by Alex A King
Xander was part cat, part cat burglar. He moved silently through the dark apartment, without so much as catching his toe on a coffee table. Clearly he was some kind of supernatural being. Me, I hugged the wall and hoped it wouldn’t let me down. When he realized I wasn’t following him, he backtracked and grabbed my hand. Sparks flickered up my arm. He switched on a flashlight. Bits of the apartment revealed themselves in triangular-shaped pieces. Fancy digs. This much chrome and black Xander probably felt right at home. I reigned in a whistle when I saw the television. It took up most of the living room wall and curved inward, so that anyone sitting on the couch would be semi-surrounded by screen.
Good thing Takis wasn’t with us. He’d find a way to make that television vanish.
After that, Xander kept the light down low. My brain was molasses; it didn’t realize what he was doing until his back became a sudden obstacle. We weren’t moving, and the place we weren’t moving into was what I’d gathered was a bathroom, judging from the overwhelming scent of cologne wafting out in noxious, thready clouds. Beneath the cloud was another odor, darker, earthy, yet bright. Blood, I was learning, was complex and layered, like winter clothing.
I tried to push past him but I was going nowhere. It dawned on me that this was where Fridas had been killed and possibly dismembered before he’d been dumped in the undergrowth behind one of Mount Pelion’s many water fountains.
Suddenly I was creeping backwards. Xander was on the move, but not into that room. Whatever was there he’d had enough and he was backing up.
We moved sideways, then forward, into the master bedroom, a room that was mostly bed with a mirrored ceiling. The word “pimp” sprang to mind, followed by “high class hooker,” “blow,” and, “Charlie Sheen.” I gave the bed a poke. Water. It figured. Nobody outside of the 80s owned a waterbed unless they were shady.
Then my gaze snapped to the object sitting dead center on the bed.
“That’s a feather,” I said, stating the obvious, mostly because I had to carry this whole conversation on my own. “I bet it’s an eagle’s feather.”
Xander reached for it. My hand jumped out, stopped him.
“Don’t you think it’s convenient that it’s just sitting here, like it’s waiting for us? Looking at it makes me wonder if it’s a big chunk of cheese and we’re the rats. If that’s the case, this is one big trap.”
He shook off my hand, scooped up the feather. As he did, the front door handle jiggled. On the other side someone female was muttering loudly about the police and their close proximity to pigs on the evolutionary tree. The tape ripped. The door opened. Whoever they were they had a key.
Xander pocketed his flashlight. His arm curled around me. All this darkness but, if memory served, there was nowhere to really hide except a walk-in closet on the far side of the room. We couldn’t make it over there without creating some kind of ruckus. Under the bed was out, because there was no under the bed. The base sat flat on the floor, and on top of that, two hundred gallons of water.
Footsteps happened, all of them on the marble floors not too far from where we were dithering. They were moving closer. Eventually they’d be in here with us. Something told me they wouldn’t be attached to anything we’d find warm and fuzzy.
Xander made a silent move. Unfortunately, his move was to flop back on the bed, pulling me on top of him.
I wasn’t on top for long. He rolled us until I was pinned under him. Instinct, that silly cow, took over, wrapped my legs around him. Which wasn’t easy. I was five-four, and five-four isn’t a height that comes packaged with long legs. Xander was a lot of densely built man. Stocky, solid, broad. Not for the first time, I wondered if he was part Minotaur. Anyway, short legs, and a lot of man, meant my instincts had really worked to coil me around him—and prevailed.
