Christmas Crime

by Alex A King

  “They are not dating, if that is what you are worried about. He spends most of his time trying to hide from her. That man is good at disguises.”

  “It runs in the family.”

  “I know,” he said wryly. He knew firsthand about my Aunt Rita’s skills. She could trick the eye into believing an elephant was a mouse. A big mouse, but still a squeaking rodent.

  “Is he okay?”

  “Your father? He misses you. And he’s not the only one.” He slammed me with the smoldering Greek god look, all dark eyes and filthy unspoken promises. “Do you think you will ever come back?”

  “For a vacation maybe, but not for a while.”

  “Gus is keeping your job open for now. He is eternally hopeful that you will return.”

  Gus is—was—my boss at the Volos Hospital’s morgue, where I never actually collected a paycheck for yelling at people who arrived with bodies and fled without them. Greece’s financial problems have had all kinds of unexpected consequences, including the inability of families to bury their dead or keep them in their graves once their three years of occupation in the dirt are up. Lucky for Gus I was still telecommuting, in a way. When someone needed scolding he called me via Facetime or Skype and let me be the bad guy. For stress relief, it was better than meditation.

  “What are you doing?”

  Greeks ask what you’re doing instead of asking how you’re faring because only one of those things is gossip worthy. But Melas wasn’t every other Greek—he cared—so I gave him a semi-honest answer.

  “Good.”

  Good is a serviceable word that covers a broad range of territory. Good draws people in while keeping them at a distance. In my case, good meant I didn’t want to mention the first note I’d discovered on my doormat the week after I got home. Well, the doormat was the note. Someone had thoughtfully scrawled NO ONE CAN SAVE YOU, YOU STUPID TWAT across the mat, using something that had originated inside a cat. I’d dragged it out onto the back lawn and hosed it off while my goat tried to nibble the edges. Tossing it out—the mat, not the goat—was out of the question. My mother picked out that mat. Since she was dead and her furnishing-picking days were over, the crap-smeared mat was irreplaceable.

  Anyway, the crap note was wrong: someone could save me, and that someone was Grandma. But I couldn’t call her for help figuring out who was leaving me all these charming messages, like the one in my pocket and the dozens of others I’d stuffed inside the closet in the spare room. No—wouldn’t. I’d flown away from Greece and the perks of being Family for this crime-free life.

  In the background Melas’s landline rang. He shot me an apologetic glance and answered the call. From the way he was rolling his eyes and biting down on his words I knew his mother was on the other end. Helena Mela (the letter s falls off most Greek last names when they switch sexes; not mine—I wasn’t letting my s go without a fight) is a small but terrifying creature who used to torture grown men for Grandma before she quit her life of crime and settled down to be a respectable and rabid Chihuahua. Maybe she likes me, maybe she doesn’t. It’s hard to say with critters.

  Melas hung up. “That was Mama.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  He flashed me a rueful grin. “She only sleeps four hours a night.”

  No rest for the formerly wicked. “What did she want?”

  “She told me to tell say you are beautiful.”

  “Lies.”

  “Okay, that was from me. But she did have a message for you. She has been trying to get ahold of Kyria Katerina and getting nothing but deflection, the same as me.”

  “Grandma lost a couple of family members recently, so she’s in mourning and not doing the whole social thing.”

  “Kyria Katerina is the kind of woman who rolls over speed bumps, whether they are shaped like dead relatives or not. Mama is worried. Every year they burn old shoes together.”

  “That sounds unhealthy and destructive, but what do I know?”

  He tipped back his head and laughed. “It is a Christmas tradition.”

  “Really? We put up decorations and exchange gifts.” Except this year I was failing Christmas. No tree. No decorations. No gifts.

  “We do that, too.” He grinned. “Burning old shoes keeps the kallikantzaroi away—the evil spirits. They bring trouble. They make milk sour, they extinguish fires, and they are hung like whales.”

  “In that case they’re not bringing trouble, they auditioning for porn and maybe bringing pizza.”

  He laughed again. “I miss you. Do not stay away too long. Until then, if you could let Kyria Katerina know my mother has shoes to burn, that would be good.”

