostly because for years it had been regarded as the worst part of town by people who didn’t live there. From a practical point of view, though, it depended on what your idea of “worst” was. The residents of SuEz often mentioned to each other how even the whores stayed out of SuEz because their customers were afraid to drive there. And how not much dope was dealt to the locals because nobody who lived in SuEz could afford even the cheapest stuff. This was the general theory anyway. Sometimes it included how the cops stayed out of it, too, and not because it was crime-free, except it sort of was, since nobody had anything worth stealing.

      On the other hand, the people who lived there were pretty insular, and while there were plenty of reasons for them being that way, it meant they really didn’t have much else to judge by.

      Tootlety-tootlety-tootlety!

      “I don’t fuckin’ believe it.” Nina sounded like she was trying not to yell.

      About five blocks up, maybe a quarter of the way to The Intersection, a truck with a flat nose crept out of a side street and onto theirs. Yellow lights flashed at the corners of the roof. Tootlety-tootlety-tootlety!

      “What’ll the cops go around disguised like next?” JannaRose never passed up an opportunity to stick it to Nina, because Nina was one of those people who could get really irritated when anybody noticed they were full of it. “The Seven Dwarfs?” This time, though, she took only the one small shot and dropped it. She could hardly believe the truck either.

      Tootlety-tootlety-tootlety! Followed by the sharp bark of amplified words still too far off to make out. But JannaRose did have to concede one thing: It sounded like cops. The way cops would sound if they sold ice cream.

      “Shit.” Nina was having a hard time trusting her eyes. Up there, when the truck pulled over to the curb, tiny figures — child-sized figures — were appearing out of houses. When it stopped in front of the little apartment buildings, the loudspeaker barked longer and clusters of the tiny figures spilled out on the walks. Grownups straggled behind them, hunched from just having crawled out of bed. But so far, everybody kept their distance. Nobody went right up to the truck. They stretched their necks almost as if they were sniffing it, not quite sure what to do.

      “That truck’s talking to those people,” JannaRose said.

      “Ice cream trucks always —”

      “No. Shut up. It’s —”

      “‘Hellllll-OH!’ they say. Then they play some tinkly —”

      “Shut up! Listen!” As the truck moved closer, the words came clearer. “It’s talking right to those kids. It knows their names.”

      Every single one of their names. All of them. It called each and every one over the loudspeaker.

      “I don’t fuckin’ believe it.”

      “It doesn’t matter if you believe it,” JannaRose said. “It’s —”

      “It’s fuckin’ insane.”

      “Alessandra,” the truck was saying, when at last they could hear it plainly. “Come and get a Glacier Gloopster.” And, “Tyree, there’s a Choc-Sicle Swirler here for you. You come right over