by Alex A King
Grandma wasn’t one to walk into a dangerous situation unprepared. It was in her nature to be the one with the upper hand, the trump card, the secret weapon. Me, it was in my nature to be the one spouting tired metaphors. I’d watched her knock on Kyria Koufo’s door and vanish inside when it opened. There hadn’t been any switcheroos between here and the house.
Had she given me the slip, going through one door, escaping through another? Maybe. But why would she do that?
I jumped out of the SUV, slammed the door behind me. I dropped my bag’s long strap over my head, so that it sat across my body. No weapons inside except my slingshot, which lived in there with a bag of marbles that had been a loaded gift from Baby Dimitri. The gun someone had left on my bedside table, before my confrontation with the Baptist, had quietly vanished, somewhere between it not firing when I squeezed the trigger, and me shaking like a Chihuahua on meth as my rescuers ferried me back to the compound in this exact same SUV.
The gate squealed as I pushed through. I walked up to the door, which had been repaired since Aunt Rita lobbed a rock at it. Listened. This was Greece—no one walking past would think my eavesdropping was weird. Chances were they’d done the same thing themselves. Around me, boy cicadas wheezed love songs to girl cicadas. Not too far away, a rapper was spitting out Greek words. There was a steady hissing from further down the street where one of the neighbors was spraying her yard with the hose.
But from inside this house? Nothing that I could hear.
I knocked. “Kyria Koufo?” I called out. “Is Grandma still here?”
There was a small sound on the other side of the door, then it opened. Kyria Koufo was wiping her hands on a calico apron.
“Katerina! She was here and then she left.”
Rats! It looked like I had inherited a few genes from Grandma after all, including the escapee allele. “Did she say where she was going?”
“Your grandmother is not a woman who shares her plans. All I know is that she went out the back door. She looked like she was in a hurry.”
I thanked her and trotted back to the SUV. The plan I was cobbling together involved driving around the neighborhood until I saw an old woman in black ambling down the street. Which would narrow my search parameters by pretty much nothing. You couldn’t throw a crust of stale bread in a Greek village without hitting an elderly widow. Sometimes I suspected Greece had a quota to fill. One-point-two black-clad fossils per square meter.
I pulled out my phone, dialed Aunt Rita.
“Is Grandma at the compound?”
“No, she’s with you and Xander.”
“Not anymore. Somebody killed Tony Goats. We left Xander there to talk to the police.”
Not with words. Possibly with Charades. Probably he was going to be there a long time while they guessed at words.
“Where are you now?” she asked.
When I told her, my aunt unleashed a string of curse words that, when mashed together, made no physiological sense whatsoever. Some of them flew right over my head. But they were colorful.
“Wait there. Don’t go in.”
I made vague promises I had no intention of keeping. Kyria Koufo had an overabundance of bones for me to pick, and I meant to pick them while they were in one neat pile on the other side of the fence. She had chosen me to be her scapegoat, hiked prices on prescription drugs, and now she’d made Grandma vanish. Now I was starting to wonder if she’d killed her husband, too.
I pushed through the gate, trotted up to rap on the door again.
Kyria Koufo poked her head out. She looked harried. Given the nature of her non-relationship with her husband, I wasn’t all that surprised at the lack of a river rolling down the dry bedrock of her cheeks. Something told me her drought was permanent.
“What now?”
“I couldn’t find Grandma. She’s nowhere in the neighborhood.”
“Look harder.”
“There’s a limit to how hard I can look without a team of bloodhounds.”
“You didn’t even start the car.”
“X-ray vision,” I said.
She shrugged and went to close the door.
I jammed my foot in the gap. “I want to look in here.”
“For what? She is not here.”
“Your word isn’t exactly reliable. You told the police it was my idea to push your husband’s girlfriend down the steps. You even suggested I did it as some kind of hazing ritual.”
“It was your idea.”
“It was a joke! So when you tell me Grandma isn’t here, I’m not sure I believe you.”
