In Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel

by Alex A King

  Hera cheered Elias on as he shoved her suits aside, bolting after the creep who’d been watching us.

  “You can do it, loser,” Hera yelled, hands cupped around her mouth.

  It was a short, dangerous jaunt across the street, but it was worth risking life and limb for a higher cause.

  I kicked her in the shin. Hard.

  “You stupid skeela,” she howled.

  “Oops,” I said, totally at peace with being called a bitch. “My foot slipped. It does that a lot.”

  Recovering quickly, her hand shot out and yanked on a skein of my hair. “So does my hand.”

  “Police brutality!” I yelled.

  “Good thing I am not the police then. If I was the police I couldn’t do this.” She whipped something out of her purse and shoved it up under my ribs. There was a zapping sound and then—

  CHAPTER 15

  When I opened one eye, Aunt Rita was staring down at me, her painted face worried. “What are you doing?”

  My first—American—instinct was to pop off a ‘What do you think I’m doing on the ground?’ but Greeks use ‘What are you doing?’ as a substitute for ‘How are you?’ That’s because they care more about what you’re doing than how you feel about it. The gossip machine thrives on that thing you did that you hope no one ever finds out about.

  “Taking an unscheduled nap.”

  She helped me up. “That skeela. Someone needs to punch her in the mouni.”

  “She’d probably enjoy that.” I looked around. “What did I miss?”

  “Whoever was watching you they got away. Elias tried, but then he cut through the line at the bus stop. Big mistake.”

  I winced. Boarding a bus was serious business—and seriously dangerous business—around these parts. Never get between an elderly Greek and bus doors. “Is he okay?”

  “The spit is already dry, but the bruises will take a few days to fade. Do you know how much damage an old woman can do with a watermelon?”

  “Katerina!” Elias limped towards us, looking like he’d been tossed into a dryer with a bucketful of rocks. “He got away. Do you think Baboulas will have me killed?”

  “Probably just whipped,” I said. His face fell. “I’m kidding.” Maybe; with Grandma anything was possible. “You did the best you could. Did you get a good look at him?”

  Breathing hard, he made a face. “Only the back of his head. He had dark hair and good clothes.”

  “Did he have a weapon?” my aunt asked.

  “Not that I could see. He was just watching Katerina, I think.”

  Aunt Rita gnawed on that a moment. “Reporter?”

  “Maybe.”

  Surely it wouldn’t be Mario. Why would he care about little old me? I was an escapee hostage, that’s all. Besides, after the toe incident I wasn’t sure he’d be able to run.

  Hands on hips, my aunt looked up and down the street. “Whoever he was, we scared him off—for now. But he will come back. Shit always floats back up to the surface, and when it does we will be there with a net.”

  As far as metaphors went it was disturbing, but I appreciated the part where there would be a waiting net.

  Back on the table-and-umbrella lined side of the street again, I plopped down into the chair I’d left in a hurry. My grandfather’s cousin was fanning herself with her hand.

  “Oooh-la-la, your life is so exciting,” she said. “I never met anybody who had a stalker before.”

  My gaze smashed into Kyria Mela’s heavy-lidded stare. Now there was a woman who knew the line between ‘stalker’ and ‘murderer’ was only about a fraction of an inch thick, and that line depended on the stability of the lies the stalker told his or herself.

  Being almost constantly followed—by the NIS, assassins, weirdoes, and by other assassins and weirdoes who weren’t Family—was growing old. The only silver lining was that I’d learned something valuable about myself: becoming a cult leader wasn’t for me.

  I reclaimed my cup from Dora Makri and pushed it to Kyria Mela, hoping for a more optimistic future—even if it was one made of bologna.

  “Can you see something else in there?”

  It didn’t take Melas’s mother long. “The cup says you need to grow a pair of balls.”

  #

  The cup was right—about the balls at least. Ever since I’d come to Greece the bad guys had danced all around me, taking (often literal) shots. The Family, especially Grandma, prodded me this way and that, trying to squeeze me in to an eventual leadership role.

