by Alex A King
Aunt Rita pointed to each one. "Bathrooms, kitchen, sleeping quarters."
"What's behind the other one?"
"Warehouse. Food, water, weapons. Whatever people keep in warehouses."
"What's that big, red button?" I asked.
The big, red button was under a see-through dome on a control panel in front of the captain's chair.
"Don't touch the button," Aunt Rita said. "Nobody touches the button."
"What does it do?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. All I know is not to touch it."
"I bet it does something terrible," I said. "Red buttons usually do."
"If you want to make Baboulas very angry, push it."
"I won't push it." My inner child wanted to—desperately—but I smacked her fingers.
My aunt slid behind one of the computers and began clacking frantically, at a nail-breaking pace. To her credit, not one of them snapped.
"It's an intruder," she said. "He or she is out the front by the garage."
She tapped a key and the front of the compound came into focus in that one big center screen. She tapped another key and the camera moved. There was my shiny, new yellow Beetle. And there was Detective Melas with his hands up, his expression somewhere between pissed and contrite.
They had him surrounded, dozens of guns pointing in his direction. Grandma marched into the circle, looking like the fearsome creature featured in Dad's bedtime stories.
Just kidding. She looked like a little old grandma. With a huge gun.
"Nikos," she said, "what are you doing? It is the middle of the night. Time for respectable people to be sleeping. Why did you wake me up?"
"I was visiting my parents—"
"You are a good son, but your parents do not live under Katerina's car."
Aunt Rita swung around, eyebrows raised.
"Don't look at me," I said.
"It is rude to slide under a woman's undercarriage without permission," my grandmother continued, unaware that several feet beneath the ground she'd been interrupted.
One of Melas's hands dropped. He held it out, palm up. Showed her a small black box.
"Transmitter," he said. "I couldn't put it on her car until I knew what she was driving. I forgot earlier so I figured I'd do it on the way home."
"Wait," I said. "Why was my car out there? Shouldn't it be in the garage?"
Not Melas, though. He didn't find that strange at all.
"You guys left my car out there on purpose, didn't you?"
"Maybe," my aunt said. I looked at Xander, but he was busy checking out the other monitors.
"And where's the guard? Melas shouldn't have been able to march right past the guard—right?"
"That's a good question." She hit a few keys and another scene came up. A view of the guardhouse. It was empty now, but she hit rewind. When she stopped, the guard had his smartphone in one hand and Mr. Winky in the other.
"Hmm," my aunt said. It was a terrible sort of hmm, the kind one hears just before a judge sends a man to the firing squad.
"Okay," I said. "Nothing to see here. Just a cop doing something stupid that almost turned him into a human sieve, and a frisky guard. In his defense, it is the middle of the night, and there's a limit to how much Solitaire a person can play on their phone." I headed towards the square in the ceiling, expecting the way in to double as the way out.
Maybe it did, but not tonight.
"Xander," Aunt Rita said, "can you take Katerina back upstairs, please?" She did a come here motion with both hands, so I trotted over. She dropped a kiss on each of my cheeks. "Get some good sleep, eh?"
"You, too."
"Katerina?" Not my aunt this time. It was Grandma, and she was looking up at the camera. "Katerina, are you wearing shoes?"
I wiggled my naked toes. And even though she couldn't hear me I said, "Yes."
* * *
The way out was through the galley kitchen (shiny, modern appliances) and along a narrow low-ceiling corridor that soon split in two. When we found ourselves at the crossroads, Xander veered to the left. I couldn't see the end point of the right corridor. Greece and Grandma were good at dangling mysteries under my nose; I wanted to know where the path led. Maybe the dungeon Aunt Rita mentioned. But for now, I had to be satisfied with discovering what was behind door one.
And it was … drumroll …
A ladder, of sorts.
Metal bars fastened to the concrete. At the top was a steel trapdoor with a keypad set into the side.
