by Alex A King
“Anyone want to come for a ride?”
Stavros raised his hand. “Me. Pick me.”
“What about me?” the old man said.
“I guess you could come, too.”
“Forget it.” Papou flipped his hand at me. “You drive too slow. How is that going to kill me?”
“Are you going to tell me who sent the box?”
“Are you going to pick up the cigarette butts so your grandmother doesn’t find out I have been smoking?”
“Later,” I said.
“Then I will tell you later.”
Damn it, he had me.
* * *
DINA WAS Dad’s former girlfriend, the woman he’d been with before he jumped ship to America and married my mother. Thirty years later she was still devoted to Dad. Her entire home was a shrine to his awesomeness. Only her bathroom was exempt from the Dad-worship, because who wants their deity to watch them poop? She lived on a steep hill, where the houses were as stubborn as Greece’s people. If an earthquake came, a storm, the Turks, they weren’t going anywhere. They would stay right here on their incline, hugging Greek soil and rock for eternity.
Halfway there, I spotted company in the rearview mirror—company that wasn’t my assassin, Elias.
A cop car.
Detective Melas.
My mouth groaned, but my body yelled “Yay!” without a shred of sarcasm.
Big showoff, he flashed his lights and indicated for me to pull over. Defying law enforcement didn’t come naturally to me, despite the patterns in my DNA, so I snugged up to the next bare patch of curb, hopped out of the Beetle, tried to look like I wasn’t carrying around a severed wang in a box.
Stavros slapped the leather seat I’d vacated. “Are you okay?”
“Great.” Delivered with a side of sarcasm Stavros didn’t get. How could I be okay when I was possibly in possession of one of Dad’s body parts, without the rest of Dad?
“Because you’re standing the way I had to stand the time I pissed my pants.”
I had a comeback curled at the back of my throat, but had to swallow it when Melas swaggered over to me. He did it on purpose, walking the bad-boy walk. He was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt with the sleeves folded to his elbows. In another week his dark, wavy hair was going to need one-on-one time with clippers and a pair of scissors. His body was hard and trim. I’d seen glimpses of what was underneath, and it was delicious. Part of his face was hidden behind sunglasses, but I knew his eyes were warm, dark chocolate, and when he looked at me I felt like the only woman in the world … this week. I had discretely asked around. Melas had the kind of reputation that sunk a Greek woman, but elevated a Greek man to living-legend status.
He grinned. My stomach tied itself into damp knots. “Do you know you’re being followed?”
“Yes.”
“Who is he? I don’t recognize him.”
He was talking about Elias, who had cruised to a stop several car-lengths back. He was poised behind the wheel, waiting.
“Oh, he’s not one of Grandma’s. That’s Elias. He’s an assassin working for Fatmir the Poor. Do you know him?”
“Fatmir? Only by reputation.” He shook his head. “Jesus. Who’s his target?”
“You’re looking at her.”
“What did you do to him?”
“I guess he doesn’t like Americans.”
Melas looked at me like I was speaking French. My joke must have flown over his head and splattered on the hot road.
“I was in the newspaper,” I said, taking pity on him. “Apparently Fatmir isn’t happy Grandma thinks she’s got an heir.”
“In the newspaper?”
“Front page.”
“What were you doing on the front page?”
“Among other things, eating dinner with you. It was a fluff piece.”
“Slow news day.”
“Maybe the Greek mafia is a more cheerful topic than the economy.”
He nodded to the box in my hands. “What’s in the box?”
“A clue.”
“What kind of clue?”
“A penis-shaped clue.”
“Penis-shaped? What’s penis-shaped?”
“A penis.”
His skin had seen a lot of sun this summer, turning him to a deep, burnished gold, but as my words sank in all that color washed away.
“A real one?” I nodded. He glanced around. “There’s a severed …” The correct anatomical word stuck in this throat. “… In that box?” I nodded again. “Lady, you’ve got problems.”
“Hey,” I said. “It’s not like I chopped it off and sent it to myself.”
His color wasn’t looking any better. “Where are you taking it?”
I told him and he stared at me, blinking.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “This I’ve got to see.”
“You can’t come with us!”
“Why not?”
“It’s … It’s official family business.”
“Your family is the Greek mafia and I’m a policeman. That means your business is my business. Either I come with you, or we can take that … that box back to my office.”
“You don’t have an office.”
“My boss does.”
He climbed back into his police car, and I jumped back into my Beetle, zipping away before he’d had a chance to buckle his belt.
Stavros shook his head, clearly impressed. “The way he does blackmail, he could be one of us.”
The mercury had to be pushing a hundred. I parked at the foot of the narrow street in a patch of shade. When I stepped into the sunlight, the heat caved in on me like a cheaply built roof. The Beetle had air conditioning, but I hated to use it now that I was driving a convertible. I relied on fresh air and low speed. Back home I had a ten-year-old Jeep with air conditioning I ran all summer long.
A pang of longing crept up on me and tapped me on the shoulder. Home. My car. Dad. Part of him could be in this box. And if it was, where was the rest of him?
My gut clenched. There was a small balloon in my diaphragm that expanded and contracted as my fear levels rose and fell.
