by Alex A King
Five hours, that’s how long we’d been waiting for Homeland Security to squeeze Takis and toss the peel. The authorities had cut Marika and me loose after a few invasive questions. By then our connecting flight was long gone. Lucky for us we were in the terminal, where we had access to coffee, magazines, and restrooms. Who knew what Takis had? Probably latex gloves, lube, and all the water he could gargle.
“You should call Baboulas,” Marika said.
“Takis said not to.”
“Who listens to anything Takis says? Not me. Not our children.”
“Wait a minute—why do I have to call her? He’s your husband.”
“Better the bad news comes from you. She likes you.”
I groaned inwardly and pulled out my phone. Was I really about to beg for Takis’ freedom and life?
The phone jittered in my hand. Incoming call from, of all people, Grandma. I looked up at the security cameras. No part of me would be surprised to learn she could see us. She had an unnatural number of fingers, and they were stuck in pies worldwide.
I answered with a cautious, “Hello?”
“Takis will be rejoining you in a minute,” she said. The call ended.
“Huh.” I looked at the silent phone in my hand.
“Who was that?”
“Grandma.”
“Did you tell her about Takis.”
Was she serious? “I’m sitting right here. Did you hear me mention Takis?”
“I was busy thinking about food. What is a ‘Cinnabon’?”
“It’s a cinnamon bun as big as your head. Grandma said Takis is on his way back.”
“Come on,” she said, pulling me up. “I want to see a cinnamon bun as big as my head.”
“What about Takis?”
“No cinnamon bun for him.”
~ ~ ~
Portland’s sky was tie-dyed blue. I half-expected to see ironic phrases scrawled across it in white smoke. Beards hung from every other chin. In a month or so the streets would be suffocating under a blanket of checked flannel. The plaid plague of hipsters was spreading as former Californians rode their bicycles north. The scent of roasting coffee beans wafted across the city, triggering my salivary glands. I needed coffee and I needed it now ... preferably with a brownie.
Nobody honked, yelled, or flipped me off when I stepped off the curb—a sure sign that we were no longer in Greece.
“That was not so bad,” Marika said cheerfully as we rolled our bags toward the cabstand.
Takis stopped dead center of the zebra crossing. An airport shuttle honked. My cousin’s, cousin’s cousin stuck his hand in the air, facing the shuttle. In Greece the hand gesture was an insult; here it was something the driver was supposed to converse with.
“Not too bad?” Takis said.
“Do not complain,” his wife said, “you can still walk.”
“Do you know why I can walk?”
Marika snorted. “I have a feeling you are about to tell us.”
“Not ‘us’. Katerina is not in this conversation.”
“I’m really not,” I said. And I wasn’t. Where I was was up on the sidewalk, head down, rolling my luggage toward a line of cabs.
“See?” Takis said. “I can walk because I have had a giant pain in my kolos for several years now so I am used to it. Do you know what that pain in my kolos is called?”
“I have a feeling you will tell me that, too.”
“Marika.”
“What?”
“No—that is the name of the giant pain in my ass: Marika.”
“Are you saying I am fat?”
I smiled at the cabdriver at the front of the line and hoped it came across as more friendly, less undead. He leaped out, got busy loading my luggage.
“Who said you were fat?” Takis went on. “Now you are twisting my words into traps so that you can snare me and cut off my poutsa and turn me into a shadow of a man ... A woman—you want to turn me into a woman.”
“Tell that to Baboulas. Tell her a woman is a shadow of a man, and then tell me what she says, eh? If you can still speak after she cuts off your head and jams it on a spike. Katerina?” Marika’s head swiveled on its stick. “Tell him.”
“Just pretend I’m not here,” I said. Because that’s what I was doing—pretending I was somewhere else, with peace, a hammock, and a plate of sushi.
“Are they with you?” the cab driver asked me.
“Yes and no.” I climbed into the cab’s back seat, stuck my head out the window. “Are you guys coming?”
