Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (25 page)

Aunt Rita and I dived in different directions, both away from the flamethrower’s path. Leaves crackled and steamed.

Varvara laughed. It was the cruel sound of mean girls laughing at the nerdy girl. I was never the nerdy girl but I didn’t like mean girls. They traveled in packs, like geese. And there was nothing more frightening than geese.

“The family is getting weak,” Varvara said. “Baboulas would take on the flamethrower like a man.”

“She wouldn’t have to,” I said, making it up as I went along. This was one of those moments when a prior stint doing improv really paid off. Of course later, if I wasn’t chilling in the burn unit, I’d think of a million other cooler, better things I could have said. But as far as comebacks went, the next thing out of my mouth wasn’t so bad. “She’d have shot you in the face before you touched the trigger.”

Varvara grunted. “Maybe once. But now she’s getting old.”

“A couple of weeks ago I watched her bearing down on an intruder with her shotgun in hand. I almost wet my pants, and I’m her granddaughter.”

Her attention slid to my aunt, who was spit-polishing her gun. “What do you two want?”

“Ask her,” Aunt Rita said casually, nodding to me. “While Mama is away everyone answers to Katerina.”

“We’ve got a problem,” I said. “Your dealers are raising their prices.”

“So?”

“Grandma—we—are losing customers. No one authorized a price increase.”

“I don’t answer to a little girl. I have shoes older than you.”

“Those ones?” I peered in at her shoes. They were gorgeous, but I wasn’t about to let her know that.

“What?”

“They look secondhand to me,” Aunt Rita said. “Did you get them from the Romani?”

Varvara Koufo sucked in her breath. Good thing she wasn’t a dragon. Unfortunately, she was the next worst thing to a dragon: a woman with a portable fire machine.

“Look,” I said. “Prices go back to what they were. If you can’t handle that, we find someone else.”

Was I saying the right things? Hard to say with my aunt behind me and zero visual cues. I tried to say it like non-compliance meant we’d send her to live on a farm.

She lowered the flamethrower’s nozzle. “Fine. Then I want a bigger cut.”

“No. No bigger cut,” Aunt Rita said.

“Why do you want a bigger cut?” I asked.

“Because it’s bigger. Bigger means more.”

“I read the dictionary, too.” I resisted the urge to scratch my head. “You … want more money?”

She glanced from side to side, as though inspecting her neighbors’ houses. “I lost my job. How else am I going to pay for this place?”

“You’ve got another job?”

“
Had
another job. You think I can put drug supplier on my tax form?”

Yeah, actually. Greece was in enough financial trouble that I didn’t think it mattered what you put down for an occupation, so long as you paid your taxes. Greeks had a long-standing habit of forgetting to pay Uncle Samopoulos. In the U.S. that scored you some prison time. Here they gave you a shrug and a “What are you gonna do?”

“I thought you were loaded.”

“Was. Times are tough.”

“So get another job,” my aunt said from behind me. “You want a bigger cut? Forget it. You get what you get, same as everyone else.”

“You’re not the boss of me,” Varvara screeched. She slammed the door.

“I bet I can guess what happened to her last door,” I said.

“Story goes Varvara forgot to open it before she fired. The door burnt down.”

“That’s not what I was going to guess.”

“People who live behind wood doors shouldn’t use flamethrowers.”

That I could agree with. “What now?”

“She will lower the prices, but to be sure we will leave her a message.”

“What kind of message?”

“A scary one.”

A
unt Rita wanted
to dabble with arson. I wanted to leave a note suggesting prices had better return to normal by tomorrow morning, or else. There was nothing after the “or else,” because that’s where the power was: in the not knowing.

Ask Jack Woltz.

Or better yet, don’t. Fictional characters don’t answer questions, unless they’ve got Twitter accounts.

Old Jack received an “or else” and chose to ignore it. End result, he woke one morning, snuggled up to a horse’s head.

Aunt Rita said blowing up Kyria Koufo’s car would send a message. I said leaving a message would also send a message.

