Christmas Crime

by Alex A King

  “Can you put his head back on?”

  Tabitha leaned over and painted Sandy’s shoes a burger-colored shade of vomit. “I always wanted to do that,” she said as Sandy squealed and tried to shake the puke away.

  “I don’t think so,” the wannabe necromancer said. “Necromancers only raise whole bodies.”

  Within five minutes the Portland Fire & Rescue Bureau rolled up, along with the local cops. Before long the fire was out and Hipster Burger was another failed eatery. With its newspaper plates and its AOL CD coasters, the restaurant’s demise was inevitable from the get-go. All the explosion did was expedite its death.

  The police had questions about things like arson and grudges and Occupational Safety and Health. They gave Sandy’s unrestrained hair the side eye. One of the boys in blue kept glancing at me. A redhead. Glowing white skin between freckles. A mustache the color of marmalade. His nametag read MOSS.

  “I know you,” he said when it was my turn under the microscope.

  Despite the fact that I’d never committed anything even like a crime—at least not on American soil—guilt washed over me. “I didn’t do it!” I blurted.

  His pointer finger got all up in my face. Close enough to bite. “I know I know you.”

  That got everyone’s attention. “I was outside recycling when Hipster Burger exploded. Ask Tabitha.”

  Tabitha raised her hand. “True story.”

  He ignored her. “Name?”

  “Katerina Makris. That’s with a silent S on the end.”

  Officer Moss clicked his fingers. “I knew I knew you. You’re Baboulas’s heir.”

  “I prefer granddaughter.” His words sank in. My mouth hung open before snapping shut so hard I almost severed my tongue. “Wait—you know my grandmother?”

  “My family is Greek.” He performed a little head lean at his partner. “Used to be Moussouliotis until my grandfather changed it to fit in better. We always have Greek newspapers around. Seen you on the front page a couple of times recently.”

  As Scooby Doo would say: ruh-roh.

  His partner cleared his throat. “Moss wants you to come in for further questioning.”

  “Further questioning?” Were they high? “You haven’t even asked me one question related to the explosion.”

  The policemen exchanged glances. “Was it an explosion? How do you know?”

  “Because something went BOOM and then the door flew off the building! What’s that if it’s not an explosion? A really loud fart? Unless I’m being charged with something, ask your questions here.”

  One of my fellow Hipster Burger coworkers fist-pumped. “They really hate it when regular people know their rights.”

  Officer Moss forked his fingers and touched his eyes, then pointed two fingers back at me. Who did he think he was, Robert DeNiro? “I’m watching you. I know who your family is, even if you say you didn’t know they existed until a few months ago.”

  “Wait a minute, how did you know that?”

  “It was in the paper. I also know where you went to school, how much you weigh, and your favorite color.”

  “The newspaper doesn’t know how much I weigh!”

  “One-twenty-five.”

  “That wasn’t in the paper!”

  “I got it from a website, so what?”

  “What website?”

  “The Crooked Noses. It’s all about people like you.”

  “People like me? I’m not a criminal! If there are gossip and paparazzi shots of me on that stupid board then it’s only because some people are obsessed and need to get a life! And it’s wrong about my weight—it’s more like one-thirty. And I owe it all to my rabid consumption of Greek sweets. What is my favorite color?”

  “Black,” he said.

  “Ha! Wrong. Black isn’t technically a color.”

  He did the eye thing again. “We’ll be in touch.”

  The fire department couldn’t do anything for poor Whyatt. They reassembled him in a bag like the world’s least complicated jigsaw puzzle and the coroner hauled him away.

  I fumbled with my car keys. My knees shook all the way home as I stewed. The big bada boom rattled Tabitha’s memories so she had forgotten that Whyatt was itching to help himself to my package moments before the explosion. Not me. I remembered. A package addressed to me. Delivered to my new job. Where few to zero people knew I worked. Where nobody legitimate would send me a package.

