Disorganized Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (23 page)

I
had
to hand it to Grandma: the woman moved fast. I'd been caged for under an hour when she shoved past Melas and swept in like Greek royalty. Impressive for a little black Weeble.

"
Yia sou
," I said, figuring it wouldn't hurt to be friendly. Brownie points were always good to have.

An invisible being stabbed her forehead with Botox, shooting her eyebrows into an unnatural arch. "Oh, look what the cat carried in. It is Katerina, the girl who is not supposed to be here. What a surprise."

The sarcasm was strong with this one.

"You accidentally sent me back home."

"That was not an accident."

"To you." I snuggled my face up to the bars. "But that's okay, I forgive you."

"You forgive me, do you? What a lucky woman I am." She swung around, snapped, "What are you waiting for? An invitation? Open the door!" at Melas.

"Don't open the door," I bit back.

Melas froze, hand and key midair.

"Open it."

"I'd prefer to stay here."

Grandma stomped out. I'd won.

Hooray!

I'd stood my ground and won this battle. To celebrate, I flopped onto the narrow cot, hands behind my head. So what if I was in Shawshank? I'd fought the great and terrible Baboulas and kept my head.

Victory turned out to be short-lived. My grandmother returned several moments later with her hellhound. Xander was coming at me like I was a basic math problem and he was armed with a pencil and a calculator. He wanted to work me out so he could move onto the next, hopefully more challenging, problem. And his plan was to do it in style. He was in black dress trousers, fashionable black shoes, and a crisp white button-down shirt, with the sleeves rolled to the most flattering point on his tree trunks. He nodded to Melas, who unlocked the door and swung it open.

I leaped off the rock-like slab and hurled myself at the bars this cell shared with the next. My arms curled around the metal. This was my tree. I was going to hug it until the bulldozer rolled away.

Xander hoisted me up by the waist. Pulled. But I didn't budge.

"Not going," I said through gritted teeth.

He pulled again. Whatever he did for a workout—sparred with orcs, wrestled with giants—it was paying off. My resolve wasn't loosening but my arms were suggesting I should consider letting go if I didn't want them to perform a humiliating twig-snap.

Melas was leaning against the doorjamb grinning. It was a miracle he hadn't brought popcorn to this spectacle. But he had brought friends. The rest of the department was crowding in, jostling to get a good look at the American and the henchman tussle.

"Katerina, enough!" Grandma's face was unreadable.

"It's my life," I said. "I'll say when it's enough." To my dismay I was losing ground, fast. My arms had thrown in the towel—I was down to fingers.

"My Virgin Mary, you are obstinate like your father!" She flung open the door to the adjoining cell, delivered a crushing blow to my knuckles with her handbag. "Let go!" My fingers unclenched. They couldn't take a beating, the pansies.

Xander threw me over his shoulder.

And that's the story of how I left the building.

G
randma said nothing
. Not a peep the whole way back to the compound. I turned in the backseat to see Takis struggling to keep up with the SUV. The grimace on his face said he wasn't a fan of the pink scooter.

Cry me a freakin' river.

When we arrived back at Grandma's the compound was quiet, apart from the cats and dogs. In the sky the sun was touching noon, and everyone was eating the day's main meal before siesta. Some were inside. Others were outside on their balconies, eating al fresco.

Takis tugged at his shirt's buttoned neck. A bug had committed suicide on the white cotton. "My God," he said. "Marika is making
tiganites
for lunch. I don't want to miss them. If I don't hurry the kids will get them all."

"Her fries are that good?" I asked.

"Nobody in the world makes better
tiganites
than Marika. I don't know what magic she does to the potatoes, but …" He kissed his fingertips. "This is why I married her, for her fried potatoes." He trotted over to the far left side of the compound, where the stairs would take him to his roomy apartment.

Now it was Grandma, Xander, and me. Or rather: Grandma, Me, and Xander, and a cloud of dogs.

I turned around and said, walking backwards, "Miss me?"

Xander snorted, but I thought he kind of did miss me. He was trying to hide a smile, but bits of it were leaking out the edges.

"Katerina!" Grandma barked. For a tiny woman she sure could project.