Marika gathered up her things and began jogging toward the cab. The driver watched in horrified silence. Marika was a lot of woman. His face said he was having that dream again, the one where he was stuck to the ground in Pamplona, with a bull gunning for his cab.
“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s house-trained.”
“Not my house I’m worried about,” he muttered.
~ ~ ~
Home sweet home. Compared to Grandma’s shack, the house I’d grown up in looked downright fancy. The neighborhood was middle class. The neighbors rolled their garbage cans to the curb every Wednesday night and rolled them back in on Thursday evening. They kept their lawns neat, their gardens attractive in a low-key we-garden-when-we-can-be-bothered way. Cars were late model, streets were patched regularly, and there weren’t too many registered sex offenders in a half-mile radius. My family home was white with gray trim. The roof had a couple more winters in it before it would need replacing. For nine months out of the year, Portland worked hard on its city-wide build-a-moss installation. There were roofs around the city where green was the primary color.
The cab driver dumped our luggage on the sidewalk, pocketed the fare and his tip. Then he roared off, leaving us standing in a small cloud of sadness and pollution.
“Kat’s back!” a voice said. “Take a look at this.”
In the privacy of my own head I groaned and slowly turned around, preparing for the worst. Reggie Tubbs had lived next-door for eons. The former judge spent most of his time on the porch in a rocking chair, wearing his bathrobe. Now that he was retired he couldn’t quit the loose, comfortable feeling of judicial robes, except now he went naked under the plush cotton. I suspected he’d thrown his black robe over bare skin in court, too. There was no telling how many criminals had been sent to the big house by Judge Nudie.
“Hi, Mr. Tubbs,” I said. “How’s it going?”
“Who’s your friend?” He eyed Marika appreciatively. “You want to take a look at Reggie Junior?”
Marika elbowed me. “What is he saying?”
Reluctantly, I translated. Marika spoke some English, but hers was limited to stiff, high school phrases.
She beamed. “Of course I want to see his grandson. I love children.”
“Not his grandson.”
“Puppy?”
“No.”
“Kitten?”
“No.”
“Pet turtle?”
I thought about it. “Kind of.”
“Oh.” Realization dawned on her face. ”I did not know America had pigs, too.”
“Pretty much every country has them.”
“Tell him I want to see it. Tell him I have never seen one that old before.”
“I can’t—”
Marika arched her eyebrows. “Tell him.”
I passed the message to Reggie, who immediately dumped his backside back in his chair.
“This whole only flashing women who want to look at Junior isn’t working out so good,” he said. “It’s bad for my self-esteem.”
“Rejection will do that. Why don’t you adjust the demographic to, say, women your own age?” With low to no standards.
He rubbed his head until the white wisps looked like the backend of a yeti. “Why the heck would I want to do that? You want me to scare the dickens out of Junior? He’d up and slap me. You ever been slapped in the face with a salami?”
I didn’t want to say yes. Porn today had a lot to answer
for.
“Has anyone been to the house?” I asked.
The retired judge missed nothing. He had been the sole witness to Dad’s hasty retreat from our family home, in the arms of two men who looked like they belonged on the wrong side of the courtroom.
“Just the usual suspects,” he said. “Crazy cult people, little girls peddling cookies, and some asswipe who said he was a cop.”
“A cop?”
“Said he was a cop. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but he didn’t look like a cop.”
“What does a cop look like?” Detective Nikos Melas flashed into my mind. Naked, glorious, and for some inexplicable reason, oiled up. Melas had a face somewhere between model and god. He was five-eleven, dark-haired, copper-skinned, with eyes the color of good chocolate. Zeus would have tapped that and then turned him into a pony for Hera.
“Around here? Not like the Terminator. If old Mrs. Jessup down the street hadn’t been running her leaf blower I would’ve heard his gears clacking.”
For the record, ‘old’ Mrs. Jessup was a good fifteen years his junior.