  We said our goodnights, which left me feeling … things. Nothing an intense Netflix marathon couldn’t cure. I climbed down the ladder, stopping to pet my donkey and goat before slipping through the sliding back door. They were both dressed for winter in thick blankets, and when night came they’d be confined to the garage. My cow wandered over to see if I had anything good. All I had were Oreos, and no one gets my Oreos.

  I hunkered down on the couch under a heated blanket after double-checking that the doors and windows were locked and the blinds and curtains were secured with no gaps.

  Melas’s words floated back. He had it wrong. Grandma wasn’t missing and neither was anyone else in the family. They talked at me regularly. Sometimes they even let me get a word in. Tomorrow morning I would call to remind Grandma it was shoe-burning time.

  Because paranoia isn’t paranoia if they’re really out to get you, I got up one more time and peeked out of the curtains. Across the street my new neighbor was gearing up for yet another lap. Watching her reminded me that I needed to step away from the window and get a life.

  At her driveway, my neighbor stopped. Her head swiveled on its Jane Fonda stalk, slowly, as though an invisible hand was loosening a screw.

  She looked right at my curtains, at me.

  Yipes.

  Chapter 2

  Greece wasn’t picking up. More specifically, Marika, Grandma, and Aunt Rita. My heart seized up. Was everyone okay? Was Melas right: were they missing?

  I called Elias, my former bodyguard. Despite Grandma’s—and Elias’s—protests, I’d left him behind when I fled Greece.

  “Boss!” he said. Somehow he squeezed a big smile into that one syllable. I bet he was wicked at packing suitcases. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to get ahold of the family. Why aren’t Grandma and the others answering?”

  “Is that Katerina?” Grandma said in the background.

  Relief washed over me. I’d worked myself into an anxious frenzy for nothing. “Never mind,” I said. “Just tell Grandma that she and Kyria Mela are supposed to be burning shoes this week.”

  He relayed the message. “Anything else?”

  “No,” I said. “I have to go. Everyone is alive and fine, right?”

  “Everyone is in their original packaging.”

  Good enough.

  Hipster Burger was waiting for me. Well, not me specifically. But someone like me: desperate and eager to work for minimum wage. Portland’s newest burger joint existed in a new brick building designed to look old. The fixtures were freshly battered metal. The wood counters and tabletops were wood reclaimed from a showroom and priced specially for suckers. No two chairs were the same.

  The manager turned out to be a straw with an ironic mustache and a beard that could easily nest several bird families. He was dressed up as the world’s frailest lumberjack. He shook my hand like a water pump’s handle when I told him Reggie Tubbs sent me, and introduced himself as Wyatt with an h. Whyatt.

  “Did you do that, or should I blame your parents?”

  He stared at me. “For what?”

  “Never mind.”

  He handed me a clipboard with a twig pen. “I know the judge, so you’ve already got the job. Just fill out the form.” He scanned my license and social security card with a doodad on his phone and handed them back
to me. “When can you start? Now? Is now good?”

  “I guess I could start now.”

  “Great.” He looked me up and down. “Is that what you’re going to wear?”

  Silly me, I’d gone business casual. Black pants. Black button-down shirt. Basically a lot of black, most of it matching. The family was still in mourning for my cousin’s murdered wife, so I’d had committed to black along with the rest of them for the next year. Returning to Portland didn’t let me off the Greece’s long, judgmental hook. “Yes?”

  The bird nest on his chin shuddered. “Come on out back. We can do better than that.”

  His disapproval made me take a closer look at Hipster Burger’s other employees, tootling around in their skinny jeans and plaid shirts. The men who didn’t have facial hair wore man buns. Apparently the women had a choice of beanies or oversized, and probably fake, glasses.

  “We’re all out of glasses and beanies,” Whyatt said apologetically. “So … mustache or beard? You can choose.”

  Wow. Lucky me.

  “I guess I could do a mustache. I’m half Greek, so with neglect and time probably I could grow one on my own.”

