Christmas Crime

by Alex A King

  “Nobody hangs up anymore. We end calls.”

  “Good point,” he said. “So you ready to hear more?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m down a body and you’re the woman who didn’t lose her cool when she caught her fiancé cheating.”

  Bills loomed in my near future. I couldn’t keep borrowing from Dad’s hidden fund behind the master bathroom’s medicine cabinet.

  “I’ll take it.”

  “You haven’t heard what the job is yet.”

  “My last real job was in a morgue. Once I saw a Cabbage Patch Kid’s head stuck up a man’s butt.”

  His face didn’t move for the longest time. Then he said: “At least it wasn’t the whole doll.”

  Small mercy. “When do I start? Today?”

  “Tomorrow. Be here 9:00 AM.”

  “What is the job?”

  “Surveillance.”

  “You want to pay me all this money to watch people?”

  “It’s boring work. Nobody would do it if I didn’t pay them well.”

  Not the weirdest morning of my life, but it was definitely a Top Ten contender. On the bright side I had a new job, so that didn’t suck. On the way home I stopped for chips I could barely afford and a bunch of bananas I needed to inject some health food into my life. Whistling, I let myself into the house.

  And stopped.

  Again.

  For crying out loud, why was I trapped in my own bizarre Groundhog Day retelling? Not cool, universe. Not cool.

  Today there were no dead bodies and no magically appearing decorations, so that was something. Instead, the shower was running and I wasn’t in it.

  This was a problem, but was it a call-the-cops problem or a plumbing problem? In the space of a few months my relationship with the local police had morphed from distant but amicable to me being in a Person of Interest database.

  They were wrong. I wasn’t interesting. Would I be carrying chips and bananas if I led an interesting life?

  What to do?

  For years I’d believed Dad was an effervescent and often hyperbolic Greek with a tendency to watch the world with a paranoid and cynical eye, who also happened to drive trucks. Then I discovered he was a mobster’s son, a high-ranking member of a Greek intelligence agency, and a gun owner. One of those guns—I was sure there were more—was in the master bathroom, secreted away in a safe behind the medicine cabinet. That master bathroom was currently occupied by a showering intruder, so there was no way I could get to the gun and shoot them in the foot for breaking into my house.

  Without a gun for backup, I was forced to improvise. I dug out my stun gun, the one shaped like a lipstick. It had the power to make a grown man poop his pants. Very convenient if you’re the bad guy who gets stunned in a bathroom.

  Back flat against the wall, I crept up the stairs, toward the master bathroom door. My skin vacillated between hot and cold. I tried to talk myself into bravery I didn’t feel. An inspirational phrase would be useful right now. My disappointing brain refused to cooperate. It burped up memes and nothing else. Ehmagerd, buhguhlers.

  I paused to listen.

  Someone was definitely in there. The water sounds weren’t constant. They changed as a body moved around under the stream.

  The shower invader was naked and wet, while I was dry and holding a stun gun. The odds were in my favor. I liked odds that were in my favor. First I’d zap the intruder and then call Francis. My new employer seemed to know things and people. Probably they came standard with the crooked nose on his face.

  Slowly, I turned the door handle. The moment it disengaged, I flung the door open and let out a primal roar, brandishing the stun gun. My eyes cut to the most prominent feature in the room.

  Penis.

  Argh.

  Waving the stun gun I leaped backward. I was prepared for a criminal, not his random penis. I jabbed at the air, hoping to find more body to go with the penis.

  No body. No penis. Just steam.

  “Katerina.”

  Ohmygod, the penis-haver knew my name.

  My eyes cut upward to the penis’s life support system. The bronze skin should have been a dead giveaway but my stupid, fear-addled brain couldn’t compute the simple math until my gaze traveled over the six-pack of abs, the hard, smooth pectorals, the mile of broad chest and shoulders, and landed on the penis’s face.

  “Argh!” I yelped, this time not in my head. I snatched up the towel and flung it at him. Instead, it wound up tangled around my head. For a moment I struggled. With an almighty slap I managed to break free. “Argh!”

