by Alex A King
The old judge grunted. “Tell him if he wants more work my place could use a fresh coat, too.”
No way did I want to go back inside, so I made all kinds of excuses to stay outside, where the air and view were corpse-free. First I trotted to the mailbox and emptied out a week or so worth of mail—mostly junk. I made a note on my phone to have the mail held until I was done with all this back and forth between home and Greece. While I was emptying the box, I discreetly glanced up and down the street for signs of crazed killers who enjoyed murdering people in my house. That’s if the guy inside had been murdered. For all I knew it was natural causes. He broke into the house and—BAM—stealth heart attack. Which kind of served him right for breaking in to begin with.
Nothing in the neighborhood looked out of place, which, if this had been a horror movie, was a sure sign something Great and Terrible was about to happen—if the dead guy wasn’t enough. The air was hot. The sky was a clear blue with slashes of white. Bugs and birds sang their discordant songs. Somewhere nearby a lawn was being mowed.
My stomach clenched. Everything looked fine from out here, but underneath the smooth surface the world was out of whack.
Then I spotted the car. A blue heap, that had last been new in the 80s, was tootling in this direction, a tail of granite smoke wagging at the rear. The neighborhood was flat, but the automobile was struggling to make it to its final destination.
It pulled up at the opposite curb. The driver stuck his head out.
“I’m looking for a date. How much?”
I rolled my eyes and gagged. The kid behind the junker’s wheel was Donk. Aka: Yiorgos, Baby Dimitri’s teenage nephew. He was at that age where his personality revolved around his penis. Donk was a hundred and twenty pounds of teenage boy in clothes for a middleweight. They didn’t fit him in all the fashionably right places. Somehow—I suspected Greek sorcery—Baby Dimitri had dumped him in my lap to learn how organized crime worked. As if I knew.
My hands went to my hips. “What are you doing here?”
“Going to the Playboy Mansion.”
“It’s in California.”
“I know where it is: Los Ankeles.”
Greeks have a hard time with the letter G. Their tongues hammer it into a misshapen K.
“Xhollywood,” he added.
Also, their H isn’t allowed to leave the mouth alone. They stick it to an X or T and tell it to hold hands.
Hollywood didn’t sound right. “I think it’s in Beverly Hills.”
“Xhollywood.”
“Beverly Hills.”
“Who cares where it is? That's where I'm going.”
I looked at the junker he’d acquired. It was held together with prayer and duct tape. “In that? You’ll never make it that far.”
His forehead scrunched as much as a teenaged forehead can scrunch. “How far?”
Math wasn’t my thing, but converting miles to kilometers was an easier task now that I’d obtained some distance from the shock of the dead man in my living room. One mile was one-point-six kilometers. “About sixteen hundred kilometers.” I did some extra number wrangling because his confusion was solidifying. “A fourteen-hour drive. Maybe a little more.”
“Fourteen hours?”
“Fourteen. It’s more than thirteen, fewer than fifteen.”
“I know how much fourteen is.”
“You don’t look sure.”
He shoved bravado down on top of the confusion, returning to his usual smart-ass mode. “How can it be that far? It’s this far away on the map.” He held up two fingers, an inch of air between them.
Oh boy. “What map?”
He pulled out his cell phone, scrolled and tapped like someone who’d been plugged into the Matrix since birth, handed it to me. I stared at Google Maps in disbelief.
“See this dot?” I pointed to Portland. “That’s where we are right now.” I zoomed out until the map evolved into one of the northern hemisphere. “And this dot? Volos. Phones make big things look small. They have to—it’s a four inch screen.”
His chin jutted out. “I don’t believe you.”
I tossed the phone back to him. “So don’t believe me then. Get the map to calculate the distance and travel time for you.”
He fiddled with the phone a moment, until his eyes popped halfway out of his head.
“Fourteen hours,” he whispered. Then he burst into tears.
Reggie Tubbs got out of his chair and shuffled to the edge of the porch, hand shielding his eyes. “What’s that boy crying about?”