“Who is there?” the voice accompanying the footsteps asked. Cool blue-white light pooled in the giant living room. Some of it spilled into the bedroom, but it was a big room, so we were still gift-wrapped in shadow. “I know there is someone in my Petros’ house. I heard the floor squeak.” She spoke with the kind of conviction that immediately told me she had pointed to her ear, even though no one could see her. “I told my son this apartment building was not a good one, but did he listen to me? No. Greek floors should not squeak. Everything is supposed to be made of concrete and steel, but I think the builder snuck some wood in there, so I will have to sue him. Concrete does not squeak, but wood, it squeaks. But maybe now I think the wood is not so bad because it tells me there is a burglar here. You should know I have a very big gun that I do not know how to use. Petros tried to get me to take lessons, but who has time for that? I think I am more dangerous if I do not know how to use a gun, eh? It could go off like that while I swing it around like this …”
BANG!
I yelped against Xander’s very warm, very nice neck. A hint of chlorine lingered on his skin. It had mixed with his natural scent, creating a blend that was giving my hormones all kinds of instructions my common sense wouldn’t let them follow. There wasn’t going to be any grinding, kissing, nibbling, or anything else with an -ing on the end, unless it was mov-ing away from him.
BANG!
Holy cow, the woman was a nut!
Okay, yes, we had technically broken into her son’s home, but what kind of sane person goes around randomly shooting guns in an enclosed space?
“Where are you hiding?” She said the words extra-loud, compensating for the temporary hearing loss that goes with firing a weapon twice in close proximity to the ears, without a pair of earmuffs. “I will find you.”
The darkness went POOF! when she flicked on the bedroom light. My eyes squeezed shut. Slowly, as the pain faded, I opened them again.
Kyria Frida, I presumed, was taking a break from her bell tower. The S of her spine was on its way to becoming a C. Her serpentine eyes were unblinking under their wrinkled hoods. She had the face of a woman who only knew “please” as a word other people used out of weakness.
She stood there gaping at us.
It looked bad. It felt good. But it looked really, really bad. The only adjective I could pin to the position we were in was compromising—and I wasn’t even being compromised.
The light flicked off. The woman stepped back out.
“I will wait out here until you put some clothes on your putana.”
Wait—what? We were fully dressed! There was nothing going on except subterfuge. And a whore? Really? Who would pay for a woman dressed in cotton knit?
I opened my mouth to protest. Xander clamped his hand over my mouth. My pre-teen self rebelled by licking his palm. The man didn’t so much as flinch; there was no way he was human.
He rolled off me. This time he didn’t take me with him. His outline shoved its hand into his pocket. He was going to shoot her!
Oh. No. Never mind. Whatever he’d pulled out of his pocket it looked like a slim wallet.
With a flick of his wrist it opened, and he strode towards the light.
Chapter 14
“WHAT DID YOU SHOW HER? Because I know you showed her something.”
The old saying tells us we should let sleeping dogs lie. Xander wasn’t a dog, and he was stalking through the night with me on his heels, back to the car, instead of sprawled on the ground with his legs in the air, twitching, which meant the old saying could go hang. Grandma’s favorite henchman was cruising for an interrogation.
He ignored me. We dodged a couple of weaving tourists on the promenade. The night was thickening to a dense black that made other nights look a washed-out gray. Lights were dying faster now that the clock’s little hand had scooted left. Xander walked with the confidence of a man convinced the sun was hanging overhead.
“What was it? Was it a nude picture? It was, wasn’t it?”
I didn’t think so, but I figured if I shot enough verbal arrows at him he’d give up and show me. Anything to shut me up.
He’d pulled whatever it was out of his pocket and gone forth
into to the living room like he belonged. No apologies, no excuses. A moment later Fridas’s mother had said, “When will you be finished with the putana? I need clothes to bury my son.”
My heart had hurt for her. Yes, her son was a bottom-feeding scumbag who had probably wanted me dead, but to her he was a bouncy toddler with no regard for furniture, electronics, or personal space.
She had excused herself after that, leaving us to flee.
Xander kept walking. I hurried to keep up. We passed the University of Thessaly’s seaside campus, a building that was perched right on the water’s edge on a sturdy chunk of concrete. To the left was Saint Konstantine’s Park, named after one half of the church that wasn’t too far ahead of us. The church was Saints Konstantine and Helena, but only the guy got a park, which didn’t seem fair.