In the end we compromised. We left a message, but my aunt sketched a picture of a burning face on the bottom of the note.

E
arly evening
, there was a knock at Grandma’s door; the sort of tentative sound of a fist that doesn’t know whether to knock on the screen itself or the frame. So it compromised and split the difference. On the other side was a middle-aged man in a white suit, white shoes, shirt unbuttoned halfway down to his waist. To his credit he wasn’t wearing a gold medallion; the gold rope around his neck was probably heavy enough as it was. His chest was smoother than a baby’s foot, but he had the whole George Michael thing going on above the neck.

“Yes?” I said.

“You are Katerina?”

“Depends. Who’s asking?”

“Lazarus.” He pointed to himself so that I got the message: he was Lazarus.

“Aren’t you busy being dead?”

He laughed. “Good sense of humor. I like it.” The laugh died abruptly, like a bird hitting glass. “No. Lazarus came back from the dead, like me.”

This was getting weird fast.

“You’ve been dead?”

“Not for four days, but for minutes, yes.”

“Was there a tunnel and white light?”

“Gold.”

“Gold light?”

“Gold light, gold tunnel, mountains of gold. And God Himself was gold.” His eyes flicked up and down my body. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

I looked down at my cargo shorts and tank top. “Right now? It would appear so. Look,” I said, “if you’re here because you want me to kill, maim, or scare someone for you, the answer is no. If you’re here for counsel, make an appointment like everyone else. If—“

“Relax, I have people who will do all that for me. Go put on a dress, something sexy, and don’t skimp on the makeup because you look tired.”

What was this guy’s problem? He shows up at my door—well, Grandma’s door—

An awful, terrible, heinous thought streaked through my head, buck-naked.

“Wait,” I said. “Is this supposed to be … a
date
?”

“Why else would I be here in my favorite suit?”

Huh. I figured he was auditioning for the new Bee Gees. “Did Grandma do this?”

Two palms up. “She said you need a husband. I’m single. You’re single. I want a family and you—“ He looked me up and down like he was in the market for a horse. “—look like you’ve still got a few childbearing years left. Normally I like them younger, but you are well-connected.”

“I’m twenty-eight!”

“That’s thirty-eight in Greek dating years.”

Unbelievable.

“Get out of here before I call the cops.”

He laughed. “The cops. They won’t do anything, not when they know who I am.”

“Then I’ll call the henchmen. This place is crawling with them.”

I shoved him off the step, pulled the screen door shut.

“I can still see you,” he said.

Easily fixed. I swung the front door into place. Yeah, it would have been more effective and satisfying to slam the thing, but I wasn’t sure this place could take it. What would Grandma say if her house collapsed while she was away?

Away. Like she was on a vacation, instead of being held in captivity.

“I know you’re in there.”

“You could be a rocket surgeon with that brain.”

There was a pause, then: “You think?”

I banged my head on the wall. “Go away. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Another long, pathetic silence. “Can I come inside?”

“No.”

“Then I guess I’ll be going now.”

Good. Perfect. Excellent idea.

His footsteps moved away. Or rather, they grew softer. I twitched the curtain, saw he’d been faking it. He was standing next to Grandma’s gardenias.

“I know you’re still there!”

“No, I’m not. I’m leaving.”

This time he left, swaggering away in his leather-soled shoes.

Too bad I forgot to get his last name. I wanted to put his name on a list of people to avoid. Also, maybe I wanted to Google him, because I’m nosy like that. Greek genes will out. I snatched up my phone, approved all those friend requests from the family, then starting picking through their friends lists to see if Loser Lazarus was one of them.

Not five minutes later, a single gunshot punctured the evening.

T
hen came
the screech of metal trying to climb a tree. Up until then it had been silent, with a hint of Greek music wafting on the light breeze. Now, after the gunfire, the night was hemorrhaging sound. Footsteps, shouting, the sound of soldiers strapping on their battle duds.

Grandma owned a gun. A big one. She kept it—I discovered—under her bed, so I raced in now and helped myself to her double-barreled zombie slayer. I shoved my feet into boots and headed for the arch, shotgun muzzle pointed at the ground.

