Doing Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel

by Alex A King

  I eyed the big cop as he took mercy on the moped and let it pass out alongside us.

  “What’s with the moped?” I asked him.

  “Well, thanks to your pal Laki, we can’t even rent a piece of shit. That Dimitri guy offered us fifty euros or certain death, so we took the money. Then we bought this from some old guy who really wanted to get rid of it.”

  I could see why. “Where are you guys staying?” It had to be close by; wherever I was, there they were. Sometimes, like outside Baby Dimitri’s, they even managed to be there before me.

  Lopez's eyes went shifty. “Why? What’s it to you?”

  “Just making conversation.”

  “You want to make some conversation, yo, how about you tell us where your dad is hiding out.,” Bishop said.

  As if I would, even if I could. “You guys do know he’s an adult, and adults can go do adult stuff without telling their kids, right?”

  Lopez's grin oozed across his face. “Sounds to me like he’s shacked up somewhere with a lady friend. He got one of those?”

  Elias moved closer. “Just say the word, I could pull a Marika.”

  My lips twitched. “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.” On that note, I turned back around and marched up to the Pappas house like I’d caught my second wind. In reality, I was faking it and dying inside. My lungs weren’t made for hauling ass up Greece’s peaks.

  I glanced back. The cops were still there. They seemed to be arguing, probably about how Bishop was going to stay on without touching some part of Lopez. It wouldn’t be easy. Lopez had the kind of body that required a lot of seat.

  When we reached the yard, Police Sergeant Pappas was performing the ritual of watering the yard. He had a hose in one hand and a stain on his T-shirt that made it look like he’d had chest-on collision with a bag of Cheetos.

  “Desp—” he started, then shook his head. “Katerina, and ...?”

  I introduced Elias as my bodyguard and they shook hands.

  “I don’t envy you, friend,” Pappas said to him. “Trouble always finds this one.”

  “Hey, I’m standing right here,” I said.

  “Yes, she is,” came a high-pitched voice. Irini came rushing out of the house; I was starting to think she had one speed: full-on. “My love, what is wrong with you that you leave guests standing here with nothing to eat or drink?”

  “They just got here,” Pappas mumbled.

  “That is no excuse, my little snail.” She reached up, pecked him on the cheek. Pappas glowed—and not entirely from embarrassment. It was obvious he adored his wife.

  Irini turned her kewpie eyes on me. “My Virgin Mary, what are you doing?”

  Good ol’ Greeks, always more worried about what you’re doing than how you are. One of those things is gossip worthy, and it’s not how you feel about stuff. There was nothing juicy about, I saw so-and-so this morning and she was sad.

  “Nothing much,” I said, trying to breathe. Irini had flung her arms around my middle. The woman didn’t know her own strength, and I didn’t know how such a tiny thing had so much muscle power. Eggs and bench-pressing her husband?

  “I heard about the suicide bomber.” She pulled back, holding my hands in hers. “What was she wearing?”

  Say what? “A leather coat and Dr. Martens.”

  Her nose wrinkled up. “In summer?”

  “It makes sense if you’re trying to hide a bomb.”

  “I’m so glad she didn’t blow you up. I would have hurled myself on your coffin and wept louder than anyone else, I swear.”

  Irini seemed like she formed attachments quickly. There had to be a fancy disorder name for that.

  “Don’t worry, I’m immortal.”

  Wide-eyed: “Really?”

  “Uh, no. I’m joking.”

  She looked past me at Elias. “Katerina brought a friend!” She did a little clap. “I brought a friend, too. Well, my sister. Which makes her my mortal enemy half the time.” She leaned close, whispered, “Sometimes I want to cut her and set fire to her face.”

  Yikes! Made me glad, for once, that I was an only child. I’d wanted siblings on and off during childhood, but my parents had been uncooperative.