Xander was up there in a flash. I tried not to notice how great his butt looked in black cargo pants, or how climbing a ladder did amazing things to his substantial arms. It felt vaguely sleazy to go from a triple-X-rated dream featuring Melas to leering at Xander's ass. Luckily I could blame the flushed cheeks I was sporting on Melas's nocturnal shenanigans—of the clean kind—and no one would be any the wiser.
He tapped a sequence of numbers into the keypad. Waited for the click. Then punched the metal slab with his palm. It swung up and stayed open. He vanished through the hole, then his head appeared, followed by his hand.
I was pretty sure that was the international signal of, 'It's safe. Come on up.' So I scrambled up the ladder, glad there was no one below to gawk at my lightly pajama'd rear.
When I reached the top, he hauled me up the rest of the way, depositing me on a cool marble floor. The lights were off, but I could make out the shape of a queen-sized bed and a big-screen TV.
"Where are we?"
I think I asked Xander questions hoping that one day he'd answer. When I was a kid, I overdosed on old episodes of Mister Ed. I spent weeks sitting in front of my hamster's cage, begging him to talk. I even went so far as to set up our video camera in my room, hoping to capture him in an unguarded moment. We wound up with nothing but hours and hours of Tootsie hauling ass on his wheel.
Xander was like Tootsie on that plastic wheel.
He flipped the switch on a lamp. Pale yellow light chased the shadows into the corners, but it performed its task in an amiable way.
The bed was big. The sheets were bachelor-style black. The furniture was decent quality, and the computer on the desk was a sleek MacBook Pro. No pictures. No art. Nothing on the walls except off-white paint. Probably the paint had a fancy name like Handful o' Blanched Almonds or Winter in Beijing, Before All the Smog. The room came with an en-suite, a small living room, and a kitchen, where a sleek steel refrigerator was quietly humming the same old cool song.
"Is this your place?"
He nodded once, then unlocked his front door and waited for me to take the hint. I was good with hints, and the adrenaline was rinsing away anyway, leaving me feeling like a balloon seven days past a birthday party. Somewhere out there was a waiting bed; it wanted me back.
His room turned out to be on the bottom floor of the compound, in the room closest to Grandma's house. Family and well-paid friends were trickling back to their beds. We exchanged 'Goodnights' as we passed each other, and I hoped they didn't hate me too much for the drama. Without meaning to I'd shaken up the family—and the Family—just by being here.
But they'd shaken up my life, too. Now we were all trying to contain the fizz.
* * *
I drove back to the beach, parked a ways down from where Penka was flipping through a magazine, when she wasn't selling Ritalin to moms. I couldn't see the Beetle from here, but it was wired out the wahzoo, thanks to Melas's midnight adventure. After everything died down my grandmother had grudgingly allowed him to stick his transmitter to my undercarriage.
Which—coincidentally—he also did in the dream I had afterward. Different chassis, though.
"Hey," I said.
The big Bulgarian drug dealer looked up like it was a chore. "What you do here?"
"I don't have any friends in Greece. You're it."
"Not my problem."
"Who said it was a problem?" I asked how she was doing, under the circumstances.
She grunted. "I no c
omplain. You should go. I never sell drugs with you sitting here. You look too clean. Come back when you look like junkie."
"I've seen your customers. They look even cleaner than me."
"They dress clean, yes, but they want a dealer to look like junkie whore. It makes them feel better about themselves."
I guess that made sense. "Selling drugs will get you killed. Have you thought about handing in your notice?"
"Life gets you killed."
Couldn't argue with that. Life came with a guaranteed death sentence. Some of us just put it off longer than others, that's all. That's what those long-dead philosophers taught me.
"When's Tasha's funeral?"
"Day after tomorrow. I must find belt for her. Is Russian funeral tradition."
I jotted down my cell number, passed it to her. "If you need company, call me and I'll come with you. Unless I'm dead by then."
"A good chance you will be."
"Most likely," I admitted.