Was it loaded? Beats me, but I felt badass.

Almost everyone was moving in the same direction, except for the groups moving to the rear of the property, in case the shot out front was a diversionary tactic. I stormed through the arch, past the garage and fountain, through the gates. The swarm was moving toward a point beyond the gates, where a black Mercedes sedan had passed out, mid-drive, after convening with an olive tree. I raced to join them, elbowed my way to the front. Through the driver’s side window the driver was visible, slumped over the steering wheel. The security guard glanced at me. Was I supposed to make the next move? What would Grandma do?

I nodded, and that must have been the magic gesture, because he jogged over to the Mercedes, checked for signs of life.

“Dead,” he said. “Clean through the head, looks like.”

Lazarus.

I knew it was his car because the vanity plate said so. The fourth Bee Gee wouldn’t be returning from the dead this time. I wondered if the afterlife was as gold as he remembered.

I was about to call Melas when a cop car crunched up the road, a brown cloud on its tail. Melas was here. His timing was suspicious. He parked nose to butt with the Mercedes, got out of his car. Warm summer night, but he was in a leather jacket, black T-shirt, and jeans. He stalked over to the Mercedes, took in the shattered glass and the dead guy behind the wheel, then stood straight, shaking his head.

“Wow,” he said. “Is this for me? You shouldn’t have.”

“We didn’t do it!” At least, I didn’t think we did.

“Yeah, I figured by the way your whole family is out here.” He opened the car’s door, didn’t look up. “Who’s this guy?”

“He said his name was Lazarus. No last name. The only other thing I know about him is that he’s a chauvinistic ass.”

“That describes a lot of Greek guys. Including me, sometimes.” He zeroed in on the shotgun I forgot I was holding. “Nice gun,” he said. “I suppose it’s too much to ask if there were witnesses?”

I looked around. There was the guardhouse camera and the guard himself, but other than that there was nobody. Wait—what about my tagalongs? Elias had told me they were taking turns watching the compound—in pairs so someone didn’t get clever and take me out on their own. Tonight it was the two newest guys, Donk and Vlad. Each of them was in his own car—probably both stolen. The Russian’s car had German tags. Zeus only knew if it was legit or not.

I waved them over. Only Donk jumped to it. Vlad the Russian took his sweet time, and he did it while he huffed on a cigarette and eyeballed Melas.

Donk jogged over in his too-big suit. “What-sap?” he said in his try-hard English.

Melas indicated for him to take a look. “Did you see anything?”

“Like what?”

“Like a shooter.”

Donk took a quick look. “Shit,” he said. “That’s my boss.”

I stood there in disbelief for several seconds. “That bozo hired you to kill me? Some idiot in a white suit? I thought you were doing this solo, to impress your uncle.”

“I was, but I was running low on funds, so I got a benefactor.”

“A benefactor who wanted me dead?”

“Nobody is perfect.” Then he fainted.

Boy, he was going to make one hell of an assassin someday.

My stomach was so tightly clenched I wasn’t sure I’d be able to eat again. Even breathing was a challenge. How did my family live this way, where death and murder were a fact of life?

When my words came out they were trite, shallow clumps. I wanted to say something reverent, befitting the situation, but the signals switched on the way to my mouth. “I can’t believe Grandma organized a blind date for me with this jerk. Who’s next, Charles Manson?”

Melas tilted his head back and let the laughter rip. “He was here to take you out?”

“My life sucks, I know.”

“It could be worse. But not by much.”

He was wrong—it could be so much worse. For a couple of weeks now I’d been teetering on the edge of losing the person who mattered most to me. Fate could tip either way at any moment with one phone call, one delivery.

The same thought bopped him over the head. His face went to work rearranging itself in the stricken position. Not too far away, emergency vehicles were wending their way up the mountain, inbound from Volos.

“Sorry—“ he started.

“How did you get here so quickly?” I asked him. “Did someone call?”

He shook his head, trying to catch up with the abrupt subject change.

