Disorganized Crime

by Alex A King

  "I swear, every time you pop an aspirin it's a lottery."

  I held up my phone. "Melas called. He wanted to know who shot up his bed and microwave."

  "You tell him?"

  "Not in this lifetime. What do you know about him?"

  "Detective Melas? He's from Makria. His family still lives there. Wishes he could make history by eliminating organized crime. Never going to happen. People are always going to want what the good guys can't give them, and he knows it."

  That sounded like people. As a kid I always wanted what my folks weren't dishing up for dinner. Fast food wasn't illegal, but turned out there was a good reason it was a banned substance at our kitchen table.

  "So he's against the Family?"

  "Yes and no. I don't think he knows. Mama has done good things for his family and for Makria. Now he's a policeman and he wants to uphold the law, but … Greeks remember. We're like elephants, except when we want to forget something. Then we're more like goldfish."

  "Huh," I said. "Where exactly does he work?"

  "Why?"

  I held up the empty plate. "Plate."

  "Keep the plate."

  "I think it's his mother's."

  She shuddered, then she ponied up the directions. I filed it away in the box in my head marked Dangerous Plans.

  After a brief, horrifying tour, my aunt threw me a key.

  "House key?" I figured this place was its own security system. No one in their right mind would raid the house for valuables.

  "Scooter. It's in the shed out back." She kissed me on both cheeks. "Careful, my love. Mama has eyes everywhere."

  After an hour or two wrestling with the kapok-stuffed mattress, I felt ready to take on the world, provided the world could be easily conquered with baseless threats and very little effort on my part. I pumped a bucket of water to take to the outhouse. And when I was done weeping over the state of Greek plumbing, I washed up with cold, sweet spring water and went to check out the scooter. Like my aunt's car it was a violent shade of pink and came with a matching helmet. I felt like Barbie as I fired it up and navigated the bumps until I hit road.

  Destination: Volos. The plan was to hurl rocks at Detective Melas's head.

  The Volos Police Department was housed in a nice steel and glass behemoth downtown. Detective Nikos Melas didn't work there. He belonged to an offshoot that dealt with crime up in Mount Pelion's villages. The digs were less fancy. A single layer of hastily cobbled-together brick, with a few windows plugging the holes. Three steps connected the front doors to the sidewalk, not a ramp in sight. This wasn't a building that coddled anyone. Those who couldn't walk simply had to avoid crime, or die trying.

  I trudged through the wall of heat only to fall face first into a humid sweat pool. Greece's austerity measures meant these cops didn't get air conditioning. The police building reeked of despair, aggravation, and cheap-o coffee. The windows were open, the breeze non-existent. Someone had propped the front doors open with a couple of bricks. Guess nobody was worried they'd left potential weapons on their front doorstep.

  Inside, they'd spared every expense. The desks were metal, the chairs flimsy, and the computers …

  Okay, computer. They had one. But it was a dinosaur from the mid-2000s. Push down hard enough on the keyboard and it would shoot crude.

  The cop behind the reception desk was barely out of high school. He was sporting a crop of fresh pimples and baby fuzz. I asked for Melas, and he asked me what I wanted, and I said, "Just get Detective Melas." Then I felt bad, so I tacked on a rushed "Please."

  "Wait there."

  He pointed to a bench against the wall. It looked like one of those prisoner benches I'd only ever seen on TV. Wood slats and a bar that ran along the front, perfect for cuffing the guilty—and probably the innocent—while the cops chugged coffee and loukoumades (donut holes soaked in syrup) and bitched about paperwork.

  One woman sat there alone, her expression set to bored. She looked like she was bored a lot—maybe even professionally. Her cheekbones were high and sharp enough to slice hard cheese. Her hair was butter blonde, its black roots leaving no doubts about its authenticity. She wore jelly sandals, a denim skirt that showed a mile of dimpled leg, and a top with all the stretch torn out. Could be she was in the wrong place, because these guys didn't look like the fashion police.

  Her chin jutted out as I plonked myself down on the bench. She let her peripheral vision do all the staring.

