by Alex A King
“Does it have to be Takis? I kind of want to shove him out of a fast moving car.”
“I will get all the boys to spit on his food,” Marika called out. “And I will not do that thing he likes for at least a month.”
Grandma glared at us all. “If anybody asks what is that thing Takis likes, I will kill them where they stand.”
Takis snickered. I pummeled him with my best stink-eye. That’s what we did all the way around the block to the house behind my parents’ house. It was a nice place. Big. Two-story. Either it had come fully furnished or someone in the family had seriously speedy decorating chops and contacts at Pottery Barn.
Francis and Terri were upstairs in the smallest bedroom. Francis was at the desk with Xander’s gun pointed at him. Terri was crying in a corner like I’d left her to die in a burning house.
She stopped crying when she spotted me. “What happened to you?”
“Some stupid cow stole my wet blanket.”
“Oh. Was that me?”
I rolled my eyes.
“You can’t do this!” Francis said to Xander, his hands poised over a laptop’s keyboard.
“What’s going on?” I asked Takis in Greek.
He shrugged. “Why are you asking me? I just got here.”
I crouched down beside Francis. He did a double take and laughed.
“Look at you,” he said. “Got a hairdo like you stuck your head in a furnace. You don’t look so privileged now.”
“Some asshole set off a tiny explosion in my house and set it on fire.”
He grinned. “How’s the house?”
“Probably gonna outlive you.”
“Too bad. You plan to let him do this?”
“Why—what’s he making you do? Tweet?”
“Resign from the Crooked Noses, effective immediately, and confess to embezzling money from the company.”
“Were you embezzling?”
“Call it that if it makes you happy.” He looked up at Xander. “You won’t get away with this.”
“Dude,” I said, “do you even read your own message board? Mobsters do stuff like this all the time. In fact you’re getting off downright easy. I bet Takis over there could saw off your limbs and boil them into a bone broth in his sleep. No one would ever find you.”
Terri sobbed harder. “That’s terrible.”
I wheeled around. “Terrible? Why do you think your husband was in prison? Shoplifting to feed his family? Jaywalking? Straight up murder is what got Dogas a second prison sentence. He killed people and cut up their body parts and sent them to me.”
“That’s an awful thing to say. You suck.”
“What’s going to happen to her?” I asked the menfolk.
“Baboulas is leaving this one up to you,” Takis told me.
Me? My mind spun. My body stank of smoke. My hair—what was left of it—reeked of burnt keratin. Even at my best, thinking up fitting punishments wasn’t one of my hobbies. I wasn’t Grandma. Not too long ago I’d killed a man partly out of self-preservation and mostly by accident. Killing Viktor was never my plan. Justice was fine but not when it dressed in revenge’s clothing.
“Let her go,” I said. “She’s a nut, but she just lost her husband, even if he was a psychopath.”
Takis’ jaw dropped. “Let her go?”
“She’s been through enough.”
He made a face. “Can I cut off one of her fingers as a reminder to stay away from you?”
“No. No amputation. It’s mean.”
“Okay, but remember she sent death threats and left you to die in a burning house.”
When he put it like that … “Can you access police records?”
“Sure. We can do anything. What country?”
“Greece.”
He unclipped his phone holster. “I can do that now. What do you want?”
Takis was a dick but he was an efficient dick. “Send Kyria Dogas home with some before and after pictures of her husband’s victims. Maybe she won’t go poutsa fishing in the maximum security prisons next time.” I turned to Xander. “I don’t care what you do with this one. He killed people—decent people—and for no good reason. If you decide to make him disappear forever, that’s between you and your maker. But maybe don’t kill him because that’s illegal and I don’t want to come visit you in prison.”
I pivoted and left Francis and Terri to their fates.
Footsteps followed me out of the room. “Wait,” Takis said. “I will drive you.”
“Around the block? I can walk.”
I walked. He cruised alongside me at the speed of tortoise.
The sidewalk was empty when I stopped in front of my house. Everyone else had piled into the house around the corner, I assumed. Probably to eat Grandma’s pre-Christmas cooking.