  “That’s the spirit.” He led me out back, where plaid shirts hung on pegs. A cardboard box of facial hair sat on the ground. From where I was standing the whole thing looked like a woolly bear caterpillar collection. Whyatt handed me a plaid shirt and nodded toward the box. “I can see you in a Dali or a petite handlebar. When you’re done with that, you can unbox the new plates. Up until now we’ve been using regular, unhip plates.”

  Humming Monty Python’s Lumberjack Song, I ditched my winter coat for a plaid shirt and selected a dark brown scrap of fake hair that more or less matched my real hair. It was sticky—eww—and clung to my upper lip without help. Hopefully no one I’d ever met in my life would see me this way. Which, if I were a smart woman, I would realize was a guarantee my entire past was destined to parade through Hipster Burger today.

  Whyatt managed to catch me before I got lost. He took me to the storage room, where boxes were stacked six high.

  “We haven’t done all the unpacking yet. We’re in the middle of a soft opening. That’s like a practice run so we can get it right before Hipster Burger’s grand opening next weekend. Here, you can unpack these.” He flipped open a box, revealing a slice of personal computing history.

  “These look like old hard drives,” I said, probably because they were old hard drives.

  “Amazing, right? I got them for a song. Cheaper than regular plates. We use them for serving desserts.” He touched a tall stack of newspapers and old magazines. “These are dinner plates.”

  “Is that hygienic?”

  “New Zealand has been selling fish and chips that way for decades. When was the last time you heard of a Kiwi dropping dead from food poisoning?”

  That was one of those rhetorical questions, wasn’t it? I really hoped so because I wasn’t sure what a Kiwi was.

  He waited.

  Oh. Not rhetorical. “Never?”

  His hair-enshrouded Bobblehead nodded. “Never. It’s perfectly safe. Well, not perfectly. But we haven’t had any customers get sick yet.”

  “How long has this soft opening being softly opening?”

  “Moving on,” he said quickly. “Guess what these are.” With a flick he flipped up the flaps of another cardboard box. It was crammed full of old AOL CDs. A whole rainbow of discarded discs.

  “A sad remnant of our recent past?”

  “Coasters. I got them for a penny plus shipping on eBay.”

  “Wow.” That was a whole penny plus shipping more than they were worth. “You’re a real bargain hunter.”

  “Thanks,” he said without a shred of sarcasm.

  “What about drinks? Do you serve them in shoes?”

  He looked at me like I was bananas. “No, we use glasses. Come on, let’s take a look at what goes down in the kitchen.”

  In the kitchen, faux hipsters were slinging ingredients onto newspapers: buns; sizzling beef and chicken; lettuce; melted cheese in medicine cups; ditto the sauces. Everything slid onto former headlines, separate and in no way burger-shaped. I hadn’t been in Greece long enough to forget how burgers work.

  “I thought Hipster Burger sold burgers.”

  “We specialize in deconstructed food.” He indicated a hard drive covered with brown blobs. “Cake, frosting, sauce. All separate. Want a mouthful of frosting without cake? No problem.” He waved his hand at a newspaper holding ingredients. “In the mood for bacon without the cheese? Eat that bacon. Or build your burger without the bits you don’t like.”

  “Where are the fries?”

  Another worker dropped a whole fried potato onto the newspaper. Not that I wanted to criticize his work, but it looked uncannily turd-like.

  “Forget I asked,” I said.

  “Were you saying something?” Whyatt said. “Okay, Tabitha here will teach you how to work the cash registers.

  Tabitha was a cheerful college-age woman rocking a beanie. She waved at me. I waved back.

  “I don’t know why they call it a cash register,” she said. “We don’t take cash. Just cards, Paypal, Apple Pay, all the Pays, and crypto currency.”

  “Cash is so retro,” I said.

  Tabitha’s forehead crinkled up. “In that case, we should take cash.” She whipped out a notepad, scribbled something down, and then ripped off the paper. The paper went into a wastebasket in the corner of the kitchen. “Suggestion box,” she explained.