  "Kalispera," I said politely, wishing her a good afternoon, because I was trying to make amends with the universe for barking at the itty, bitty baby cop. I didn't nod to her cuffs. As a recently cuffed person myself, it seemed rude. "How are you?"

  She answered in a Slavic drawl. "Terrible. This is the worst day ever since my last worst day ever."

  "Why?"

  "I sell drugs. They caught me."

  "Really? I've never met a drug dealer before."

  "Congratulations. Now you have met one."

  "What kind of drugs?" It was a question more suited to an alleyway or a smokey corner at a party, but I was working with what we had. It never hurt to be polite, unless the other party didn't know or care about good manners.

  "Medicine. Pills. Drugs for classy addicts."

  "My family's kind of in drugs, too," I told her, searching for common ground. "But I think they have people who sell for them. I don't think they do classy drugs, though. Just regular drugs."

  "Who is your family?"

  I told her. "Do you know them?"

  "Everybody knows them," she said. "What do you do?"

  "Debt collector."

  "Is good money?"

  I thought about how my workplace burned to the ground. "Not anymore."

  The bench shook as she changed position. "What you do here?"

  "Came to bust a corrupt cop."

  Could have been respect I saw in her eyes, could have been allergies. "Bad weather can get better; bad man—never. What he do?"

  "More like what didn't he do."

  "Before you tell me you debt collector, I would have guess maybe he didn't pay you for sex."

  Yikes. Had past twenty-four hours tap-danced on my face that hard?

  "He did cuff me to a pole," I admitted. "But there wasn't any sex. He just ate moussaka in front of me while I watched."

  She nodded like she knew. "That is a fetish, you know. People pay good money. You should tell him that. Ask him for money or make him gets kicks somewhere else."

  Seemed pointless to explain it wasn't like that. Anyway, here was Melas, big shit-eating grin on his face, until he spotted me wasting the afternoon on his police bench.

  "Good," he said. "You can pay for what you did my bed and microwave right now."

  I pulled out my trump card, my 'Gotcha.' It was early in the game but he had swung first and I had face to save. Also, I was operating this mouth with a shortage of sleep and an overabundance of indignation.

  "I'll pay for your bed as soon as you tell me why you didn't ask me to describe the Baptist. It occurs to me now that maybe you already know who he is, you … you … dirty cop!"

  I said it big, said it loud. Said it Greek, basically. I even planted my hands on my hips so they'd know I meant business.

  And guess what?

  Nobody gave a damn.

  They kept on doing what they were doing—eating, drinking, grudgingly scratching info on paperwork—without a single blip in their cop radars.

  "Huh," I said, puzzled. "That didn't go the way I planned."

  Melas looked at me. "How did you plan it?"

  "More indignation on your part. Maybe some crying. Lots of time in interrogation for you, followed by a few years in a damp, chilly cell."

  "You aim too high."

  A big cop ambled over, keys in hand. He had ham hock hands and a white stain on his shirt. Given that he also reeked of garlic, I was guessing tzatziki.

  "Come on, Penka," he said to my new friend.

  My stomach growled. Th
ree sets of eyes swiveled my way.

  I nodded to the human barrel unlocking Penka's cuffs. "The yogurt sauce on his shirt made me hungry."

  "Great timing," Melas said. "You can buy me dinner. You shot up my microwave."

  "Wasn't me," I told him truthfully.

  His buddy rolled the dealer away. She seemed personable enough. Hopefully they'd go easy on her, and she'd be back on her stoop or wherever soon, peddling pills to insomniacs and the jittery.

  Melas steered me through the open double doors. His hand was clamped around my upper arm, and I was hoping he didn't drive a car the way he was driving me. Just saying. I almost tripped down the steps, and at once point he came this close to walking me into a parked car. Guess Greek cops didn't know about serving and protecting. He marched me three blocks down, shoved me into a souvlaki shop where it was standing room only in one of Hades' smaller closets. So many bodies squeezed in there it could have been a mosh pit, if not for the sharp bark of "Come!" every thirty seconds as the souvlaki guy beckoned the next starving customer, and the mouthwatering aroma of sizzling onions and meat.

