by Alex A King
Marika hugged her bag and hurried down the driveway, shooting worried glances over her shoulder in case the big, bad porn stars were coming after her.
Donk’s mother shrugged. “Guess she doesn’t want the job. All that lube makes the hands so soft though.”
“So your son isn’t here then?”
“Yiorgos does not approve of my career. And my brother does not know about it, so keep that mouth of your shut or I’ll put it to good use.”
Baby Dimitri didn’t know? Funny, I figured he wouldn’t have minded dipping his toes in the porn business. And he sounded like he’d be pleased his sister was showing some financial initiative.
My memory banks chimed. “There’s a rumor that your brother killed all his siblings.”
She laughed. “That’s not a rumor, my doll. They are all dead, except me. I’m a half sister and no threat to his business. So here I am, making my little movies.”
Using Baby Dimitri’s allowance money, no doubt. And I thought my family had issues.
“Any idea where your son might be?”
“School.”
“It’s August—no school.”
She fanned her face with her hand. “That must be why it’s so hot. Try his friends.”
“Who are his friends?”
A giant wiener swung into the picture. I couldn’t be sure, but I think it was attached to a man. “We’re waiting on you,” the salami said.
I tried to look away but ... God, it was really hot out here.
Donk’s mother followed my line of sight and grinned. “I don’t know who the kid hangs out with. That’s his business. Got to get back to the set. Come back if you want some big, easy money. Baboulas’s granddaughter ... the world would go crazy for it. You could be famous.”
Wow ... and they said there were no jobs in Greece. I’d been offered two so far: crime lord and porn star. Made me question what vibe I gave off that people thought I’d be amenable.
“So,” Lopez said as we set off down the driveway. “Did you get anything?”
“I nearly got crabs, does that count?”
The look on his face said it didn’t.
Poor Donk. I really felt for the kid. Mommy was a deadbeat porn actress and his uncle was a mobster. No wonder he was a flake.
“Where are we going to find this kid’s friends?” I said.
Lopez looked up and down the street. The house behind us was a misfit in a street of family homes. Kids bouncing basketballs. Women sweeping concrete yards. A couple of old biddies staggering with five gallon bottles, inbound from the nearest spring water faucet.
“If it were me I’d ask a kid,” he said.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“You ever think about being a cop?”
“Sure. I also think about flying to the moon to excavate cheese.”
Lopez shook his head. “You’re a piece of work.”
“Okay,” I said to Marika in Greek. “Pick a kid and we’ll ask him if he knows Donk’s whereabout or his friends.”
“Donk has friends?”
“Give the kid a break. His family sucks donkey dicks. Possibly his mother does it literally.”
We picked a couple of kids, early teens, wearing knockoffs of a popular sports label—TRIKE: Just Go It—tossing a basketball at what used to be a garbage can lid. Someone had punched out the middle, leaving a sharp metal ring. Greek parenting around here mostly involved booting your kid outdoors and warning them not to show up until lunchtime, chased by a second warning that their deaths would be impending if they didn’t show up to the table the second the food hit the table. Everything else was degrees of apathy, or so it seemed. It was a country built on Darwinism. The fittest survived; the rest emigrated.
“Hey,” I said to the pair. “Do you know a kid who calls himself Donk?”
They exchanged glances. Was I a cop? A weirdo sex fiend preying on teenage boys? A truant officer? Did Greece even have truant officers? Then they smirked. They’d obviously decided on the second one ... until they got a load of Marika and Lopez. “Why?” one of them said. “Did he beat up their kid?” He nodded to my companions.
Marika sniffed. “My sons do not get beaten up—they do the beating. Unfortunately. Their father and I are trying to break the habit.”
The kids backed off fast. “We don’t know where he is. He’s too good to hang with us anymore.”
“He have any other friends around here?”
They jerked their chins up and both went, Tst. “Hey, we saw you come from Donk’s house. You going to be in one of his mama’s movies?”
“Ugh. No. Just ... just ... go home and watch The Disney Channel!”
They smirked and went back to their game.
I scanned the neighborhood, hand shielding my eyes. Something told me we’d get nothing no matter who we asked. That same something told me Donk wasn’t off with friends or strippers or stripper friends.
I made a decision. Melas had blown me off when I told him Penka was missing, but something besides Lopez stunk.
“Whatever happens next, you have no jurisdiction, remember?” I said to Lopez.
He held up his hands. “Hey, so long as you find Gene you won’t get any complaints out of me. Scout’s honor.”
Yeah right.
We drove to Penka’s apartment building. I wanted a look inside her place to see if anything was amiss. If she was snatched did it happen there? Was there sign of a struggle? Had someone maybe left a ransom demand? Basic stuff.
When I broke into Melas’s house the first time, I’d used a makeshift lock pick out of thick wire. Now I had my own set of real lock picks, a gift from Aunt Rita. She felt every woman should have an exit strategy, in case the sexcapades turn bad. Part of the basic personal security measures she’d enacted after reading Gerald’s Game. My family was nothing if not practical. I had a feeling my mother would have liked Aunt Rita.