“The distance from Portland to the Playboy Mansion.”
“Yeah, that’s a thing worth crying over, all right. Could be I’ve cried about it myself a night or two.” He went back to his chair, his attention on Mrs. Bean, lugging groceries from her Subaru to her house across the street.
I turned back to the weeping kid. ”You really came all this way to visit the Playboy Mansion? Then why didn’t you fly to Los Angeles?”
“Maybe I was also following you.”
“Maybe? I didn’t know teenagers could catch international flights alone.”
“I had a permission slip.”
There was the boom-crash of Mom and Dad’s screen door flying open, slapping the siding as Marika’s palm gave it a whack. “You!” she bellowed.
Donk looked like he was about to shrink to fit in his own droopy pocket.
“What’s she doing here?”
“She’s my sidekick,” I told him.
Marika rushed to where we were standing. She got up in Donk’s face with a freshly sharpened finger. “I’m going to make you eat wood!”
Eating wood was one of those things that sounded sexual but wasn’t. Eating wood meant being on the receiving end of a spanking. Which also sounded sexual (thank you, Fifty Shades of Grey) but wasn’t. Well ... not always. I had no doubt Marika could feed him the kind of wood that would knock his block off. She had wild children. She also had Takis.
Donk ducked behind me. “Make her go away,” he whimpered.
A week ago he’d aligned himself with a group of assassins who had been plotting to kill me. This week he expected me to be his rock. But I couldn’t bring myself to step aside to let Marika have him, mostly because he was holding me in place.
“Let go,” I hissed.
“No.”
“Let him go,” Marika said.
The front screen flew open a second time. Takis strode out on his toothpick legs.
“What is he doing here?” he wanted to know.
“Looking for the Playboy Mansion,” I said.
Takis glanced around. “It’s around here somewhere, isn’t it?”
I stared at him. I couldn’t help myself. The ignorance was strong with this one, and he was treading water in my family’s gene pool. Takis struck me as the kind of guy who didn’t think twice about peeing in pools.
“Fourteen hours south,” I said. “At least.”
“No!” Takis said. “It can’t be.”
“And yet it is,” I said.
Takis pulled out his phone, did some tapping. His face turned to stone. The phone vanished into his pocket. Obviously not a fan of being wrong. “We should put the brat in your dungeon. He’s Baby Dimitri’s spy.”
My eyebrows crawled up my forehead. “I don’t have a dungeon. We’re civilized.”
“Basement?”
“No basement.”
His head tilted like a dog’s. “Where do you put your prisoners?”
“Don’t have prisoners.”
“Enemies?”
“I didn’t have any enemies until I went to Greece. Greece is the only place where people want me dead.”
“Deep freezer?”
My mouth sagged open. I had to work to snap it back into position. “It doesn’t work.”
“Perfect.”
“It is?”
“What kind of animal keeps a prisoner in a working freezer? That is inhumane.”
My blinks and twitches were coming faste
r now. “Okay ...”
“You’re not putting him in the freezer,” Marika said.
Takis threw his hands in the air. “Here we go. Now my wife is telling me how to do my job. Do I tell you how to do your job?”
“All the time,” she said. “Leave the boy to me. I will take care of him.”
“Yes, because you take such good care of our children. Tell me, where are they right now?”
“With Stavros, who they adore. There is a man who knows how to care for children.”
I grabbed Donk’s elbow. “Let’s back away slowly. I don’t want to get a rabies shot.”
“Rabies?” There was genuine fear in his eyes.
Okay, maybe not rabies, but definitely some kind of mad Greek disease. Takis acted like a carrier. I backed us up to the piece of crap car. “Where did you get this thing? Because I know you’re too young to rent one.”
“I borrowed it.”
Borrowed, my butt. More like stole it from some poor person who was probably grateful. “Did you steal it?”
“No. Yes.” He tilted his head and put on a dopey expression. “Can you define ‘steal’?”
“You’re grounded,” I said.