  “I can’t tell if you’re a pirate or you’re surprised to see me,” Xander said.

  “I’m not a penis!” In the bathroom mirror, through the veil of steam, I saw my face turn the red of ultimate humiliation. “I mean I’m not a pirate. You’re in my bathroom. Why are you in my bathroom?”

  “I was dirty.”

  “Well … you look clean now.” My gaze gravitated south again—probably for science. “I can’t stop looking at your … It’s just …”

  “Just what?”

  “So … so … so there. Can’t you cover it up?”

  “You’re holding the towel.”

  I thrust the towel at him and tried not to stare as he casually, slowly, wrapped the towel around his waist. Disappointment shanked me between the ribs and twisted.

  More than once Xander and I had come this close to bonking. I knew the wiener gods had been generous because it’s hard to miss something that big when it’s in the upright position and pressed against you. Seeing it in the flesh was life altering.

  Xander is a complicated man. He’s half henchman, half spook (he works for the NIS - Greece’s CIA), favors an all-black wardrobe, which does him all kinds of favors when he doesn’t need any favors at all. His skin is bronze, his body is basically god-like, and he can tie a ponytail without pulling my hair. Someone that big shouldn’t be able to move through life like a panther, but I swear I’ve never heard the man’s footsteps.

  “Better?” he asked.

  I gulped. From the waist up he was all wet, and from the waist down he was mostly towel. No, not better at all. Just covered. “What are you doing here?”

  “Showering.”

  “In this country! In Oregon! In Portland! In my house! In my parents’ bathroom!”

  “Showering,” he repeated.

  “Because your shower back in Greece is broken? That’s a long way to go for a shower.”

  A grin spread slowly across his face. Xander didn’t smile much but when he did it was like the sun coming out in summer after a long Portland fall, winter, and spring.

  “Yes.”

  I wasn’t born yesterday, and I wasn’t born at night—especially not last night. I wasn’t any of the things that meant a person might be casually tootling through life, wool neatly wrapped around their eyes. Something was up. No, not that—I looked. Something else.

  “Are you going to tell me what is going on?”

  “Kyria Katerina sent me.”

  Grandma. Of course. She couldn’t help trying to control my world. “I told her not to send anybody!”

  “She is an old woman and she does not hear as well as she used to.”

  Yeah, right. Grandma could hear a towel drop in another country.

  “How did you get in?”

  “Key.”

  I glanced around. “Where is it?” One set of clothes sat on the counter—black. No boots. No wallet. No nothing. “Where are the rest of your things?”

  He produced a toothbrush and got busy brushing.

  To the rest of the world Xander was silent. He didn’t respond to knock-knock jokes or sudden tickling. He spoke to me when it suited him, and right now it didn’t suit him.

  No problem. Lots of the mouths in my family loved talking. One of Marika’s biggest talents was Too Much Information.

  I snatched my phone out of my pocket and pressed Marika’s number using Facetime. If
she lied to me I’d see it all over her face.

  She took her time answering. Crumbs tumbled down her chin. She mopped them up with a napkin. “Katerina! What are you doing?”

  Wherever she was it wasn’t anywhere familiar. To me it looked like she was at a booth in a restaurant.

  “Where are you?”

  She beamed. “A miracle has happened. Takis took me to a restaurant without me holding a knife to his poutsa.”

  “It was not a knife, it was a nail file,” Takis said in the background. “Those things are worse!”

  I cheered inside my head. Takis never took Marika anywhere, except the one time they went to Disney World and he bought guns from a dodgy man under a bridge on the way, and once when she tagged along after I flitted back home.

  “What restaurant?” My stomach growled. It wanted Greek food and it wanted it now. “Tell me everything. What did you order?”

  “A restaurant with a name I cannot remember. One on the waterfront.”

  “Which waterfront?”

  “Volos.”

  I twirled my finger. “Show me. I want to live vicariously. I’ve been living on chips, and the only view is my neighbor power walking to nowhere.”