“Can you describe him—besides the Terminator thing?”
“Guy had a face like a mountain’s ass. I’ve seen softer granite.”
“American?”
“Yeah, while we were having a tea party he said he was born in a Kansas cornfield. Doesn’t get more American than that.”
“Really?”
“Nah, I’m just screwing with you. He didn’t sound like a foreigner, but what do I know. The Ruskies trained their spies to be Americans. They built replica towns. Their agents ate at McDonald’s like any other schmo. Wouldn’t have known they weren’t us when they opened their mouths. Yeah, he sounded American. Couldn’t pin a state on his forehead, but then I wasn’t trying. He was just some asshole.”
“Did he ask anything?”
“You got any friends who got a thing for older men?”
“How much older?”
He stared at me.
I stared back.
“They’re all married,” I said.
“So?”
“Did he ask questions?”
“My memory isn’t what it used to be.”
Yeah, right. The former judge was sharper than a shard of glass punched out of a truck stop restroom window. My head swiveled to let my eyes get a good look at the new Lexus in his driveway. For years he’d driven a Mercedes, but when Grandma drugged me and shot me back home a couple of weeks ago on her private plane, I’d noticed he had new wheels. Reggie told me the old car had burned up in a fire.
“Did they ever figure out who set your Mercedes on fire?”
Reggie Tubbs shook his head. “Too many suspects, they said. I guess I pissed a lot of people off, what with sending them to prison and all.”
“They’re sure it was a former foe?”
“Who else would it be? Now that I’m thinking about it, he asked when I’d last seen you.”
“Me?”
“You and Mike. Say, did Mike show up?”
“Not yet.”
He shook his head, sucking air through his teeth. “Bad business. Got to wonder what they wanted with a guy who drives a truck for a living. I’ve known Mike a long time. He’s one of the good ones.”
My heart hurt; I missed Dad like crazy.
Marika was starting to jiggle beside me. “I have to pee,” she said.
I handed her the keys, pointing out the one that opened the front door. Verbally, I sketched out a quick map of the bathroom’s location. The house had two and a half, none of them with a wastebasket for toilet paper. Greek plumbing gagged on paper, so nobody lived dangerously; they tossed their used paper—yellow or brown—into a basket beside the toilet. Unlike her husband, Marika was America-trained, so I knew she understood things like flushing toilet paper.
“Yeah,” I said, after Marika vanished inside. “You have to wonder.”
“He’ll be back,” Reggie went on. “Don’t worry, they won’t stuff him in a bridge alongside Jimmy Hoffa.”
“You can’t really do that safely, you know. It compromises the integrity of the structure.”
Marika trotted back out, keys in hand. “Have you got any unusual art in your house?”
My eyes narrowed. “Unusual how?”
“Sculptures that look like dead people.”
“No. No sculptures that look like dead anything.”
She looked at me. I stared back as my neurons forged connections. It was a slow process—I’d been awake for what felt like days.
“Holy crap on a cracker!” I yelped, bolting for the front door. My feet backpedaled fast when the stench of slow-baked corpse punched me in the nose. There was a dead man, all right. Dead as dead gets. He was hunched on the floor in front of the widescreen television I gave Dad two Christmases ago. From the doorway I couldn’t see his face, and I wasn’t about to get any closer.
“I have to call the police,” I whimpered.
Marika peered in over my shoulder. ”Call Takis,” she said matter-of-factly. “He will know what to do.”
Takis was in the doghouse, also known as the Holiday Inn. If I called him he’d show up and inflict himself on us. If I didn’t I’d be stuck with a dead body, at least until the cops showed up. Then there would be questions, followed by more questions, and stern looks. But, I reasoned, if anyone knew what to do with a corpse without asking lots of questions, it was Takis.
Suddenly I was glad Grandma had made him tag along. Well ... almost glad. This was Takis we were talking about.
