by Alex A King
“No way,” I said, swiping away his attempt at chivalry. “This is my baggage. I want the satisfaction of ditching it myself.”
He grinned. “Okay, boss.”
Terri Dogas—formerly Fincher—lived in a townhouse in Aloha, where the rents were high and the meth heads had to pile twenty bodies to a house to afford sleep between tweaks. High rents didn’t mean high quality, just greedy landlords. The townhouses huddled together around patches of dirt, interrupted periodically by plants that looked like they’d been disappointed by life. Jaded kids were hauling a refrigerator from the dumpster to a narrow stream that ran alongside the property.
“Cool boat,” I said as I was getting out of the Jeep.
“Bitch, it’s a refrigerator,” one of the kids said, a seven-year-old with dead eyes and a floppy blond Mohawk. He flipped me off. Then his pals flipped me off. I didn’t flip them off because someone had to be a responsible adult and a good role model. Also, I was carrying this box so I didn’t have a finger to spare.
I trudged over the cracked, faded parking lot to knock on Terri Dogas’s door with my boot. There was no door bell. Terri’s door was separated from its neighbor by two thin strips of trim and two inches of siding. The neighbor had one of those cheap chairs people use for their kids’ sporting events set outside, the kind that come with flimsy mesh cup holders.
Nobody answered.
As I prepared to knock again, the neighbor’s door flew open. There was meowing from several feline mouths. Someone hardcore collected cats.
“Are you looking for Terri?” Terri Dogas’s neighbor looked like the kind of person who had fifty alleged health conditions and wanted to chat enthusiastically about them all.
I said that I was.
“She’s not home.”
“Any idea where she is?”
“I got all kinds of ideas if you’ve got time.” She didn’t wait for confirmation. She plonked herself down in chair and settled in for what I hoped wouldn’t be a long time. “She’s not at work. I know that because I was down at the secondhand store this morning and she weren’t there. And I know she wasn’t at the library because I went there for my videos and she weren’t there neither. Want to know what I think?”
My nod was superfluous; she was going to tell me anyway.
“I think it’s something to do with that man, if you can call him that. He’s not even American, and he’s in prison. Prison! What kind of woman hitches her wagon to a man in prison—and not one of us neither. It’s unAmerican. She never even met the man except the one time last month that she went over to see him. One of those brown countries, I think. Foreign. Probably one of those shitholes where they eat babies and wipe their butts with their hands. They’re all the same to me. When she came back, she came back married. Bragging about it, too, like it was some kind of accomplishment. Probably got herself knocked up and now my taxes are gonna pay to raise her kid.”
Wow, someone was a little ray of sunshine. “What do you do?”
“I’m on disability on account of how I can’t work. Hurt my back lifting boxes. I had surgery—”
I cut in before she launched into a never-ending story that would see me dying here of old age. “When was the last time you saw Terri?”
She shrugged. “A couple of days ago. Heard her sneaking in early this morning though. By the time I got to the window she was already inside. I was feeding the cats when she left. You don’t say no to cats. They’ll eat your face.”
“Do you think she’s”—I approached the subject delicately—“a crazy person?”
“She ditched all her cats. What’s that if it’s not crazy?” She squinted up at me. “You look like a cat person. How many do you have?”
“Zero, but I’m hoping to invest in cats in the near future.”
“Hopefully you won’t get stuck with a neighbor like Terri. After she abandoned her cats and took up with that foreign jailbird, she left me a note saying I better keep my cats locked up good because when her husband moved in he’d be bringing his eagle with him—and if there’s one thing eagles like to eat it’s cats.”
I dropped the box at home and drove back to work, where I stared at the ceiling and wondered if Terri knew an expert bomb maker and whether she had a history of arson. I tried to walk a mile in her shoes but her shoes were banana peels.
Francis wandered over to my cubicle. “Bad lunch?”
“I went to find Terri Dogas.”
“Did you get your woman?”
“She wasn’t home. Her neighbor said she hadn’t been around much.”
“Newly widowed … she’s probably keeping herself out of the house and busy. The question is: how is she keeping her mind off her husband’s death?”
His point was icky and scary and dark. His point was also potentially accurate. What if I was Terri Dogas’s new favorite hobby?
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“You know what, you should bring that box of Dogas’s things inside and we can have a look through it. Maybe there’s a clue in there. Another address. A hiding place.”
“It’s at home,” I said.
“Don’t worry, okay?” He touched my shoulder. “If I post her picture to the General board, I bet we can locate her in hours, then your guys can keep a preventative eye on her.”
“The Crooked Noses can do that?”
“We’re everywhere. We post to the internet and we know things. In the meantime, how’s about you work on that interview with Baby Dimitri?”
That wasn’t going to happen. But maybe I could switcheroo the interviewee. “Would you take an interview with his nephew?”
“You mean the kid? Isn’t he in high school?”