  Then it hit me: her sister was Melas’s ex. The same Melas who dropped kisses in my hair and hinted constantly that an expedition to my southern hemisphere was on his bucket list. This was going to be interesting—and by interesting I meant I wanted to curl up in a ball and roll back down the hill. It wasn’t that I was jealous; it was more like regular, old school envy. Irini’s sister was someone normal. She wasn’t a mobster’s granddaughter and her father wasn’t currently missing. Probably she didn’t even have an ex who’d turned last-minute gay before the wedding and fallen throat-first on a human sausage. That was the kind of woman Melas could date. No baggage, no connections of the illegal kind.

  Irini grabbed my hand, dragged me over to the table, sat me down on one of the same chairs that every Greek home seemed to have. Simple wood chairs with a lacquered straw seat. These were painted the blue of Greece’s flag.

  The air parted behind us. We both turned around.

  Irini rolled her eyes. “This is my sister, Hera.”

  Gulp. Smooth, shiny blond hair. Perfect skin. I recognized her as the blonde from Melas’s room.

  My inner envious bitch said shark; the rest of me sighed and admitted some women were airbrushed from birth. I wasn’t one of them. Already there were signs of impending decrepitude in my mirror.

  The goddess said. “I saw you today at the hospital outside Nikos’s room. I would have introduced myself then but I was in a hurry.”

  Yeah, for her Models Anonymous meeting.

  “I think I saw you, too.” And those boobs. Which from this angle looked potentially, horrifically, real. I hunched my shoulders in case anyone other than me was comparing us. Sometimes there’s no point competing. Not that I could compete—my family situation meant I was disqualified from birth.

  “I’ve been there every day with Mama,” Blondie went on. “She’s so worried about Nikos. He’s her favorite, you know.”

  Wait—she called Kyria Mela ‘Mama’? Holy cow, some people lived dangerously. I wanted to ask her if she called Mela’s mother ‘Mama’ to her face, but even as a straight woman those boobs were distracting. She’d put them up on a shelf in that pillowcase she was wearing.

  “That’s what she told me,” I mumbled.

  “I heard two of the Germans are dead now,” Hera went on. “The third one broke out.”

  “News travels fast.”

  “Police talk. Eventually I hear everything.”

  “You’re a cop?”

  Hera smiled. “Something like that.”

  “Hera is an agent for the National Intelligence Service,” Irini told me in a bored voice.

  “Allegedly,” Hera said. “ ‘Do not discuss confidential affairs.’ That’s the NIS’s motto.”

  I wondered if she could walk on water. She and Melas were made for each other. A non-creepy Barbie and Ken, with present and functioning genitals.

  Where were the drinks I was promised? I needed a dozen—stat.

  As though she had a direct line tapped into my head, Irini clapped and squealed, “Ouzitos!”

  “They sound lethal,” I said dubiously. From where I was sitting, oblivion sounded appealing.

  “They’re delicious, that’s what they are. Ouzo, mint, sugar, and some other things. Shake, shake, shake and pour. Then drink.”

  “Just one for me,” Hera said. “I’m driving.”

  “What about you?” Irini wanted to know.

  Hera was watching me. I felt like she had every intention of measuring and weighing my answer.

  “Bring on the ouzitos,” I said.

  Chapter 14

  Elias took the wheel.

  “I only had two!”

  “Two ouzitos is like ten of any other drink. Can you feel your face?”

  I jabbed my cheek with my f
inger. At least, I think I did.

  “No ...”

  He nodded. “Ouzitos.”

  A dozen ouzo cocktails had sounded like a swell idea at first, but partway through the first round Hera had slowly begun to grill me. About myself, about Melas, about my family. So I pulled back and took the drinks one small sip at a time, while feeding her a steady supply of non-sequiturs and one-liners. Eventually she seemed to realize my head wasn’t a database she could breach, so she sat back and let Irini regain control of the conversation.

  Now we were on our way back to the compound—or trying to be. Not far from the Pappas house, the road was blocked by a wide butt with feet. Lopez was standing in the headlights, waving his arms.

  “Is it me or is there just one of him?” I said to Elias.

  “Hey” Lopez called out as we rolled to a stop. “Bishop’s gone.”

