by Alex A King
Mario looked up from his bleeding foot and ruined sandal. “Papa! You said it was your work.”
“I lied. So did your mother when she told me you were my son.”
This was devolving into a domestic situation—fast.
I clicked my fingers under their noses. “So who are you waiting for? Who would swap little ol’ me for a hundred million dollars worth of software you obviously stole from some other poor sucker?”
“Me,” a voice said.
Grandma was in the house.
CHAPTER 21
Grandma rolled into the puddle of light, her deadly duo at heel. Either she had too much pride to let either of them push her new wheels, or too much energy. For Grandma she looked good. Her steel hair was piled in a neat, high bun, and her black dress was crisp and new over her plastered lower half. Who was she all dressed up for? Surely not Aldo.
Xander and Takis hadn’t come to the party empty-handed. They’d brought big, bullet-spitting guns. The regular sized handgun Aldo was holding suddenly looked inadequate. Mario’s shiny piece wasn’t faring any better.
For some reason Aldo looked more surprised than I felt. His mouth opened and closed a few times, then he managed to aim some words in Grandma’s direction. “Katerina! What are you doing here, my flower?”
“Did I ask you a question? No. Why you speaking?”
Aldo opened his mouth. Grandma cut him off with a stink-eye that made Hera’s earlier pitiful effort look downright friendly.
“Technically you just asked him two questions,” I said.
Grandma didn’t look amused. “The first one I answered for him, and the second one I do not care. Katerina, come here.”
Aldo swung the gun around in a balletic arc. He was pretty spry for an old guy. Unfortunately, the gun was pointed at me again now. “No.”
Grandma ignored him. “I gave you an order,” she told me.
I jabbed my finger at the problem. “Gun.”
“Mine are bigger,” she pointed out. “Come here.”
“And if he shoots me?”
“Xander and Takis will shoot his son.”
“Ha-ha,” Aldo said. “That little girl is not my real son. Kill him for all I care.”
“Papa,” Mario wailed. “This sandal is destroyed. It is irreplaceable.”
Grandma scratched her nose. “Okay, I did not expect that. Let me think.”
Behind the wheelchair, Takis tilted his head toward Xander. “I have no idea what anybody is saying. Just tell me when to shoot, okay?” he said in Greek.
Xander didn’t speak, didn’t move. Was he NIS? Wasn’t he? The man was a mystery. Mysteries were better in books and movies, where they belonged. In real life they just made scary situations scarier.
While Grandma did her thinking—which, for the record, I didn’t buy for a second; Grandma had pre-thought through every scenario, guaranteed—I inched closer to Hera. She was a snake, and snakes give me the willies on a good day. But I felt bad for her. She looked scared, in over her head. I was scared, too, but fear had been my default setting lately. I was learning to function while terrified. My big plan was, if guns started firing, to get Hera out of here. An NIS agent winding up dead in Grandma’s company didn’t seem like it would be good for Grandma. Questions would be asked—and they’d be asked in tiny, airless rooms, where there was a lack of refreshments and pot-laced koulourakia. Grandma was a criminal but she was my Grandma. Save Hera, save Grandma.
“Who did you expect?” Grandma said after a moment. “Kostas? He could not be here tonight. He sent a present though. Would you like to see it?” She didn’t wait for his answer. What she did do was chop both hands at her plastered groin, inviting the elderly Italian man to suck a masculine appendage she didn’t own. Actually, I wasn’t sure that was true. Knowing Grandma it was entirely possible that she kept mason jars filled with her enemies’ severed genitals. They weren’t stored in her kitchen or the root cellar under the greenhouse, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
“Greeks give terrible gifts,” Aldo said. “Ask the Trojans, they will tell you. Where is my program?”
“My program!” Mario cried. Everyone ignored him.
“Your program?” Grandma shrugged. “Who knows? Could be anywhere.”
“That was the deal: your granddaughter for the program. Otherwise ... bang-bang.”
