Christmas Crime

by Alex A King

  “We met when he was stalking me. Why?”

  “Also dead.”

  “Since when? Wait—what does that have to do with me?”

  “You tell us.”

  “Nothing!” I’d quit thinking about Periphas the moment the barred door slammed in his face. “Was he killed in prison?”

  They glanced at each other, then back at me. “Yes.”

  My arms waved around at all the everything. “Do you see the problem?”

  “People die around you?”

  “Todd died around me. Periphas Dogas? He died in prison. He was a crazy person and he’s not my problem. Viktor … who knows?” I knew. “If I can be helpful—genuinely helpful without having to answer ridiculous questions—let me know. Otherwise, I really need to wash this man right out of my hair. Literally. And I’d really hoped I’d never have to say that.”

  I flung the photos back at him and slouched in the seat, arms folded tight, guarding against stupid questions. They got the hint. Neither of them lobbed any more questions at me. They pulled up outside my house and I got out. They drove away. That was the end of that—I hoped.

  Seeing as how it was my home, I let myself in. Everyone was in my living room, except Grandma, whose cooking streak continued in the kitchen, masking the stink of death and Todd.

  “Don’t you have homes to go to?” I asked.

  Grandma looked me over. She peered down her nose at me. Given that she was almost a foot shorter I was pretty sure that was some kind of Greek sorcery. “What is that in your hair?”

  “Todd. Todd is in my hair.”

  “He needs to see a doctor,” Takis said from the living room.

  “Todd is beyond needing a doctor,” I said. “I’m not sure even Gus could help him now. He exploded, in case anyone is interested.”

  Takis came in to gawk at me. “Sometimes that happens. Usually when I eat Marika’s beans.”

  “Soak them in sugar water,” Grandma said.

  “I do,” Marika said, following her husband into the kitchen. “Takis is a sack of farts with a man’s face sketched on it.”

  The sack of farts with a man’s face shook his hands at the ceiling. “Re, I am standing right here!”

  “I know,” Marika said sweetly, her hand diving into a bag of M&Ms.

  “No—he exploded,” I clarified for all the slow people in the room. “Boom. Bang. Blood and guts spread all over the parking lot.”

  “His car blew up?” Marika asked. “That happens a lot in our family.”

  “No, just him,” I explained. “His car caught fire the other day and I’m pretty sure his rental was fine.”

  “Did he have a bomb?” she asked.

  “Not that I know of, but it wasn’t like I checked his pockets.”

  Marika tossed an M&M into her mouth. “Remember Winkler’s adopted daughter? She exploded all over you, too. She had a bomb.”

  Like I could forget. “Todd wouldn’t have a bomb. That wasn’t Todd. He liked kale and yoga and romantic comedies.”

  “How would you know?” Takis said. “You did not know he was a sister until you caught him eating loukaniko.”

  I ignored that. “Speaking of news, Periphas Dogas is dead, too. Killed in prison, apparently.”

  Takis snorted. Grandma said nothing. She kept on mixing by hand while Mom’s KitchenAid sat on the counter looking sad and unwanted. Who does that?Grandma, that’s who. Anyone else would be all over the mixer.

  “It is a miracle. Now he cannot force you to marry him,” Marika said.

  “She should marry somebody before she gets old and her eggs dry up,” Takis said. “How old are you? Forty? Fifty?”

  I shot him in the face with my best stink-eye. He laughed.

  “Grandma, can I kill Takis?”

  “Takis is a malakas but he has a good point,” Grandma said. “You should think about a husband before it is too late.”

  Marika clapped her hands. M&Ms scattered across the kitchen. “I love weddings! I know the perfect dress shop in Volos.”

  “I’m not getting married,” I said. “I’m not even dating. And right now the only place I’m going is the shower.”