“You are not my mother, even though you are almost old—”
I held up my hand, moutsa be damned. “Finish that sentence and you die.”
“Okay,” Takis called out. “I have decided the kid can help me with that big problem inside.”
Donk glanced from Takis to me, and back again. “What problem? I don’t like problems. They always mean I have to do work.”
“Congratulations.” Takis grinned at him. His grin wasn’t a pretty one. “You have won a greater share of the work. Now get your worthless kolos in the house, and if you tell anyone what we do in there I will kill you.”
“And that’s not a metaphor,” I said.
Donk’s expression was blank. “What is a metaphor?”
I shook my head. “Should have stayed in school, kid.”
Mr. Teenage Puniverse puffed his chest out as best he could—which wasn’t far—and followed Takis into the house.
“Well, this is fun,” Marika said, eyeing me. “Here I am in America again and all I have seen so far is a dead man and an old man’s poutsa. How can I put either of those things on Facebook?” She shot me a meaningful look.
“Reggie didn’t actually show it to you.” In a weak moment, I took the bait. “Do you ... want to go do something?”
“Wonderful idea. We should do that. I am glad you thought of it.” She hoisted her massive handbag onto her load-bearing shoulder. “Now, where are we going?”
~ ~ ~
An hour later we were dying of old age in the line outside Voodoo Doughnut. Every day at Voodoo is like the original opening week of The Empire Strikes Back.
“Takis and the child can have one of those,” Marika said, checking out the menu on my phone. She was pointing to the Cock-N-Balls doughnut, a cakey confection stuffed with Bavarian cream and smothered in chocolate frosting. “It looks like a big, black snake I saw in a movie once.”
“What movie was this?”
“Snakes on a Plane.”
I gave her a look.
“That is my story and I am sticking to it," she said. "My husband and that child need these.”
“What are you going to have?”
“One of everything else.”
“You never had a doughnut before?”
“Not shaped like a monster.” She tapped on my phone. “Look at this. Adorable. Greeks make their food shaped like food. Although one time Papou brought Takis a loaf shaped like a poutsa. Takis gave it to Stavros.”
Papou was Grandma’s advisor, what the Sicilians called a Consigliere. He had a half-hearted death wish, a gun rack on his wheelchair, and an eagle named Yiorgos. The bird was an inheritance, of sorts, from his now-dead nephew, a kook with a penchant for eagles. Papou was nobody’s grandfather, but everyone called him that anyway.
An hour later, we were back home, hauling enough doughnuts to throw the entire Portland Police Bureau into a diabetic coma. As soon as I threw open the front door, the smell punched me in the face. The body was gone but the smell lived on.
“Good grief, it stinks in here,” I said.
Takis and Donk had helped themselves to Dad’s widescreen TV. They’d planted themselves on the sofa, feet on my mother’s coffee table. Wherever Mom was she was currently wishing for a sharp axe and a corporeal body. In life, my mother had been an easygoing woman, but no one—no one—put their shoes on her coffee table.
“You are the women,” Takis said without taking his eyes off the screen. “Cleaning is your job. We are just the muscle.” He hooked a thumb at Donk. “Okay, that one has no muscle. I am the muscle.”
My eyebrows took a short hike to a higher altitude. Takis’ muscle was all in his mouth. “We brought doughnuts.”
“Oh boy,” Donk said. “I love donknuts. What kind did you get?”
Marika flipped open the first box, delivered the bad news.
Takis peered into the box, sniffed, went back to the TV. “I am not putting that in my mouth.”
“Me either,” said Donk. “I’m all about the ladies. Didn't they have any mounis?”
“Sure,” I said. “They’re sitting on the couch.”
“More for us.” Marika picked up one of the chocolate-frosted wieners, bit off the end. Donk winced. “This is how you tell the men from the boys. A man would not care. He would eat the doughnut, even if it looked like a poutsa. I bet Xander would eat the poutsa-shaped doughnut.”
“Xander would cut it into pieces first,” Takis said. I had the feeling he meant it.
