[Kat Makris 01.0] Disorganized Crime

by Alex A King

  "Yet this man climbed into her car and punched her face."

  "Melas and his team?" he asked.

  She gave him two palms up.

  "Xander?"

  "Gone to fetch Nikos," Grandma said. "I do not like this. Too much is happening that I cannot control."

  "What's the plan when he gets here?" Aunt Rita asked.

  "You know the rule, we do not kill policemen." She layered more rubbing alcohol on my sore bits. My face was enjoying the chill. "That is how it has always been. But he will have to go."

  Behind the headache, an alarm went off in my brain. I tried talking some sense into the silly thing, but it was ignoring me. "Go where? You can't just get rid of him!"

  "We will arrange for a transfer," Aunt Rita said. "His family is here, but he should have considered that before he let you get hurt. They will understand."

  "I'm fine," I protested. "Honestly."

  My phone beeped and bonged. Melas. I picked up.

  "Why do you hate me?" he asked.

  "Where are you?" My voice came out nasal and malformed.

  "At the guardhouse."

  "Not for long," I muttered and hung up.

  Everyone was looking me. "Melas wanted to know why I hate him."

  "Just say the word," Aunt Rita said. "We could send him to Turkey."

  "His family's here. Doesn't that count for something? Imagine how his mother would feel. How did you feel when Dad left Greece?" I asked my grandmother.

  Grandma's chair creaked as she stood. She put away the rubbing alcohol and washed her hands before opening the cupboard where her baking ingredients lived. She pulled out another bowl and placed it on the counter next to its sibling.

  She said, "This is what I get for agreeing to Melas's plan."

  "There is no other way to catch the Baptist," Papou said. "We have tried."

  "You all know he's a former policeman, right? And that he's targeting informants?"

  Everybody looked at me. Of course they knew. Great.

  A thought popped into my head. All this bleeding and pain had rattled me, and I'd forgotten about Dad's ex. "He's got Dina," I said. "He said he's planning to use both of us as bait to catch my father."

  Aunt Rita rolled her eyes. One set of Bambi lashes stuck to her brow. She peeled it off with two talons and stuck it on the back of her hand for later. "That crazy mouni."

  Grandma gave her a dirty look, for the language, mostly. "Your father will not come," she said. "How can he?"

  "He thinks Dad is faking it."

  She dumped flour into a bowl. Squirted vinegar. Pinched salt. Eyeballed a short pour of olive oil, then did the same with hot tap water.

  Aunt Rita and Papou were silent. I decided to copy them. It seemed prudent under the circumstances.

  She began to work the dough with her hands. "Katerina, I have a big problem—"

  "Do you want us to go, Mama?" Aunt Rita asked.

  "No. Stay right there. I want you here when Xander brings Melas. Katerina, this is my problem. I am old. I asked God, I talked to the Virgin Mary, I pleaded with Zeus and offered him some of the good-looking men in the family. But none of them will stop time for me. I am old and growing older by the minute. When I die there is no one who can run this family. I have no real underboss. An advisor I have, soldiers I have, a very good accountant—" She nodded to my aunt. "—that I have, too. Your uncle Kostas is busy running what will become his own Family in Germania. Your father was always meant to take over the business here. I sent him a letter telling him to come home and learn all the important things, so that when the time comes the Family would be his. And here I am now with no son and no underboss and no heir."

  "What about you?" I asked my aunt.

  "Honey, I'm too glamorous for anyone to take me seriously."

  "They haven't seen you with a gun," I said. She blew me a kiss.

  "Rita does not want the job," Grandma said.

  I contemplated the impossible. "What if we don't find Dad?"

  She looked at me, her hands working the dough. A lightbulb turned on in my head.

  "No," I said. "Noooooo."

  "There is no one else. Michail or you."

  "I'm … I'm …"

  One of the good guys. A heroine not a villain. I was a freaking debt collector, and when I went home I was going find another job, equally not-criminal.

  "You are what?" she prompted me.

