In Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel

by Alex A King

  My life used to be that way.

  At least I hoped so. This whole thing with Dad being an alleged NIS agent hadn’t sunk in yet. Maybe I’d been watched my whole life and didn’t know it.

  That was disturbing.

  My life was disturbing. I was seriously disturbed. And existing in a constant state of whatever the hell the word was—disturbedness? disturbedosity—was exhausting. My neck hurt from all the snapping it had to do. The back of my neck prickled constantly. Although maybe that was a heat rash or residual poison ivy ...

  I found Dad’s slingshot sitting on top of a filing cabinet someone had shoved out in the hallway. Not the NIS. Probably looters or kids or once-employees that rebelled on the way out of their jobs by shifting furniture. A petty, understandable action. Back when I still had a job in a building that hadn’t yet been razed, I’d fantasized about dragging one coworker or another’s desk into the bathrooms. We saw all kinds; bill collecting is a position with a high turnover rate. How surprising, said no one ever.

  Next to the slingshot sat my phone, keys, lip-gloss, and Marika’s pregnancy test with its accusatory pink line.

  It wasn’t telling me I was pregnant, but it was telling me something.

  Something I didn’t really want to hear.

  Ugh, I hated to even put these words in the same sentence, but Hera was right about one thing (and only one thing, damn it). Eventually I would have to pick a team. Team Organized Crime or Team Law Enforcement. I couldn’t call either side the good guys or the bad because, at times, they were equally shitty.

  On the one hand I was a law-abiding citizen. I didn’t steal and I never parked in the disabled parking spots, even before Christmas when all the regular parking places were taken. I could fly back to that life right now and live a nice, decent life.

  On the other hand, I’d never had any family that weren’t Mom and Dad, and then eventually just Dad. My mom had parents, but they had sucked at being people and died before they had a chance to protest against gay marriage, equal pay, and a decent minimum wage. When I finally tricked some poor guy into taking on my increasingly heavier baggage, I wanted our children to have more than just parents. I wanted them to know their messed-up, crazy Greek family.

  I glanced at the stick again, tried not to touch the peed-on end. The next generation was already here, and soon it would have a new member. They didn’t have to be criminals. The Family could change. It could stop cementing enemies into foundations, stuffing them into speed bumps, dumping them in woods dressed in women’s underwear. The Makris Family could go legit.

  If Grandma was determined to push me into the driver’s seat then I could steer the unwieldy ship in that new direction.

  Right?

  But what about Dad? Whose side was he on? When I found my dad there would be a reckoning. Him and me. No more secrets.

  Okay, maybe some secrets. But not the massive, life-altering kind.

  With that thought in mind, I stuffed everything back into my pockets and made for the exit. Hera and Orestis, I presumed, had left the main doors wide open. Very considerate of them.

  Just my bad luck, Hera was there, waiting.

  And she’d brought a buddy—a buddy with a gun to her head.

  “Katerina Makris! How’s the poison ivy rash? And where is my program?”

  Not-even-remotely-Super Mario had found me, and that wasn’t a good-to-see-ya smile on his face.

  CHAPTER 20

  “The program? What program?” I drew a few blanks in a row.

  “What program? The only program that matters,” he hissed. “My money program!”

  A bright white light came on in in a dark corner my head. It was a little speck of a thing, probably LED. “You mean your counterfeiting program? It’s gone?”

  “It’s gone? As if you don’t know!” Mario stomped his good foot. He was channeling the 80s in a white linen suit paired with strappy man-sandals. His injured foot—the foot I’d shot—was strapped up with Louis Vuitton tape.

  “Is this a friend of yours?” Hera said in English, batting her eyelashes in Mario’s direction.

  “Gay,” I said.

  Her face fell as her advantage dissolved. “All the good ones are gay.”

  My eyebrows rose. “Clearly you’ve never seen a pride parade. A lot of the bad ones are gay, too.”

  Mario sighed. “I want to march in a pride parade but my wife won’t let me.”