“Sometimes.” Donk—real name Yiorgos—spent most of his time ditching school and sneaking around in my shadow. Donk’s uncle encouraged the teenager to hang out with me. The Godfather of the Night and Watching Boobs figured time spent with me was giving the boy a good crash course in organized crime. I didn’t mind too much. Donk’s mother was a former porn star, porn director, and stone cold killer—current whereabouts unknown but probably nowhere good since Baby Dimitri got his mitts on his half-sister for a variety of crimes—so I worried about the teenager.
“What can he tell us?”
“He’s seen things—probably more things than Baby Dimitri lately.”
Francis mulled it over for a moment, then shrugged. “Yeah, all right, see if you can get the kid to talk. But I still want to hear about Baby Dimitri’s life in his own words. He’s a figure of interest to the Crooked Noses.”
Every criminal I knew was a figure of interest to a lot of people. What would Francis do when my list of contacts ran dry? I didn’t fancy being some kind of field reporter. I’m built for a life of couches and pizza, which, I was sure, made me part retired greyhound.
“I’m on it,” I said.
He flashed a quick smile. “Got plans for Christmas?”
Christmas. Yikes. It was almost here and so far I had zero gifts for family. “Sure,” I said, lying through all thirty-two of my teeth. “You?”
“No plans. I’m a free man.”
“No family?”
“None that matter.”
Before I could spit out a few platitudes, he said, “Give Baby Dimitri’s nephew a call. I have somewhere to be.”
He rapped twice on the wall of my cubicle and took off.
Not one to slack on the job, I called Donk.
“You want a poutsa pic?” he said when he answered.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m trying to quit.”
“Yo, bae, you do not know what you are missing.”
“Bae? BAE?”
“It is American slang for ‘baby’.”
Sadly, I knew what it meant. I was eager to steer him away from slang. Donk did unspeakable things to the English language—things worse than bae. “What’s new? Besides pictures of your genitals,” I said quickly in case he got the wrong idea.
“Noth
ing. All I do is work, work, work. When is the Donk supposed to have fun? Do you know when I last had sex?”
I went out on the world’s shortest limb. “Never?”
“Never,” he said, clearly unhappy about the situation. “Girls all over Greece are throwing away their best opportunity for a good time. I tried writing my number on bathroom walls but the only people who call me are German men.”
“I’ll light a candle for you. What work?” These days, when Donk wasn’t at school, which was most of the time, he stuck close to Elias, who was teaching him the ins and outs of being a bodyguard.
“Kyrios Elias is making me guard an egg while he is away. It has to go everywhere I go, and I cannot break it. I cannot even give it to a babysitter. It has to be me, all the time.”
“Want to do something fun?”
“Is it sex?”
“No.” I told him about the interview.
He brightened up. “A real interview? Fack yeah, bra.”
I winced at his assault on my mother tongue.
My phone beeped. Incoming call.
Marika was on the other end.
“There is someone in your house and I know it is not you because you are at work, and I know it is not Elias or Xander because they are with you. And I know it is not Baboulas, Thea Rita, Stavros, or Takis because they are out shopping at some place called IKEA.”
“Grandma is at IKEA? Really? Wait a minute—how do you know someone is in my house and why aren’t you shopping with the others?”
“Somebody had to stay behind to keep an eye on your house, so I volunteered.”
“Is everything okay with the baby?”
“Of course, but Baboulas brought over a lot of sweets and I was feeling a bit hungry, so I decided I should stay and eat. For the baby and my health, you understand.”
“Marika?”
“Yes?”
“Who is in my house?”
“I cannot tell from here …”
“Where are you?”
“Behind your back fence, staring through a knot hole. Do not worry, I am good at surveillance. You did not know I was here for days, did you?”
She had a point—and her point said as much about me as it did about her. I was sloppy. All that peering through windows and watching the world from the roof and I’d still missed what was right in front of me, and behind me, and in my crawlspace.
“I have to run,” I told Donk. “There’s someone in my house.”
“Is it a burglar?”
“Probably—or worse!”
“Fack yeah!”
I winced again.
Francis was out of the office so I called him to let him know I was busting out of work for the second time that day.
“No problemo. Did you get the interview with Baby Dimitri’s nephew?”
“Working on it,” I said. “He’s eager.”
“Excellent. The Crooked Noses will love it. They’ll be drooling by the time you score the Baby Dimitri interview.”
Yeah, like that was going to happen any time soon. Later on I’d have to figure out a way to let Francis down easy. Tell him Baby Dimitri was dead or something. Something told me the wily old mobster would dig that.
Chapter 15
“We should call the police,” I said.
I inspected Xander. I inspected Elias. Both men looked like they did a little light breaking-and-entering in their spare time. Then there was Marika, who probably had half a dozen guns stashed in the handbag over her shoulder.
“Maybe we don’t call the police,” I decided.
“Good idea,” Marika said. “The police do not seem to like you much, except Nikos, and Nikos is not here.”
“They like me just fine,” I said. “I’m a model citizen. Or I used to be before Greece happened.”
Marika hugged me around the shoulders. “Greece changes a person.”
Xander went in first while I waited outside on the porch with Elias and Marika. Arguing with Xander seemed like an exercise in futility. There was no winning when he was on mute.
It took him fifteen minutes to sweep the house. When he reemerged it was without prisoners or missing body parts.