Right there on the lawn I hummed carols to myself and watched steam rise from the blackened bones of my parents’ house. I thought hard about what was supposed to come next. No house. No job. But I had my health, if not my hair, so that was nice.
“Tell me you did not lose it in the fire,” a woman’s voice called out from across the street. I whipped around to see my neighbor—the constant walker—marching down the driveway in her sweats and sneakers.
The rain started up again the way it always did in winter. When I wiped my face my hand came away black.
“Huh?”
My neighbor jogged across the street. This was the first time I’d seen her up close, and I could see now that her face had issues. It didn’t work like a regular face. I half expected her jaw to unhinge as she swallowed a rat.
“Did you lose it?”
The voice was familiar now that it was speaking Greek. It couldn’t be …
“Hera? Holy cow, I’m pretty sure I’ve had this nightmare before.” I pinched myself to make sure this wasn’t all a dream, because to be honest that would solve ninety percent of my current problems.
Ouch. Not a dream. I was stuck with this hairdo until it grew back.
The temporarily suspended NIS agent wasn’t my least favorite person in the universe but she was vying for second place with all the people who’d tried to kill me lately. It was a big list. Competition was stiff.
“Why are you here, and what’s with the crazy outfit?”
Hera laughed. “You should see your face. And your hair … it is the best thing I have seen in my life. Stay like this forever.”
“You are truly one of life’s cockroaches.”
“Thank you.”
That she’d dodged answering my question didn’t matter much, Without her uttering a word about her agenda, I knew why she was infesting my home turf with her skanky perfume and offensive personality. The “it” she’d mentioned was the cassette tape I’d pilfered in Siberia.
“You sure walk a lot,” I said.
“I got shot, remember? Walking is good exercise while I heal.”
“You’re here for the tape.”
“Yes and no.”
I gave her two raised eyebrows and a head tilt.
“I want the tape but I also want to make sure no one else gets it. So where is it?”
“Safe.”
“Would you bet your life on it?”
“No, but I’d bet yours.”
Under her fake skin, she made a face, thrusting her further into the uncanny valley. “Can I see it?”
“Ha! I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could bowl your bony skull down this street. But I’ll check on it and report back.”
She considered that for a moment—like she had a choice. “Okay. I will wait here.”
Before I left, I had one more question: “Why do you care?”
Hera shrugged one bony shoulder. “My job is my life. That cassette is the only way back to my job.”
“If it contains the codes. I don’t know that it does.”
On the porch next door, Reggie grinned. “Well, hello.”
Hera swiveled on one Nike heel. “Never speak to me again,” she said in
English.
Reggie laughed. “God sure knew what He was doing when He invented broads.”
I left them to it. Reggie could handle himself. Probably he was handling himself right now.
Structurally the house was ambiguously sound. Didn’t matter anyway; I wasn’t going inside. I eased through the side gate, the leftover smoke stale and bitter in the air. When I was sure I was alone, I stuck my hand in the birdhouse, where I’d stuck the cassette to the inside of the roof with duct tape, after wrapping it in a dense layer of plastic wrap.
My hand touched wood.
No cassette. Not in the birdhouse.
Someone had found my hiding place.
The list of candidates was short. Someone else—Takis, Stavros, maybe even Xander—had likely done the pilfering, but at the end of the day that tape was destined to end up in just one black handbag.
Well played, Grandma. Well played.
I went back to Hera and grinned. “Bad news—for you, anyway—you’re about to drop dead.”
“Is there good news?”
“Are you unhappy right now?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the good news.”
She didn’t snark back, that’s how I knew the situation was dire.
“Then it’s over,” she said.
I looked at the house. My childhood home. My adult home. The place where I was happy until Mom died and the world turned gray … until Greece blasted it with a whole rainbow of colors. Staying here was out of the question while Grandma’s architects and contractors were busy replicating my past. I was homeless. Jobless. With a slew of unusual pets to care for. I’d come home to avoid crime and Greece, and both hunted me down anyway.
But it wasn’t as though I had no place to go. Grandma had that tape, and I for one intended to find out which part of her took it: mobster or the government.
“Not even close,” I said. “What are you doing for Christmas?”
Thank you for reading Christmas Crime!
Kat will be back shortly in Winter Crime.
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Alex A. King
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