by Alex A King
Basically all I could rely on once I reached the cave was a smart mouth, a limited amount of hubris, and a wicked case of body odor. My fancy cell had a bathroom with a toilet and bidet. What it did not have was running water from the sink or shower.
Where was the cave? From my vantage point on the rocks, it was gone.
Then it sank in: I couldn’t find the cave because the stupid moon had hoisted the tide up over the rock formations I’d seen earlier, covering—and filling—the sea cave.
The tide was high—too high for survivors.
A sob burst out of my throat, Alien-style. Marika and Donk were dead, gone, drowned. I had sworn to keep them safe and now I’d failed them.
Heart achy and breaky, I flopped down on the rocks and waited for the moon to reel in its water.
#
Six hours—that’s how long a high tide takes to recede. Six hours until low tide, then another half dozen until the tide arrived at this same marker on the rocks.
I didn’t have six hours.
I didn’t need it.
After a couple of the longest hours of my life, the ocean scooted low enough for me to wade into the cave. In I went, heart in my throat, stomach contents crouching at the bottom of my esophagus.
The cage was empty.
There was no sign of Marika and Donk. Somehow they’d escaped—I hoped. I wandered back out to the beach, hands on hips, and scanned the rocky beach for life signs.
There was some life; starfish, crabs, wriggling fish trapped in the water-filled pools. But no Greeks.
Ooooh ... and look: a couple of men bolting down the path from Mario’s mansion. If you could call Baked Potato and Beaver men. They were more of an Italian comedy duo. Cheech and Chong without the weed or the Big Green Van.
They were yelling in Italian.
I raised my hands in the “Who, me?” position. “Can’t a guest take a swim?” I asked.
“You were not swimming, you were escaping. We know escaping when we see it,” Beaver said, mustering all his criminal know-how.
“If I’m escaping, then how come I’m not escaping?”
They stopped to scratch their heads. “Because we stopped you?” Baked Potato said.
“Because I wasn’t escaping,” I said slowly, indulgently.
They did some equally slow math. Baked Potato yelped and went hauling ass into the cave. He emerged a moment later, rubbing his face with both hands.
“You let them go.”
“They were gone before I got here.”
“Mario is going to kill me.”
I thought Mario was more likely to challenge him to a dance-off.
He stooped to pick up something wedged between the rocks. White plastic, about five inches long. Baked Potato looked up and down the beach. “Mario is going to kill me twice. Fucking tourists dropping their garbage. This is a private beach!”
“Do you know what that is?” I asked him.
“Garbage.”
“Not married are you?”
He scoffed. “Show me a man who wants to be shackled to a woman and I will show you an idiot.”
“Have you ever touched a woman?”
Beaver laughed.
Baked Potato made a face. “I kiss my mama goodnight every night.”
“I want to kiss your mama every night,” Beaver said. Baked Potato shoved him onto the rocks. A playful, vaguely homoerotic man-tussle ensued, and in the process the white plastic tumbled to the rocks. I scratched my leg, bobbed down to pick it up and stuffed it into my pocket. Unlike the two bozos, I recognized the stick and the significance of the pink cross stretched across its oval window.
Marika’s pregnancy test.
It was positive.
CHAPTER 9
Beaver and Baked Potato—I still didn’t know their real names—carted me back to my fancy prison cell, but I didn’t mind too much. Marika and Donk had escaped the sea cave before the tide had a chance to gobble them up. Possibly it was some kind of Italian folk magic.
Or not.
My money was on Marika chewing through the bars. When she was hungry she wasn’t exactly picky. Possibly a third-party intervention; I hadn’t forgotten the Armani Hobo.
Everyone mixed up in this crime soup—Greeks, Italians, law enforcement, and civilians—needed team shirts so I’d know who was who and whether they were using their powers for good or evil. Bright, unmistakable colors.
