by Alex A King
Then Grandma buzzed off in what I assumed was a borrowed bird.
I slumped in the passenger seat. My heart didn’t know what to do with itself. Skip beats? Run laps? It looked to my head for help, but my thoughts were jangled. We had witnessed a prison break, conducted by Grandma and Xander, which had to be some kind of major league felony.
Stavros was still recording.
“Did you get all that?” I asked him.
He pushed the red button. “Uploading to YouTube right now, then I will send Takis the link.”
“You can’t do that!”
He looked puzzled. “Why not? The file is too big to email.”
“Because the cops will see who did it!”
A pause happened. Stavros’s head did some slow addition. “I didn’t think of that.”
We both looked at his phone.
“Oh,” he said. “It finished uploading.” A moment later he said, “It has five hundred views already.”
“Take it down!”
“Okay, okay.” He fiddled with the phone some more. “I took it down.” More diddling and face-making. “Too late. Somebody already copied it and put it on Reddit.”
“Maybe you can’t see their faces.”
He perked up. “Maybe my hand was shaking and it’s too blurry to incriminate anyone.”
I grabbed his phone, found the video, hit the triangle to make it play.
Our chatter crackled out of the speaker. It was the perfect accompaniment to Grandma and Xander’s prison break.
“Dippy doodles shit on a stick,” I breathed. Grandma was screwed, Xander was screwed, and Curly and I were bent over the hood of this car, getting screwed. Stavros had handed the police everything they needed to nail my family through the forehead for this crime.
An argument could be made that we only recognized Grandma and Xander in the video because we knew them, but it was thin and wheezing. The police could probably zoom in on their faces, swivel the bird around onscreen and nab the license plate number.
“Do helicopters have license plates?”
“In Greece sometimes even cars don’t have them.”
My phone rang. We both looked at it. There was wild fear on Stavros’s face, and I knew mine was its mirror.
“Don’t answer that,” he said.
“I have to. It’s Grandma.
“She’s going to kill us and have Takis bury us in Turkey.”
“You recorded it—not me!”
“She won’t care,” he said mournfully. He buried his head in his hands.
I answered the call. “Hello?”
The silence wasn’t completely empty. There was crackling, the sound of Grandma’s hellfire under our feet.
“Katerina?”
“Grandma?”
“Tell Stavros I want to see him as soon as you get back to the house.”
“Okay.”
“When I am done with Stavros I will deal with you.”
Gulp.
Stavros didn’t lift his head. “What did she say?”
“I think you’re right about Turkey.”
* * *
WE DROVE BACK toward Volos in a horrified silence. I wondered if she’d let us have a last meal.
“Does Grandma let people have a last meal?”
“No. No last meal. Whatever you ate last, that’s it.”
I was afraid of that. “What did you have?”
“A croissant with Camembert, roast turkey, red onions, and cranberry sauce. I roasted the turkey breast myself, and I baked the croissants.”
Even though I was about to be killed, that sounded great. “You cook a lot?”
“I took a course.”
“I had a piece of Grandma’s spanakopita.”
“That’s a good last meal.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to die on an empty stomach. Do you?”
“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t.”
Chapter 5
“HAVE ANOTHER DOLMADA,” I told Stavros.
“It won’t fit.” He shoved it into his mouth anyway.
This was potentially our last meal and we were taking it seriously. That meant we had picked a seaside taverna with a reputation for excellent food. Not that it was difficult to find good food in Greece. Throw a small rock and you were bound to hit a plate fully loaded with delicious eats.
Only a generous blue umbrella stood between us and the sun; it kept knocking on the canvas, trying to find a way in. We were alone. Well, unless you counted the German couple sitting two tables away. They had first-degree burns but they looked happy about their situation. All the other pansies had retreated to their cloistered bedrooms, snoozing the afternoon away because they lacked the fortitude to handle the blistering heat.
Did I say pansies? I meant the smart people, who probably weren’t in danger of winding up at the bottom of a deep hole on Turkish soil.
I sucked down another frappe. Greece had cornered the market on iced coffee. They tossed instant coffee, sugar (or not, if that was your thing) cold water, and ice cubes into a cocktail shaker, then shook until the whole thing was dense foam. Then they poured it into a tall glass, stuck a straw in, and changed your life.
“I was thinking we could stay here forever,” I said. “We’ve got food, drink, the beach, and a bathroom directly across the street. Grandma wouldn’t kill us in front of all of these people.”
We looked at the German couple.
“In front of all these two people,” I said.
Stavros thought about it for a moment. “Or we could run away.”
“Where would we go?”
“Las Vegas. I hear you can get anything in Las Vegas.”
True, but did you really want it?
The more I thought about it, the more the idea had merit. We could run away. It had worked for Dad—
Oh. Yeah. His mother had known where he was the whole time. She’d even come to visit me, with Mom’s help. I had no recollection of the time we spent playing together at the park, but apparently Xander had been there, too.
Maybe we could run farther. New Zealand sounded promising, or … what was that nugget on Australia’s foot called? Tasmania.