  What had I done about being proactive?

  Not much.

  Reacting instead of acting was my MO.

  “You can have mine,” Aunt Rita said. “Mine are sitting here, taking up room in my lingerie.”

  Balls. Aunt Rita was stuck on the subject after Kyria Mela made her declaration about my future. After that, the detective’s mother had clammed up and told me if I wanted to hear more then she expected an exchange: stories about Italy for another stab at my future. “Cheaper than what this one will charge you,” Kyria Mela had said, shooting an invisible arrow over Dora Makri’s bow.

  My grandfather’s cousin had snatched the twenty-euro note out of my hand and stuffed it into her pocket. “What kind of monster charges family?” She bestowed a smile upon me. It was the innocent curve of one who flirted frequently with selective memory loss.

  Now Aunt Rita and I were back at the compound and I still wasn’t sure why Grandma had sent me to Dora Makri to begin with. When I mentioned it to Aunt Rita she shrugged. “Baboulas’s ways are mysterious.”

  Mysteries were fast becoming my least favorite genre. Mysteries were helping nobody, least of all Dad.

  I kissed my aunt on both cheeks, hopped into the Beetle, and zipped off toward the hospital, Elias sticking close behind. Two NIS vans clung to his metallic butt.

  Hera still wanted to debrief me. I wasn’t about to make it easy for her.

  I called Stavros to complain. Stavros was good at listening to complaints.

  “She’s got no right,” I said.

  “Actually, the government says she does.”

  “But they shouldn’t. Not after she dumped Marika and me in Italy. We were almost killed.”

  “Collateral damage,” he said sadly. “That’s all any of us are.”

  “It shouldn’t be that way.”

  “This is the life that chose us.”

  #

  Grandma had visitors. All I could see of them was a row of masculine backs. Three men clad in variations on the same theme: slacks, plain-colored business shirts rolled to the elbow, shoes clean but not mirror glassy.

  The door was open, but an immovable force was blocking the way. Very Biblical. Very Xander.

  “Can I go in?” I asked him.

  Xander performed the little up-down chin move that Greeks use instead of a headshake. So that was a ‘no’ then.

  How much luck did I have, and how far could I push it?

  “Can I stand out here and wave to her?”

  Grandma’s best henchman and favorite bodyguard rolled his eyes. But wait, was that my imagination or did the edges of his lips twitch?

  “Do you know why Grandma sent me to see my grandfather’s fortune-telling cousin?”

  Nothing. Not even a twitch this time. The situation was regressing.

  “Hey—want to play charades? You go first.”

  A soft snort.

  “Interpretive dance? I won’t even judge you much. Can you dance?”

  A guy that big, surely he couldn’t. He walked like one of the big cats, but dancing was a whole different set of skills.

  “Blink if you know why Grandma sent me to see Dora Makri.”

  “You are looking for a mystery where there is none, Katerina,” Grandma called out from inside her hospital room. Three heads turned my way. There was a moment of silence as they did basic math, then one of the men said, “Katerina! You grow more beautiful every time we see you. Any word from Mikey?”

  T
hree men—three of Dad’s best childhood friends. Once upon a time the group was six strong, but now they were down two members. Cookie had drowned in Grandma’s pool, helped along by a serial killer. Tony Goats, former dentist, was erased on his wife’s orders. Not a stable marriage, that one.

  Now there were three ... and Dad, wherever he was. Jimmy Pants, the scrawny high school gym teacher; Fish, an accountant built like Santa Claus; and Johnny Deadly, mattress salesman. Dad was Mikey Far, on account of how our last name means a long, long way away.

  I’d met them all before at Cookie’s last funeral, before the family dogs discovered him floating in the pool, and again at Tony’s gravesite. Now they were here, and I was getting a three-horsemen-of-the-apocalypse vibe.

  “We’re still looking,” I said, sidestepping Xander.

  Dad’s old posse took a few moments to swap kisses and hugs with me before resuming their positions.

  “Bad business,” Fish said.