Melas crunched to a stop behind us. I took a deep breath and somehow—by the power of sorcery—managed to put on a smile that wasn’t wobbling.
“Let’s do this,” I told the two men.
Dina’s house was one white cake box set in two parallel lines of nearly identical cake boxes. The roofs were all flat, topped by TV antennas and washing lines. Unlike all the other yards in the neighborhood, Dina’s fenced-in space was a barren slab of concrete that she swept constantly, when she wasn’t inside paying homage to the memory of my father. If anyone who could tell me whether this was one of Dad’s bits it was Dina.
We found her in her yard—surprise, surprise—sweeping. Briefly, I wondered if she’d ever sought professional help for her issues. Last week she sent a tray of tulle-wrapped, poop-filled wedding favors to the local police department to show her appreciation for their complete failure to stop a serial killer from conning her. With a little help, she and I had ended his career in crime ourselves.
Dad’s former girlfriend had the kind of figure one could use to prop up a load-bearing wall. She was a lot of woman packed into a smallish container. Density had trumped mass.
“You.” She made a sniffing sound. “What do you want?”
I didn’t waste time—hers or mine. “I need you to identify a penis.”
“Are you calling me a putana? What makes you think I can identify it? You should ask your aunt.”
If Aunt Rita were here she’d zip off a smart comment about how Dina had become a born-again virgin after Dad split Greece. According to my aunt, the sugar had been licked off that candy repeatedly, and by dozens of different tongues, long before Dina and Dad became a thing.
“Ain’t nobody got time for this,” I muttered in English. Three faces looked at me. “Heh,” I said. “It’s an urban American prayer.” I held up the box, showed it to Dina. �
�See this box? There’s a penis in it. It might be Dad’s.”
“Why would it be in that box?”
I looked at her—hard—until the light bulb in her head exploded.
She gasped and clutched her chest. It took a while—the woman had a lot of acreage to cover. “My Virgin Mary, Michail!” Her brain and heart went to battle over her face. They fought long and hard for control of the muscles. In the end her head won. She blinked away any potential tears and put on her no-bullshit expression.
“Show me,” she commanded, fanning her face with her hands.
Everyone crowded around me. I lifted the lid, revealing the male appendage in all its glory—and gory.
Clonk.
That was the sound of local law enforcement fainting. Melas had collapsed in a manly heap.
“It’s not that big,” I said.
“It’s pretty big,” Stavros said. “And that’s not fully extended.”
Stavros knew a lot about other guy’s dicks, on account of how he watched so much porn. Not all of it human, I suspected.
“It’s not Michail’s,” Dina breathed. “It’s not Michail’s.”
The bucket of relief was poised over my head, but I wasn’t about to let it splash Flashdance-style over me yet.
“Are you sure?” I prompted her.
“I would know it anywhere. His is bigger and it’s different.” She leaned in and poked at it with one sharp fingernail. “See this?”
“See what?” To be honest I wasn’t inspecting it too hard. If it was Dad’s, ogling his private part was horrifying, wrong, and upsetting. If it was someone else’s, then it was still wrong, horrifying and upsetting. A severed penis is a severed penis—ask Melas, who was still spread out on the concrete, groaning.
“Wait there. I will show you.” Dina vanished into her house.
I crouched down beside the detective. “Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Can you sit up?”
“Make it go away.”
To the best of my abilities, I pulled him into the sitting position, back against the fence. One at a time, I bent his legs. “Head between your knees,” I said. “It should help.”
“Don’t tell anyone I fainted. Please.”
“I won’t. But Stavros will.”
“It’s true.” Stavros bobbed his head. “I will tell Takis, and he will tell everyone.”
“How about you don’t tell Takis?” I asked.
“I can’t help myself,” he said sadly.
Dina reappeared, waving a Polaroid photo. “Look! This is Michail. He let me measure it and take a picture.”
It was a primal reflex the way my hands jumped up to cover my eyes. “This is so wrong.”
“Isn’t it magnificent?” Dina asked, waiting on a round of approval that wasn’t going to happen. Not with this audience.
I didn’t want to. I really didn’t want to.
“You do it,” I told Stavros.
“I don’t want to look at it.”
I peeked. He was looking at it.
“Okay,” he said, after a long, hard look. “It’s not the same one.”
The lid fell back into place. My brain took several pinches of relief, a handful of question marks, and tossed them into a blender. What it came back with was: “So then whom does it belong to?”
“I don’t know,” Dina said. “It’s not Michail’s, that’s all I care about.”
We left the Queen of Empathy to her sweeping and trudged back down the street. I followed Melas to his police car to make sure he was going to make it. His color was slowly coming back. He had worked his way up to the shade of whipped honey.
He stared off into the distance, where there were ponies, and rainbows, and no dismembered members. “Who sent you that thing?”
“Nobody. They sent it to Grandma.”
“Who sent it to her?”
“She didn’t say, but she knows them, whoever it is. It’s someone in prison. That’s all she told me before she left. Papou said he’d tell me who it was if I could open the box.”
He gnawed on that a moment. “Where’s Baboulas?”
“Away.”