"Hey!" a male voice called out.

I turned back around to see Cookie jogging towards us across the courtyard. He'd stuffed his package into a Speedo that outlined all its contents. Mostly undressed, he reminded me of a castaway from Miami Beach. He was missing the mojito and the gold medallion, but he was cultivating a wicked pornstache to make up for the loss.

"Look who it is! Mikey Far's girl. You're back! "Where'd you go? Did you find Mikey yet?"

"No, and I probably never will now. Not with—" I mouthed,
Attila
. "
—
running the show."

He chuckled. Grandma shot me a dirty look, but I blew her off with two palms up and an innocent shrug.

My goat was glad to see me. He trotted over, showing his affection by scarfing down the tissue in my pocket.

"You didn't cook him," I said to Grandma.

"Too tough. Too stringy. Who wants to eat that?"

I cupped his head in my hands, gazed into his slitted eyes. "Don't listen to her. She likes you, otherwise you'd be on the spit." Now that he'd said his hellos, my goat went back to romping with his new canine buddies.

Cookie followed us into Grandma's house, flip-flops flapping on his feet.

"Sit," Grandma said when we were all inside, and she'd closed the door so I couldn't bolt. She picked up my grandfather's oil tin, stood it in the middle of the kitchen table. "I am the reason you are not in jail right now."

I nodded to Granddad on the oil can. "Is he allowed to do that?"

She looked confused. "Do what?"

"Put his feet on the table."

Xander's lips twitched. Cookie roared. "I like this girl," he said, patting his gut.

Grandma was unamused and refused to be diverted from the point she was desperate to make. "I want you to take a good look."

"At the oil can?"

"At your grandfather."

I leaned forward, elbows on table. He was still dead, still wearing a toupee.

"Is this like Spot the Difference?"

"What is she talking about?" Grandma appealed to the men. "I have no idea what she is talking about."

"It's a game in the newspapers," Cookie told her. "Two pictures side by side. The same. Until you look closer. The goal is to find what's different about the two pictures." He'd pulled up a chair at Grandma's table, helped himself to a couple of diamonds of baklava. "This is great," he said. "Almost as good as my sister's."

Grandma's eyes were black shiny pebbles. "Almost as good, eh? What a compliment."

No. No compliment. His days were numbered—single digits.

"You want a little baklava, Katerina?" she asked me.

No. No freakin' way. Everything in her kitchen was officially suspect. "I'm not hungry."

"I think you should eat the baklava."

When she put it like that … "I guess I could eat."

She made a satisfied noise and lifted the glass dome on the countertop, where the treasure sat steeping in its honey syrup.

The screen door screeched pitifully and Aunt Rita teetered in. Today she was one of the Pink Ladies from Grease. Pink jacket, tight black pants, high-heeled clogs, pink scarf knotted around her neck.

Cookie looked her up and down. "Rita, I saw you at my wake. You looked good."

Hand on hip: "Honey, I always look good."

"I remember when you used to have balls."

"I still have them," Aunt Rita said. "I just tuck them up high, that's all."

My grandmother's mouth tightened, but she said nothing.

The baklava's thin layers snapped as I hacked through them with my fork. "How does that work?" A lot of the time it didn't seem like there was enough room in my underwear for woman parts, so it boggled my mind how a guy could tuck it all up and go.

"It's like wrapping a gift."

"Never ask me to wrap a gift. I'm hopeless at it," I admitted.

"Not me," Aunt Rita said. "I can make wrapping paper look like anything you want." She wiggled her fingers. "Origami."

Grandma had reached the end of her very short rope. "Xander, privacy. I want to talk to my granddaughter."

Maybe it was my imagination, but it looked to me like the blood drained out of Aunt Rita's pancaked face.
Good luck
, she mouthed, then she skedaddled with the two men.

Two fighters left in the ring. I had youth, but Grandma had a warped sense of morality. She took her seat at the table. Her face was hard. Her lines seemed as though they'd been carved eons ago. Life hadn't been easy for the woman. I wondered who she used to be in the old days, before she was left holding the Family's bloody reins.

"Look at your grandfather. No jokes. What do you see?"

