by Alex A King
Oh. Yeah. Cheesecake.
Todd fiddled with the napkin. He picked at a slice of white bread, rubbing the crust until it turned to a pile of crumbs. While he was doing that I scoffed down three heavily buttered slabs of the brown.
“I don’t know what to do about Francis,” he said at last.
You know in cartoons when the character shoves a finger into their ear canal to dislodge something stuck in there, blocking the sound waves from beating on the drum? Often it’s a fish or a family of squirrels. Sometimes it’s dirty laundry or snacks. That’s what I almost did because Todd’s words had entered my ear but my brain couldn’t transform them into either of the languages in my databank.
“Excuse me? Could you repeat that?”
He said it again. Same words. Same order. Same fog between my ear and brain. Then, miraculously, it cleared.
“You brought me here so I could give you … relationship advice? You can’t be serious.”
“You were so good at our relationship, I figured you could help.”
Christ in a crate. “I was good at it because I loved you and had no idea you preferred penis!”
“I didn’t prefer it, I just like it a lot more than I prefer woman … parts.”
“That is the very definition of preference!”
“Is it?”
How I had ever loved this man was a mystery. “Go on then, what do you want advice about?”
Todd looked relieved. “You met Francis, remember? The other day at Hipster Burger, before it blew up.”
“Short, stocky, looks like his family tree is part Gotti, part Corleone?”
“That’s the one.”
“What about him?”
“I don’t think he’s into me.”
Fillers Todd had injected into his forehead had somehow leaked into his brain. Was he always this boneheaded?
“Congratulations, bub, that’s life. Sometimes people aren’t into you no matter how much you want them to be. You of all people should know that.”
“I get that. But I don’t get him. He’s giving me mixed signals. He’s always hanging around, calling me—
His phone whistled. He glanced at the screen then held it up for me to read the text from Francis, asking how lunch was going.
“See what I mean? Why would he care unless he was interested?”
“You do know two men—or any two people in any combination of sex or gender—can be just friends, right? People do that all the time.”
His face fell. “So what should I do?”
Our server returned for our orders. Forget lunch, I just wanted to eat cheesecake and go. For a friend I’d be happy to sit here for hour dissecting relationships and hunting for omens in the entrails of this bread. But for Todd? Forget it. He was poo.
“Ask him on a date.”
“I tried. He mistook it for a friend thing.”
“Have you tried talking to him about your feelings?”
“If I was good at discussing my feelings I would have just told you I like men more than women.”
Ouch, but also good point.
I waved my arm at the server. She bustled over. “Make that cheesecake to-go, please.”
Todd’s face fell. It was doing that a lot. “Can you give me a ride home? Car. Fire. No more car.”
My teeth ground together. This time there was no bread to buffer them. “Fine. But never call me again after this.”
“But—”
“Which part of ‘never’ is giving you problems?”
Outside, Oregon was being Oregon. Rain fell from the sky in thin wet sheets. I told Todd to wait while I brought the Jeep around. Wouldn’t do to get that nice suit wet as well as crumpled and smoky. Todd nodded. I wasn’t surprised. He was always happy to be pampered—by me and by others. Not a gallant bone in his body. Well, maybe someone else’s bone, but never one of his own.
After a long slog through the busy parking lot, I arrived at the Jeep. My blood froze. While I was gnawing on brown bread graffiti had appeared across the driver’s side door. Black spray paint. Four letters. One word.
BOOM.
Chapter 7
I jogged back to Todd. “Change of plans, get a cab or an Uber.”
“Something wrong?”
“Probably my car has a bomb in it.”
He looked horrified.
“Relax,” I said. “It’s not the first time. At least this time the bomber was nice enough to leave me a note. They’re not normally so polite.”
“Oh my God.”
“God can’t help me—not unless He knows how to locate and defuse a bomb. Do you think He can do that? Should I ask?”
“What is wrong with you? Why are you so cheerful? Why aren’t you freaking out?”
“Things have really changed. Todd. I’ve been in Greece for the past few months with my family.”
“Wait—you have family in Greece? Since when?”
How could I possibly condense a few months of insanity and crime into a few sentences? Easy. I didn’t even try. “Dad kept his side of the family a secret because they’re the Greek mob. When they’re around, stuff blows up all the time.”
Blood drained out of his face. He glanced around the way a small fuzzy creature does when it senses a bird of prey is imminent.
“About that ride …”
“No can do,” I said. “Unless you’re okay with your body parts spraying all over the parking lot.”
“There’s a thing I have to do,” he said weakly.
“A thing far, far away from here?”
“Yes!”
Like a little chicken-shit—or a sane person—he took off. Huh. Who knew Todd could run so fast?
With Todd gone, the panic set in. In Greece I could call Grandma. Half the cousins seemed to know about locating and disarming incendiary devices. Here I had nobody. Who could I call? I’d effectively cut myself off from the Google of organized crime.
Wait a minute. The note stashed in my bag. The note I’d discovered pinned to the dummy, offering help. Was I crazy? Possibly. Whoever left that note also left it pinned to a fake corpse, so their level of sanity was on par with mine. But I had no one else. I didn’t want to call Greece or Dad and admit that things weren’t going to so great. If I called Grandma she’d send the whole Scooby gang.