  Wedding plans continued without me—or a groom. Marika had ideas and she had a lot of them. Every last one involved mountains of food, parties, and a terrifying amount of tulle and satin. I trudged upstairs, one heavy footstep at a time. Coming home was supposed to be my shot at a do-over, a return to a normal life where no one exploded in my face and I never had to shoot anyone to survive. My plan was solid. My execution was the worst ever.

  Xander was at the top of the stairs. A wave of helplessness washed over me.

  “I don’t know where to start.” I sounded pathetic.

  His head tilted toward the bathroom.

  “Want to shower with me?” I asked. Shock had rattled my brains. Yes, I wanted to shower with Xander, but I didn’t want Xander to know I wanted to shower with Xander. Which was crazy. He was single. I was single. What was my problem?

  Without a word, he took my hand, led me into the bathroom. He locked the door. ““Let me take care of this.” His words brushed my ear. “Take your coat off.”

  The night was cold but heat rippled through my body.

  I went to do as he said, then I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. Blood freckles. Bits of bone in my hair. A pink-gray blob that I hoped wasn’t a fragment of Todd’s brain. A pained noise squeaked out of my throat.

  “Don’t look.” With a gentle hand Xander turned my chin away from the mirror.

  While I was staring into Hell, Xander had piled several soft towels on the floor by the tub. With calm, steady hands he removed my top layer and wrapped me in one of the soft towels. He indicated for me to kneel by the edge of the tub and bend my head over the edge.

  “Close your eyes.”

  Warm water sluiced over and through my hair. With gentle hands he washed Todd away, using shampoo, conditioner, and one of those fine-toothed comb moms use to eradicate nits. Emotions bubbled up. Once upon a time I’d loved Todd with all my heart, then he betrayed me, taking a sledgehammer to my world. I cried for him, spending all those years in the stupid closet when he could have been out and happy. I cried because he was dead. I cried because he’d chosen wieners over me. I cried because I wasn’t sure if we had a pipe snake in the garage. What if Todd clogged the pipes and I had to call a plumber to get him out? I wasn’t confident I could pay the bill—not before payday, whenever that was. Plus how would I explain human debris in the pipe?

  Xander turned off the water. He combed through my hair again before clipping it up in a makeshift twist.

  “You’re good at this,” I said.

  “I used to have long hair.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “Really.”

  There was a grin in his voice that wasn’t on his face. “No.”

  A memory swam to the surface, of a name with no woman. “Did you do Sofia’s hair?”

  There it was, the name I’d been clutching in my hand since my first few days in Greece. Xander had mumbled the woman’s name in his sleep. Soon after I’d forgotten the incident. Until now.

  Xander’s programming didn’t so much as blip. With the smoothness of a well-oiled robot, he kept doing what he was doing, which was fine-tuning the shower.

  “Every day,” he said. “She loved it.”

  I gulped. Opening Pandora’s box always seemed like a good idea until the harsh truth and other nasties spilled out. I could follow this line of questioning to my doom or I could let it go and be hunky dory with my ignorance. “Well, you’re good at it. If you ever quit doing what you do, you could always be a hair stylist.”

  “Maybe.” He arranged the bathmat on the floor, folded the towels, directed me to the steaming shower. “I’ll be in my room if you need me.”

  Did I need him? Affirmative. But could I open my mouth and tell him about the one spot on my back I couldn’t reach without a man in the shower with me? No, I could not. />
  “Thanks. But I’ve got this.”

  “You doubt yourself, but I never have.”

  Xander’s services didn’t extend to laying out clean clothes for me this time, so I wrapped myself in the comforting embrace of oversized flannel pajamas and flopped down on the bed to get my bearings.

  It took a while. My bearings were really messed up.

  A soft snort jolted me out of my self-pitying mode. I tilted my head up. Bear’s nose twitched. Her eyelids were shut tight. Someone was really digging hibernation. Hopefully she wouldn’t wake up craving a Greek-American snack.

  The phone rang. I reached over and snatched it up off the bedside table.

  “I heard you had a bad day,” Melas said in his caramel voice. “What can I do?”