If the homeless guy with the thimble-sized bladder was responsible for the timely jailbreak, I was grateful ... and baffled. What the heck was his motivation? Did he travel Italy on foot, peeing on all available surfaces and doing good deeds? Was dumping a gun in a garbage can for a stranger technically a good deed?
I didn’t have any answers.
What I did have was an itchy back.
Using the doorframe to scratch my itch, I closed my eyes in the dark room and sent out silent thanks to any eavesdropping deity for Marika and Donk’s getaway. With luck they were now headed home, leaving Italy, and me, in their dust.
If they were safe I could deal with whatever came next.
#
When I woke up it was still the dead of night, and the world was completely black. The power must be out, I figured.
Oof! Something hit me in the face. A wall by the feel of it. The light, when my fingers found it, didn’t work. Power outage, for sure. Because Italy didn’t suck quite hard enough with electricity.
Channeling my inner mime, I felt my way around the boxy room to the bathroom. I crawled across the floor until my chin collided with cool porcelain. For once I was glad I was in Italy where toilets were for sitting, instead of Greece where your average toilet was built for squatting like a dog.
This was crazy. When I went to the beach, the moon had been a generous sliver and the sky had been glassy. The clouds must have rolled in thick and fast to hide the moon this well. I waved my hand in front of my face. Nothing.
Oh God. This was the zombie apocalypse, wasn’t it? I listened for sounds of moaning and shambling, but the night was quiet. Stealth zombies then. Hey, it could happen. Stealth zombies weren’t any less ludicrous than regular zombies. If your imagination is going to work it may as well work overtime, otherwise why bother?
Scratching one-handed, I felt my way around to the door. Mosquitos must have made a meal out of me when I snuck out. My skin wasn’t used to Italian mosquitos. My body was soft and American, used to summer nights under an air conditioner’s low hum.
One hand clawing at my skin, I jiggled the door handle with the other.
“Hey,” I called out. “Is the power out? Is it zombies?”
Footsteps approached the door. “What are you talking about? Zombies? What zombies?”
Beaver. Clearly he wasn’t a fan of zombie flicks. That or the Italians used some other word to describe the shambling undead.
There was a click as he unlocked the door. I felt air rush past me, then a long stretch of time where nothing happened.
“Hello?”
“Che cazzo,” he whispered.
“No speakee Italian,” I said.
“What happened to your face?”
“My face?” My hands quit scratching. I reached up and touched a face that wasn’t mine. I mean, it was on my shoulders but it felt like someone had swapped my usual skull for a watermelon. “Argh! What’s going on? Somebody tell me!”
Footsteps thundered down the hall toward us. Two sets, at least. They came skidding to a halt a few feet away. Two voices gasped.
“It’s horrible,” Mario said melodramatically. I pictured him pressing the back of his hand to his forehead, swoon imminent. “I cannot take it. Make it stop.”
“What is it?” I asked. “Is it Italian Ebola?”
Nothing. Well, not quite nothing. There was the soft snorting sound of someone trying to suppress laughter.
“Oh jeez,” I said slowly. “The power isn’t out, is it?”
“No,” said Beaver.
“And it’s n
ot pitch dark?” My voice bore a hopeful note, painted on a backdrop of doom.
“It’s nine o’clock ...”
“At night?”
“... in the morning.”
“And my face?”
“Hideous,” Mario said. “All puffed up like a loaf of bread. The biggest loaf of bread I have ever seen. And I am a man who has seen a lot of bread. My grandmother used to make these wonderful round loaves bigger than my head, but not bigger than your head.”
Baked Potato didn’t say a word. I knew he was the third guy because my other senses were all suddenly razor sharp and his eau de loser was about to knock me out. I swung my fist in his direction ... and hit a wall.
Big, ugly, damp laughter burst out. Three grown men howling while I hopped around, nursing my fist and scratching like I’d fallen in a patch of poison ivy.
Screw those guys.
Figuratively.
With a rusty chainsaw.