I put on my best imitation of Grandma’s intense stare. But either she was immune to Grandma or I was a lousy mimic, because she didn’t cave.
“Look at that,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s a travesty!”
“What?” I threw a glance over one shoulder, half expecting Grandma to have circled around to steal the SUV from under my nose. But the car was still there, snugged up to the curb.
When my head swiveled back around, there was a gun butted up to my nose.
Chapter 22
SHE GOOSED the tip with the metal stub, pulled me indoors. Somehow she managed to make my forward progress feel like I was talking a step backward. The Koufo-Katsikas home was Greek chic … from the seventies. I was standing inside a fruit bowl where only orange-colored fruit was allowed. Tangerine walls. Clementine couch. Persimmon cushions. The wax in the lava lamp was a blobby papaya. But the pieces looked high dollar, chosen and placed with precision by someone who’d been paid for their terrible taste.
“You stupid child,” she said.
I reached for my handbag but she jabbed me with the gun again.
“Take it off slowly. Drop it on the floor.”
“Did Grandma tell you your husband is dead?”
“How very sad. Excuse me if I do not cry. I plan to save my tears for the funeral.”
“Did you kill him?”
Because it looked to me like she could have killed him. He was having an affair, she was having an affair …
Her expression said I was a world-class moron, which validated how I felt. “Of course I did. He was using her!”
Two things dawned on me. Her was Cleopatra, aka: Tony Goats’ receptionist. And now that Kyria Koufo had admitted to committing murder she probably wouldn’t stop at one. Murder seemed like it had a lot in common with potato chips: you couldn’t kill just one person. One death lead to another, lead to another, until you’d killed the whole pack, and then flopped on the couch in a fit of self-loathing, telling yourself that tomorrow you wouldn’t kill anyone at all.
“Were he and the girlfriend planning to kill you, or was that bullshit?”
“One way or another, I wanted Katerina gone. Prison, death, it’s all the same to me. Sometimes, in this world, you have to lie to get the outcome you want. It’s too bad she refused to arrange their murders.”
“Where’s Grandma?”
She kicked the door shut, sealing me off from the sounds and light of the outside world. The shutters were drawn, the windows closed. An unnatural twilight. My nerves fired warning shots. In response, my hands clenched, but there was nothing for them to snap. Deeper in the house, something moved.
The gun prodded my cheek. “Walk. Go down the hall.”
“Where are we going?”
“Walk.”
My heart was going wiggity wack. Great. I was in danger, and the organ responsible for keeping me alive was pounding in time with a one-hit wonder.
“Jump,” I said, without thinking.
Kyria Koufo smacked my ear with the gun. “Walk.”
Yeah, yeah, she was real bossy with a weapon to underline her words. I wasn’t that scared of her.
In all fairness, it wasn’t a bravery thing. Under normal circumstances—pre-Greece—I would have been a weeping, wailing mess if someone pointed a gun at me. I’d have a mouthful of “Yes m’am, no m’am,” and I’d be asking precisely how fast she wanted to me to w
alk, lest she shoot. But after my ordeal with the Baptist, Kyria Koufo wasn’t all that scary.
Which was stupid of me. A person pointing the business end of a gun at you is scary. Even if the piece isn’t loaded, they’re still trying to frighten you.
But it was backfiring on her. Any residual fear I felt was slowly dissolving in the cauldron of anger bubbling in my head.
“Last door on the left.”
I took it slowly, one small step for woman at a time.
“Women are supposed to stick together,” I said.
“Says who?”
“Women.”
Somewhere behind me, a door opened and closed. The gun gave me a temporary reprieve, a few inches worth.
“Honey, where are you?”
I knew that voice. Cleopatra.
“In the hall,” the woman at my back said. “I’m taking care of a problem.”
“You haven’t even begun to take care of it,” I said. “Hurt Grandma, I give you a day. That’s if the Family decides to go easy on you.”
“I have a plan,” she said.