  “Mikey will show up. That’s what he does.”

  Jimmy Pants was right ... to a point. Dad’s job, whatever its true nature, took him all over the world, apparently. But he’d always come home. Or he had until a couple of crooked noses marched him out of our home.

  “What are you guys doing here?” I asked.

  Johnny Deadly spoke for them all. “We’re here to pay our respects.”

  “I like respect,” Grandma said.

  “Everybody likes respect,” Uncle Kostas said, appearing in the doorway. “Throw some of it this way, would you?”

  The men stared at him. Uncle Kostas stared back. They didn’t look happy to see him, and the feeling seemed mutual.

  Then, slowly, like an enemy submarine rising, my uncle grinned. “Look, it’s the three malakas. You are missing a couple of balls, though.”

  “Cookie and Goats are dead,” Fish said.

  My uncle shook his head. “Nobody tells me anything these days.”

  “When did we ever tell you anything?” Johnny Deadly said.

  Suddenly there was tension in the room, overpowering the stench of the pine-scented cleaner that seems to exist in every medical facility in the world. The four men metaphorically pulled out their wieners and staged a measuring competition, all without unzipping, speaking, or moving a muscle.

  Somewhere behind me metal whispered against fabric. Xander was getting his gun out—and his was definitely bigger.

  While all this male posturing was going on, Grandma sat back against Aunt Rita’s frothy nest of pillows, enjoying the play.

  I threw something into the room to cut the tension. A kind of verbal knife.

  “Someone is following me. You know, just for a change.”

  The tension fell away. A new kind of conflict filled its shoes. This one was sharp and it was pointed right at me.

  “You should have opened with that,” Grandma said.

  “Relax, it’s the NIS,” Uncle Kostas said.

  “It’s not the NIS,” I told him, “although they’re following me, too.”

  “For what?” Grandma wanted to know.

  I told her about Hera’s itching, burning desire to drag the details of my impromptu trip to Naples out of my head. When I was done I said, “What should I do?”

  “Nothing. Live your life. I will keep my eye on the NIS.”

  “And the person following me who isn’t NIS?”

  “That is what you have Elias for, but I will assign someone else to you as well.”

  “Do you mean Marika?”

  Grandma snorted. “Marika.”

  Uncle Kostas laughed. “Marika is a joke.”

  Marika was the punch line to a joke as far as the bodyguard business went, but her heart was a barrel of hot chocolate. Whatever Uncle Kostas was made of, it wasn’t candy. Mostly it smelled like pee.

  “Not Marika,” Grandma said. “Someone invisible. I will arrange it immediately.”

  I looked at her. She didn’t move.

  “The other kind of immediately,” she elaborated. “After you leave. And after they leave.” She was looking at Dad’s old pals.

  “Maybe you should stay in the compound,” my uncle suggested. “Save the manpower. There is nothing you can’t do there. The pool, the movie room, the gym ...”

  Was he saying I needed to work out?

  “There’s a movie room?” I asked.

  “Sure there’s a movie room.” Then he winked at me, and I knew he was talking about the super-secret room—well, rooms—directly beneath Grandma’s dump. From beneath the compound, Grandma could keep eyes on places that were her property ... and some that weren’t. Detective Melas would poop a kitten-sized brick if he knew his police building was under constant Family surveillance.

  “You know I’m an adult, right?” I said to my uncle.

  He beamed. “To me you will always be my baby niece.” His attention shifted, for which I was grateful. I didn’t need him putting ideas in Grandma’s head. Grandma’s head was already home to plenty of bad ideas, including the blind date thing. The last thing I needed was to find myself confined to the compound again. I’d been there, done that, and captivity definitely didn’t agree with me. So much so that I’d escaped to go hunting a serial killer.

  “What do you do these days, Pants?” Uncle Kostas asked the high school gym teacher. When Jimmy Pants told him, Uncle Kostas laughed. “You almost had me there.”

  Jimmy Pants wasn't a laughing man. “No joke, malaka.”