  Probably it was my Makris blood that had kept my mouth shut in front of the police. We were designed to evade the law—although Grandma and Dad were the law. It was more than my DNA that had zipped my lips though. My desire to be a regular human overrode my desire to be a helpful citizen. I’d run home to Portland to get away from things like this. I didn’t want to believe someone sent me an exploding package because that would mean my casual stomp out of the family sandpit was all for nothing.

  Body quaking, I parked in the driveway and wobbled up to the house, keys in hand. Behind me I heard the slap of sneakers on concrete as my new oddball neighbor marched down her driveway and took off around the block. I kept my head down, back to the street as I slipped inside. No way did I want to fall into the small talk trap.

  The house was quiet. I checked on my pets—cow, donkey, and goat were outside munching on hay, while the bear was right where I’d left her, in my bed. I slapped together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—cherry jelly, natural peanut butter, this was Portland, after all—and grabbed my laptop and went to hide in what used to be my parents’ closet but was now occupied by the few clothing items Dad owned. In Greece he dressed like a movie star. Here he had always dressed for the role he’d played: truck driver for a local paper products company. Laptop balanced on my lap, mouth full of sandwich, I cruised on over to the Crooked Noses Message Board to scrape the world’s seedy underbelly.

  Crooked Noses is the biggest gathering place on the internet for amateur sleuths, lookie-loos, and other folks who consider themselves experts on organized crime around the world. Each country with prominent organized crime—dodgy governments don’t count—has its own subforum. Lately Greece’s subforum has been a hive of activity. To be fair, Grandma gives them a lot to work with.

  Because I couldn’t call the family to tell them someone sent me an exploding package—probably—without Grandma calling the family equivalent of the National Guard, I figured my best bet was to do some information gathering behind the scenes. If Greek mafia figures had been receiving boxes of fire and death, I wanted to know. Maybe mine was an isolated incident. Or maybe the package was a coincidence and an unhappy customer had decided to burn the place down. Serving food on newspaper was one step up from serving it on paper money—both had to be teeming with germs just looking for a place to set up a salmonella factory.

  I scrolled through the Greek subforum.

  Nothing.

  I ran a search.

  Nothing about exploding mail. Not in the past year, anyway.

  Isolated incident. Yay?

  With that out of the way, I ran a search for my alleged weight, according to the redheaded cop. Sure enough, some clown had posted a blurry picture of me standing by the compound’s pool in a bikini. Either someone in the family had snapped the picture using a potato phone or the compound had a paparazzi problem. For about a week the Crooked Noses had weighed in with their guesses about my weight. Then the conversation took a charming turn toward casual speculation about whether my carpet matched the drapes, or did I install hardwood floors?

  The envelope under my username—FarFarAway Girl—lit up. Someone wanted to say hi. I could guess who. BangBang, often the board’s voice of reason, and owner of the Crooked Noses, and I casually exchanged messages on a regular basis. I had reason to believe he—or she—knew my real identity, but they’d never outed me. When I discovered he—or she—owned the board I’d logged out and hadn’t come back for weeks. Eventually curiosity reeled me back in, and BangBang and I struck up a … whatever it was we had going. Not
a friendship exactly. Probably the Germans had a good word for it. Germans had all the best words for universal oddball experiences and feelings.

  Rough day? BangBang’s message read.

  How did you know?

  Word gets around. A lot of people have keeping tabs on you since you left Greece.

  I lost my job in a fireball. My new boss got decapitated. The police think I’m involved. So yeah, it was a bad day.

  For a moment I leaned back, closed my eyes, pretended I was someone with an uncomplicated life. An Instagram influencer, whatever that was. A Pinterest mom. An indoor cat.

  I opened one eye. New message from BangBang.

  Want to tell me what happened?

  Depends. Are you the police? I added a little winky face.

  His message was delivered with a grin. Not always.

  Good enough, I wrote. I gave him the condensed version, including Whyatt’s eagerness to open my mail. I skipped the part with my boss’s rolling head and missing body.