  This was hell and I was in it. But it was a job, and right now I needed money. While I was slinging ingredients at Hipster Burger by day, I could spend my evenings hunting for something that didn’t involve costumes or whatever trendy grease Whyatt insisted they use to fry their whole potatoes. As far as jobs went this was safe, and I didn’t have to deal with killing or being killed. How bad could it be?

  I rolled up my sleeves. “Okay, Tabitha, let’s do this.”

  Her face broke out in a smile. “It’s easy. This way.” She took me out front where customers were trickling in.

  By noon I had the hang of pressing in dollar amounts, swiping cards, and dealing with virtual cash. Whyatt handed me a newspaper loaded with burger fixings and told me to go take a break.

  I carried lunch out front to the designated staff table. As soon as I’d reconstructed my burger and sliced up my fry, my phone rang. Marika’s beaming face filled the screen.

  “Look at you,” she said. “I always knew you could grow a mustache. You remind me of my mama.”

  “I hope Takis doesn’t get jealous.”

  “If he does I will just spit in his tiganites. What are you doing?”

  Tiganites are fried potatoes—AKA: fries—which I was definitely not eating right now. The lone potato was crispy on the outside but slightly undercooked in the middle. Something told me I’d better prioritize job hunting because Hipster Burger wasn’t going to last long, not unless it stepped up its fry game and maybe started construction on their burgers.

  “Working,” I said with all the enthusiasm of a funeral director.

  “You found a job! I have never had a job before, except when I was your bodyguard.”

  “Hipster Burger is hiring,” I said. “I bet you’d look great in a fake beard.”

  “Takis would kill me if I cooked tiganites for strangers. Is the food good?”

  “It’s food.”

  “Now I am hungry. I have to eat or I will vomit.”

  Marika is always hungry. Being pregnant doesn’t help. It amps up her appetite from regular pound pup to Labrador. The most dangerous place on Earth is between Marika’s mouth and a bar of chocolate.

  “Vomit, vomit, vomit,” Takis said in the background. “Why do you have to talk about vomit so much?” Takis is my cousin’s cousin’s cousin. Which means if we share any blood it’s so diluted that my future offspring will have butts instead of the deflated whoopee cushion Takis wears in his pants.

  “
You make me want to vomit all the time,” I told Takis.

  “That is because of my personality.”

  “And your face,” I said helpfully. “Hey, don’t you have somebody to intimidate or murder?”

  “Today is my day off,” he said.,

  “Henchmen have days off?”

  “The union says yes.”

  “Henchmen have a union?”

  Takis made a sound like a cat coughing up a hairball. Someone else might have called it laughter. “Congratulations, you are the world’s biggest vlakas. Of course we do not have a union.”

  Marika made a face into the phone. “Ignore him. Tell me everything about your job. Does it pay real money or the promise of money like your job at the morgue?”

  “It’s a job,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure it pays real money. There are laws about that kind of thing here, unless you’re an unpaid intern.” I thought about it a moment. “Hey, Tabitha, we’re not unpaid interns, are we?”

  She experienced a deer in the headlights moment. “Let me check. Unpaid interns are trending right now so I wouldn’t put it past Whyatt …” Off she scurried to enquire about the status of our paychecks.

  “You should come home,” Marika said on the screen. “Baboulas will give you any job you want, even the one you had at the morgue. We miss you.”

  “Not me,” Takis piped in. “I am glad you are gone.”

  We had this conversation every day—sometimes twice. “I miss you too—Marika, not you, Takis—but Greece—”

  Hipster Burger’s door swung open. A pair over well-dressed men walked in. Businessmen in good suits. Not nearly hipster enough for Hipster Burger. Definitely not the kind of guys who would be okay with eating burger fixings out of newspaper. My gaze swiveled away.

  Something in my brain blipped.

  My gaze flicked back to the men, gluing itself to the blond one.

  Without thinking, my butt began to slide down in the chair, until my mustache was resting on the table.

  A million miles away in Greece, Marika asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Hiding,” I whispered.

  “From what?” Her hand clutched the gold cross around her neck. “Is it a criminal? And to think you are all alone there. I knew Baboulas should have sent Elias with you!”