Chapter 2
Takis rolled up fifteen minutes later in a white van; rented, by the looks of it, from Abductions R Us. He swaggered over to the porch, grinning.
“You need me.”
Jesus Christ on a rice cake. “I confess nothing.”
“I want to hear you say you need me.”
Marika rolled her eyes so hard she could have scored a strike. “Just do something about the body, eh?”
Takis muttered something about how Greece had shucked more than its share of oppressors, yet he couldn’t manage to get rid of his wife. But he went inside. When he reappeared a couple of minutes later, he tossed me his phone.
“Know him?”
I was looking at a picture of a dead man who had gained—I assumed—inches of gas bloat in death. He was puffed up like Elvis Presley during year five of his addiction to pills and fried peanut butter-and-banana sandwiches. The only normal thing about this was his everyman outfit of khakis and what looked like a white polo shirt.
“I don’t know.”
“Shave off twenty kilos and imagine his purplish skin as white.”
I was trying, I really was. But it’s hard to look at a corpse and imagine the possibilities. “How many pounds is twenty kilos?” It wasn’t my fault; the dead man in my house was interfering with my ability to do basic math.
“Americans,” Takis said.
On the porch next door, Reggie cleared his throat. ”What’s going on over there? You having some kind of Greekfest? ‘Cause I don’t mind going Greek once in a while.”
“We’re deciding where to eat out,” I told him.
He thought about it for a moment. “There’s a new place down in Tigard, near the mall.”
Tigard was southwest of here, one of Portland’s outer suburbs, and home to the Washington Square Mall.
“They’re picky eaters,” I told him.
“I hear you. Can’t eat like I used to.” He sat back down, robe clutched tight around his potbelly frame. “Everything goes through me like shit through a goose. The pudding days aren’t too far away.”
Takis nudged me. “Who is this malakas?”
“Neighbor,” I said in Greek. “Are you going to get rid of the you-know-what?”
The henchman shrugged. “And put him where? In Greece it’s a different story. But here? Where do other people put the corpses they find in their living rooms?”
I didn’t think dead bodies were a common fe
ature in most suburban American homes. “Can’t you roll him in a carpet and dump him somewhere?”
“Do you have carpet?”
“Hardwood floors.”
“Then how can I roll him in a carpet?”
“So ...” I squinted. “What are you going to do about him?”
Another shrug. “Nothing until after dark. I can’t get him out of here alone, not without a hand truck or a wagon.”
“Or,” I said, “you can pull into the garage and load him up?”
“Or ... I could do that. But you will have to help me carry him.”
My gaze slid toward Marika. “I could be wrong but that sounds more like a sidekick’s job ...”
“I just remembered I have to do a thing,” Marika muttered, and bolted toward the door. She covered her nose with one hand and went diving in.
“So much for that,” I said.
Takis shook his head. “If she has to kaka that will kill any smell that dead man is making. You got keys for that car in the garage?”
I shook my key ring at him. He grabbed it and vanished in to the house. A moment later the garage door began to grind.
Reggie was inspecting Takis. “He family or something?”
“Distant. Very distant. The way bears and dogs are related.”
He grunted. “You all got the same nose—you, Mike, and that one.”
Something occurred to me. “That cop who wasn’t a cop ... Do you remember what he was wearing?”
“Yeah. He was in those khaki flat front pants young guys wear today. Whatever happened to good old pleats? And he had on a white polo shirt. He was so big it looked like a prophylactic stretched over—”
Yikes. “Did you see him leave?” I said, cutting him off.
“Didn't get to see the big send off. The phone rang so I went inside.” His eyes narrowed. “Why? He spring a leak on your door or something?”
Headshake. “Just curious.”
Takis spent the next five minutes playing musical automobiles. He parked my Jeep on the street, followed by Dad’s car, and then pulled the abduction-mobile inside. Down rolled the door.
Reggie watched the whole thing. Ask me, he looked too interested.
“My cousin’s a painter,” I said. “He’s painting the downstairs.”