  That’s why you were searching the board for package bombs?

  There was no denying it. BangBang owned the whole Crooked Noses shebang.

  I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me, so I typed yes.

  As soon as Homeland Security finds out there was mail involved, things are going to get more complicated, BangBang wrote.

  If they find out.

  They will.

  Yikes. This I needed like I needed another hole in my head—a hole some men, some of them on this board, would no doubt want to stick things in.

  It wasn’t technically mail. Whyatt said the box was delivered by a courier, not the mailman.

  Know anything about the courier?

  A man. That’s all I know.

  The enveloped stayed dark for a long moment before it lit up again. How are things besides the job and the exploding mail?

  Christmas is coming and I still haven’t decorated, plus I need to find a new job before I wind up living under a bridge. The good news is that Portland has oodles of bridges to choose from.

  Baboulas would never let that happen.

  Grandma wouldn’t know. She’s so busy at the moment that she can’t even find time to burn old shoes with a friend of hers.

  I was about to explain the burning-shoe thing in case he didn’t know when someone ding-donged the doorbell. What I wouldn’t give for some of those attack geese to ward away salespeople.

  Except it wasn’t salespeople. Standing on the front doorstep were two black suits, one male, one female. A matching set. She had a face like she’d been sucking mothballs, and he had a face like he’d been sucking regular human balls and was undecided about whether or not he enjoyed the experience. They waved a pair of matching badges under my nose, the kind that came in fake leather cases, then the badges vanished back into their pockets.

  “Katerina Makris?”

  As a kid I got used to people—well meaning adults usually—massacring my name. I tolerated the carnage because grownups get twitchy when kids correct them. Now that I had my own pair of big girl panties I was okay with handing out an education when someone rhymed my last name with mattress.

  “Makris,” I said. “The s is there on the end but it’s silent.”

  “Can we come in?” one of them asked. I think it was the woman. Hard to tell. They were one organization, one mouth, despite having two heads.

  “No.”

  I stepped out, closed the door behind me. Didn’t want these two thinking hospitality was on the menu.

  “If you’re recruiting I’m not interested.”

  They exchanged glances. “She thinks we’re recruiting,” he said.

  “Cute,” she said.

  Nothing about this was cute. My stomach flip-flopped, and I felt barf making casual threats. I kept my cool anyway. Spending time in Greece surrounded by psychopaths, criminals, and other Greeks had strengthened the muscles I needed to stop myself leaping out of a window and escaping via an alley.

  “We understand there was an incident at your workplace this morning,” the Woman in Black said.

  “If by ‘incident’ you mean it blew up and my boss lost his head, then yes.”

  “We have questions,” the Man in Black said. He didn’t elaborate so his compadre did the job for him.

  “A lot of questions.”

  I really wanted them off my porch. “This will go faster if you actually get around to asking them.”

  “Hang on just one darn minute there,” Reggie Tubbs called out from his porch. He was in his robe and sweatpants. For once everything was tucked away. “You can’t just go asking her questions without an attorney present. I know you people. Worked with a lot of you in my time.” He rushed over as quickly as a man his age could rush. Things flopped. Other things flapped. From where I was standing, old age appeared to be mostly about skin coming unhitched from its posts. “Okay,” he said, planting himself beside me on the porch. “You can ask your questions now.”

  The government suits checked him out. “You an attorney, sir?”

  “Was. Then I was a judge. Now I’m a man who has seen some things, so don’t try to dick this girl around. I’m retired but I still know people—not people in nursing homes either.”

  “We were hoping to do this in private,” the Man in Black said. Neither of them looked happy about the old judge’s sudden appearance and know-how about the legal system.

  “This is pretty private,” I said, which was true enough, except for a brief glimpse of my neighbor from across the street as she performed yet another lap. If she glanced this way it was hard to say behind those big sunglasses. The government suits scoped out the view for a moment, then swung their heads back around. They reminded me of cows. I should know because I had one.