Footsteps stopped somewhere behind us. I felt Kyria Koufo turn around. “Why have you still got all that mess on your face. Go wash it off. You know I hate all that makeup.”
Cleopatra hesitated.
“You going to let her talk to you like that?” I called out. “I don’t like you, but I thought you had guts.”
“My Virgin Mary,” the woman who had been tailing me said. “What is she doing here?” She sounded surprised—and not in a good way. Her words were embossed with a watered-down fear.
“Looking for Grandma. Hey,” I called over my shoulder, “did you know your boss is dead?”
There was a short, shocked pause. “Antonis is dead?”
“It’s for the best,” Kyria Koufo said.
“What happened to him?”
“I did it for you.” A thin whine had wiggled its way into the older woman’s voice. “He was using you.”
“I was working for him,” Cleopatra said. “Good, honest work. In return he gave me money—money I need.”
“What for do you need his money? I have money.”
“Yes, but his money didn’t have strings.”
“Christ on a cracker,” I said in English, then switched back to Greek. I slowly turned around. “What does any of this have to do with Grandma and me?”
“Nothing,” Cleopatra said, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at Kyria Koufo as though her lover was dog poop smeared on her shoe.
Varvara Koufo’s head swiveled from me to Cleopatra and back again.
“Your grandmother is stealing from me!” Her words were damp, hard pebbles. “I want to raise prices, she says ‘No.’ I want to diversify, bring in some sisa, she says ‘No.’ I know an excellent sisa cook who could make us all a fortune, but Katerina says she won’t be responsible for Greece’s destruction. So high and mighty. Sometimes I think she believes she is a better class of criminal.”
I wanted to high five Grandma for saying “No” to sisa. The ‘cocaine of the poor’ was ripping the country apart, now that regular drugs were increasingly unaffordable.
Ungh! What was I thinking? Drugs were bad. Prescriptions drugs could be a controlled kind of bad; they often came with warning labels longer than the Magna Carta. Pop a pill to stop smoking, you could wind up in the kitchen contemplating the merits of knife juggling. Got psoriasis? Say goodbye to patchy skin, say hello to oily gas. In some ways, the pharmaceutical industry was Ursula from The Little Mermaid. So me sitting here hooraying Grandma’s stance on sisa wasn’t really a victory for the War Against Drugs.
They’re getting to you, the mean girl inside me said. Soon you won’t be like them—you will be them. The bad thing about an inner mean girl is that you can’t kick sand in her face and put laxatives in her brownies.
“I hope you can run,” I said, “because the Family won’t stop hunting you. And if you kill me, too, it will be that much worse.”
Tell me Grandma’s still alive. Tell me …
“I won’t kill you. Only her.”
Relief mingled with anger. Grandma was alive—for now.
“What are you going to do with me?”
“That’s up to you. You have two choices. You let me kill the old woman, then you go back to the Family, where things will change. You will be in control. Everyone will follow your commands …”
Phenomenal local power … in an itty bitty fiefdom.
“… and together we will make an even bigger fortune selling sisa. You will be rich beyond anything you have ever imagined. Powerful. Young. The world will kneel in front of you. Or—“ She made a face. “I will do a deal with the next head of the Makris family, if there is one.”
“You want me to betray Grandma?” It was the second time today I’d been encouraged to sell out.
“What’s the problem? You barely know her or the Family, and she’s trying to force you to take her place. What kind of loving grandmother is that?”
“Aren’t you trying to force me to take over?”
“No!” she cried out. “I am offering you a choice. What choice has she offered you? None. She rolls over you like she rolls over everyone. I give you choices. She takes them away. You could take the sisa deal, then walk away if you want. Hand the Family to someone else. Go live your life in America, doing whatever it was you did before.” She looked at me expectantly.
“Bill collector.”
“Was that a job or a hobby?”
“Job.”
“Not bad,” she said. “You could go back to that.”
“Can’t. Grandma burned down my workplace.”