“What took so long?”
He made a shape in the air with his hands.
“A giant marshmallow?” I guessed.
He thrust his chin up-down. No.
“Overstuffed pillow?”
“I bet you are terrible at charades, eh, Boss?” Elias said.
“The worst.”
Up-down. Xander made the shape in the air again, this time with finger effects that to be honest were a lot like spirit fingers. I wondered if part of his past involved a stint in musical theater.
I tried again. “Bomb?”
“Bomb?” Marika clutched her chest. “Why are there always bombs?”
He made a hand motion like I was hot and getting hotter.
“Searching the house took longer because you were searching for a bomb?”
Nod.
Great. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my messed up life.
“Did you find one? Or more than one?”
His chin went up-down. So that was a no then.
“Relax, everybody,” Marika said. “There is no bomb.”
I exhaled. “Can I go in?”
Xander nodded.
Before he could hit me with another round of charades, I bolted inside to check that everything was okay by my standards. First stop, my miniature zoo. Everyone was safe and accounted for, including the bear, who couldn’t care less who was wandering around the house invited or uninvited. Second, Mom’s jewelry and photos, from back when our family was three people wide. Third was the super-secret hiding place where I’d hidden the cassette tape that may or may not control a nuclear silo in Siberia.
Only one thing appeared to be out of place—so out of place that it was no longer in the house. Periphas Dogas’s box of unwanted goodies.
When I ran back to the Elias and Xander with my brilliant observation, neither man looked surprised.
“Xander stuck a tracker in the box and put it on the porch after you took it inside,” Elias said casually like it was no big deal. “Dogas’s wife must have grabbed it, just like the gods—and Xander—intended.”
“Sneaky,” I said. “What now? Do we go get Terri Dogas? I mean, she’s the thief, right? No one else would want Dogas’s thong underpants.”
“Xander goes to get her. You stay here.”
“Why?”
“Because she is trela and capable of anything.”
Crazy. He meant crazy.
“I know a lot of people like that. Some of them are even family.”
We went around in a circle. I wanted to go. The men wanted me to stay.
Marika had something to say about that.
“As your supervisor I say Katerina and I will go while you men follow us for backup. We will not need backup because I am very good with a gun. Elias, give me your gun.”
Elias didn’t give her his gun. He’d witnessed Marika’s shooting.
Marika went on, undeterred. “But now that I think about it, it is best you come with us anyway because I am not sure how Takis gets rid of bodies, and he will not tell me.”
“What a monster,” I said. “I can’t believe he won’t give up all his trade secrets.”
“I do not give him mine either. I would cut off my own hand before I gave him my tiganites recipe.”
“It’s not just potatoes, olive oil, and salt?”
“He must never know that,” Marika said darkly. “Never.”
I promised never to part with Marika’s recipe for fries. When I turned around, Xander was gone and Elias was inside checking all the windows and doors.
“Where did Xander go?” I asked.
“To follow the package,” my bodyguard said.
“I am the supervisor. I decide,” Marika said. “This is not what I decided.”
“Maybe Xander doesn’t know that,” I said.
&n
bsp; Elias stifled a grin.
“I saw that,” Marika said. “I have children. I have eyes in places men will never have eyes. I can see what you are thinking.”
Elias hurried out of the room, leaving us alone. I did another circuit of downstairs to make sure nothing was missing. If Xander had left the package on the porch, who had been sneaking around inside my house and why? You’d think people would learn a thing about that classic cautionary tale, Goldilocks, but apparently they were slow on the uptake.
The ceiling creaked. I knew that creak. There were nights when I came home after curfew and had to crawl on my belly like a reptile to avoid putting pressure on those planks in the hallway upstairs. The planks never squealed without good reason, and that reason was always feet.
“Elias,” I called out. “Where are you?”
Elias appeared around the corner. “Garage. Why?”
I pointed at the ceiling. “Someone is up there.”
“Xander checked. It was clear.”
He was right. If Xander said the house was safe, the house was safe. But what if he’d missed a hiding place or someone had snuck in after he gave it the all clear? Those things happened all the time to people like me. Well, just to me.
“Maybe it is that crazy woman who calls herself Kyria Dogas,” Marika said.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Xander is tracking the box,” Elias said. “It cannot be her.”
“What if she and the box aren’t together? What if she didn’t steal the box.”
Elias looked genuinely worried. “I did not think about that.”
None of us had. “But then who else would want the box?” I asked. “It was full of useless junk that nobody would want, except his wife.”
The ceiling creaked again, this time over my room. I relaxed. This wasn’t a break-in—it was a simple case of lumbering bear.
“Bear,” I said. “Not bad guy. I’ll go up and check on her.”
Marika made other plans. “While you do that I am going to see what Baboulas left here. All this excitement has made the baby and me hungry.”
I jogged upstairs, wondering what my bear was up to. Maybe she wanted another little midwinter snack. All the commotion might have aroused her curiosity enough to jerk her out of hibernation. Would she settle back down if I read her a story? I could do that. The crawlspace was home to several boxes of picture books and early readers.