“How about Antarctica?” I said.
“I like polar bears,” Stavros said. “We should do that, right after I go drain the snake.”
“Wrong pole.”
“I like penguins,” he said, switching hemispheres. “They are cute in their little tuxedos.”
He jogged across the street to the taverna’s storefront. The cooking happened inside the building, but the tables and chairs were mostly outside along the waterfront, with a few inside for people waiting to take their food to go.
I dragged my gaze up and down the deserted beachfront road. Nobody but us and the Germans and a couple of stragglers down the far end of the promenade, knocking back frappes. The sun was at its highest point, shooting for a top-down assault. The heat was coiling into one massive, overstuffed feather duvet, and it had plans to smother those of us dumb enough to be outside.
Stavros jogged back, his fly half mast. His face was pale, his eyes wild.
“Get up! I hear a helicopter!”
Now that he mentioned it, I did hear the faint buzz of an incoming bird.
“Probably a police helicopter. Or a news helicopter.”
“No, the local police cannot afford a helicopter. Baboulas bought it from them!” he said urgently. “We have to run. Or hide. Or run and hide.”
“What about the check?”
He dumped a wad of euros on the table. “Happy? Let’s go!”
The whirring was moving closer. It sounded like a swarm of furious giant hornets.
I stood and stepped out from under the umbrella, my belly loaded with good Greek eats. When I moved it was how I imagined wading through quicksand, which, so far, hadn’t been a real problem. The dangers of quicksand had been overhyped in my childhood.
What I needed was a good nap, but the caffeine surging through my syst
em wouldn’t give me permission. The coffee wanted to dance, the food wanted to nap, and so they struggled for dominance while I watched the sky, a hand shielding my eyes from the glare.
There was a helicopter, all right, and it was moving our way.
Inside my head I started running, but my feet hadn’t received the message. All the food in my gut was blocking the transmission. If running was going to happen I wouldn’t be the one doing it.
“Argh! It’s coming right for us!” I said lamely.
“That’s what I said!”
“What are we going to do? I can’t run! Not with all this food in me.”
“Too bad we are not Ancient Romans,” Stavros said as the helicopter lowered its belly to the road. The Germans had their phones out, capturing footage of the most unexpected part of their vacation. “They used to vomit their food before the next course started.”
Now that he mentioned it, throwing up sounded like an inevitable evolutionary step. But it would have to wait, because Xander jumped out of the chopper and landed on the ground with a visual thud.
“The good news,” I yelled, nodding to the front of Stavros’s pants, “is that you already got rid of your coffee. Again.”
Chapter 6
“SIT.”
I pulled out the kitchen chair, sat, tried not to freak out. The sight of Grandma measuring ingredients into a bowl made me want to hurl.
Grandma’s baking meant one of two things: either she was trying to cope or trying not to explode. Hopefully, if she exploded it wouldn’t be in my direction.
“Somebody had to go see Rabbit,” I said. “You were gone! I had no choice! Okay, I had two choices, but that was the better one. So don’t even think about reprimanding me. If you’d told me what you were up to then I wouldn’t have been there with Stavros and his camera. Also, not to be judgmental, but you broke a man out of prison. That’s not exactly sound decision-making.”
I’d made the mistake of standing mid-rant, after Grandma had commanded me to sit. Grandma wasn’t a woman you defied unless you wanted to wind up standing at the bottom of that hole in Turkey, with a lot of dirt taking a nap on your head.
“And you thought it was best for you to go see him?”
“Who else was there?”
“The whole Family,” Grandma said quietly. “Did it not occur to you that I would not wander off, who knows where, when there might be a clue at last about my son’s whereabouts?”
“You didn’t tell me anything. You left.”
“I do not have to explain myself to you, Katerina. You have one foot out of the cradle. And now thanks to your … zeal, I will have the police asking difficult questions.”
“I told Stavros not to record it.”
“So he told me. I will deal with him later.” She put an uncomfortable amount of weight on the word deal. The range, with Grandma, was impossible to gauge. On the one end was baking, on the other … execution.
I didn’t have the ovaries to ask where on the spectrum this particular deal fell. I was worried she might tell me, and then I’d be forced to do something crazy to plead for my second cousin’s life.
“Go easy on him,” I said. “He was there because of me.”
“You can leave now.”
“Okay …” Where were the threats to send me back home or lock me in the dungeon? Unease hoisted itself onto my shoulders. It wanted a piggyback ride. It expected one.
“I have a lot of baking to do.”
“Okay.”
“And many decisions to make.”
That unease wrapped its hands around my throat and squeezed as it tried to get a better foothold on my spine. Panic pulled out its billows and began to huff and puff at my adrenal glands. I could almost feel the cool breeze above my kidneys as it fanned. Decisions about what?
Then I remembered she had Rabbit here somewhere. Possibly in the dungeon.
“What about Rabbit?”
“What about him?”
“He didn’t send you that box.”
“I never said he did,” Grandma told me. “I told you I knew who made the box.”
