Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (20 page)

So basically my threats were emptier than the US vaults holding Germany’s gold. But I didn’t want Rabbit to know that.

My body unfolded as I stood. I was doing my best to tack an extra foot onto five-four.

“We’re done here,” I said. “The police can have you.”

Poker wasn’t my game. As far as I knew I didn’t have a bluff face. But I tried, as I stalked out of the room, to move like I meant to leave him here for the police. My breath caught and held.

“Wait.”

I exhaled, pivoted, strode back into the room. I said nothing, raised my eyebrows.

He leaned forward in the chair. His knuckles gleamed white as his fingers bit into his knees. The ravines in his skin deepened. “You have no idea what you are asking. He is … he is my son!”

“Your son?” I echoed.

Two palms up. “What is a man to do?”

“Ungh,” I said. Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. I dropped into one of Kyria Mela’s fancy chairs. “Your son.” I gnawed on that a moment, then looked him square in the eyes. “Which one?”

“The craziest one.”

Of course. Which other one would it be? The crazy one is always the obvious candidate.

“Why?”

“Who knows? He didn’t say, I didn’t ask. He demanded I make him a box, and that was all.” Something in his voice rang trueish. My gaze slid to the woman holding the metal box. She nodded almost imperceptibly.

“He is telling the truth,” she said. “I know when a man is lying.”

Probably she did.

I rubbed my temples. I’d never had a full-blown migraine, but there was one lurking nearby, waiting to squeeze my brain.

“What about the other boxes?”

“Maybe he made them himself, I don’t know.”

“Does he have a name—a real name?”

“Katerina … You don’t know the trouble you bring on yourself. Do you hear that sound? It’s the water coming for you. You will drown in this world.”

“Good thing I can swim. Tell me his name. Please.”

“I have already given you too much rope. No more.”

“His name.”

“Would your father give up your name so easily?”

He had me there. For all his recently discovered flaws, I knew my father would die rather than give up my name to someone who might wish me harm. For now I’d stand down, find another way into the fortress.

“I don’t know what Grandma had planned for you. She obviously wanted you out of jail and alive, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. So I’m maintaining the status quo until I get different orders or I figure out something better. Which,” I added, “doesn’t seem likely, given that I’m winging it.” I turned to Kyria Mela. “Is it okay with you if he stays until it’s safe to bring him back to the compound?”

She nodded.

I had one more question for the man known as Rabbit. “Are you really Papou’s brother?”

He scoffed. “Not anymore. It has been a long time since we were anything. Fifteen years ago the bastard put me in prison. Once a man sends you to prison he is not your brother.”

The sun was clawing its way higher, heating up the small room, even with its shutters latched. Threads of gold peeked through the gaps.

“Who brought him here?” I asked Kyria Mela, as we gravitated to the front door.

“The quiet one.”

Xander.

He and Papou were still unaccounted for, so they were next on my must-find list. Xander hadn’t replied to my text.

“Are you going to …” She gave me a look loaded with meaning.

“Tell your son?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“Your son?”

“Yes.”

“No. Not now, not ever.” Unless I did. Which I wouldn’t. Not while the Family was taking bets, and not while we were on opposite sides of the morality fence.

It was for his own protection.

T
hirty-six hours
after Grandma had been brutally hauled away by the Hellenic Police, my family was driving me to drink.

Katerina, should we kill a drug dealer? What if the drug dealer is stealing from us? What if the same drug dealer is stealing from us and calling us names? Katerina, what was the name of that tantric sex guy?

“Sting,” I said.

“Stink,” Stavros repeated. His thumbs worked like miniature pistons on his phone.

“Why?”

“Trivia game.”

“The drug dealer isn’t a stupid game,” Takis said. “Or the stealing.”

“What about the name-calling, is that real?” I asked.

“Sure, that could be real.”

Marika snorted.

Takis turned on her. “Why are you here? I gave you four children and a house to clean—go clean them.”

“The house is clean, no thanks to you, and your children are in the pool.”

It was true, their kids were in the pool, not far away from where we were all sitting, under one of the courtyard’s grapevine trellises. It was early afternoon and the boys were practicing their drowning techniques. Fortunately, none of them showed any talent in that direction; too buoyant.