“Maybe the deal you made with my son. Me, I am here for my granddaughter. Give her to me and you live—that is the new deal. That is my deal.”
“No.”
“Wait,” I said. “Uncle Kostas stole the counterfeiting program from Aldo?”
“Yes,” Grandma said. “That is why he was in Italy again—to acquire the program. He failed there, and so he tried again when Aldo stole the program from Mario and fled to Greece. I am impressed because Kostas was never a very good thief.”
I switched to Greek. “Who did he steal it for? You or Winkler?”
“For himself,” she said dryly. “Your uncle has big plans for his future.”
Which, from Grandma’s tone, could be very short. “Was he ever going to be here tonight for the swap?”
Grandma looked at me. I looked back.
So, it was like that.
“Oh,” I said. “Not sure what I expected, seeing as he’s my uncle.”
“Rita would have made the swap. Rita adores you.”
“That makes me feel better.”
“English!” Aldo barked.
Grandma winked at me. “Inferiority complex. Everybody who is not Greek wishes they were Greek.”
I swallowed a smile.
Then Aldo fired his gun and it all went to hell.
Stavros darted out of nowhere and wheeled Grandma away. Xander and Takis charged toward Aldo, who couldn’t, as it turned out, hit the side of a barn from six feet away. Mario, still on the ground crying over his sandal, ignored the ruckus. More people poured into the area, but I couldn’t tell if they were on Team Grandma, Team Aldo, or some other team that wanted everyone dead.
Only Hera and I were dumb enough to be left standing there.
“Where are Orestis and the rest of your guys?” I yelled at her in Greek.
“Gone!” she whispered. Okay, so she didn’t whisper but I was mostly deaf from the shooting. Me being in close proximity to weapons without suitable ear protection needed to stop.
“Then why are you here?” Realization dawned. “Jiminy Cricket, you were going to double back and kill me, weren’t you?”
“Maybe a little light torture,” she said. “But I admit to nothing.”
“You suck,” I told her.
Something got lost in the translation, because the cow grinned. “Believe me, Nikos knows.”
Okay, maybe nothing got lost in translation. “I hate you.”
“I hate you, too.”
“I hate you too much to see you die this quickly.”
“I would prefer to see you suffer, too. Ever been water boarded?”
“Not lately.” Or ever.
“It’s excruciating. You would be a perfect candidate.”
Ugh. I wrapped my arms around her, right there on the ground. Then I rolled, and she rolled, and finally we rolled until we were in the factory, out of the direct line of fire. Hera shoved me out of the way, then jumped up and brushed the non-existent wrinkles out of her clothes. I figured she didn’t sweat, she steamed, which was why her clothes existed in a state of smooth perfection.
“Time to go,” she said, reaching for the same filing cabinet where I’d found my belongings earlier. She yanked open the drawer and retrieved a gun. Once again, I was standing on the wrong end of a weapon. Sonofabitch.
I groaned. “Not you, too.”
She fired.
Behind me, something suspiciously heavy slumped to the ground.
“Bad guy,” she said. “But then out there they are all bad guys. Look, I don’t like you, and seeing your whole family in prison would make my year. But your record is clean. Go hom
e and stay away from Greece. There is nothing here for you except a criminal life and, eventually, hard time. And hard time in a Greek prison is harder than most.”
“I can’t go home. Not while my father is out there.”
“The NIS can help you. Michail Makris is our asset and we want to find him. Help us put your grandmother away, go home, and we will do everything we can—and we can do a lot.”
“With what? Greece is this close to broke.”
She never did say. At that moment the ground shifted again. Uncle Kostas appeared behind her, gun in hand. In his shiny suit it was almost impossible to imagine him as the hobo who had helped me in Italy. Bad guys are crows: they love shiny things. Even the villain in Ant Man wore a shiny suit leading up to the final battle.
“What are you doing here? I thought you scuttled back to Germany with your prize,” I said.
“Figured I would help my favorite niece first.” He stepped around Hera and handed me his gun. I took it without thinking.