I dumped the other box on the kitchen counter, went back to the living room where I shoved Takis’ shoes off the coffee table using my foot.
“Did you get rid of ... you know?” I asked him.
Eyes on the TV: “Not yet. We do it tonight.”
“So he’s still in the garage?”
“Unless you want me to put him in one of the bedrooms.”
I shook my head. “No. That’s fine. Any idea who he was?”
“You did not tell me to look. You said get rid of the body.”
“Maybe we should look before you ... you know. And by we I mean you.”
“What do I get if I do this?”
Marika pinned one of her eyebrows an inch higher. “You get to not be divorced.”
Takis did two palms up. “Who asked you? I was talking to Katerina!”
“I am her sidekick.”
“You are my wife. Go home.” Takis got up and began poking through the other boxes. He picked up one of Marika’s monsters. “Heh. This one looks like you when you are bleeding,” he said to his wife. “Rawr! Rawr!”
Marika spat in the box. “Enjoy your doughnuts.”
Chapter 3
After I loaded up with carbs I finally had a chance to escape the circus. The bickering followed me up the stairs, until I shut my parents’ bedroom door.
Bliss.
I wasn’t used to this family thing. Not that I didn’t love them—they were growing on me, like thrush—but sometimes it was nice to do all that loving from a distance ... behind two locked doors.
Alone at last, I plopped down on the cool porcelain edge of the bathtub and considered the medicine cabinet on the wall. Behind it was the safe Dad installed the year I turned ten. Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t seen the inside of the safe since that same year. There hadn’t been any need for me to go digging through my parents’ treasure. Necessity (being mostly broke after Grandma had my workplace burned down to keep me in Greece) had driven me to go hunting for a temporary loan. That's when I'd discovered Dad's stash of secrets.
After I double-checked the bathroom door was locked, I lifted the cabinet off the wall, leaned it against the tub. Dad, non-traditionalist, had chosen the date he landed in America as the safe’s combination. I twiddled the dial. The door popped open.
My heart s
queezed for a moment before getting on with its one job. A piece of me had expected to yank the safe open and find everything gone or something new. Instead, everything was disappointingly the same—exactly the same. For some reason—you know, because of the dead guy in my house—I really had expected to find it empty, or at the very least, disturbed. Whatever the dead guy had been doing in my family’s house, he hadn’t known about the safe ... or made it that far.
Also I’d be lying my tail off if I said I hadn’t been hoping for a little something extra in the safe. Something to indicate Dad was a free man again—maybe downgraded to a free man in hiding. Which was so much less terrifying than his current status as ‘kidnapped’.
Not wanting to put anything on my phone—this one was Family-bought—I got to work with a pen and notepad, jotting down the names and nationalities in the passports, along with dates and places visited. Italy was a favorite destination, it looked like, and Germany wasn’t far behind. Dad was looking fifty shades of shady.
My phone rang. Grandma was on the other end.
“What are you doing?” she wanted to know.
Panic streaked through my veins, until I remembered she was being Greek and that chances were slim—although not impossible—that she had set up cameras in the bathroom. Greeks don’t ask how you are; they want to know what you’re doing. What you’re doing is always more interesting than how you feel about it.
“Thanks for sending Takis with me,” I said, dumping a load of sarcasm on the sentiment. “You didn’t give me a chance to say that earlier.”
“You are welcome.” Not a hint that she sensed my dollop of sarcasm. “Takis tells me there was a dead man in your house.”
She had called him first—of course she had. He was one of her best henchman; I was just her granddaughter.
“Not for long.”
“You did not call the police?”
“I wanted to, but Takis is taking care of it.”
She made an approving noise, and it occurred to me that like it or not, I had rolled slightly toward the dark side. Got a dead body in your house? Call the police. Everybody with a moral compass that points to Good or even Decent Enough knows that. Yet my first and only call had been to someone who knew how to make bodies vanish. True, my instinct had been to yell for the police, but did Marika twist my arm and force me to call Takis? That was a big, fat nope.