“What did you show her?”
My thoughts zipped back to that day in the church, after Xander had rescued me by unloading a bullet in the Baptist’s head. I’d found Xander in Saint Catherine’s, doing what I thought at the time was praying. Afterward I wondered if he’d been talking to the Powers That Be. Not the religious ones, but the government agencies listening in. Grandma had, for her own reasons, allowed several agencies from God knows how many countries wire the church for sound. To what end, I didn’t know.
That thought conjured up another, and it wasn’t pretty.
“Are you … a … a cop?”
He stopped so abruptly I almost plowed into his back.
“Oh, God,” I said. I might have been clutching my hair. “You’re a cop. Grandma’s right-hand man is a cop.”
He was on me like syrup on baklava, like plates smashed on the floor at a Greek wedding, like a donkey on a bag of carrots. His hand circled my arm. He pulled me into the park.
Grandma’s henchman-cop was going to kill me and heave my body into the gulf. I didn’t want to die like this. I didn’t want to die at all.
But for someone who wanted to kill me he wasn’t being particularly violent. Someone trying to murder me probably would have banged me into a few trees, but he deftly steered me around them, until we were standing in its thickest shadow. I heard rather than saw him rustling around in his pocket, then he flicked on his flashlight and aimed the beam at the leather billfold. He shoved it into my hand.
I squinted at the rectangular identification card inside. It featured Xander’s picture and full name: Alexander Dimou.
He worked for the National Intelligence Service. Greece’s CIA. My hands shook as I thrust it back at him. They were icy chunks on the ends of my liquid arms.
“Holy crap,” I said, trying not to upchuck. “Is that real?”
He lifted his head to indicate that it was indeed a fake, and pocketed the thing.
“Looks real,” I said.
He shrugged.
“Does Grandma know you’re a fake NIS agent during your time off?”
A single chin lift. No.
We had known each other for two weeks, but somehow he knew I wouldn’t say a word to my grandmother. In a way, neither of us belonged. He was a foundling—or maybe a cuckoo—and I was the black sheep’s lone lamb.
“The woman whose buzzer you pushed, who is she?”
He shrugged.
“Can I at least see the feather?”
He looked at me with a slightly constipated expression.
“Ha! You thought I forgot about it, didn’t you?”
He flicked the feather out of his pocket, laid the quill across my open palm. The body of the feather was white, the tip a rich, dark brown.
“I don’t know birds,” I said. “Does it belong to an eagle?”
His mouth said nothing, but the downward tilt of his chin said, Yes.
* * *
GRANDMA WAS BEING DIFFICULT. She was difficult a lot. But I supposed she could say the same about me.
“What time are we leaving for the Fridas wake?”
We were baking. I didn’t know what we were baking, only that I was up to my wrists in sugary goop. Who didn’t own a stand mixer? Grandma, that’s who.
“Never,” Grandma said.
“But—”
“There is a difference between a Family and gangs. Gangs are promiscuous. They take anybody who wants to join. There is nothing holding them together except fear and greed. That man was the leader of a gang. It would not be right for me to attend his wake or funeral.”
“You could send a representative.”
“No. No one from this Family will be at his funeral. We are not the same people.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Katerina,” she said, finger aimed at my nose. “Stay away from Fridas and his people. Nothing good can come from you being there.”
“Okay.”
“No. No ‘okay.’ You will not go. The end.”
Oh, I was going. Melas had mentioned that Fridas was carrying my picture in his pocket. If Fridas had wanted to kill me, wouldn’t he have hired his own assassin? He was a guy who could afford to outsource the job to one of his gang, or a third party—and had in the past. I was counting on somebody at the wake knowing what Fridas wanted with me.
“Okay.”