Not feeling good about any of this, I dialed the number. A man answered almost immediately.
“Hello?” No-nonsense voice. Calm, capable tone.
“This is Katerina Makris—that’s with an s at the end.”
“Hello, Katerina. I hoped you would call. How can I help you?”
I have a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Probably when you left a dummy in my house and a note offering help, you meant something like carpet cleaning or carrying groceries, right?”
“Do you need your carpet cleaned or your groceries carried?”
“My carpet is fine and with the amount of groceries I can afford right now I can carry them in one hand. My problem is way more exotic.”
“Hit me with it,” he said without freaking out.
“It’s just a teensy car bomb—or at least the threat of a car bomb. I can’t be sure which. I only recognize car bombs after they exploded. Before they explode they look just like any car part to me.”
If he thought I was a babbling idiot he didn’t say. He asked where I was and then he said, “I’ll take care of your Jeep. Someone will be right there to take you home.”
“Who?”
I was talking to dead air.
The mall kept on doing its hectic mall-before-Christmas thing, with its bright lights and tinsel. Nobody looked worried. They kept coming and going, to and from their cars that didn’t have bombs or graffiti. Happy people. People who had finished their Christmas shopping. I gnawed on my lip and tried not to look like a woman with a potential bomb in her car, a woman who had just called a complete stranger—or worse—for help.
A cab rolled toward me.
Stopped. The window buzzed down. The cab driver stuck his head out. He was maybe fifty, clean-shaven, with a skin tone that suggested that he or his ancestors originally hailed from elsewhere. Somewhere with warm seas and rum.
“Katerina? Are you Katerina?” The accent said he was Oregonian, born and raised.
“Yes, but I didn’t call a cab.”
“Someone paid me to pick you up and take you anywhere you want to go.”
“Who?”
“Just a guess, from what they paid me, I’d say your guardian angel.”
Thanks to the whole Trojan Horse debacle, Greeks had issues with forgetting to look gift horses in the mouth. This was a taxicab not a horse, so I peered through the windows before angling into the backseat.
“This isn’t going to blow up, is it?”
“It hasn’t yet.”
I fretted the whole way home. Would my poor Jeep explode all alone amidst a sea of cars in the mall parking lot? Worse—what if someone got hurt? What kind of sicko was getting his kicks vandalizing my things and stopping me from collecting a paycheck? Was this very nice cab driver going to pull over somewhere dark and cut my head off before tossing the rest of me in a ditch?
When he stopped in my driveway I decided my head was safe. I pulled a twenty I couldn’t afford to part with out of my purse and offered him the cash.
He waved it away with a big, pale-palmed hand. “Already got paid above and beyond. You have a good night now. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
Which was the merry part? This Christmas was feeling about as merry as a horror novel.
Now seemed like a healthy time for some good old-fashioned paranoia. I scrounged up a bag of chips and sat by the front window while I waited for the disembodied voice from the phone to give me update. From the way the air shifted I could tell my bear was rolling over in her sleep on the couch behind me. Across the street, my neighbor’s house was still and quiet, the driveway empty, the garbage cans neatly tucked against the side of the house. If she had a car I’d never seen it. The only transport I’d ever seen her use was feet. I scanned the street. The black van was still there—or back again. If it came and went I hadn’t noticed any movement.
The van bothered me. A lot. Things in my life were hinky, and something told me that van was involved.
My neighborhood is quiet on weekdays. Everyone is at work or out doing the things people do when they’re not slaves to the paycheck. Lawns get mowed on weekends, and those who tend to yard work during the week hire the job out. No one was mowing today. The street was free of contractors and other potential witnesses. I was still in my workout gear so I trotted out, breathed in the cold, damp air, and set off for the black van with a knife tucked up in my sleeve. If the van’s driver was a scumbag, I wanted to get a good look at them from the safety of my house. Flat tires would stop them from zipping away in a cloud of fumes.
I crouched down behind the van, faked an untied shoelace. The blade went into the vulcanized rubber like butter—frozen butter. Was that enough? I gave it another hearty stab for good measure. With that out of the way, I figured since I was part way around the block it wouldn’t hurt to keep on going and get some exercise.
Despite the cold, my frostbite quickly turned to sweat and my good intentions turned to regret.
My phone interrupted the Top 40—again. I was destined to never hear this week’s most popular song. The phone number was the one I’d called earlier. My mysterious savior.
“You weren’t there,” the voice said.
“I thought the cab was you.”
“The cab wasn’t me. But I have an offer I’d like to extend to you.”
“Is it an offer I can’t refuse?”
He laughed. “You can refuse all you want, but I hope you accept. It’s a job.”
The sun peeked out, then vanished again behind Portland’s gray curtain. “Things have been blowing up around me lately. The animal shelter wasn’t happy about that. You might not be happy about it either.”
“I don’t rescue and rehome pets, and my employees are used to bomb threats. Your Jeep was clean, by the way. It’ll be in your driveway by morning, I’m sure.”