“I was my parents’ place when I got a call I figured you’d want to know about. We’ve got a lead on why all these gangsters want you dead. Turns out word is getting out that Baboulas has you earmarked to take her place when she dies. A lot of people don’t like that. It’s change. These guys don’t like change unless they’re doing the changing. They’re worried you’ll shake things up so they’ll have to adapt—and adapting might cost them. The economy the way it is … the loss could be substantial. Fridas had a plan to sell you on the black market. Figured he’d get a good price on Baboulas’ only granddaughter. There’s a rumor he already had a buyer lined up.”

“Who?”

“We don’t know.”

My stomach unclenched, twisted itself into new shapes, resumed clenching. “Do you think one of these clowns is responsible for Dad’s abduction?”

“It’s possible. The timing fits. Baboulas decides she’s mortal after all and starts making preparations for a handover, and then your father goes missing? It’s a safe bet they made him disappear so he couldn’t take over. I guess no one figured your grandmother would rope you into the job sooner, or you’d probably be missing, right along with him.”

I gave Donk a nudge with my foot. The poor kid was out. “So now they know, they figured they’d kill me instead of using me for leverage.” I did some fast thinking, trying to swim my way between the sharks in my head. “Who’s next in line?”

“Rita or Kostas, as far as I know. But they don’t want the job, or Baboulas wouldn’t have pinned it on you.”

Uncle Kostas was a stranger. I’d never met him, never knew he existed until this month. I knew precisely nothing about him, except that he was about to become the head of his own Family in Germany.

And Aunt Rita was vocal about not wanting to sit in the captain’s chair.

“Where is Aunt Rita?” I combed the crowd for that blip of fabulosity in the matrix. Just in time to be useful, Takis and Stavros slouched over.

“Cool shotgun,” Takis said. “I don’t think belongs to you.”

“Finders keepers.” Everyone looked at me, puzzled. “It’s … an American thing. It means I found it, I get to keep it.”

“At least until Baboulas gets back, eh?” Takis said.

I repeated my earlier question. “Where’s Aunt Rita? I don’t see her anywhere.”

“How should I know?” Takis asked. “What do I look like, her babysitter?”

I managed to get a grip on my sudden urge to wrap my hands around his scrawny neck and shake. It seemed like bad business to strangle your unofficial sidekick’s husband. Lucky for me, and for Takis, Stavros had something useful to say.

“She’s visiting her children. The ex-wife only allows visitation once a month.”

My heart broke a little for my aunt. I didn’t know a thing about their situation, before or after the divorce, but I had an inkling how much Dad loved me … and how much my mother had loved me before cancer stuck its thumb in her. I could only imagine how it must feel not to have free access to your kids.

But maybe their mother was doing them a favor. This family …

“Thanks,” I mouthed. Stavros gave me a small smile. His outer shell was a goober, but inside he was carrying around a heart of something better than gold.

“What’s better than gold?” I asked.

“Cocaine,” Takis said.

“Diamonds,” Stavros said.

“Women,” Melas said.

Takis scoffed at that. “You only say that because you’re not married.”

Whatever Stavros’s heart was made of I didn’t think it was women, although Takis would probably disagree, the little weasel.

Something caught on the edge of my senses. An anomaly. A sound that didn’t fit into the evening. No one else noticed the call of the eagle overhead. Not until it swooped low, then soared away again, toward Makria.

“Ohmigod,” I said. “That was an eagle! Follow the eagle.”

Melas knew exactly what I was talking about. He leaped back into his cop car and blew up a Category 3 tornado of dirt and stones as he peeled away. The bird was headed toward the main road. Melas must have let the others know what was going on because the sirens split into two groups. The cops followed Melas’s lead, and the ambulance eased on up Grandma’s crude road.

The eagle dipped low, then vanished between the treetops. A moment later, the sirens died. I couldn’t tell if the cars had stopped or a giant wormhole had opened and sucked them inside. Logic dictated the former, but Greece was weird.

Takis planted himself next to me, hands on hips. “What’s with the bird?”