  The convertible’s top was up, so I stuck my head out the window. “Gone where?”

  “If I knew that he wouldn’t be gone, would he?”

  “He’d still be gone. The word you’re looking for is ‘missing’.”

  “Goddamn, you’re a pain in the ass. Fine—Bishop is fucking missing, okay? That better? And before you ask, I looked all over—nada. You gonna help me now or what?”

  “And I would help you ... why?”

  “Because we’re the same, you and me. Americans in a strange land.”

  “Call the embassy. Lots of Americans there, same as you.”

  “Come on, Miss Makris. You’ve got a big family. You know the cops here. Help me out, maybe I can help you out.”

  “Help me out how?”

  He did one of those lip-jutting moves to show he was considering how low or high he should bid. Finally he came to a decision. “A few bucks in my pocket, maybe I could make this thing with your Dad go away.”

  “Oh my God, are you a dirty cop? Because you sound like a dirty cop.”

  He had the audacity to look offended. “What? No! I’m just sayin’ money has a way of changing fortunes. It can turn heads, make ‘em look in another direction.”

  “Dirty cop.”

  He stomped his boot on the dirt. A small dust cloud rose and fell around his feet. “I’m not a dirty cop. Just sometimes you gotta be flexible in this job when you’re working the back alleys. Flexibility means money or smarts. Probably you haven’t noticed but I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so sometimes I gotta go with cash. But I’m still a guy you want on your side.”

  “I can’t believe I’m going to do this,” I murmured.

  “Don’t pay him,” Elias said in Greek.

  I flashed him a grin. I dug around in my bag a moment and pulled out a business card for one Police Sergeant Pappas. “Call this number in the morning and tell him what you told me.”

  Lopez looked at it like I’d dropped a turd in his hand. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a cop’s number. A clean and honorable cop. Call him and he’ll help you. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

  “But—”

  “You hungry?” I said.

  “Yeah, I could eat.”

  I jumped back into the Beetle’s passenger seat. “Then get in. I’ll buy you dinner.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “So when and how did Bishop go missing?”

  “We were waiting on you. He went to take a whizz down at some abandoned house. There were a bunch of bushes and trees, real private, so he figured no one would see him. He never came back.”

  “Did Timmy fall down a well?”

  “It ain’t funny.”

  It wasn’t funny but it was oddly poetic. Chances were good old Detective Bishop took a turn at the wrong bush and wound up sucking down Greek coffee in a stranger’s yard. It’s hard to care about a mosquito when it quits biting.

  We cruised on down to the waterfront. The main street was a no-drive zone at this time of night, but the best place to grab souvlaki was hidden down a side street that wasn’t blocked off. Elias parked, then he ran into the tiny souvlaki joint with the order in his head. More perks of having a bodyguard—I could send him in to get food. I guess he figured I was safe enough with a cop riding in the backseat.

  “Jesus.” Lopez gawked at the tiny shop, where it was standing room only and the bodies were three deep. “Is this place hygienic?”

  The paint probably started its sentence on the wall as one of the paler shades of white. Now it was a fatty yellow from years—maybe even decades—of grease spatter and smoke that billowed up from the grills when someone didn’t pull the skewered meat off fast enough. Posters on the wall curled at the corners. The cook’s mustache dripped down his jowls and mouth. When rats and roaches died, this is where they believed they’d wind up. But the souvlaki was heaven stuffed in pita and wrapped in white greaseproof paper. One taste and the filth would fade away. It was all surface dirt anyway; deep down, where it mattered, this joint was clean.

  “By the time you bite into the food you won’t care. It’s like one of the Oracle’s chocolate chip cookies in The Matrix—everything will be right as rain.”

  Lopez gnawed on his bottom lip. “What’s healthcare like here? You know, just in case I get the runs.”

  “Universal,” I said.

  “No shit? Didn’t realize the Greeks were communists.”

  I rolled my eyes, but it was lost on him, what with him being in the backseat.