  "I'm just a normal person. I can't run a criminal organization. I won't do it. I couldn't do what you do and still look at myself in the mirror without hating what I see. How do you sleep at night?"

  Papou cackled, slapping his thigh. I hoped he wouldn't knock out his catheter. "You have met your match, Katerina," he said to my grandmother. "Forget her father—this is the one. You sent her home and what did she do? She defied you and came back because she believed she was doing the right thing. She will not run away from a problem." He made a fist with one hand, slapped it with the other. "She is you, but with better legs."

  I wished he'd stop beefing up my resume. I was in no way qualified to slide into the supervillain seat and run a crime syndicate. Not to mention the moral aspect. I was a fundamentally decent person. And I couldn't bake.

  More footsteps. Two sets, both heavy and male. Melas walked in with Xander on his heels. Neither man looked happy.

  "Nikos," Grandma said, still kneading the new dough. "Come stand over here beside me." She indicated with her eyes exactly where he should go. He did as she asked, then she said, "Look at Katerina. What do you see?"

  Our gazes clashed, then his moved slightly to the right. "Gamo tin mana sou," he swore.

  "Her mother is dead, so you cannot do that to her," Grandma said in a calm voice. "And today Katerina could have been dead, too."

  "When?" he demanded. "How?"

  Xander crouched beside me. With a distractingly warm hand he moved my chin this way and that. Then he went to the freezer, pulled out a chunk of frozen mystery meat. I hoped it was animal and not former foe.

  "I already used rubbing alcohol," Grandma told him. "She will be fine."

  The silent man ignored her. He pulled up a chair and sat beside me, holding the steak to my black and purple bits. The cold seeped in. The throbbing in my face and head dulled. I tried to express my gratitude by smiling, but it hurt.

  "Your mother wants her plate back," I told Melas.

  "That's what I told you." He turned to my grandmother. "What happened?"

  "Ask Katerina. She is sitting right there. Katerina, tell him."

  So I did. His expression darkened as the story went along. He had that look on his face guys get when they want to punch a wall. I wound down with a description of how I went after the Baptist with the slingshot, but he got away despite my stellar shooting.

  "Sorry," I said when I was done.

  "What for? I messed up. I put you in danger then left you there." He pushed a hand through his hair. Grandma went, "Tsk!" and he moved away from where she was molding the dough into a smooth ball. "He must know we're following you. I had to go to the bathroom, and that's when he pounced."

  "Next time piss in your car," Grandma said.

  "Too bad I didn't need to ouro."

  Papou laughed. Phlegm rattled in his chest. "He got you there, old woman."

  She ignored him. "Now the problem is I do not know what to do with you. I wanted to have you relocated to the worst village in Greece, far away from here, and Rita wants to send you to Turkey. But I think my granddaughter wants you to stay. And because there will come a time when this Family is hers to run, I think I will listen to her. But you only get a pass one time. After this …"

  "Are you threatening me?"

  "No." She stopped for a moment to look at him. "That was a promise."

  I raised my hand. "I'm not running the Family, so you don't have to listen to me if you don't want to. It was just … a serving suggestion." Now that the ice was working its magic my mood was plummeting further. I was feeling somewhere
between PMS and Medusa, and getting bitchier by the second. If Xander moved the meat my head might start spinning and spitting pea soup.

  "Don't I get a say?" Melas asked.

  "No," Grandma said.

  "Okay." He raised both hands, careful not to show his flat palms to the room. "Just checking. You know I could arrest you all, right? For something, I'm sure."

  "Not for long," Grandma reminded him.

  "No pithani aitia," Papou said. No probable cause.

  Melas blew out a long sigh. "I need a time machine."

  Tell me about it. "Your plan isn't going to work," I said. "He's watching you watching me. He knows all the tricks because they used to be his tricks, too. We've got an old dog. What we need new tricks." Everybody looked at me. "We've got a saying back home: Den boreís na didáxete éna gérikos skylos néa kólpa." You can't teach an old dog new tricks.

  "We say you cannot catch an old fox in a fox trap," Grandma said.