  Synchronized snorting was as close as Hera and I would ever get to bonding.

  “Don’t laugh!” he screeched. “And stop changing the subject. Where is my program?”

  “Read my lips,” I said. “I don’t have it.”

  “Then who?”

  I chewed on it a moment. “Seen Aldo lately?” Because I just realized I hadn’t—not since Grandma’s hospital room. Things had been hectic, making it easy to lose track of one old man with a big bag of money.

  “Papa? No. Why?” He raised his gun to eye level, twisted it this way and that, peering into the shiny metal. Jiminy Cricket, was he using it as a mirror?

  “Think about it,” I said. “Think hard.”

  “Forget Papa. Where is my program? I have been following you all over, trying to figure out where you put it and who you are going to sell it to. Your life is very boring and also strange. Who dresses you?”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me if I had it?”

  “Why would I do that? You could just lie.”

  The guy was nuttier than a jar of almond butter.

  “I. Don’t. Have. It. I never did!”

  “Did you give it to this one?” He chucked his chin at Hera. “I think you did. She is a spy, you know.”

  Like I didn’t know. “The first and last time I saw your program was in Italy. The last time I saw your father was in Grandma’s hospital room. He took his money and left.”

  “My money. Papa took my money.”

  I held up both hands, not caring that I was flashing him a double open-palmed moutsa. As an Italian he probably didn’t know about the moutsa and its opinions about how his masturbatory habits had affected his brain. “Hey, I don’t care whose money it was. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Wrong.”

  Great. He was gearing up for the criminal confessional that always happens when the bad guys want to kill you but they like the sound of their voices too much to hurry up with the murder part. Probably it can get lonely talking to dead people, so they squeeze in as much talking as they can first.

  “Is this where you go into a long, drawn-out soliloquy of sadness, about how you were driven to a life of crime against your will, and your father never loved you and your mother was a prostitute and it’s all just so awful and now I have to die? You’re my forth villain, and I have to say this confession thing you all do is getting boring.”

  My mouth was being a smart-ass but my circulatory system was shooting blood around my body at insane speeds. The thing about my heart is that it’s chicken; it’s not a fan of bad guys and their deadly weapons. Terrified on the inside, my gaze slid to Hera. I didn’t look her in the eye, mostly because I didn’t fancy being turned to stone. What I did was take stock of her situation, which appeared to be even more problematic than mine. At least I had a slingshot and a cellphone in my pockets. Unless she had a bazooka stowed in the lady cave, she was unarmed. Her handbag was decidedly absent, and I knew that’s where she kept her zapping toy.

  “Four is nothing,” Hera mumbled. “Wait until you have heard dozens. Many of them in the torture room.”

  Mario waved his shiny gun at her. “Less soliloquy, more monologue.”

  “Where is Orestis?” I asked her in Greek.

  Super Mario stomped his sandaled foot. “English! Tell the government agent to speak English. Don’t you know it is rude to speak another language in front of people?”

  “How do you know she’s a government agent? Look at her. She could be a well-dressed homeless person or ... or ... a goatherd.”

 
; “I already know she belongs to Greece’s spy agency. She is not a very good spy.”

  Hera didn’t look happy, but at least her unhappiness seemed to be aimed sideways and slightly back. She still hated me—it’s just that at this moment she hated Mario more.

  I gave him a hurry up motion. “Can you get moving and do the monologue then?”

  His eyes narrowed into suspicious slits. “Why?”

  “I’m getting bored.”

  Mario let out a shoulder-shaking sigh, then got started. “My papa was terrible. He beat me. Judged me. My mother was born without a spine. Despite all that, I became successful in business. The Camorra were beginning to respect me, and not just because I married into their ranks twice. I could make money—good money, almost perfect. Do you know how rare that is? Very rare. My replicas were almost exactly like real euros. Then your uncle came on behalf of that German he works for.” He spat on the ground. “He wanted the printing program.”