  Marika went shifty eyed. “Here comes more food. I have to eat otherwise the baby will make me throw up.”

  Was she … lying to me? Inconceivable. But also very conceivable. Marika thrived on dispensing Too Much Information but it wasn’t always True or Accurate Information.

  “Show me.”

  “Show you what?”

  “The view and the food. I want to see the water and some Greek food.”

  “Marika, put down the phone,” Takis barked in the background. “Vre, I am trying to eat here. What is this? Do they call this patates tiganites?”

  “Skasmos,” she bit back. “Eat your food. I am busy trying to avoid a conversation with Katerina right now.”

  “Wave the phone around,” I said.

  “I do not want to.”

  “Live dangerously. Do it anyway. Show me the food.”

  She sighed. The phone shifted to a tall, sweating glass of water. “There. Now you see the water, yes?”

  While she was busy trying to fake me out, my brain was hard at work picking out details of the limited surroundings. My gaze latched onto the tattooed college kid sliding a plate onto the table and the woodwork at the bar. I knew this place and it was nowhere near Greece.

  “Wait a minute — is that a McMenamins?”

  “What? I do not know what that is.”

  “It is McMenamins! I know it is. Don’t lie.”

  “What is that word? I cannot understand what you are saying. My phone is not working—”

  “Stay. Right. There.”

  I punctuated the sentence like her life depended on it.

  Chapter 8

  Every Portlander knows every McMenamins. Right now Marika and Takis were sitting in a booth at a McMenamins in Beaverton. Normally I didn’t gamble with people’s lives, but today I’d bet my whole family’s good health that Grandma had blatantly defied my wishes and sent family to spy on me.

  Grumbling about privacy and betrayal, I snatched up my keys, bag, coat.

  Xander appeared at the bottom of the stairs, fully dressed in his usual black. I tried not to think about his penis.

  “Going somewhere?” he said.

  “On a wascally wabbit hunt.”

  “Okay, I’m driving.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. But only if I can control the music.”

  He didn’t get in a hurry to answer that. Xander has music issues. He has the taste of a man who took a syringe of cement to the ear canal. There’s a whole world of great music out there, yet Xander prefers the pained wails of rembetica, Greece’s folk music, where grown men whine about how they lost their favorite goat to another goatherd, or about how some other guy caught a bigger fish and used that fish to lure his wife into a life of debauchery.

  Xander nodded once. Victory was mine—this time.

  We went outside. Reggie Tubbs was in his usual spot on the porch, hunkered over a steaming coffee cup. He raised the cup when he spotted us.

  “I’d high five you but this coffee is the only thing stopping me from freezing my balls off. I’ve only got the two so I gotta be careful. Although these days they make implants if you lose one of them along the way. They look like ping pong balls.” He snorted. “Maybe they could hook me up with a pair of baseballs.”

  I backtracked to the innocent time before the ball talk. “High five?”

  “The tall drink of water there with you.” Reggie raised his voice. “Just so you know, it’s not every day she brings a man home, so don’t go treating her like a common ho.”

  Kill me. Kill me now. “This is Xander,” I said. “He works for my grandmother.”

  The retired judge zipped his lips. “Say no more. I won’t mention this to her.” He settled back into his chair and sipped his coffee. The coffee slopped over the edge as he sat bolt upright. “Hey now, that’s the guy from the van. I recognize him now. He and his three amigos put some serious muscle into decorating your place.”

  I looked up at Xander. When we were standing this close there was a lot of him to scale before I reached his face. “You put up the decorations?”

  He shrugged.

  Relief swept over me. Xander was my mysterious interior and exterior decorator, not Francis or some dodgy stranger whose goal was to traumatize me with tinsel and flashing lights. That I could live with.

  “Who were the other three guys?” I asked him.

  He said nothing.

  “Never mind, I can guess.”