Yesterday I'd never made it to the beach, so this morning I made good on my promise. I unrolled my mat, stripped off, and let the sun broil me for a couple of hours—sixty good minutes on each side—while I watched kids hauling themselves onto the brightly colored boats. The boats' owners didn't go for any of those sissy pastels or cool whites, they went big and bold and blinding. Stare at any of these boats too long and you were going to fry those rods and cones. Maybe it was a new, innovative way of fishing: stun the seafood out of the sea.
Watching the kids dive made me want to be young again. I wanted to be in that water, with my parents standing on the pebbles, screeching my name.
The hole in my heart widened another inch.
My phone rang. It was Melas.
"What's with the dental floss?"
"Huh?" The sun had me feeling woozy and not entirely capable of forming coherent sentences.
"That thing you probably call a bikini."
"What about it?"
"You're almost naked."
"Who died and made you the fashion police?" I hung up, slightly peeved.
The sun's slap didn't feel like much now, but I was going to be praying to major and minor gods later to take away the pain, so I packed up my show and took it on the road, all the way back to the Beetle. I jumped in, hit the button to seal the lid on this baby, then froze when I glanced in the rearview mirror.
"Katerina Makris," the Baptist said, pulling himself upright. "The prodigal son's brat."
Clank, click went the top.
Chapter 20
"I WATCHED you talking to the Bulgarian pig. We had a friend in common, did she tell you?"
"She didn't tell me anything."
"Liar. But least you are a bad liar, not like your father."
Was Melas listening? Was anybody? The cross felt like a brick around my neck. I closed my eyes, tried to force my heart to its normal non-deafening speed. When I opened them, I resisted the urge to grab the delicate gold pendant and scream for help. What was it with men? Whether they wanted to bone you or kill you, they always preferred to come at you from behind.
I kept my breathing slow and even, so when I spoke it barely sounded like I was one heartbeat away from wetting myself. "What did you have against Tasha?"
"Nothing. She was another piece of garbage that's all, and I am a garbageman."
"And my father?"
"Worse than garbage. He's shit."
"What did he do to you?"
He showed a mile of teeth in the mirror. I had flashbacks to the first time I saw Jaws 3. Who recovers from that? Nobody, that's who.
"Doesn't matter. What matters is what I'm going to do to you—and to him when he comes for you."
"He won't come."
"He will come. I will have you, I already have his girlfriend—"
"Who?"
"His girlfriend."
Dina. I'd forgotten about her. "You took Dina? Is she okay?"
He looked at his watch. "We're going to have fun, you and me and Dina. Maybe I'll fuck her while she's drowning. Feels good to shoot a load into a dying—"
"Ugh. Jeez. What is wrong with you?" My fingers were tracing the side of the seat, feeling out the levers. I took a chance and yanked the top lever, slamming my weight backwards. It was obvious at this point that I had to be my own cavalry. Melas and his merry band of policemen were officially slashed off my Christmas card list.
The former cop cried out as the leather seat crashed into his face. He recovered fast—too fast. His fist was quick and accurate. It nailed my ear, punching me into the car door. His second shot cracked my nose sideways, and I saw the light end of a dark tunnel. He tried to bail, but I wasn't about to move until my hands were exactly where I wanted them: in my bag, on my slingshot, on the bag of marbles from Baby Dimitri's shop. Then I leaned forward and let him shove me into the wheel so he could bolt. I wanted to cry and bleed in peace, but this wasn't the time for dallying. I jumped out behind him, loaded up the slingshot, stretched the elastic to its limits.
What was it gun experts always said?
Fire on the exhale.
I did that now. The marble shot out of the cradle. It nailed him in the shoulder, and he spun around momentarily. What can I say, I was a slingshot virgin and he was running. He howled and spat out a string of curse words, stumbling in the street. A taxicab almost sideswiped him. The driver leaned on his horn before zipping away. People were looking, but they weren't sure what they were seeing.