“Rabbit’s kids,” I said, mulling over the morning. “Anyone here know any of them?”

“Sure,” Stavros said, not looking up from his trivia game. “Rigas Dogas owns a
kafeneio
in Agria. It’s on the promenade.”

My left eyelid fluttered. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

Takis busted out laughing. “Did you ask? No. How can anyone give you answers if you don’t ask questions?”

“Why are you such an asshole?” I asked him

Marika had a smug look on her face. “Because I will not do a thing he wants me to do.”

“
Skasmos
,” her husband said, telling her to shut up.

“What thing?” I asked.

“Don’t you tell her or I will—“

Marika’s gaze landed on him with an almighty THUNK. It was like watching the space shuttle dock successfully at the International Space Station. “You will what?”

“Take away your allowance.”

His wife sucked in her breath.

Stavros grabbed my arm. “We should leave before she explodes.”

Marika shot up out of her chair. “No! You are not leaving—I am leaving. Katerina, let us go. Takis, you can watch the boys for once. It will do you good.”

Like a summer squall, she moved off in search of a new piece of earth to rain upon. Unfortunately, she was pulling me along with her.

“Where are we going?”

“You are going to see a man. Me, I am coming along for the coffee.”

I
t was
2 PM when I killed the Beetle’s engine outside the
kafeneio
. Parking was easy pickings; the Greeks had scurried back home to their beds, along with the smarter tourists. Not the rest of them. They’d paid for sunshine and they meant to get their euros’ worth of UVA and UVB.

Inside, a couple of baristas were wiping down tables. The manager was stooped over a small laptop, tapping numbers into the keypad. He didn’t look up as Marika and I pushed through the door.

“You want a
frappe
?” she asked me. “Because I am getting a
frappe
.”

“Make it two,” I said.

I helped myself to the chair across from the manager.

“Rigas Dogas?”

“Who’s asking?” He looked up at last, grunted. “You.”

“Have we met?”

“I read the paper.”

“I don’t,” I said. “It’s full of rubbish and unflattering pictures.”

He went back to his laptop. “What do you want?”

“I’m looking for your brother.”

“I have a lot of brothers and sisters. I don’t know where any of them are.”

“The one with the eagle.”

“Don’t know him. Don’t know most them.”

“They say you do.”
They
didn’t say that, but
they
might have if I’d asked.

He slapped down the lid of his laptop. The table shook. “Then they are lying to you. Go away, I’m a busy man.”

“I want to, believe me, but your brother keeps sending me gifts.”

His eyes met mine. “What kind of gifts?”

“Body parts.”

Horror skittered across his face, then vanished. “I don’t know him, and now I don’t want to know him.”

“Your family is weird,” I said. “If I had siblings out there I’d want to meet them.”

“Not me.” He tilted his chin up then down. “I know what my father is. I know what my brother is. Me, I live a quiet, honest life. I own this
kafeneio
. I sell coffee—good coffee.”

Over by the counter, Marika was sucking on a straw. “It is good coffee,” she agreed.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“Her unofficial sidekick,” Marika said.

“So your brother is a criminal?” I asked Rigas.

For a split second he looked stricken. He’d stepped in doo-doo. “I don’t know anything.”

Yeah, right. “Do you know where I can find him?”

“Still in prison with our father? I don’t know!”

Holy moly! More than one jailbird in the family?

“Your father isn’t in prison. He broke out.”

His eyes bugged out. “What?”

“I thought you read the paper.”

“Mostly I look at the pictures,” he said. “The news is too depressing.”

He had a valid point. “Your father broke out and I don’t think your crazy brother is in prison either. Not if he’s sending me body parts. Do you have any idea where I can find him?”

“What is with women? You are crazy. You ask the same questions over and over, expecting different answers. How can I give you different answers if the questions are the same? I can’t! How do you live with yourself, being so illogical? The only sane woman is my wife, and I have to say that, otherwise she will cut off my balls.”

“Do you have issues with women?”