  “Where were you when Hipster Burger exploded?” the woman asked.

  “Out the back. I was breaking down boxes for the recycling.”

  “What was in those boxes?”

  “Newspapers.”

  The black suits looked at me.

  Oh. Was I supposed to elaborate? Nobody said anything about elaborating.

  “Hipster Burger’s shtick was serving food on and in newspapers. I unpacked the ‘plates’ and took the boxes outside like Whyatt—my boss—asked.”

  “Did anything unusual happen before that?” the Woman in Black asked.

  Neither of them took notes. Was that normal?

  “It was Hipster Burger, a lot of things were unusual. On my first day I had to wear a fake mustache. They served dessert deconstructed on old hard drives.”

  “Not that unusual.” The Man in Black nodded like he knew. “Last week I ate at a restaurant where they served breadsticks in a boot. Irony is so common that it’s no longer ironic.” He and the woman swapped smirks, which made me want to rise up and defend the local hipster community.

  “Why are you targeting Miss Makris?” my neighbor asked. “What does any of this have to do with her?”

  “Miss Makris was conveniently not in the building when the incendiary device was triggered,” the Woman in Black said.

  I waved my hands. “I wouldn’t have been outside if Whyatt hadn’t asked me to unpack the newspapers and toss the boxes.”

  “You have a history,” they said.

  They were right; I had a history. Although it was more like the history had me. Trouble regularly accosted me on the street while I was trying to avoid eye contact.

  Reggie wagged a finger at them. They didn’t know how lucky they were that it was just a finger. “Wait just a darn minute. I’ve known this once since she was no bigger than your head. You’re not gonna find a person with a cleaner history. I know good people and I know bad people, and she’s one of the good ones.”

  Tears threatened to well up. It was nice to know someone was on my side.

  The Woman in Black was unmoved. “With all due respect, what do you know about her family, sir?”

  “Quit calling me ‘sir’. It’s Your Honor or Judge Tubbs to y
ou pair of clowns. And don’t think I don’t know that ‘with all due respect’ means without any darn respect whatsoever. So quit pissing down my back and telling me it’s raining.”

  The Woman in Black didn’t back down. “Miss Makris here is the granddaughter of Greece’s most notorious crime boss, were you aware of that?”

  Reggie didn’t look one bit impressed or scared. “So what? My daddy was a bootlegger and my grandfather was cross-dressing gigolo back in the day. People do what they’ve got to do to put food on the table for their families. No shame in that. Are you insinuating that Kat blew up her own place of employment? What proof do you have? Why would she do that? She’s been looking for a job and she just found one.”

  “Your logic has no logic in it,” I told them.

  They hit me with another question. “Do you know the whereabouts of Mike Makris?”

  “Dad?” What did he have to do with this? “He’s in Greece.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “You’d have to ask him, but last time I saw him he was eating my grandmother’s cooking and spending time with his family.”

  “Your previous place of employment burned down, correct?”

  “As far as I know the Volos Hospital’s morgue is fine.”

  The Woman in Black looked exasperated, like I was five and she was tired of running in verbal circles. It wasn’t my fault; her questions were sloppy and disorganized. “Your previous place of employment on American soil.”

  Oh. That. I couldn’t deny it. The old job burned down, along with the apartment building where I’d barely paid the deposit for my first solo place. No one was injured except Bryan, my old boss, who broke his legs falling down stairs. That was all Grandma’s doing—she hadn’t wanted me to leave Greece—but the rumor was everyone inconvenienced was well compensated. Which didn’t make it right, but at least she’d tried. That counted for something, right?

  “I wasn’t in the country when that happened.” At the time I was unconscious in Grandma’s plane after Takis and Stavros abducted me. Maybe the suits knew that, maybe they didn’t. Either way I wasn’t about to bring it up. “Why don’t you both just tell me what you want and why you’re bugging me, otherwise we’re done here.”