“I’m your only niece.”
He laughed. “True. Now shoot her.”
The gun was small but heavy in my hand.
“Katerina,” Hera said, “we are the ones who can help you. You shoot me and everything changes for you. You become one of them.”
She was right. This was the narrow line in the pale sand.
Uncle Kostas scoffed. “Don’t listen to her. The NIS wants to destroy our family, destroy us. This one would kill us all without a second thought. That’s what the NIS does. Its enemies don’t always go to prison. Ask her how many of them have simply ... vanished.”
I looked at Hera.
She shrugged. “A few. It happens. Bodies slip easily through cracks.”
Back to Uncle Kostas. “I can’t kill her. I’m not going to kill her.”
“Katerina, listen to me,” he said. “I know where Michail is. Shoot her and we go together to bring him home. Right now. Tonight.”
Low, effective blow. He’d taken my one major weakness and used it to twist my arm. Finding Dad was the most important thing in the world to me.
“Where is he?”
“Kill the NIS woman and we will talk.”
“He’s lying,” Hera said. “He has no idea where your father is.”
He scoffed. “The NIS will tell you anything you want to hear, as long as it serves their purposes.”
“Like you?” I challenged him.
“I am your family, Katerina.” He pressed the fingertips of both hands to his chest. “I care what happens to you.”
My thoughts jumped into a boxing ring. In one corner stood the behemoth. With Hera permanently gone, Grandma would be marginally safer. Hera was gunning for Grandma—and all of us. If she were dead, the investigation might lose some steam. Hera’s death meant Uncle Kostas would lead me to Dad—if he knew where Dad was. I’d been working towards this since Takis and Stavros drugged me, kidnapped me and tossed me onto Grandma’s plane.
In the other corner stood the three-legged underdog. Hera had nothing to offer me—not really. Neither she nor the NIS knew where Dad was. Killing her would move me several spaces toward my goals. Saving her would keep me treading the same murky water.
Ugh. Why did life-or-death situations have to be so life-or-death-ish?
I stared at my uncle. “Why do you want me to kill her so badly? You want me to kill people. I don’t want to kill anybody!”
“If you want to be part of this business, sooner or later you will have to kill. Do it, Katerina, then we can get out of here and be on our way to Michail before Mama realizes we’re gone.”
Grandma. I glanced at the open door, where the battle was still in progress. Bullets flew. Insults soared. Mario wept over his ruined sandal.
“This is the world we live in,” my uncle said as the skirmish continued. “We make deals, and when the deals fail we make death. The trick is to do it before the other teams gets to you first.”
“You stole Mario and Aldo’s counterfeiting program.”
“They drove me to it. Aldo met with another buyer here in Greece, after I agreed to pay his price. He was going to double-cross me. We were to meet near the farm. Aldo never showed. But I managed to find him and the program anyway, before he gave it to the other buyer. Why pay for something when you can steal it for free?” He winked at me.
“Who was the other buyer?”
“Do you really need to ask? I thought you were smart.”
I thought about everything that had happened lately. About the untimely demise of Aunt Rita’s moped.
“Baby Dimitri?”
“Like everybody in this business, he wants to move up in the world. Counterfeiting was going to be his ladder.”
“And yours.”
He shrugged. “As Americans say: it is what it is.”
“Why did he have Laki shoot a missile at me?”
“That was never meant for you, as I am sure you know by now. Laki missed, that is all. I was following Aldo, who was following Mario, who was following you. Which of us he was aiming for, I don’t know. Probably Aldo. Once I stole the program, he was forced to back out of his deal with Baby Dimitri. But it was never you.”
The gun felt ugly in my hand; uncomfortable and unsightly, as though I’d sprouted a gangrenous appendage. What a world I’d fallen into, where guns were fashion accessories and people talked about killing other people like it was standard operating procedure.
Dad or no Dad, it wasn’t my standard anything. Hera was a person. Maybe not a great person, but she was someone’s daughter, someone’s sister. For all I knew she even had friends she didn’t have to pay.