  Tension melted out of me. New tension took its place. Horny tension. “Can you glue a man back together?”

  “No.”

  “Probably Gus could.”

  “If anybody could it is Gus.”

  True. Gus was a magician in the morgue. Give him pieces of a person and he could fashion a whole one. He’d done it with Litsa, my cousin’s George’s wife and Melas’s former lover.

  “Not this time, I don’t think,” I said. “Some of the dead guy is in the sewer. Xander washed him out of my hair.”

  “Xander washed your hair?” His voice had a sharp curious edge. There was a subtle rivalry between the men that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with a shared past that I knew next to nothing about. All I knew was that it involved Viktor—my dead cousin—Hera—Melas’s ex and Viktor’s—and bears.

  “Only above the neck,” I said. “Periphas Dogas is dead, did you know?”

  “How did you hear about that?”

  “Feds.”

  He gave me a questioning yet unsurprised look.

  “Feds are following me everywhere because of my DNA,” I explained.

  Melas blew out a sigh. “Dogas is dead, that is true. He died a few weeks ago.”

  “Was he shanked?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Could you find out?”

  “I can do that.”

  If he thought my request was weird he didn’t say. I wanted to know for no specific reason beyond curiosity. My life had well and truly exceeded its death quota. Yeah, Periphas Dogas was a whacko, but that didn’t mean I’d wanted him dead. Prison was a suitable alternative.

  I gave him a grateful smile. “Thanks.”

  “Do you know who blew up? Was this someone you know or a random act of Baboulas?”

  I filled him in on the Todd situation. “How does a person just explode?”

  “Was your ex carrying anything?”

  I didn’t have to think twice. Breaking off the engagement hadn’t erased my memory. At night when I couldn’t sleep and desperately needed to be somewhere early the next morning, my idiot brain played the sausage-eating incident. Repeatedly. Sometimes in slow motion because my brain was a real jerk like that. I remembered Todd. I remembered us.

  “His messenger bag. He never leaves—left—home without his laptop.”

  “That is where they put it.”

  “Whoever they are. Todd didn’t have enemies. He was the human equivalent of steamed rice.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  No. Not even close. Someone blew up Todd. Someone blew up my workplace. Someone set fire to my other workplace. My world was going up in flames, one piece at a time.

  Todd didn’t have enemies, as far as I knew, but I had all of Grandma’s. What if one of them decided to use Todd to get to me to get to Grandma? Bad guy logic was always twisty, at best.

  Melas promised to call about Periphas Dogas. After he ended the call I wandered downstairs to rustle up some grub. With Todd’s untimely and unexpected demise, dinner hadn’t been on my radar. Now suddenly my stomach wanted food—and fast. While I was cleaning up and talking to Melas, my family had evacuated. Once again, Grandma left a refrigerator and countertop full of food. I wolfed down a whole tiropita before hacking off a slab of spanakopita.

  Melas called back as I was eyeing seconds.

  “Periphas Dogas tripped and cracked his skull on a stainless steel toilet while he was cheering his football team. One of his cellmates smuggled in a phone so they could watch sports.”

  Wow. That was some bad luck and I told Melas so.

  “It gets better. Apparently Dogas left you all his worldly goods. His wife is not a happy woman.”

  “Wife? He had a wife? Why was he trying to marry me then?”

  “The wife came later. My source says he recently married some woman he had been corresponding with for years.”

  “So why leave me his belongings? I don’t want his anything. Someone needs to get in touch with her and let her know it’s hers—all hers.”

  That was weird. All of this was weird.

  I didn’t like any of it.

  My bear didn’t like it either. When I went upstairs she sniffed my breath once, snorted, and rolled over.

  Xander was in the kitchen with coffee in one hand, his phone in the other. In his black slacks and shirt he looked like someone you’d take home to your parents if you wanted them to panic about your virginity and whether it would be lost in a Fifty Shades scenario, minus the emotional abuse.

  “Have you ever tied anyone up?” I asked him as he poured a cup of coffee and slid it over to me.