“Screw you guys,” I said, leaving out the part about the chainsaw. They were still my captors and I wasn’t totally stupid. My stupidity was a half-assed infliction that came and went.
“We should put this on YouTube,” Baked Potato said. “I bet we get a million hits.”
“No. No YouTube,” I said. “I’ll sue you.”
“For what? Nobody will know it’s you.”
“I’ll know it’s me,” I wailed. This couldn’t be happening. What was Europe going to throw at me next? Would they force me to grow a crop of armpit hair and fill my iPhone with Eurovision songs?
A pack of stupid hens, the Italians continued to cackle. I hated them. I’d shoot them all if I had a gun.
Wait—I did have a gun. A gun nobody knew I had. Apparently not even me, at times. Too bad I couldn’t see them to shoot them.
“What happened?” I demanded, hopping around and scratching frantically. “Is this Italian voodoo? It’s not an allergy—I haven’t got allergies!”
The laughing stopped long enough for Mario to say, “Did you climb out the window?” in a mocking, singsong voice.
“Maybe.” I turned in the direction of his voice. Eyeing him suspiciously wasn’t possible right now. “Why?”
“Somebody had a little cuddle-cuddle with Papa’s sweet plants, didn’t they?”
“Maybe. Wait—was that a rhetorical question? Because it sounded rhetorical.”
“I don’t know what that means, but the answer is yes, you cuddled with my plants. They are lovely, yes? They make pretty patterns on people who try to climb in or out my windows. But even I have not seen a reaction like this before.” He wheezed with laughter again.
“It’s very funny!” Beaver said. “Could you hop around some more, do a little dance? Look, an American monkey.”
The men took to jabbering in Italian, and it sounded to me like more than one of them was holding up his phone. So I did the mature thing: I ran back into my room and slammed the door behind me. Locking it from this side was out of the question, so I slid downward and blocked the door with my body. If I could see the furniture I’d drag it over. But I couldn’t, so I was forced to work with what I had. A hundred and twenty or so pounds of American-Greek—possibly more with this massive, bloated head on my shoulders.
“Check the cave,” Mario barked on the other side of the door.
There was silence from the peanut gallery. Oh-ho—so neither of the two bozos had delivered the bad news that Mario was down two hostages.
A small thrill rippled through me. Dissent amongst the bad guys had the potential to foster opportunity. Opportunity was nice. I liked opportunity.
I also liked eyesight, but right now I had none. And what was that smell? Was it me? Jeez, I really hoped it wasn’t me.
I raised my arm and gagged as the BO slapped me.
Yup, it was me. Jeez ...
Baked Potato muttered something in Italian. Mario asked a question, sheer disbelief coating his words. Both flunkies chased his question with a steady torrent of words, none of which meant a thing to me, proving that arguments are less entertaining when you can’t understand the language.
Back to the door, I waited for the dust to settle and hoped no bullets would show up. The door seemed solid enough, but even the toughest wood gets wobbly in the cellulose when someone fires a gun in its direction.
Mario hiked his voice to scream level. Beneath the ear-bleeding pitch Baked Potato and Beaver murmured platitudes. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine them bowing and scraping as they escaped down the corridor, backwards.
Finally it was just Mario Fontana and me.
“Poison ivy?” I called out.
“Yes,” Mario said. “I had a friend smuggle the seeds into Italy for me. They are a special breed. Extra strong. Do you like?”
“Charming. Do you have any Benadryl or calamine lotion?”
“Whatever that is I don’t have it. And if I do have it, I don’t have it. Think of this as a lesson and me as your teacher. If you had stayed in your room where you belong, this would not have happened.”
“How about some coffee?”
There was a pause.
“Please?” I said, sounding pitiful.
“Okay, you can have coffee. I am not that cruel.”
#
Coffee came on a tray, creamy, sugary, and hot. Some of it even made it into my mouth. My tongue wasn’t swollen up, so that was something. The coffee was accompanied by something soft and squishy that turned out to be a napkin.
