2
RICHIE NIX BOUGHT A T-SHIRT at Henry’s restaurant in Algonac that had it’s nice to be nice written across the front. He changed in the men’s room: took off his old T-shirt and threw it away, put on the new one looking at himself in the mirror, but then didn’t know what to do with his gun. If he put his denim jacket back on to hide the nickel-plate .38 revolver stuck in his jeans, you couldn’t read the T-shirt. What he did was roll the .38 up inside the jacket and carried it into the dining area.
There was a big it’s nice to be nice wood-carved sign on the shellacked knotty-pine wall in the main room, over past the salad bar. It had been the restaurant’s slogan for fifty years. Most people who came to Henry’s liked a table by the front windows, so they could watch the freighters go by while they ate their dinner. Richie Nix took a table off to the side where he could look at freighters and ore carriers if he wanted, though he was more interested this evening in keeping an eye on the restaurant parking lot. He needed a car for a new business he was getting into.
The waitress brought him a beer. He looked up, taking a drink from the can, and there was a big goddamn ore carrier a thousand feet long passing from the river into the channel. Richie grinned at the sight. It was neat the way the boat looked like it was going right through the woods. It went by the point of Russell Island, a narrow neck of land, and you saw the boat through the trees without seeing the channel. It could be going to Ford Rouge or one of the mills downriver from Detroit.
For the past few weeks Richie had been staying with a woman he’d gotten to know at Huron Valley when he was doing time there a couple of years back and she was a corrections officer in charge of food services. Her name was Donna, Donna Mulry. She was retired now, actually forced out, after twenty-five years working in corrections, and didn’t like the way they’d treated her. Richie Nix believed she was close to fifty, old enough to be his foster mom (he never knew his real one), but she was a little thing with a nice shape, a big butt on her for her size and not too bad-looking. Donna had retired to Marine City, the next town up the river, and spent four hours a day driving a school bus for the East China Township system. She’d come home ready to play Yahtzee, which she loved, or watch TV, have some drinks. Donna introduced him to her favorite, Southern Comfort and 7-Up. It was pretty good. After a while she’d ask him what kind of Campbell soup and frozen gourmet dinner he wanted, Donna never having learned to prepare a meal for less than twelve hundred people at a time. She’d have on her sparkly cat-lady glasses and her orange hair a pile of curls trying to look young and sexy for him. She was always fussing over him. He let her pierce his ear and stick a little diamond in it. He let her wash his hair with a special conditioner to take out the oil and bring back its natural luster, but drew the line at letting her cut it. Long hair made you feel you could do what you wanted. Short hair was what you had entering prison life. She’d say, “Honey, don’t you want to look nice for your Donna?”
Richie knew he could do better than her and her frozen dinners. He was being nice to Donna in return for her being nice to him in the joint. Otherwise she was not in his class. Hell, he had an NCIC sheet that printed out of that national crime computer as tall as he was: six feet in his curl-toed cowboy boots with three inner soles inside. His ambition was to rob a bank in every state of the union—or maybe just forty-nine, fuck Alaska— which he believed would be some kind of record, get him in that book as the All-American Bank Robber. He had thirty-seven states to go but was young.
Right now Richie was considering a score he’d lined up that was way different than robbery. It was higher class and took some thought.
Meanwhile he spent his leisure time drinking Southern and Sevens and watching TV with Donna pawing him or listening to her tell him how, after devoting her life to corrections, they had treated her like dirt. Richie’s opinion was that if you liked corrections it meant you wanted to live with colored, because that’s what it amounted to. He’d tell her from experience. The first place he was sent, the Wayne County Youth Home, stuck in Unit Five North with twenty guys, all colored. In Georgia, when he got the six-to-eight for intent to rob and kidnap, he did three and a half at Reidsville, most of it stoop labor, all day in the pea fields with them. Hell, he’d been eligible to serve time in some of the most famous prisons of the south, Huntsville, Angola, Parchman, and Raiford, all of them full of colored, but had lucked out down there and only drew the conviction in Georgia. Okay, then the two years in the federal joint at Terre Haute, they were mostly white where he was. But then the transfer to Huron Valley put him back in with the colored again. How could she like living among guys, white or colored, that would tear your ass out for the least reason? Donna said, “Women are good for a prison. They have a calming effect on the inmates and make their life seem more normal.” Richie said, “Hey, Donna? Bull shit.”
He’d get tired of lying around and go for a drive in Donna’s little Honda kiddycar, go over to Harsens Island on the ferry and wonder about those summer homes boarded up, nobody in them. Stop at a bar on the island where retired guys in plaid shirts came in the afternoon to drink beer, waiting out their time. It was depressing. Donna told him to stay out of the bar at Sans Souci, Indians from Walpole Island drank there and got ugly. Oh, was that right? Richie dropped by one evening and glared for an hour at different ones and nobody made a move. Shit, Indians weren’t nothing to handle. Go in a colored joint and glare you’d bleed all the way to the hospital.
The score he had a line on had come about sort of by accident. One night bored to death listening to Donna and watching TV, Richie slipped out to hold up a store or a gas station and couldn’t find anything open that looked good. So he broke into a house, a big one all dark, on Anchor Bay; got inside and started creeping through rooms—shit, the place was empty. He hadn’t noticed the for sale sign in the front yard. It got Richie so mad he tore out light fixtures, pissed on the carpeting, stopped up the sink and turned the water on and was thinking what else he could do, break some windows, when the idea came to him all at once. He thought about it a few minutes there in the dark, went out and got the name and number off the for sale sign.
Nelson Davies Realty.
Richie had seen the company’s green-and-gold signs all over the Anchor Bay area from Mount Clemens to Algonac and had heard their radio ads in the car: sound effects like a gust of wind whistling by, gone, and a voice says, “Nelson Davies just sold another one!” He seemed to recall they had a new subdivision they were selling too, built on a marsh landfill they called Wildwood, a whole mess of cute homes, twenty or thirty of them.
Pretty soon after, while Donna was out driving her school bus, Richie called up Nelson Davies, got his cheerful voice on the line and said, “Them Wildwood homes are going fast, huh?” Nelson Davies said they sure were and began telling him why, listing features like your choice of decorator colors, till Richie cut him off saying, “I bet they’d go even faster if they caught fire.”
Nelson Davies asked who this was, no longer cheerful.
Richie said, “Accidents can happen in an empty house, can’t they?”
Nelson Davies kept asking who this was.
“I understand you already have one messed up,” Richie said. “It can happen anytime. Call the police, they’ll keep a lookout for a while, but how long? They get tired and quit it could happen again, huh? Or you can pay so it won’t, like insurance. You get ten thousand in cash ready and I’ll come pick it up sometime. If you don’t have it when I come, you’re dead. If I see police cruising around that subdivision you’re also dead. You understand? You get ready, ’cause you don’t know when I’m gonna walk in the door. Or which one that comes in I’m gonna be.” Richie paused to think about what he’d just said. He believed it made sense. “I’ll tell you something else. You remember a guy working in a Amoco station, one up in Port Huron, was shot dead last year during a holdup? Not last summer but the one before?”