“See?” She leaned close, as if we were sharing a secret. “You could be free of all that,” she whispered. “You could be your own woman. But first, Katerina has to die.”
“Or we both die?”
“No. If it were up to me I’d kill you, too. If you don’t take the deal I’m giving you away, as a good faith gift.”
“Huh?” Eloquent, I know. But gifts were things, not people.
“He came here to kill me, you know, because I offered a bounty to have you assassinated. He is killing everyone who wishes you harm. But we made an agreement, the Dogas boy and I. But if you and I make our own agreement, then I will be happy to kill him.”
“You and Periphas Dogas?
She did a tiny, but affirmative, shrug.
My bravado rolled over and played dead. Varvara Koufo was one of the freaks who had wanted me dead, and now she was in cahoots with a bird-loving psychopath.
“Which assassin was yours?”
“The Russian.”
Vlad. The meanest of the bunch. “What’s the agreement?”
“I get rid of your grandmother, the Dogas boy gets to keep you.”
“Why didn’t he get rid of her himself.”
She shrugged. “Nobody else has the balls to take on the infamous Katerina Makri, except me. It was a good deal for both of us.”
“What do you say, will we be in business together?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m trying to think of a polite way to tell you where to shove it.”
There was a soft, malignant chuckle.
Cleopatra glanced backwards and gasped. A shadow appeared at her elbow. It stepped out of the gloom, into the slightly lesser gloom. He wasn’t wearing mirrored shades but I recognized the man as Periphas Dogas. Mostly because of the big freakin’ eagle on his left shoulder.
“Shh,” he crooned. “Don’t move. Don’t move and everything will be okay.”
Holy cow, was that meant for me? This guy was several musicians short of an orchestra.
“What are you doing here? We agreed you wouldn’t come until later.” Kyria Koufo sounded pissed off.
“Doing time made me impatient. You move too slow.”
“We have a timetable here, Dogas.”
“You have a timetable. Me, I want to be sure everything is being done right. I don�
��t want anything happening to my prize.”
“We made a deal. I promised not to hurt her.”
“And look, here you are with a gun in her face.”
“I had to get her inside somehow,” Kyria Koufo hissed.
Now that I was seeing him without the mirrored shades, Periphas Dogas was his old man, with an easy forty years shaved off the crevasses, crags plastered over with acne scars. Prison had stolen his body fat and shoved some gym-built muscles under his skin. The effect was lumpy and mean. He was a junkyard dog in a man’s skin.
“What, you never heard of an invitation? You are a coarse woman, Koufo. A peasant. Even amongst peasants you are rough, unpolished.”
Her face twisted into unhappy shapes. “Who are you calling a peasant? Look at your family. Your mother is a putana, who lay down with a dog that stuck his poutsa in everything with a pulse. They were not even husband and wife.”
The bird lurched as he gave a carefree shrug. He was creeping closer. “Maybe that’s true, but I rose above that. Self-improvement, that’s what I strive for every day. I refuse to rot in a village like a peasant. What is life for if not for the pursuit of perfection?”
She scoffed at that. “You are a genius. Where did prison fit into your plan?”
“It was an opportunity to meet new people, make contacts that can’t be made anywhere else.”
Kyria Koufo rolled her eyes. “Only an idiot would look at prison as a career move,” she told Cleopatra and me.
“I can see why the old man didn’t stick around all those years ago …” Periphas stuck his head through the open living room door, glanced around. He pulled back and made a face. “You’ve got no ambition beyond the accumulation of wealth. For two minutes I have been listening to you and I’m so bored I’m thinking about sticking this gun in my mouth to get away from you. Good thing you’ve got my girl there or I might be tempted.”
The old man? Did he mean old Rabbit boned this nut with the gun on me? Yikes. He really did get around.
“You are indiscreet,” Kyria Koufo said. “Now that I have thought about it, I do not think I need you. I can kill the girl, kill Katerina, and kill you for being annoying.”