“Psst! To the right,” a voice said in whispered Greek. It was low, male, and definitely not Donk. This voice had balls in it, and it was coming from the direction of the window—at least I thought so.
“Right?”
“On the tray.”
My fingers danced awkwardly across the lacquered surface, where they discovered something else soft and squishy. Call me suspicious but I wasn’t about to stick it in my mouth. One mouthful of napkin had made me jumpy.
“It’s food,” the voice outside the window said. “Eat.”
“Because I’ll need my strength?” I said hopefully.
“No, because it has medicine that will fix your problem.”
“Which problem? Because I’ve got a few right now.”
“The poison ivy problem.”
“The poison ivy outside the window, where you are right now?”
“Don’t worry about me. Get that medicine into you.”
“How do I know it’s not poison or some kind of drugs?”
His voice took on a strained quality. “Because if it was poison or drugs I would have let you discover the sweet roll on your own.”
I perked up. “A sweet roll?”
“A sweet roll.”
A sweet roll didn’t sound like the answer to any of my problems, but it did sound delicious. I grabbed it and began gnawing, the part of my DNA that had once been an animal seizing control of my mouth. It was warm, mouthwatering, fresh. When it had vanished I considered licking the tray. Too bad I had company, even if I couldn’t see him.
“Who are you and what are you doing outside the window?”
“Keep your voice down,” he said.
Speaking of voices, his was closer now. “Are you inside my room?”
“Didn’t want anyone to notice me clinging to the wall.”
“Are you the Armani Hobo?”
There was a pause. Then: “You noticed it was Armani?”
“Your coat is old and shabby but it’s a great cut. So you are the Armani Hobo?”
“I don’t want that to be my superhero name,” he said. Men—they all wanted to be superheroes. “Can’t you call me something else?”
“What’s your name? I’ll call you that.”
“Not yet,” he said.
“Armani Hobo.”
I felt his flinch from across the room. “I guess that will do for now.”
“Where are Marika and Donk?”
“Safe.”
“Define safe.”
“They are on the
ir way back to Greece as we speak—legal and above-board.”
“You have that kind of power?” I said, reverence creeping into my voice.
“I know people.”
“What people?”
“Your people. Do you always ask this many questions?”
“If people would just tell me things I wouldn’t have to.”
“You should know Mario Fontana sent a ransom demand to your family.”
“Ransom! How much?”
“A hundred and one million.”
A light bulb came on in my head. “A hundred million. That’s how much Aldo wanted from Grandma to buy his counterfeiting program.”
He made a non-committal sound.
“So that makes me worth ... a million dollars then?”
“Moving along,” he said quickly. “Aldo offered you the program? Does Mario know?”
I set aside my indignity. For now, anyway. “He was close by. Why?”
“Big father-son feud between those two.” I opened my mouth but he cut me off. “Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. But Aldo would be happy to put an end to Mario’s business while pocketing some getaway money for himself. And who can blame him? Aldo Fontana is a criminal, but Mario? He’s a stupid criminal.”
“He doesn’t seem too stupid if he’s holding me for ransom.”
“He’s stupid for doing it while Baboulas is in the hospital. Nobody in the Family will make a move without her approval—not even to save you.”
“They don’t like me,” I said, trying not to blubber. After all we’d been through together they wouldn’t pull my bacon out of the fire and slap it back into the frying pan.
“Of course they like you. Who wouldn’t?” There was a smile in his voice. “But if they do the wrong thing and Baboulas recovers? They know what she is capable of.”
“Okay.” My heart lay heavy in my chest, a deflated bicycle tire of a thing. “So what now?”
“What has to happen. You shoot Mario.”
CHAPTER 10
“I can’t shoot Mario!” I squeaked.
“Do you want to go back to Greece?”
“Yes.”
“Then you have to kill Mario.”
“But I don’t want to kill Mario. I don’t want to kill anyone. Except Hera—I really want to kill her.”