  I nodded as best I could with meat stuck to my face. "We've got an old fox. We need a trap for something other than foxes."

  Grandma stopped. Her face went grim. "I know what you are thinking."

  "No, you don't," I said.

  "You are thinking of letting him take you so Nikos can catch him."

  I was only totally lying out my butt when I said, "No."

  "Good. Because that will never happen. Nikos," she said. "It ends here. You want to find the man, use different bait. Katerina is off-limits."

  Everyone in this kitchen wanted to roll me in bubble wrap and cotton balls, and stick me in a padded room until trouble passed. But in this Family there would always be trouble heavy breathing around the next corner, waiting to expose itself.

  "It's not your decision to make," I told her. "I decide for myself."

  The way she slid the second bowl aside made me shudder. No aggression in the movement, just cold, methodical calm. The bowl went exactly where she wanted, how she wanted. There was no question of it defying her. When she spoke, it was softly, dangerously, and the walls trembled. They knew about her big stick. God knows how many times this room had seen the thing.

  "Remember the conversation we had in this room, Katerina. Remember that."

  How could I forget her 'It puts the lotion on its skin' conversation? It wasn't just my head that remembered, my body had perfect recall, too. Currently it was pairing Grandma's quiet threat with the image of her going full Rambo with her shotgun, and it was saying, Hey, Kat? Maybe Granny's got a point. She's smaller than you—and older than dirt—but she could cut off your head and bury you in a stolen grave.

  My face was throbbing. In fact, it and my heart were involved in a beat-off, which wasn't nearly as dirty as it sounded. My face was a fraction of a second behind my heart, irritating me with its inability to keep up. It was a lot like listening to a garage band, and my own body was the unfortunate garage. Inside my mouth, my molars began slow grinding.

  I stood.

  "Where are you going?" Grandma asked.

  "To hang out with my goat."

  By early evening I'd swapped rubbing alcohol and ice for vinegar. My sunburn was going supernova. Grandma, Aunt Rita, Papou, Xander, and I were in the yard, watching the sun swagger slowly home. It had really kicked my butt—but it was my own fault. Not far away, on the other side of the metal fence, the kids were kicking balls and splashing in the pool. Their mothers were reading, knitting, doing needlepoint, and occasionally, screeching. Their fathers were sipping beers and swapping bullshit stories. From the outside it probably looked peaceful, relaxing, but there was an awareness, a thin, bright wire of tension threaded through us all.

  Sooner or later, something was going to happen, and everyone knew the person it would happen to, like it or not, was me.

  I was the duck and I was sitting while they waited. I don't think it mattered one bit that Grandma had put the kibosh on Melas's plan to catch the Baptist, or that she'd gone Godzilla on my willingness to be the chunk of cheese in the trap.

  My chair was inches from the secret underground entrance.

  Some things you never forget. They're plastered on the psyche with indelible spray paint. During my thirteenth year, my period arrived for its inaugural visit, without warning. It was late, late August, the harsh beginning of the new school year. I was in white shorts and Backstreet Boys T-shirt. I was cute, I was cool, I was suddenly bleeding all over my eighth grade biology class. Ms. Fletcher, the biology teacher, flipped out when I quietly asked to be excused, drawing every eye in the room to my Aunt Flo's unannounced arrival. The biology teacher had immediately launched into a monologue, pointing out that what was happening to me was completely normal, that no one was to make fun of me or they'd spend the rest of their lives in detention. She said this while my uterus slowly bled out beside her.

  "Lady," I'd said, slicing into her sermon. "If you think the threat of detention is gonna stop them, you're a freakin' nutpie."

  The only person who scored detention that day was me. And—go figure—nobody made fun of me. At least not to my face.

  Mom picked me up. She bleached those shorts, taking the color white to Antarctic extremes. But I refused to wear them again. All I could see when I looked at them was my first ride on the cotton pony.

  Grandma's yard was like those shorts. Whoever put the secret door in did a perfect job. It was all but seamless. But now I knew where it was it stuck out like the crimson tide.

  "I hurt all over," I said. "I'm going to sleep this off."