“Of course I have issues with women—you are women! You live to torture men. We are not tidy enough. We want too much sex. We don’t want enough sex. If we don’t bring flowers we don’t love you. If we bring flowers it’s because we have done something wrong. ‘Take out the garbage. Bring in the garbage.’ Sometimes you say it when it is not even garbage day, to see if we will jump.”

“My father takes out the garbage, but it’s always his idea.”

He reopened his laptop and began jabbing at the numbers again. “No it’s not—guaranteed. He’s afraid of his wife.”

“She’s dead.”

“Then he is afraid she will haunt him and nag about garbage from beyond the grave,” he muttered without lifting his head. “Go away, now. I can’t tell you anything else.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

He lifted his head. His mouth opened to argue.

Then something went
BANG!
Glass shattered. Rigas slumped sideways, the laptop smashed as it belly-flopped on the marble-tiled floor. A red hole had appeared where his ear used to be. The ear itself had stuck to the tabletop. A bloody lake began to spread across the floor, its source on the other side of his head.

I hit the floor and scooted backwards, out of the line of sight.

My body shut down, but my brain couldn’t quit staring down at the dead man. He’d gone from living, breathing human being to a corpse in under a second. How could that happen?

Nearby, the baristas were shrieking. My throat hurt, so it was possible I was screaming, too, but I’d mentally blocked it out. On the other side of the glass, across the street, the smattering of tourists were shouting and running. Obviously not their idea of a good time. I couldn’t see them, but the sound of panicked shoes pelting blacktop and cement is universal. The two baristas fled through the front door, which struck me as ridiculous: they were bolting toward the origin of the gunshot. I peered through the window as best as I could without getting my head shot clean off my shoulders. Nobody else appeared to be hurt, and I couldn’t see a shooter.

Marika pushed two
frappes
into my hands. She knelt beside the dead man.

“My Virgin Mary!” she said, wide-eyed. “I have never seen anyone shot before. Afterwards, yes, but never the shooting! She stared at him. “I would ask if you have a
servietta
but it is too late, he’s dead.”

Maxi pads. I remembered Melas mentioning the usefulness of sanitary products, when we were rifling through Dad’s former best friend’s apartment, only a handful or so days back. On shaky legs, I stumbled sideways, plopped down on a chair out of the red flood zone. I sat the two iced coffees down, pulled out my new phone, dialed Melas.

When I told him what had happened he swore. “Get down and stay where you are.”

“I think the shooter’s gone,” I said.

“Stay down. Someone will be right there.”

“Why aren’t you following me?”

But he’d already hung up.

Huh. So much for tailing me. What had happened to scrape the hounds off my butt?

And where was my smallish mob of assassins? They’d melted away at the first—and only—gunshot, it looked like. I wondered if one of them was responsible.

I dismissed that theory immediately. If one of them had taken the shot the others would have pounded him into the concrete. No one wanted to miss out on their bounty. Still, when assassins flee it’s eerily reminiscent of the way birds and animals take a long, fast hike before an earthquake strikes.

Less than a minute later, sirens began to wail in the distance. They were closing in on the
kafeneio
fast. Another minute and they were screeching to a stop, lights swirling, sirens howling. Two cops cars, with an ambulance riding their rear bumper. Melas wasn’t among them.

Beside me, Marika hit the floor with a thud. It took a split second for the absence of gunfire to register, but that didn’t stop my heart from freaking out.

I crouched down beside her. “Marika?”

She opened one eye. “I have never seen someone shot before.”

“That’s what you said.”

“I realized my husband shoots people, like that shooter did.”

Oh boy. Think fast. “I don’t think he does it from far away like that.”

“Do you think?”

Takis struck me as shoot-a-person-in-the-back-up-close kind of guy. “Shh, the police are coming. Don’t say anything about Takis shooting people.”

She closed her eye. “I can do that.”

“
Gamo ti Panayia mou
,” the first cop through the door said. He was a walking barrel that had rolled in a police uniform. There was a small, greasy
tzatziki
stain on his shirt. “I remember you,” he said, pointing at me. “You’re the one who kicked all that stuff off Melas’s desk.”