"A picture of a dead man taped to an olive oil can."

She shook her hands at the ceiling. "Yes, that is what you see. And do you know why that is what you see?"

Was this one of those trick questions? Because it felt like a trick question. "No?"

Her hands landed in her lap with a dull thud. "Because your grandfather is dead and he is inside that can. I am worried—" She thumped a fist on her chest, held it there as though she were trying to prevent her heart's next beat. "—that soon I will have another can on that window ledge, and on it a picture of you."

I gulped. "Are you going to kill me?"

"No! My God, Katerina, of course not. You are my family, my blood. My only granddaughter."

"You drugged me."

"For a good reason."

"Then you sent me home—against my will."

"To protect you."

"I'm twenty-eight. Staying here to find Dad was
my
choice. You don't get to decide otherwise."

"You are my grandchild. I care about you."

Her words punched me all the painful places. She had no right—not now. I couldn't help lashing out.

"Really? Where have you been all my life? Where were you when Mom died? Nowhere, that's where. In your stupid hut, running the underworld. So you don't get to control me now."

Silence. Then, "You do not like my house?"

"It should be condemned. The toilet is outside.
Outside
."

"In my day, many people had toilets outside."

"Well, in my day they don't."

She pushed back her chair. Stood. A shriveled old coffee bean shrouded in black, she appeared benign, fragile, yet she kind of scared the dickens out of me.

"Do not cross me again, Katerina. I run this family." She stabbed at her chest with her index finger. "I protect it. Never defy me in front of the others or I will be forced to act against you."

Did I back down? Nope. "Have you learned
anything
about Dad's kidnapping? Even one tiny thing?"

"No."

"Don't you think that's strange? You have money, power, a … a dungeon, but you can't find out anything?"

"I am bothered by it very much. But it is only a matter of time until somebody talks or his abductor reveals themselves. They want something—something that belongs to this Family."

"What?"

"Who knows? But I am afraid it will be something that is not mine to give and I will not be able to save my son."

"Like what?"

No answer. She shuffled over to the pantry, pulled out the flour, the sugar, the butter. This, I was starting to notice, was how she dealt.

L
ate afternoon
, while the compound was beginning to stir after a long, peaceful siesta, the dogs went wild. Grandma was sprinkling chopped walnuts on what looked like turds drenched in honey syrup. We hadn't slept. Something told me she never did, and that same something told me I never would. I was too Americanized and too old to take midday naps, even if the idea of them made me drool over the decadence of it all. Grandma dropped the nuts, wiped her hands on her black apron and bustled out the front door.

I bolted after her.

The dogs had congregated around the pool's fence. They were attempting to leap over or push through the bars, but so far they had only managed to be ineffectual battering rams. A fully dressed Xander was wading into the pool, and the rest of the family was beginning to dribble out into the courtyard to see what all the commotion was about.

Cookie. Cookie was the commotion. Facedown in the pool, Dad's former best friend was an untethered boat, drifting at the mercy of the pump's whims. Either he was dead or he was gunning for breath-holding as a new sport in the Summer Olympics. The gut suggested athletics wasn't his thing, so I was going with dead. Acid jumped in my stomach, made a grab for my uvula as leverage. As soon as Xander reached Cookie he flipped the man over and towed him back to the concrete shore.

Papou rolled to a stop beside me. "We should cut off his head, make sure he is really dead this time."

"No decapitation," Grandma said.

"How about a stake through the heart?" he asked, hopeful.

"He is a man not a vampire."

"So you say." He winked at me behind her back.

"I saw that."

"Everything she sees." He grabbed his crotch. "Did you see that, old woman?"

"How can I when there is nothing to see?"

He snorted but couldn't manage a laugh, despite the levity of his word. I thought I understood why. We were all Russian nesting dolls—not just me. Under the skin we wore another skin. And under that, another. Cookie wasn't just a mobster, a criminal, a godfather of his own smaller family. Beneath all the layers—the Bartholomew Cubbins hats—Cookie was still the little boy who used to play with Dad. Wasn't a dead man Papou and Grandma were seeing, but a kid who'd drowned in the pool.