I laid the gun on the ground and faced my uncle.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said, expression unreadable.
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. Dad wouldn’t want me to kill anyone innocent for his sake.”
“You don’t know Michail half as well as you think you do. He would be very disappointed in you right now. Very disappointed.”
That old trick? Puh-lease. Dad might be a lot of things but his love for me had always been blindingly obvious. Now my so-called uncle was just pissing me off.
I bent down, snatched up the gun, aimed it at Uncle Kostas.
Time passed. Each second ratcheted the tension between us.
His grin slowly faded. “You are no Baboulas.”
“I don’t want to be.”
Then I pitched his own piece at his head. The handgun smacked his forehead with a dull clank. Bounced off. Landed back at my feet. He staggered backwards. Curse words fizzed out of his mouth. I kicked the gun at him, slamming it into his shins. He leaped backwards, avoiding another collusion with his own weapon.
“Keep the gun,” he said, readjusting his cool. “I have plenty more where that came from. Possibly even more than Baboulas. When I see your father, I’ll say hello. He is in the last place you would expect.”
He walked away, hands deep in his pockets, whistling. The factory’s darkness swallowed him whole.
Hera turned to me with a satisfied smirk, but she was stark white beneath the artful contouring and her summer tan. “The offer stands. Come to the light side; we have baklava and frappedes.”
Baklava and iced coffee were tempting, but I couldn’t commit. Not yet.
“Just because I didn’t shoot you doesn’t mean I’ll help you. If you find out anything about my father, then we’ll talk.”
“I thought—”
“That because I didn’t kill you it meant we were going to be best friends? Allies?”
“Maybe allies,” she said. “Never friends.”
“You’re confusing basic human decency for capitulation.”
I shoved my uncle’s gun into the back of my jeans, the way I’d seen good guys and bad guys and just plain guys do on TV. If I were lucky I wouldn’t shoot myself in the ass, figuratively or literally.
“Go away,” I told her. “And stop following me.”
“Never.”
&nbs
p; “If you don’t stop following me, I’ll start dating Melas.”
In the half-assed light, her face turned plum. “I will kill you and bury you so deep nobody ever finds you.”
“Funny. That’s exactly what the bad guys would say.” I cocked my head. “Tell me, Hera, which side are you on again?”
For once she kept her yap shut. She stalked off toward the night, as much as a person can stalk in kitten heels. Before vanishing into the shadows she glanced back and raised her middle finger. I didn’t have the energy to retaliate.
Slumped against the factory wall, I took a moment to pull myself together. It was a hasty, sloppy job, but I managed to stuff my thoughts into one container to be unpacked and examined later when there was less gunfire and more cake.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom. I had something. I had a new starting point thanks to Uncle Kostas. Maybe.
All I had to do was figure out the last place I expected Dad to be.
#
Outside, Team Grandma had everything under control. Aldo was trussed up like a turkey. Nobody was bleeding too much, and Mario was still too worried about his designer sandal to be much of a threat to anyone. Aldo had brought hired guns to the party, but they’d bailed before taking too many bullets for the team, leaving their dead and mostly-dead behind.
“Katerina,” Grandma barked. “Are you hurt?”
Only in my heart, but that wasn’t fatal—yet. “Not even a scratch.”
She nodded once—satisfied perhaps—and, with Stavros at her side, rolled away, back into the darkness from which she came.
Xander and Takis stuck around to clean up, the way they always did. Not me. Cake had entered my head, and now it wouldn’t leave. Problem was, Grandma’s place was all out of cake and all out of brownies.
Lights flashed. Tires crunched over a mixture of stone and debris nature had littered over the driveway’s original gravel.
“You’re late to the party,” I said when Melas and Police Sergeant Pappas emerged from the police cruiser.
They both stood there, hands on hips, surveying the wounded and the fallen—and by fallen I meant dead. Falling was just a side effect of the dead part.