And me, I was leaning against the yellow Beetle, clutching the cross, making threats against local law enforcement. Really though, they had nothing to fear unless I suddenly encountered a boulder, a time machine, a donkey, and their mothers in the same afternoon.
I got back in my car, locked all the doors, and then with shaking hands and Jell-O for a brain, drove back towards Grandma's house, hoping I wouldn't encounter any more wolves along the way.
* * *
Halfway up the mountain I pulled over. The road had no shoulder, so I had to make do with the parking lot outside a microscopic village. From here it looked charming, and I wasn't the only one who thought so: two tour buses pulled up behind me. The doors opened and tourists flooded out.
I hoped they wouldn't notice me sitting in my car, moping up my own blood with a beach towel. My teeth were chattering, making little clack-clack noises in my head.
"Where is my plate?"
"Argh!"
The woman had snuck up on me. She was a hundred pounds of disdain, tucked into a floral knee-length dress. Her hair was a helmet, but I didn't think it was hairspray keeping it in place. From the look of her she rose every morning and commanded her locks to stand still until she gave them permission to move.
Plate? What plate?
I sat in the Beetle, hands on the wheel, and tried to think. Then it sank in. The memory of me chowing down a plateful of cold moussaka as Aunt Rita and I fled Melas's home.
"Kyria Mela?" Mrs. Mela. No s on account of her being a woman—unless she was persnickety like me. My grandmother was a mobster, but this woman looked like she'd mess you up hard and leave you for starving cats, without a second thought.
"The coffee cup told me we would meet, and now here we are. The coffee cup is never wrong."
This was turning Twin Peaks fast. The only thing she was missing was a log and a sinister message about the owls not being what they seemed.
"I like coffee," I said feebly.
"Then you will come for coffee soon. Bring my plate."
She jumped into an ancient Peugeot and zoomed away.
I sat there blinking for a moment, at least with one eye. My right eye was puffing up fast. My nose and ear had tapped direct lines to my brain—wasn't like they had far to go—and both were screaming for icepacks and a handful of ibuprofen.
My phone bonged. Incoming text.
Jesus. Was that my mother?
Melas, that rotten bastard. Where was he when there was a psychopath in my backseat?
I typed with two f
urious thumbs, hoping the venom would seep through his screen and poison him. I hate you.
Hands back on the wheel. Shoulders square. Sunglasses on and covering some of the damage. I freed my ponytail and gave it a shake. That was my red ear and purpling cheek taken care of, provided I kept my head at a strange angle that was bound to make people go, 'Aww, look at the poor hunchback.'
Five minutes later, I was waving to the guard in the guardhouse. This one was focused on his surroundings, no smartphone in sight, his baloney pony fenced in his pants where it belonged. I stopped outside the compound's garage. Takis and Stavros were slouching against the wall, watching two of the younger cousins play tavli—a.k.a. backgammon—on the hood of a BMW.
They all stopped what they were doing to gawk at me getting out of the car.
"Why the blood?" Takis called out.
"Must be that time of the month," I said.
He looked confused. "But it is on your face."
"A psychopath punched me."
He shrugged. Probably a broken face was just another workday to these guys. "Who was it?"
Hands on hips. "Guess."
He and Stavros jumped to attention. "Where is that malakas Melas?" Takis demanded.
"That's a really great question," I said.
I stomped through the compound. Grandma was—predictably—baking. She glanced up before returning to the bowl.
"What happened to your face?"
"I tripped on an asshole."
"I have tripped on many assholes, but I never broke my face."
"The Baptist got in my back seat. We fought, and then we both kind of won."
She picked up the phone clinging to the wall. Stabbed one of the preset numbers. Said, in a voice reminiscent of Gandalf challenging the Balrog, "Bring Melas here."
Uh-oh.
The baking went forgotten as she reached under the sink for a clear bottle three-quarters full of pale blue liquid. No discernible label. Call me kooky, but I wasn't sure about whatever was inside the container.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Rubbing alcohol."