  “Uncle Kostas wanted to buy your father’s program?”

  “My program.” He stabbed his chest with his finger. “Mine. My father only created it, that is all. The financial backing was all mine.”

  “You mean your wife’s money?”

  “My money. I saved up my allowance.”

  Man-child alert. “So what did he offer you instead?”

  “Nothing. He skulked back to Germany without the program like a worthless Greek dog, or so I thought. But then he tried to steal it. My program! After I tried to do business like a man. He could have had it for the right price.”

  “I’ve seen the program in action, so I guess he didn’t succeed.”

  “Funny story,” Mario went on. “Very funny. Your uncle came this close to stealing the program ... and then somebody stopped him. An outsider did the job for me. Very lucky and very funny. You know who that somebody was?”

  “No.” I had a good idea but I wanted him to say it.

  “Michail Makris. Your father.” He nodded, a joyful rift opening on his face. “I asked around after you left and I discovered that Michail is not your uncle, like my papa thought. He is your father. He came and he stopped the German’s lapdog from taking the program. Oh, it was beautiful. ‘Brother don’t do this. This is not how it’s supposed to be. Dirty fake money is worse than dirty money.’ Very entertaining. Until they switched to Greek, then I lost interest fast. It is no fun watching a movie without subtitles, unless there are fight scenes. And those two did not fight. Next thing I know, you show up, the third Makris, and you had no idea what was going on. I knew your grandmother would send someone else after your father failed.”

  “Wait, I’m confused. My father tried to steal the program, too?” I looked at Hera.

  “Why wouldn’t we want it?” she said. “Every law enforcement agency in Europe would take us seriously if we took an axe to a notable counterfeiter’s business.”

  “Notable?” Mario asked. “Is that good?”

  “It means people know who you are,” I told him.

  “So it’s good then.” His chest puffed up. “Everybody wanted Sexy Mario’s money program, and then somebody took it. I know that somebody is you.”

  “Me?” I squeaked. “Are you crazy? I already told you I don’t have it.”

  “I am not crazy!”

  “Everybody keeps saying that, and yet you all keep acting crazy. I didn’t take your stupid counterfeiting program.”

  “Then who?”

  I resisted the urge to slap my forehead. “Once more for the people up the back: Maybe Aldo took it.”

  “Papa would never take the program.”

  “He took your money, didn’t he? Remember back in Italy, you told me he was going to screw you over.” I stared at him until a light bulb came on in his head. Lumens in the low double digits. Less of a bulb, more of a birthday cake candle.

  “Oh,” he said, dragging the word out. “You think my papa took my money and my program. I did not think of that.”

  “It’s not exactly a stretch. Maybe the money he took wasn’t enough.”

  “It was a lot of money—more than enough for a stupid old man to live on.”

  The snick of a gun butted into the conversation. Mario whipped around. He saw what I saw: Aldo advancing on us with a gun in his outstretched hand. Aldo grinned when he took stock of Mario’s little situation.

  “Two pretty women, and you and that useless worm between your legs have no idea what to do with either of them. A real man could have both at the same time. In my day I would have.”

  I raised my hand. “You couldn’t have had me.”

  “Maybe not. But maybe yes.”

  “Or me,” Hera said, arriving late to the denial party.

  “A few years from now when your ass droops you will not be so picky,” Aldo said. He winked at her. She shot him a look of utter disgust.

  “Perfect timing,” I told Aldo. “Maybe you can help Super Mario here. Somebody stole his money-printing program.”

  Aldo raised both eyebrows. “Oh-ho-ho. And you think it was me?”

  Mario wasted no time shoving me under a fast-moving bus. “She thought it was you. I didn’t.”

  “Then you are an even bigger idiot than I thought. If the program was stolen then I am the logical choice. But I don’t have the program.”

  “Why the gun then?” I asked him.

  Aldo moved closer. “I never said I did not steal the program. I said I do not have it. I did have it ... and now it is gone. Somebody robbed the robber, and you are going to help me get it back.”