  “You. In school. Ha! Back in the old days you six would do anything to get out of school.”

  “Things change,” Jimmy Pants said.

  My uncle swung around to waggle his eyebrows at me. “Not for your father, eh, Katerina? I bet school is the last place you would find the man, even now. Did he ever show up for those meetings American schools have with parents?”

  Grandma glowered. “Kostas.”

  “What?” Two soft palms up. “We are just talking, that’s all.”

  I thought about all the times Dad didn’t show up for parent-teacher conferences. It wasn’t that Dad didn’t care, Mom told me. According to her, our family liked luxury items like food and electricity, so Dad had to work. These days I wondered whose kneecaps he’d been whacking while Mom discussed my note-passing prowess with my teachers.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said to Grandma, returning to my original point. “I think you sent me to see Dora Makri for a reason. I don’t know what reason, but there’s definitely a reason.”

  Uncle Kostas laughed. “It’s like she knows you, Mama.”

  “Everything in life does not have a reason.” Grandma closed her eyes, then opened one hawkishly. She fixed it on me. “But since you are here, did you learn anything interesting?”

  “Yeah, that Kyria Makri and Kyria Mela hate each other.”

  “If that is all you learned then it was a waste of time.”

  “And money,” I said. “Don’t forget money.”

  Grandma grinned, making her one healthy-sized wart away from “witch." “Money is one thing I never forget.”

  #

  I felt uneasy. I felt uneasy all the way back to the parking lot with my uncle beside me.

  “Sit back, Katerina. Let life happen to you. Or—” he dealt me a libertine’s grin “you can choose to happen to life.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Miyagi,” I said. “You know, you’ve never said what you’re doing here—in Greece, I mean.”

  “Why does anyone come to Greece? For the sunshine.”

  “Germany doesn’t have sunshine?”

  “Everywhere has sunshine, but not like sunshine at home. Greece’s sunshine is different.”

  “It’s the same sun.”

  He shrugged. Looked up and down the parking lot. “So they say. Look, Katerina, whatever Mama said up there, forget it. Stay at the compound. The compound is safe.”

  “One of Winkler’s brats tried to kill me there. One of Winkler’s other kids tried to blow herself up there. A serial killer murdered one of D
ad’s old friends there. Which is the safe part again?”

  “Okay, the compound is mostly safe. What I’m saying is that it’s safer in there than out here.”

  “Grandma and I have been over this.”

  “Mama is an old woman. She is reaching an age where she is not thinking clearly. Her mind is deteriorating, and her health. In her prime, there was no way she would have allowed you to go traipsing around Greece with the NIS and God knows who else for company. She would have locked you away until it was safe, and she would not have yielded for anything.”

  “Hello,” I said. “American citizen here. Adult. My country would make a frowny face at that sort of treatment.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe not.” The way he said it was annoyingly mysterious. My uncle was yet another person incapable of saying exactly what they meant.

  “Leaving now,” I said, stepping off the ramp.

  “You can never leave. You can run away, fly back to America, but leave? Greece never leaves you. Now that it has you, the Family will never let you go.”

  “Can I check out?”

  “What?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Just an old song.”

  I could check out, but leaving? Nope. That sounded about right.

  Greece and my family were Hotel California.

  #

  Someone was watching me. I knew this because the watcher was standing in the compound’s shadows, in a puddle of dogs.

  “Help,” Donk said. “They want to kill me.”

  “Sure looks like it.” Death by drowning, maybe. Good thing Donk and the dogs weren’t in an enclosed space or he’d be up to his knees in drool.

  “Get them off me!”

  “You don’t like dogs?”

  Nearby, a rash of laughter broke out. Takis and Stavros were at a nearby table, sucking down frappes, cellphones aimed at the flailing Donk.

  I stomped over, snatched away their phones.

  “Hey!” Takis said. “What is your problem? Is it that time of the month?”

  When it came to Takis I lived in the PMS zone. “I know what you’re doing. The YouTube channel ends now.”

  “What YouTube channel?” he wanted to know.