  Grandma watched me spoon out cheek kisses, then offered her own. As I pulled away she caught my face between her hands.

  "One day you will understand," she said.

  Yeah, right. They didn't call her Baboulas for nothing.

  Back in my room I flopped down on the bed. Yelped. Jumped up. Then tried it again slowly. Not a yelp this time—more like a thin whine.

  This much stinging, there way no way I was going to fall asl—

  Chapter 21

  When I was a little girl I had one of those baby dolls with eyes that opened and closed. Stick her in a doll's bed, her eyes flicked shut. Sit her up, her plastic eyelids rolled back into her head.

  I was like that doll. I sat up. My eyelids popped open.

  Something had woken me.

  The right side of my face still felt like I'd been playing the part of the mole in a whack-a-mole game, but my headache was down to a dull roar. I held my breath. Listened. If anyone was in the room with me they were dead or not human. My heart skipped a few beats then hurried to catch up to itself before my brain realized it had slacked off on the job.

  I flicked on the lamp.

  What the—

  On the beside table were two new things that hadn't been there when I crash landed on the mattress and pillow. One was a handgun. The other was a slip of paper with a string of numbers.

  Great. Somebody wanted me to do math. Clearly they didn't know me.

  Oh. Wait. It had letters, too.

  Not math. GPS coordinates.

  For a few moments I sat there and tried to process, then I tapped the numbers into my phone and watched the virtual map stick a pin in the middle of nowhere.

  The Baptist's location or Dad's?

  Warm invitation or a terrible warning?

  Only a nut would follow these breadcrumbs to their destination. The gun, the coordinates, they were fitting too neatly into my plan, which meant they were automatically suspect. Who had left them here? Were they a good witch or a bad witch?

  This was, I was afraid, one of those times where there would be no answers unless I did something really dumb, like drive out to the middle of nowhere. I could feel myself making the decision to be one of those women, the obligatory idiot in a horror movie, who goes down to the basement when the basement is obviously where the big, bad evil is waiting in the thickest shadow, licking his lips, thinking, Thank God for stupid people, otherwise I'd starve and there'd be no movie.

  The thing was, if what was w
aiting at the dot on the map was Dad or the Baptist, then it was my idea of a jackpot.

  Down my short list of options I scrolled, looking over my alternatives to going alone. They were pretty pathetic.

  I could wake Grandma and show her the note and gun. Then she'd confiscate the weapon, commandeer the coordinates, and send her own idea of a cavalry charging into the night. Possibly Takis and Stavros. They seemed to be her first choice when it came to lackeys. But I would be absolutely forbidden to take part.

  Melas. Calling him was another option. He was, after all, the law. He'd also seize control of the situation, sitting me on the sideline with a patronizing head pat.

  Aunt Rita? No, she'd be getting her beauty sleep. I just knew she was one of those women who went all out, sleep mask, a thick layer of gluey moisturizer over her sprouting stubble.

  Then there was Xander. It was possible I could enlist his help, get him to shadow me, and hope he didn't run squealing to Grandma first.

  Yeah, no.

  Truth was, I didn't want them involved. I didn't fully trust a one of them. Not to mention—although here I was mentioning it—each one of them was a candidate for the role of benefactor. There was a limit to who could walk into this room while I was sleeping.

  I was going. Alone. Do or die. Preferably no die.

  My skin screeched when I eased my lower half into jeans and boots. Yeah, I could have done myself a favor, gone easy on myself with a dress, but a dress has fewer hiding places—and I had a feeling I'd need more than one. So I stuck with what I wore best: jeans, boots, a fitted T-shirt. I felt like a badass as I shoved the gun down the back of my pants—I barely winced at all—and the slingshot in my boot. The marbles I stashed in my pocket. I bunched up my hair in a ponytail, and I was ready to rock 'n' gently roll.

  I took the alternate exit—the window—landing on Grandma's gardenias. There was a dark object hiding in a shadowy corner of the yard, but I recognized Xander's shape immediately. No one else around here was built like a sexy tank.