“You checked it?”
“No. A third party had the situation under control.”
“Third party? What third party?” There were too many third parties in my life, and I wasn’t invited to any of them.
“Relax, your Jeep is safe.”
Nothing reassures a person less than being told to relax, chill, or calm down. “It won’t explode?”
“Not unless you drive it into a gas tanker.”
“I need to start keeping it in the garage.”
“If someone wants to blow you up a locked garage won’t stop them. I’m sending you an address. See you at 10 AM tomorrow morning. No obligation. Hear me out, and if you like what I hear the job is yours.”
“Is there a dress code?”
There was a pause. Then: “Just be yourself, Katerina Makris-with-an-s.”
Be myself. I could do that. And I could do it in black jeans, boots, and a black sweater. My survival instincts told me Grandma would know if I wore anything lighter than midnight. She might not mind—Litsa, my cousin’s dead wife, was less of a village bicycle and more of a city bus—but Greece’s tabloids would adore my blatant disrespect. Their covers would be all me, all the time, until someone else screwed up.
“Be good,” I told my pets as I performed rounds and made sure everyone was taken care of until this evening. “Probably I won’t be home until late this afternoon, so don’t eat anything that isn’t food—your food.”
I found my Jeep hunkered in the driveway, acting all innocent like it hadn’t gone slumming with a vandal. The mysterious third party had taken the time and effort to fully detail my beloved ride—and they’d done it without needing the keys, which should have bothered me but was barely a blip on my weird-o-meter these days. The gas tank was full, and a new sticker on the windshield said the oil was freshly changed.
I backed down the driveway like the Jeep was filled with eggs, through my neighborhood at the speed of snail. When the Jeep didn’t explode, I dared to nudge the gas and push the speedometer to ten below the speed limit. The Toyota driver behind me waved at me Greek-style with their middle finger.
Ironically, although I was on my way to the address the disembodied voice on the phone gave me, I had reservations. Was it a smart idea to drive across town to meet a person who propped up a dummy against my Christmas tree, a person who broke into my house? No. Was I about to deny my Greek curiosity by turning around and going home? Also no. Curiosity drove me to an address over in St. John’s. The two-story building looked like the supply depot for the guy who sold guns out of his trunk under a nearby bridge. A baker’s dozen of vehicles were lined up out front, new and gleaming. The place was a dump but the business inside was some kind of gold mine. Probably organized crime. Which, to be fair, was kind of my wheelhouse these days.
I sat in the Jeep, hands on the steering wheel, not going in. What was I doing here? Even for me and my recent history this was nuts. A sane woman would have filed a restraining order. Me, I’d all but accepted a job I knew nothing about. Around here the odds were overwhelmingly for the job being of the blow or hand variety. I had plenty of experience with both on a strictly amateur, only-in-relationships, and occasionally-on-dates-that-were-going-pretty-well basis.
A finger tapped the window. My head shot up. It took me a moment but I recognized the finger tapper as Francis, Todd’s special friend. Today he was dressed like a billionaire mobster from a spicy romance cover, all suit and tie and lightly stubbled chin.
I rolled down the window. Cold air whooshed in.
“You.”
He held both hands out, splayed. “Me. Who did you expect?”
“Somebody who isn’t you. More shadowy. Someone with henchmen.”
He laughed. “You have an active imagination.”
No, what I
had was an overabundance of henchmen in my life. Everyone I knew these days employed a few.
“What is this?” I asked.
He shoved his hands in his pants pockets and rocked back on his heels. “I meant what I said. This is about a job. I want you to come work with me.”
“You want me to work for you?”
“With me. There’s a difference.”
“Usually working with someone is working for them. The words are just semantics. What’s the job?” Whatever he said, probably I’d take it. These were desperate times. “Unless it’s a hand job. Ohmygod, this isn’t a prostitution gig, is it?”
He shook his head, laughing. “You and your imagination.” He reached into his lapel pocket and presented me with an envelope. Very American Psycho. “This is what I’m offering as compensation if you agree to work with me.”
I opened it up. Read the number. Read it again because the numbers had to be a lie.
“Is this your phone number? I remember it being shorter than that.”
“Salary.”
“Per decade?”
“Year.”
“Will I be doing anything illegal?” Because these kinds of numbers suggested crime was afoot.
“No.”
“Shady? Gray? Off-white? Walking a fine line?”
“Nothing illegal or anything like it.” He held up both hands. Clearly he wasn’t Greek or he’d know better than to show his palms. An open palm was an insult. It meant the person on the receiving end suffered from a brain-softening malady brought on by a chronic self-love habit. “I swear on my life. I know I look like I fell out of a mafia movie and hit every branch on the way down, but I’m one of the good guys.”
“You stuck a dummy in my house. Come to think of it, you broke into my house!”
“I needed to get your attention.”
“A conversation would have sufficed.”
“I figured you wouldn’t take a chance on a conversation with a guy who is friends with your ex. Todd told me what he did to you. If I were you I would have hung up on me.”
My ex’s candor was admirable … and also very Todd-like. The only one he’d never been honest with was me.