  “Didn’t you buy travel insurance?”

  “Naw. It was one of those spur of the moment things. You were on the run and we had to follow.”

  “Doesn’t your job pay for travel insurance? They sent you here, right?” The whole thing sounded kind of hinkey to me.

  “Budget cuts are a fact of life these days. So any word from your old man?”

  “Not since you got into my car.”

  “You want to know what I think?”

  “Not really.”

  He ignored me. “I think you don’t have a clue where he is. Maybe he took off without telling you; maybe someone gave him a helping hand and made him vanish. Either way, you don’t know.”

  “Parents do stuff without telling their kids all the time.”

  “Not Mike Makris. I did some checking and I know you lost your mother. You and Mike, you’re what’s left and you’re tight.” He sucked air between his teeth. “He wouldn’t up and vanish without telling you unless he had no choice.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “You got any leads? I could maybe take a look at the situation, give you my professional opinion.”

  “You just lost your partner while he was taking a leak. That’s not exactly a glowing endorsement of your skills.”

  “What are you gonna do if your old man doesn’t show up?”

  Just then, Elias emerged, steam rising from the bag in his arms. He looked sweaty and happy, which is how souvlaki always made me feel—especially this souvlaki.

  “Say, that does smell kinda good,” Lopez said.

  Elias dropped the bag on my lap, slid into the driver’s seat.

  I had motives for being in this area, and they were ulterior. I wanted another sneak peek at Baby Dimitri’s shop. He was still open for business—tourists ate, drank, and then sometimes went shopping—and I knew he’d be sitting out front in his usual chair, watching the skirts walk by.

  Once again, it was Baby Dimitri and Laki, no sign of the third man. They had their backs against the glass window, eyes sifting the crowd, looking for persons of interest, objects of lust, and potential customers. As a godfather of the night, Baby Dimitri specialized in nocturnal activities; sins of the flesh, scratches for very particular itches, and drugs. Grandma distributed drugs, too, but she refused to sell women. She believed women were capable of more ... like organized crime.

  We blasted away from Baby Dimitri’s shop, down to Penka’s stoop. Still no sign of the Bulgarian dealer. I barely knew the woman but I suspected this wasn’t like her. She struck me as a rain-or-shine kind of gal. A few weeks ago her friend Ta
sha—a fellow dealer and occasional working girl—was executed by the Baptist, a serial killer who was getting his jollies wiping out police informants. I’d gone with Penka to her friend’s funeral. I’d picked her up at her apartment and dropped her home. I knew where she hung her extra-large hat. So I told Elias to take the next right and jag inland a couple of blocks.

  Penka’s place was a second-story apartment in a white box. Every apartment had two tiny balconies—one off the living room and one off the kitchen. Dining al fresco wasn’t a possibility unless you didn’t mind eating standing up, alone. Like last time, the elevator was out of order. No sign, just a sad lack of movement or grinding noises when I stabbed the button a dozen times. I jogged upstairs with Elias following close behind. We’d left Lopez in charge of making sure no one stuck explosives—fake or not—in, on, or near my car. He didn’t know about Grandma’s criminal career, so I couldn’t exactly threaten to have him whacked if he didn’t sit and stay.

  Once we reached Penka’s floor, I located her apartment door and knocked. The building was upper lower class but the hall was clean and the paint wouldn’t need freshening up for another year or so. Either peddling prescription drugs didn’t pay big or Penka was thrifty.

  No answer. If Penka was home she was sleeping, in the bathroom, or binge-watching torrented TV shows, and therefore disinclined to answer. On the far side of the door everything sounded quiet, although I couldn’t be certain without a drinking glass for eavesdropping.

  When we got back to the car, Lopez said, “You know what I can’t figure out? I see you with all these different guys. Which one are you banging?”

  “None of them.”

  “No, really, you can tell me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “All of them.”

  “Damn,” he said reverently. “All of them?”

  “No. Jeez, I’m related to most of them. That’s weird, even for Greece. This isn’t exactly Alabama.”