Her eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. “Hmm …”
* * *
WE WERE on our way to a wake. Marika was fiddling with the radio. She’d fixated on a euro-pop disaster that sought the potentially life-altering answer to a vital question: What does the fox say? Now we were negotiating volume.
As per usual, we had a lengthy tail—and was it my imagination or was there an extra vehicle tacked on today?
“I think we picked up another assassin,” I said, eyeing the side mirror.
“You picked up another assassin. Nobody wants to kill me.”
My gaze slid over to the huge black bag Marika had dumped on her lap. She was hugging it like an extra child. “Please tell me you didn’t bring a gun. You didn’t bring a gun, did you?”
“I did not bring a gun.”
“Really?”
“No. You told me to tell you I did not bring a gun, so I did.”
All this freedom was going to her head. She was getting downright mouthy.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“Low blood sugar. Normally I eat all the boys’ leftover snacks, but now I am out with you my food intake is down.”
“You want to stop and get something?”
“No, I brought supplies.” She reached into the bag, pulled out the baby-sized submachine gun, dumped it in my lap so she could rifle through the contents.
“Yikes!” I yelped. “I don’t want to touch your gun.”
“It’s just a gun. Here, hold these.”
Two handguns fell into my lap. My immediate reaction was to slap them back to her.
Marika jumped. “Ay-yi-yi! Are you trying to kill us?”
“Don’t they come with a safety?”
“How should I know? I took these from Takis. There were no instructions.”
“How did you know how to shoot Cleopatra’s car?”
“Improvisation. I watch television.”
I was mildly impressed. She had handled it like a pro. “That’s pretty clever.”
“Any idiot can use a gun. Look at Takis.”
Point taken. “You can’t take those into a wake, especially not a gangster’s wake. What if they search us?”
She looked at me like I’d grown an extra head. “If we go in there unarmed, we will be the only ones.”
That sounded reasonable, which was another sign of how messed up my life was these days.
The wake was happening on the floor below the Fridas apartment, at his mother’s place. I managed to score a parking spot closer this time, a couple of streets away. The assassins and the walking blowup doll were forced to park further up the street.
The three assassins left their vehicles, swaggered over to where Marika and I were preparing for our high stakes mission. As I suspected, they had a fourth guy. I did a double take when I got a goo
d look at his face.
This one was Donk. He had dumped the wannabe homeboy costume for a black suit with a matching black shirt, tie, and sunglasses. I was sweating looking at him, and not in a good way.
“What the hell?”
He tugged at his tie. His smirk looked sweaty. One quirk of his lips and it would slide right off. “I’m moving up in the world. If I kill you I’ll be able to cash in and impress my uncle.”
“Baby Dimitri hired you to kill me?”
He glanced around nervously. “Uh, no. Don’t tell him I’m doing this, okay? I want it to be a surprise.”
I stuck between wanting to strangle him and rolling on the ground, laughing. What made up my mind was the cauterizing heat of the pavement.
“Who hired you?”
The smirk slid off. “Why do you have to say it like that, like I don’t have skills? You know how many hours I’ve clocked playing Call of Duty? Bow-coop.”
My gaze slid to Elias, Lefty, and Mo. “Keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t kill anybody—especially me.”
Mo said, “Somebody tell the Yankee pig woman I would never let a child steal my money.”
“Hey, I’m not a child,” Donk snapped. He reached for his fly. “Show me your poutsa, we’ll see who’s a man around here and who’s an interior decorator.”
“An interior decorator?” Mo glanced around. “What is this silly child talking about? Somebody call his mama to take him back to kindergarten.”
“Interior decorator, always carrying that rug around with you.”
“This is a prayer rug! I carry it so my knees do not get dirty when I pray to Allah.”
“If Allah made Persians,” Donk said, “he doesn’t care much about dirt.”
Mo launched himself at Donk. The kid went splat, with a mad Persian atop him, slapping and pulling his hair. Arms folded, Elias and Lefty watched them catfight to the death.