  While I locked up, Xander crossed the street. He stopped by the black van, crouched down. Uh-oh. On the one hand I felt vindicated. The van’s driver was up to no-good, sort of. On the other hand I’d slashed Xander’s tire and now he had a face like stone—angry stone.

  Back he came. “Someone slashed my tire.” He spoke low and facing away from the street so no one would catch him speaking.

  “Wow,” I said. “How about that. This neighborhood is really going downhill. When I was a kid the worst crime committed around here was random dog poop on the lawn. Guess we better take my Jeep.”

  Xander went to wait by the driver’s side, hand extended.

  I rattled the keys at him. “No, no, no. My car.”

  With a quick smirk, he went around to the passenger side.

  “Forget it, Mister. It’s the backseat for you.”

  I had to give the guy credit, he got in and buckled up without complaining. Which was saying something because the Jeep didn’t have an overabundance of legroom in the back, and Xander had a lot of leg to extend.

  “Payback?” he asked.

  “Worse: this is straight-up revenge.”

  His expression devolved until his face resembled a gargoyle perched on a gothic church. “Pop music?”

  I beamed into the rearview mirror as I hooked up my phone to the sound system. “Siri, one rickroll please.”

  Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up danced out of the speakers, front and back. Xander’s expression shifted from gargoyle to open-heart-surgery-without-anesthetic.

  “Could be worse,” I told the rearview mirror. “Could be rembetika.”

  He snorted. “Where are we going?”

  “Like you don’t know.”

  If Xander was in my house, and Takis and Marika were currently stuffing their faces at McMenamin’s, then chances were they were all in on the same not-so-cunning plot.

  He didn’t confirm or deny. “How are things?”

  “Great!”

  His dark gaze tried to hold mine in the mirror. I broke away because I didn’t fancy crashing the Jeep.

  “I’ve got a job.”

  “Really.” There was no question in his question. More like a statement of disbelief.

  “This is my third since I got back. I’d call myself a wildly suc
cessful interviewee, so I’ve got that going for me.”

  He said nothing.

  “Probably I’d be working at a pet shelter, except they got all funny when I told them my last two jobs ended with fireballs. Did you hear about that?”

  He sidestepped the question. “So what’s the new job?”

  “You don’t know? I thought you knew everything.”

  “Humor me.”

  “It’s a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Job stuff,” I said, and now Xander knew as much as I knew about my employment situation.

  “Job stuff,” he repeated.

  He didn’t ask any more questions after that, which suited me fine. More time to focus on picking out my favorite pop tunes.

  “Thanks for the decorations and the tree,” I said as a remake of Wham’s Last Christmas hit the airwaves. “Are you responsible for the cab ride and the bomb detection squad?”

  “Yes.”

  “You changed the oil and detailed the Jeep.”

  He didn’t deny it.

  “Thanks.”

  McMenamins shares a parking lot with a UPS store, a dry cleaner, and several other storefronts that seemed to feature a rotating cast of occupants. Happy Hour was still several hours away so the parking lot was only a quarter full. In the front row I spotted a gleaming black van identical to Xander’s, but without the slashed tires. It was parked next to a black Ford Focus, equally shiny and devoid of life inside. A sure sign that Xander, Takis, and Marika hadn’t come alone.

  “How many of you are here?” I asked Xander. “Stavros? Elias? Never mind. I’ll find out myself.”

  On that note, I marched into McMenamins, scanning the booths for glitches in my Matrix. Takis’ complaining stood out above the other, more polite chatter. He was still ranting about the fries and how they weren’t cooked with olive oil in Marika’s kitchen.

  “Skasmos and enjoy America,” I heard Marika say. “Do not ruin this food for me.”

  “Ruin it, she says. Woman, I am here to work.”

  “Are you?” I said, sneaking up on them. “Are you here to work? Really? That’s why you’re here? Where are you working, then? Walmart?”

  Marika beamed. She heaved herself out of the booth and launched herself at me, smothering my cheeks in kisses. Not Takis. His face scrunched up like he’d popped a whole box of laxatives and was just now feeling the effects.