  The crowd moved swiftly, and soon it was our turn. Melas ordered; I paid. That didn't seem fair, but when I complained about it (hey, if I'm paying, I should be able to order for myself), he said, "A lot of women would love to buy me souvlaki," totally missing my point.

  Was that a metaphor, or did women just wanted to feed the guy?

  When our food was up he grabbed both paper-wrapped rolls and skedaddled, leaving me to carry the drinks.

  Lucky for Melas, and lucky for me, he didn't go far. He commandeered a patch of shade from a couple of teenagers who had been using the sheltered wall to draw pretty pictures with a magic marker. He leaned his back flat against the FACK, leaving me to admire the picture of what seemed to be a deity violating a donkey.

  "Zeus?" I asked.

  He looked. "The Prime Minister."

  Showed how little I knew about Greek politics.

  Melas swapped a souvlaki for a drink. Even trade. The lemonade was sweet, lemony, and nothing like any lemonade I'd ever tasted in my life. Heaven in a glass bottle.

  "The Epsa factory sits on top of a spring," Melas told me. "That's what they use to make the drinks."

  Interesting, but I hoped a biography of the meat wasn't next. As far as I was concerned, meat comes from a supermarket.

  I went from bottle to souvlaki, peeling back the paper before sinking my teeth into the top. Flavor exploded in my mouth, a perfect storm of pita bread, lamb, tangy onions, sweet tomatoes, and a swirl of tzaztiki and feta.

  "Oh my God," I said, violating Mom's Number One rule at the dinner table. I figured she'd forgive me, given that there wasn't a table in sight, and also because it's hard to enforce rules when you're dead. In a foreign country it felt slightly decadent and exotic to talk with my mouth full.

  We ate in silence until I couldn't take it any more. Mouth still stuffed, I said, "You know who he is, don't you? the Baptist, I mean."

  He shrugged and kept on chewing. Probably his mother had the same rule about talking and eating. Given that she was still living, and Greek, she'd probably magically know if he scribbled in her rulebook, and turn his life into a living hell.

  Eventually the food ran out. He drained his bottle, leaving him with no choice but to answer my question. "I know who he is."

  "Who?"

  "It's a 'need to know thing'. You don't need to know. What you need is to go home."

  "Tried that. Didn't like it." I folded my arms, planted myself in front of him. The donkey lover was inches from his right ear.

  He groaned. "You're a pain in my ass."

  "Pegging's not really my style."

  He looked confused, so I explained it to him, using the politician and his donkey as reference material. Confusion turned to fear. "There's something wrong with you," he said. "Go away."

  Wheels turned in my head. Nerve cells flung neurotransmitters across my synapses. I did the math and came up with an awful number.

  "Is he a cop?"

  Twitch. "No."

  I stabbed the air with a finger. "Liar. He is too a cop. Not just any cop—he's one of yours."

  "No, he's not."

  "Yes, he is."

  "Not."

  This was turning kindergarten, fast. "Okay," I conceded. "Let me extrapolate further. the Baptist is a former cop. He used to be one of yours."

  Silence. His jaw ticked.

  "He's a former cop," I repeated. Dread blossomed inside my chest, elbowing my heart and lungs to the side so it had room to expand. "Shit." I might have grabbed my hair and paced a bit. When I stopped I said, "The people he kills, they're all bad guys, aren't they? None of them are contracts. They're his own personal hit list. He thinks he's taking out the trash."

  He shrugged, but it was the kind of shrug that was intended to be a nod.

  It's easy to fall into the sort of magical thinking where you're the good guy, and where the other guy—the one hellbent on detaching your head from its body—is the bad guy. I'd been one of the good guys all my life. Never got a parking ticket, a speeding ticket, a library fine. My record was a blank, squeaky clean page. Then along came Greece. Hellas was all out of paper in its outhouse, so it had wiped its butt on me. By default, because I was a Makris, I was part of the criminal class, one of the bad guys. There's no being good around here when you family name is bad—Dad was adamant about that. Steal one chicken, the entire line is contaminated for centuries. As far as the Baptist and people like him were concerned, I was a ticking bomb. I could go full supervillain at any moment. I was Tony Soprano waiting to happen. For all they knew I was a Michael Corleone; he started out as one of the good guys, too.