  “Me?” I said in a shrill voice. I didn’t know nuthin’ about counterfeiting programs or how to get them back.

  “Let us say the thief has a big interest in swapping you for the disc, I think.”

  Hera chose that moment to bust out laughing. “Criminals are so stupid—I love them. You are the reason I have a job.”

  “Who is this one?” Aldo wanted to know.

  “National Intelligence Service,” I told him.

  “Allegedly,” Hera said. “I am not saying I am.”

  NIS, I mouthed to Aldo. Hera gave me her best stink-eye, but frankly it was more smolder than stink. A C-plus at best.

  “An intelligence agent. Perfect,” Aldo said, grinning. “Two useful hostages and the idiot I tried to raise.” He pulled the trigger, blasted Mario in the good foot.

  Mario went down. “My sandal,” he cried. “Do you know how much these cost? And what about my foot?”

  “It will heal,” his father—or not—said.

  “Yes, it will heal, but I’ll have to live with the scar! Twice in one week I have been shot in the foot.”

  “Men like scars,” I told Mario, not knowing if that was true or not.

  His weeping paused. “Really?”

  “Sure. Scars are sexy.”

  Take Melas and Xander and their matching scars—although they’d both still be delicious and dangerously good-looking even if their backs were smooth.

  Mario looked up at me, eyes drowning in tears. “It hurts so much.”

  Aldo waved his gun, which happened automatically as he spoke. Italians and Greeks burn half their daily calories during conversations, which possibly explained why they enjoy talking so much. I’d talk more if I could eat massive portions without piling on weight, too.

  “This is what I raised—a little girl,” the older Fontana man said.

  Hera said, “I never cried that much.”

  “Yes, but did you get shot?” Mario asked through his tears.

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  We all looked at her. “Tough family?” I asked.

  “My sister and I did not get along.”

  I knew Hera’s sister. Not that well—but Irini Pappas was determined to be my new best friend. Shooting her sister wasn’t something I could easily picture her doing. The woman is a human kewpie doll. Still, history was filled with pretty monsters. Look at Ted Bundy.

  “No wonder you’re an asshole,” I told her.
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  She shrugged. “Greek women have to be strong.”

  Off to the side, Aldo was busy scanning the darkness for his thief, I figured. Using his gun, he shoved his sleeve up and peered at his watch. “He should have been here by now. I texted him to let him know you were my hostage.”

  I scanned the area. Nothing around but night and trees, and lots of both. “Maybe he didn’t get it?”

  He pulled out his cellphone, stabbed at the screen with one finger, then said, “Cazzo! Stupid phone. It did not send the message.” He stabbed around some more with the same finger. “A fanabla! Now I sent it to the wrong person. Wonderful. I just bribed a Nigerian prince. This business, I tell you, there are potential enemies everywhere.”

  “You know the Nigerian prince doesn’t exist, right?” I said to him.

  Aldo’s nostrils flared. “Of course he exists. How else does he have my email, eh? Every week he writes, wanting to do a deal. It’s a lot of money. I told him I will need to think about it, but I think I will tell him ‘yes’ when I get my money from the sale of the printing program.”

  I stared at him. The elderly folks I knew fell into two camps: those who took to modern technology like champs, and those who shouldn’t be allowed near anything more sophisticated than an electrical can opener. Aldo was the second one. How he managed to design an almost flawless printing program was a mystery.

  Unless he didn’t design it.

  I smacked my forehead. “You didn’t design it, did you? The printing program, I mean.”

  He had the audacity to look offended. “Of course I did!”

  “Gimme a break,” I said. “You can’t even work your phone, and you think a Nigerian prince is a potential business partner.”

  “He is!”

  “Whose program is it really?”

  One-handed, he slapped the air. “What does it matter, eh? Soon I will pass it on to the highest bidder. But first I need the program.” He glanced around. It was hard to tell with all his wrinkles, but I think he was worried.