“It belongs to the guy who’s sending us organs. The name is Periphas. Ring any bells?”

There was a long pause while we watched the paramedics load Lazarus onto a gurney.

“Dogas?” he asked.

I nodded. He threw back his head. Laughed. I was glad I gave good joke.

“First the Baptist, now Periphas Dogas? You are cursed.”

Right then that felt true enough.

T
he moon was slowly emerging
from its dark shell, and the stars were there to watch its coy act. Gardenias had pulled the green covers over their petals for the night. Now it was jasmine’s turn to squirt perfume all over the night. In places it was like stumbling through the mosh pit that was the ground floor at Macy’s. The paramedics had hauled Lazarus away a couple of hours ago; police had come and gone; the family had wandered back to their apartments and various corners of the courtyard. The mood was low-key, the air quiet apart from nature’s bleating and the burble of the fountains.

I heard Melas pull up to the gates then crawl to a stop this side of them. My heart picked up its pace. It was a mash up of desire to hear Periphas was back in his crate and, well, desire.

The day had taken its toll on him. His broad shoulders were slightly stooped and he pushed a hand through his hair like he really wanted it out of his way. He looked more bad night than bad boy.

“Nothing,” Melas said in response to what must have been my curious expression. He pulled out the chair beside me, dropped himself in it. “Sometimes an eagle is just an eagle.”

“Except when it’s not.”

“There was no sign of Periphas or the bird.”

I tugged on the Memories of TV Shows Past. “Not even tire tracks?”

“Too many tire tracks. It’d be like trying to untangle …” His mind wandered off to find a good metaphor but came back empty-handed. “There were a lot. The eagle was probably a coincidence.”

No way was I buying that. “Come on, we both know Periphas Dogas shot Lazarus. Who else is following me around, killing people?”

“Lately? Could be anyone”

I slapped at his arm. He trapped my wrist in his hand. I was already warm, sluggish, but his was a different kind of heat—his made me come alive.

“Let go.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Yes and no.”

His manacle unlocked. His hand fell back to his side.

“The longer you stay the more complicated this gets,” he said. “So what’s the plan, are you taking over the Family? Because to me it looks like you are.”

“Right now it’s a temporary thing, until Grandma gets back.”

“If she doesn’t?”

It was a good question. Too bad I had no good answers. Say they kept Grandma indefinitely, with no one else in the immediate Family who wanted control, what could I do?

Nothing. I was stuck until the cops released Grandma and Dad was found.

I nibbled on a hangnail. What if someone else in the family did want to slide into Grandma’s seat? All I had was her word, and her words were calculated with an engineer’s skill and precision. She used them as levers to move the family into their rightful positions, according to her blueprints. The Makris Family was her pyramid; she was building it to endure. There was no room for error—or for truth, if a lie was the more efficient tool.

“I don’t know.”

T
akis dropped
out of the archway’s shadow. He sauntered over to where I was standing, his face thoughtful, lips gripping a cigarette. We stood there in silence, watching the cop car’s lights jiggle as Melas maneuvered the dirt road. When the lights vanished, he turned to me.

“I hear you are taking Litsa’s boy to the dentist.”

“He asked. I couldn’t say no. What’s with his mother? He said she had a thing.”

“Litsa is Litsa,” he said cryptically. “Baboulas would take me to the dentist, too, when I was small.”

“Your mother didn’t take you?”

Puff, puff, blow
. “She died when I was a boy.”

Guilt and sympathy stabbed me in the chest and gut. Here I was thinking Takis was an everyday dick. In reality, he was an everyday dick who had lost his mother, same as me. At least I’d had my whole childhood with Mom. Takis had been raised crooked by the mob.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What happened?”

“She died taking out the garbage.”

“Drug dealers? Henchmen?”

“No,” he said, looking at me like I was nuts. “She died taking out the garbage in winter. Whoosh! on the ice. Then she was hit by
tsiganes
selling watermelons. The pickup truck stopped quickly and watermelons crushed her head. I saw the whole thing while I was sitting on the front step, smoking.”