I pulled out those real lock picks, handed Marika my phone. She leaned against the wall, dark eyes scanning the gloom for things she could shoot, while holding the phone up so I could follow the instructions on YouTube.
“What are you doing?” Lopez wanted to know.
“That depends. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Breaking and entering.”
“Just the first bit.” The lock made a soft snick. “Now we can do the entering.”
“Shit,” Lopez said. “That’s on YouTube?”
“Everything is on YouTube.”
He grumbled something about how the Internet was making a cop’s job harder than it was in the old days. Then I pointed out how the Internet was making it easier for the police to hunt people down like dogs. Case in point: me. And he said that wasn’t the Internet, that was aviation.
“He never shuts up,” Marika said. “You got any food in your bag?”
“What happened to that third piece of baklava?”
“I already ate it. Being a bodyguard is hungry work.”
I looked in my bag. Nothing food-like except some old receipts and lint. Too bad she didn’t have pica. “We can stop somewhere when we’re done here.”
“No problem. I will look in the refrigerator.”
Lopez hovered in the hall. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
“If it makes you feel any better, the woman who lives here is a drug dealer.”
“Okay,” he said, “I’m in. What are we looking for?”
“What do you usually look for when someone’s missing?”
“Signs of struggle, signs of anything suspicious or helpful.”
“Great,” I said. “Do that then.”
Penka lived simply, only she did it in red and purple. Red couch, purple cushions, red rug. The walls were a faded crimson. I felt like a scope in a urologist’s office. These colors make me happy, Penka had said when I came to pick her up for Tasha’s funeral and I commented that she lived in a urethra.
Marika launched herself at the refrigerator, foaming at th
e mouth. If she was pregnant Greece’s food supply was doomed. Lopez took the single bedroom. I wandered around the combination dining and living room, looking for anything out of place in an apartment I’d visited once. Everything looked fine to me, except the conspicuous absence of its inhabitant. On the kitchen wall hung a little plastic rack that held bills. Flicking through, I could tell everything was paid on time.
“Find anything?” I asked the others.
“Nothing,” Marika said in disgust. “Tomatoes and cheese.”
“I like tomatoes and cheese,” I said.
“This job demands real food. Something that will fill me up and stick to my bones.”
I didn’t think the job demanded much of anything except carrots to help with her eyesight. “Anything will stick to your bones if you eat enough of it.”
“I am going downstairs. I think I saw a periptero on the corner.”
A periptero was a boxy pavilion that sold newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, and junk food. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one. Which was a funny coincidence, because it seemed to be a national law that only pet rocks could man them. They were unofficially designated no-smile zones.
“Wait—” I started, but she was gone. Marika didn’t have a grip on the whole bodyguard thing yet. My body was here with the tomatoes and cheese.
Lopez wandered back into the living room. “You find anything?”
“Nope.”
“Me either. She say anything to you that would make you think she’d go missing?”
I thought about it. “She said Baby Dimitri came to her a week or so back and tried to convince her to push some kind of new product.”
“Some kind of drugs?”
“Yeah. I think it must be a German thing.” I was doing math and coming up with numbers. But were they the right numbers? Hard to say. Everyone had a disability; math was mine. “Melas said the Germans were trying to distribute something new, similar to sisa.”
“Sisa?”
I explained sisa. Cocaine for the poor. Cheap. Easy to get. Fried the brain.
“Like meth then.”
“Pretty much.”
“And this dealer wouldn’t move it?”
“She only deals prescription drugs. There are levels.”
He snorted. “You keep telling yourself that, sister. Prisons back home are full of people like your Bulgarian friend.”
There was noise in the hallway, and Marika reappeared. “Katerina ...” she said. She was on the wrong end of a gun. When the gunman came into focus, I exhaled. Volos cops. I didn’t know their names but I remembered their faces. Melas's department.
“We got a report someone was robbing this apartment,” one of them said.
“Fuck, I hate this,” Lopez said. “What are they saying?”
I ignored him. “Penka’s a friend,” I said in Greek. “She’s missing, so I came looking for her.”
“That’s not what the caller said. They said you broke in. You got a key?”
Uh ... “Not exactly a key. Does a key-shape count?”
“You can’t arrest her,” Marika said. “She’s Katerina Makris.”
“I know who she is,” the one cop said. “I was there when she kicked all the stuff off Detective Melas’s desk. Great show.” He grinned. “Still got to bring you in.”
“What about my missing friend?”
“Penka’s your friend?” They glanced at each other, laughed. “Probably they hauled her in for selling drugs again. Happens every other week. I bet she’s down at the station now.”
I doubted that. “Do we have to wear the cuffs?”
“Depends. Are you going to make a run for it?”
“Nope.”
“What about them?”
Marika gave him a dirty look. “Cuff me and I will shoot you.”
Five minutes later we were all in the back of the police car. I was in the middle. Marika and Lopez were wearing shiny cuffs; identical to the ones I had back at Grandma’s place.
“How come you’re not cuffed?” Lopez wanted to know.
“Just lucky, I guess.”
Something was niggling, but I couldn’t catch it by the tail.