  “Why?”

  “For science.”

  “Not this week.”

  I sipped the coffee and sighed. Perfect.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a muffin to go with this?”

  He presented me with a paper bag. Nestled inside was an oversized chocolate chip muffin. “Stavros baked.”

  Of course he did. Grandma didn’t know Stavros was the family’s true heir to the master chef title. Kneecapping went with the henchman job title, but in his spare time Stavros longed to be a stay-at-home dad while he baked canapés.

  I grabbed my coat, my bag, my keys and phone. The doorbell rang as I shimmied into the coat Xander was holding out. Elias was on the other side. He pointed to a box sitting on the porch.

  “Package,” he said. “This needs to be checked.”

  The box was too big to fit a human head, too small to fit a whole human. When I said it out loud Elias shrugged.

  “Maybe if you cut a small man up into pieces and assembled him in the box like a jigsaw puzzle he would fit.”

  I stared at the box. That could work.

  “Whatever it is, it’s not for me. I didn’t order anything.”

  It was for me. My name was on the label. Point of origin: Greece.

  “Hey!”

  I swung around to see Reggie waving from his porch. I waved back, avoiding eye contact with his lower half. Better to be safe than sick.

  “One of those shady looking cousins of yours left that there earlier,” he called out

  “The human weasel or the bear?”

  “The weasel. What’s with that guy? Does he know he was born without an ass?”

  “He has one,” I said. “It’s on his shoulders.” I called Takis. “Did you leave a package on the porch?”

  “It came yesterday. I forgot to give it to you after Stavros scanned it.”

  “For what?”

  “Bombs, drugs, human remains.”

  Bomb free. Excellent. After my recent circus of a life a regular package was a welcome surprise. Maybe it was a care package filled with treats from Dad or Melas.

  “What’s inside and who is it from?”

  “Do I look like an oracle?”

  “More like a cheese stick with a huge mouth.”

  “Cheese stick? What is a cheese stick? The things you Americans—”

  I ended the call. Way less satisfying than hanging up. App makers found all kinds of ways to replicate nostalgia with new technology. Why couldn’t they invent an app that invoked the smug, delicious sensation of ending a crappy call?

&nbs
p; “Stavros scanned it for all the usual suspects,” I said. “It’s safe to open.”

  Elias hauled the box inside and located a knife. With a few flicks, the tape popped free. He peeled apart the flaps. We peered inside.

  Rat skeletons. An enormous leather glove thingy. Books about the care and training of eagles. A notebook filled with love and erotic poetry. A massive bundle of letters—at least two hundred scented envelopes. Male thong underwear. Finally, a packaging slip from a Greek prison that said all this loot was my problem now.

  Yikes!

  I jumped backward. This was it, my inheritance from Periphas Dogas. I didn’t want it, no siree.

  I closed the flaps and shoved it away. “Wrong address,” I said.

  Elias glanced at the labels. “It has your name on it, and this address.”

  Xander opened up the box again, rifled through the contents. He pulled out the stack of letters and raised an eyebrow. He passed me one off the top, tapped the return address with one finger.

  Well, well well, this was freakishly coincidental, which practically guaranteed it wasn’t. The return address was right here in the Portland area. The sender’s name was one Terri Fincher.

  I shuddered.

  Lately Portland felt more like The Upside Down. The only thing missing was the groovy 1980s soundtrack.

  Hoping it wasn’t a federal offense to take mail after it had been posted, opened, and left to me as some kind of freakishly weird and inappropriate inheritance, I slipped the envelope into my bag.

  “I’ll deal with this later.” When I was feeling less icky. “Right now I need to run. Mama needs to renew her Netflix subscription.”

  I didn’t stop to ask if the menfolk were coming, too; I already knew the answer and that I didn’t have much choice in the matter. To be honest, although having constant bodyguards could be slightly suffocating, it was nice to know someone had my back.

  Or whichever body part the bad guys were aiming a gun at.