The wily old bat was at least one square ahead of me on the chessboard, once again.
“He told me who sent it.”
“Oh, he told you, did he? What name did he give you?”
“The Eagle.”
“The Eagle.” She made a face. Not a very impressed face. Somehow I’d pictured her more excited than this. “You do not think that is strange?”
“Why would it be?”
“You walked in there, a stranger, and he gives up the name.”
“He did ask for a favor.”
“A favor.” The question mark had been hammered flat until it was more like a long, uncomfortable period.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I wrapped it up in conditions. The name for an equal favor.”
“An equal favor.” Her obsidian eyes degraded to flint. “Oh, well, that is different. An equal favor.”
“I did what I thought had to be done to find Dad. If it was the wrong thing … sorry, but you weren’t there. It was my call to make.”
“”There is nobody named the Eagle that I know of—not in this business. And I know the people Stelios Dogas knows. We go all the way back to the beginning, Rabbit and I.”
“Could be someone new.”
“No.”
“Could be someone old with a new name.”
“No.”
“Why would he give me that name then?”
She smiled. Grandma was a little old lady, but that smile make my innards wobble.
“It is a dangerous thing to owe a favor. The people who come to me to ask for my help, they know this. Never do a favor unless you are certain of the other person’s loyalty. A gift is different.” She shrugged over the bowl as her hand worked. “You can give anybody a gift. If they choose to repay you someday … then it is a good surprise. If not, then you are not disappointed. But favors … favors are dangerous. You asked for a name and promised an equal payment in return, and now I will have to take that favor upon myself to fulfill, when he asks it of me.”
“I didn’t ask you to—“ I started.
“It is my responsibility as the head of this Family and as your grandmother.”
I inched toward the screen door that separated the kitchen from the front yard. Outside held fresh air, and freedom, and also the outhouse. In here there was a grouchy munchkin-sized ogre with a compulsion to bake.
“I’m going to check on my goat.”
She looked up from the bowl. “Before you go, what was in the box?”
“You don’t know?”
She shrugged. “Why else would I ask?”
“I figured you’d opened it before leaving.”
“No.”
“It was … uh … a man’s penis.”
“Not a woman’s?”
Oh God, was she kidding? I checked. There it was, the twinkle in her eyes.
“It wasn’t Aunt Rita’s,” I said carefully, “if that’s what you’re asking.”
The pause that followed was so long that I couldn’t be sure it was technically a pause. For all I knew the conversation had ended, and on a deadly note.
Well done, Kat. Insult the Godmother’s youngest child, the one she’s sore about anyway.
“It wasn’t Dad’s,” I said, eager to wedge something other than my own foot into the silence. “I figured you’d want to know.”
“I do not want to know how you know.”
“Dina,” I said. “She identified it for us. She kept pictures.”
We both made faces.
“That woman …” she said
* * *
I WANTED to hunt down the name Rabbit had given me, but finding out there was no such person had lopped off that plan’s head. The twerp had tricked me.
I left Grandma’s house and trotted over to one of the courtyard’s tables, with Googling on my mind. I pulled up the Crooked Noses Message Board, a forum dedicated
to organized crime of every flavor. The top thread in the Greek Mafia sub forum was all about Rabbit’s prison breakout. Stavros’s video had gone viral. He’d killed the original but the Internet’s memory was long.
The Crooked Nosers were filled with speculation, most of it about who had shot the video. They had managed to uncover the news about my visit with Rabbit, and now they were pooping out a million and one scenarios about what I could have been doing there.
It’s got to be connected to her father’s disappearance, they said.
Stelios Dogas has been in prison fifteen years. What would she want with him?
Child support, someone suggested.
My mouth fell open. Where did they get this stuff? I couldn’t even defend myself without leaping out of the virtual closet.
I was checking my email—I’d won the Irish lottery again—when Detective Melas swaggered through the archway. His face was hard and grim. Whatever was scheduled to come out of his mouth, I didn’t want to hear it.
“I didn’t do it,” I said as he planted himself in front of me like a statue. All that was missing from this art installation was Zeus’s thunderbolt. Also, Melas was wearing too many clothes to be an actual Greek statue, but it was probably better this way. For both of us.
“I know, I saw the video. Know what else I saw?”
“Why don’t you tell me.” I rubbed my stomach. No more last meals for me. Next time I’d prepare to die on an empty stomach. “I ate a huge lunch and now I’m too tired to play guessing game.”
“You and Stavros chatting, that’s what I saw.”
“Technically you didn’t see that, you heard it.”
His eye twitched. “What I also saw was the hood of your yellow car.”
“Lots of yellow cars in Greece. It’s a happy color.”
“Do those people sound like you?”
“A lot of people sound like me.”
“Were their names on the visitors’ list at the Larissa prison?”
“Maybe. Who can say?”
“I’m thinking you can.”
“If the wind changes direction,” I said, “your face could be stuck like that.”
He pulled the stick out of his ass and sat in the chair directly across from me.
“That looked like Baboulas flying that helicopter,” he said.