Chapter 16
The lockup was empty, so they separated us into Boys and Girls. I let Marika take the bed on account of how she was probably pregnant. Her feet were overburdened at the best of times; now she was potentially walking for two. I stood at the bars, face smushed between them, probably bearing an uncanny resemblance to a basset hound. I would have sung the blues but I didn’t want to get popped for noise pollution.
“They can’t charge me with anything,” Lopez grumbled in the next cell. “I’m one of them.”
“A foreign cop, with no jurisdiction.”
“Still,” he said, “no professional courtesy?”
“I don’t think they have that here. Not for breaking and entering.”
“I didn’t do the breaking, just the entering. Whatever you get I should only get half.”
I was pretty sure it didn’t work that way in any country, but what did I know?
“Screw this,” he said, slumping against the bars. He slid downwards until he looked like something out of my old geometry books. “As soon as I get a phone call I’m calling my boss. He’ll get me out of this.”
“Isn’t he too busy with the whole dead-cop-in-his-trunk thing?”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Fuck. Fuckin’ Bishop, this is his fault. It was his idea to follow you here.”
“Really? You seem like the ringleader.”
“You think?” He sounded hopeful.
“Definitely.”
“Naw. I got a bigger mouth, that’s all.”
Marika sat up. “I could eat a whole sheep. I am going to call that souvlaki delivery guy we saw earlier. Do you have money?”
I blinked. “Souvlaki delivery guy? I don’t think he really delivers souvlaki.”
“Then why was he riding around on a souvlaki delivery bike?”
I looked at her. She looked back.
“Don’t you watch—”
“I admit nothing,” she said. “I am a good Greek woman.”
Somehow I doubted that. “Wait—where did you get a phone?”
She looked confused. “My pocket?”
“Give me that.” I held my hand out. “Please.”
She tossed the phone to me. “Who are you calling?”
“Aunt Rita.”
“No! Don’t call the family. Takis will never shut up for the rest of his life.”
“So, five minutes then?”
She shrugged. “If he is lucky.”
If I couldn’t call family, there was no one else. Marika didn’t have Melas’s number programmed into her phone, and I couldn’t remember it. Hazard of the modern age where there are no numbers, only gadgets that do the remembering for you. Melas was in my phone as Detective Beefcake. I scrolled through Marika’s contacts. Every name in there was family.
“I will die if I do not eat soon,” Marika said. “Do they serve lunch, do you think?”
“Sure. Three courses.” I passed her phone back. “Any ideas how we can get out?”
“We could ask nicely.”
I asked Lopez the same question and he shook his head.
“Unless you can shimmy out that window, we’re stuck here,” he said. “And with those hips you’re not going anywhere.”
“What’s wrong with my hips?”
“Nothing, Jesus Christ. It was a compliment.” He looked up. “I suppose someone tall enough could get through the ceiling tiles.” He hauled himself off the floor, climbed onto the bunk and pushed at the el cheapo squares. It popped out. “Greece’s financial problems are our salvation,” he said. Then he hoisted himself up and into the hole. They were big squares. He stuck his head through. “Got to check which way is out. Don’t want to go crawling over a bunch of cops. They’re armed—I should know.” Then he vanished again. The ceiling groaned.
We waited.
And waited.
“Huh,” I said. “He never did say he was going to get us out, too, did he?”
We waited some more.
Marika eyed the pillow, possibly inspecting it for signs of edibility. “I will shoot him just as soon as we get out of here and I get my guns back.”
I walked to the adjoining wall of bars, stared longingly up at the hole in the ceiling. “Lopez?”
“It’s dark up here,” he called out. “Got to wait until my eyes adjust.”
That seemed fairish.
The door flew open. Police Sergeant Pappas to the rescue.
“I heard you were in here,” he said to me. “Irini would kill me if she knew we had you locked up.” He looked around. “Where is the fat one?”
I pointed up at the ceiling. Screw Lopez and the moped he rode in on.
Pappas grinned. He stuck his head out the door. “We’ve got one in the ceiling, boys!”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s in the ceiling?”
“Limited funding, so we added our own security measures.”
“Security measures?”
His grin spread. “You want coffee?”
“How about cake?” Marika wanted to know. “If you are passing out cake with that coffee I will take two pieces.”
“Coffee sounds great,” I said.
“And cake,” Marika reminded him.
“Coffee and cake,” he muttered. He left the room. When he came back it was with two coffees, no cake, and the whole department. They crowded in, eyes on the ceiling like a mob of meerkats.
“Wait for it,” someone muttered.
There was a long pause. Then Lopez said, “Yeah, still dark up here. I’m gonna go for it anyway. Eventually I’ll hit an outside wall.”
The joists sang out as he shifted his weight.
Overhead, something snapped, metal clanking against wood. Then another snap. Lopez shrieked, girlish and high. There was a thud, followed by several more snaps and squealing.
“That is one determined rat,” Police Sergeant Pappas said, slapping his belly. The crowd roared; police humor.
“Oh fuck,” I heard Lopez say. He banged on the outside wall. Nothing happened.
“That should take care of your stalker problem,” Pappas said. “How did you pick these guys up?”
“They’re American cops. They followed me here.”