Both eyebrows crept higher.
“I don’t know,” I said. No mention of the fact that I could guess. Grandma hadn’t shared her health status with me. No way was I going to share it with Melas.
He lounged against the car. A hundred degrees and the man was in jeans—and he looked cool wearing them. Detective Nikos Melas was an impossible situation. We were attracted to each other, yeah, but he was a lawman and I was the offspring of a former hitman—amongst Dad’s many other talents—and the granddaughter of one of Greece’s most notorious women.
He already had a bad habit of turning me on when I’d rather snipe at him. My body’s memory had perfect recall when it came to The Kiss he’d stamped on my mouth last week. Those stupid hormones of mine wanted a rematch.
Well, they weren’t getting one. I was the one in control of my moving parts, and where I wanted to move was far away from Detective Melas—effective right now.
Too bad he had a look on his face that said he wanted to converse, now that his color was returning to normal.
Here it came—the bad boy grin. Followed by that move where his eyes slowly raked over my body, digging up all kinds of feelings I didn’t want, most of them in my underwear. I hadn’t seen him since the day after he’d been one of a four-man rescue team who’d saved my bacon from the Baptist.
“I’ve been thinking about taking you out again,” he said.
“We’re out right now.”
“Are you snippy because I haven’t called?”
He wished. “Why would I? Our date wasn’t a date. It was business.”
He blew out a long stream of hot air. “Maybe I wanted it to be a date.”
“Did you?”
“It’s complicated.”
You’re telling me. “It’s complicated because you’re making it complicated. All you have to do is quit bringing it up and—voila! —uncomplicated.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Denial solves a lot of problems.” I thought about it. “Maybe not solves, but denial definitely has its place.”
He changed the subject. “How are you?”
“So hot and sweaty that either my sweat glands shut down or the heat is sucking it up faster than I can make it.”
“I meant to check on you, see how you were doing after the Baptist thing.”
“You didn’t.”
“But I wanted to.”
A cold spider clambered up my spine. The former cop was dead but the horror lived on. Fear was like a zombie: reanimate that sucker and it would stump around after you forever, moaning for its share of your brain.
“I’m fine,” I said. Was I fine? Not really. More like fine-ish. Except for the part where a serial killer almost snuffed my lights out, where my family was the mob, and where my father was still missing and maybe dead.
“I have to go,” I said. “I have a thing.”
“I know. I saw it. I’m coming with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“It’s evidence of a crime.”
“For all you know it fell off.” He looked at me so pointedly he could have poked out my eye. “Or it could be from one of those medical corpses.”
“Which would make it stolen property.”
“You suck, Melas.”
He grinned. It was the slow, lazy expression of a man who had me where he wanted me. “Not even once, honey.”
I jumped back into my yellow car, revved the engine, cranked the radio’s volume button until the speakers blew my hair back. Then Stavros and I blasted back toward Mount Pelion with Melas on our tail.
By the time we reached the compound, and I killed the engine outside the garage, I’d already come up with a dozen different identities for the man with the missing frank. He was a medical corpse, like I suggested to Melas. Or some poor homeless guy who’d been i
n the wrong place at the wrong time. He was the sender’s enemy—or a friend who really screwed up. The sender had delivered a message, but where the heck was I going to find an interpreter, and what did any of this have to do with Dad? Without Grandma around I’d have to figure out who sent the box, then go to the source itself.
A big voice in the front of my head began hammering on about how it wasn’t like me to go running off to a prison, demanding answers from inmates. I mean, look at The Silence of the Lambs. Things almost ended Very Badly for Clarice Starling, and she was a professional. Me, I was a former bill collector. Former because Grandma razed my workplace and broke my boss’s legs. Now he was being eyed for arson and investigated for tax issues—the issue being that he hadn’t paid them properly. This is no way qualified me to waltz into a prison with empty pockets and a mouthful of questions.
My stomach churned audibly.
“Hey!”
Melas. He was stuck on the wrong side of the gate. Oops.
“Can I come in?” He seemed so sad standing there, gripping the bars, handsome face smushed between them.
I looked at the guard. The guard looked at me, request poised on his lips.
“No,” I said.
“Katerina …”
“Go home, Melas.” I blew him a kiss and trotted under the arch into the courtyard. As always, it was like walking into Eden—minus the serpent and the naked people. Grandma had fountains, fig trees, a conservatory, an enormous pool where Xander did late-night laps, and pockets of gardens arranged in pretty patterns.
Papou still owed me a name. Now it was time to pony up the goods.
But first I scooped up every last cigarette butt, stashing them in a paper bag I’d rustled up in Grandma’s kitchen, and took them with me.
His apartment was on the second floor at the far right end of the compound, Stavros had told me, facing the family orchard.
Papou hollered, “Come!” when I knocked. The door was unlocked, so I went right in.
“Why aren’t you on the ground floor?” I asked.
“Nobody expects the cripple to live on the second floor.”
He didn’t explain further. To my ears it sounded like a Zen saying. Only the hand that erases can write the true thing; it is the power of the mind to be unconquerable; do not seek for the truth, only stop having an opinion; nobody expects the cripple to live on the second floor.