  The Baptist was just taking protective measures.

  Something mewled. I suspected it was me.

  "Why did you tell me Grandma hired him to kill Cookie?"

  "I didn't. I told you that was the story going around."

  "Was it really?"

  "There's always a story. That was one—just not one of ours. Go home," Melas said. "There you can have a life. Here you'll always be watching your back, waiting on a bullet to come out of nowhere."

  Gulp.

  Ordinarily I'd have gone like a good little sheep, but Dad was still out there. Until he turned up there was no backing down. If a bullet—or the Baptist—found me before then at least I'd die honorably, doing what mattered most.

  "Is there another way off the naughty list?"

  He shook his head.

  "Then I'll take my chances. Dad's worth it."

  "He'd be the first one to send you home."

  "How would you know? You know nothing about him—or me."

  "I'm a father, remember? I'd be furious if I was him. A parent is supposed to lie their life down for a child."

  "Yeah, well, I'm not every child. I'm doing this my way. Are you going to help me or what?"

  "Forget it."

  "Give me something. Anything. A picture so I can ask around."

  "You want to find him?"

  "Not really." Maybe I was nuts, but I wasn't crazy. "I need to talk to him, though. Reason with him. Maybe he'll leave me alone."

  He tilted his head back and laughed. "Baby, he's not somebody you bargain with. He's a psycho. He'll listen and then he'll kill you."

  I stood there for a moment, hands on hips, squinting through the doily that was my plan. "Okay, so I haven't thought this whole plan through yet."

  "The plan is: go home and leave it to the police."

  "Because that's working out so well."

  "I'm not helping you find him. So don't ask."

  "How about his real name?"

  His eyes dropped to my chest. When they came back to my face they were all warm and gooey. "You look good. Do you know how irresistible you are? You make me wish I wasn't a cop, or that you weren't a Makris."

  My heart kicked itself in the butt, sped up to a moderate jog. Lust shot me with an arrow, right in the v
-spot.

  "I'm immune to rotten bastards."

  "I liked seeing you in my handcuffs," he said, deep and low. "Ever let a man tie you up before?"

  "You're a pig." My mouth was dry. I wanted him to keep talking, and I wanted him to shut the hell up. First world problems.

  Somehow we'd switched places. Now my back was against the wall and Melas was dangerously close.

  "Oink," he said. He slid one hand behind my neck, fitting his hand to the smooth curve. Then he kissed me.

  I've been kissed plenty, but that kiss? Magic. I was glad the wall was there to catch me when he deepened the kiss and my knees began to wobble. Down in my underwear a party was starting. The world desaturated around us. Only Melas and I were in bold, bright colors, and I was no longer sure if we were one object or two.

  He pulled away a split second before I curled a leg around him and embarrassed myself by dry humping a man in public.

  "Go home," he said.

  "Go fuck yourself."

  He looked me up and down, grinned. "Maybe later." Then the smile died as the gravity of the situation swallowed him up. "You need a ride?"

  I wasn't sure if he meant the kind with wheels or bed springs. Truth is I needed both, but for decency's sake I went with wheels. "I've got a vehicle."

  "Stolen?"

  "Borrowed."

  "Borrowed, borrowed or stolen, borrowed?"

  "The first one," I said.

  "Where'd you park? I'll walk you back."

  Yeah, right. He wanted to run the tags, see if I was telling the truth. To be honest, I was kind of curious what they'd turn up if he did.

  "It's more scooter, less car."

  We rounded the corner, to where I'd parked my aunt's scooter on the sidewalk.

  "And it's pink," he said. "Something smells like …" He glanced around, looking for the dog.

  The dog was long gone. "Poop," I said. "It smells like poop."

  Together we looked for the source.

  After a moment, Melas started to laugh. "You're not going to like this."

  My eyes followed the path his had already burned, all the way to my borrowed helmet. It was still Barbie pink, but now the inside was brown. There was no way my head was going in there. For one thing, it wouldn't fit.