by Alex A King
“Why was there a dead man in your house?”
“Probably because someone killed him,” I said. “Or he was unlucky enough to just die here.”
There was a pause as she processed my smart-assery. “I swear, sometimes it is like I am talking to your father. Who was he?”
“I don’t know, and I’m not about to touch him to find out. Takis said he required some kind of restitution to look.” Take that, Takis. This is what he got for following Grandma’s orders.
“He did, did he? I will take care of Takis.”
A short stretch of silence passed before I realized she had ended the call without bothering to warn me—again.
A moment later there was a knock at the bedroom door.
“Katerina,” Takis said, “I am going to kill you. But if you tell Baboulas, make sure she understands that is an empty threat.”
~ ~ ~
My voice rose an octave—maybe two. Any higher and I could smash crystal. “Christ on a skateboard, he’s a cop? He’s a cop! A for-real policeman? Reggie said he’d pegged him for a fake.”
Takis flicked the leather badge case at me. “Portland Police—whatever that word is. The letters make no sense.”
With shaking hands, I flipped it open. “Bureau. Portland Bureau of Police.”
“See, I would have said boo-ree-aw. English is a disaster.”
“That’s because we borrowed some of it from the Greeks.”
“That is funny. You know how funny? So funny I forgot to laugh.”
I inspected the badge. “Holy crapola, he’s a detective. Why is there a dead police detective in my parents’ house?” I looked at Takis. He looked at me. “Okay, so I come from a family of criminals, but still. Why is there a dead police detective in my house?”
“Maybe it was his time. Natural causes.”
That was a slightly more cheerful thought. “Really?”
“No. Someone garroted him.”
I pitched the badge at his head after carefully wiping it with my shirt. I watched TV, I knew about stuff like fingerprints. “I hate you.”
“We should make a club,” Marika called out from the living room. “We could have T-shirts.”
“I like T-shirts,” I said.
Takis pocketed the badge. “The boy and I are going out to take care of this problem.” He tapped his pocket. “We will take care of this other problem somewhere else. It will take them longer to identify him—if they find him.”
Stars and sparks bopped around the inside of my head. I dropped onto the couch, buried my head in my hands, and tried not to assume the fetal position. A dead police detective in my parents’ house ... why? At what point did he transition from living to dead? Had someone killed him in here or placed him after the fact?
“What are you doing?” Marika asked me.
“Wishing for a time machine.” And a new, less complicated life. Like my old life—minus the secrets.
“If you get one can we go to 1981?”
“What happened in 1981?”
“Charles and Diana’s wedding. I broke one of my mother’s plates and want to replace it before she comes to visit.”
“Sure,” I said. “We can do that.” 1981 sounded good. The world was different then. The fashion was sketchy, but if the time machine was big enough I could take luggage.
Marika snuck a sideways glance at me. “Do you want the remote?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Good. At home Takis will not let me hold it.”
Takis poked his head in the living room. “Do you have any makeup?”
My eyes narrowed. “What for?”
He shook his head. “No reason.”
“Upstairs bathroom. Take a right at the top of the stairs. Middle drawer.”
He vanished upstairs. When he slunk past again it was with an armful of my cosmetics. I glared at him—hard.
“Please tell me you’re not putting my makeup on the dead guy.”
He stopped. “I am not putting your makeup on the dead guy. That’s the boy's job.” He vanished into the garage with my favorite palettes that I never used, and several lipsticks I’d forgotten were buried at the bottom of the drawer. Maybe it wasn’t so bad someone was getting to wear them, even if they were too dead to appreciate it.
My phone shuddered on the kitchen counter. The caller ID told me it was Detective Nikos Melas, hot cop, spectacular kisser, and bad idea. Given that my family resided on one side of the law and he was law enforcement, there could never be anything between us except sexual tension and sweaty longing.
He opened with, “You went home and didn’t tell me?”
“Detective Melas, did I hurt your feelings?”
“Where I come from it’s customary to say goodbye to friends when you leave.”
“Hang on,” I said. “Let me ask Marika if that’s really a custom. Because I think you’re making it up.”
“Marika’s there?” He sounded incredulous.
“She’s my sidekick.”
“The best sidekick in history,” Marika said tonelessly from the living room. She had discovered cable TV and its hundreds of channels, and was currently flicking from one reality TV show to the next. “Why are these people hunting ducks? What for do they put this on TV? Who cares? And look,” she called out, “they have made a show about fat people surviving in the woods.”
“Be grateful it’s not Japanese television,” I said.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked me. I told her and she said, “You two need to have sex.”
“I like Marika,” Melas said. His grin was audible. “She’s full of good ideas.”
“She’s full of something,” I muttered. “Did you call because you miss me?”
The grin in his voice widened. “Maybe. How long are you going to be gone?”
“You do know I live here, right?”
“Could be I’m hoping you’ll change your mind. You improve the scenery.”
I sighed on the inside where it counted, and where he couldn’t hear it and gloat. “I’ll be back in a couple of days. I just have some things to do here.”
Good cop that he was, he seized on that. “What things?”
“Things.”
“Does this have anything to do with your father’s abduction?”
“Pretty much everything in my life is about that,” I said. “What do you know about counterfeiting?”
He took a deep breath, blew it out slow. “What I know is that we’ve seen some counterfeit Euros in the Volos area. Good ones. Which means they are probably out of Naples. There’s a village in the area that produces the best. Almost undetectable, except—”
“They feel different,” I murmured.
That got his attention. “Have you seen one?”
“No. I just heard about them, that’s all.”
“Heard where?”
“Around. Is this your case?”
He sighed like I was busting his balls. “Different department. But if I heard anything I would pass it on.” He lowered his voice. “Look, Katerina, I know the Makris family isn’t involved. Baboulas doesn’t approve of counterfeiting. To her it’s dishonest money. So if you know something ...”
The idea of criminals having morals and standards confused me. Once upon a time, a moral compass was something that pointed black or white. Now I was discovering there were degrees and levels of dodgy.
“I don’t know anything,” I told him, which would be true if we were talking about fishing or curing bacon.
“Just ... if—when—you do, let me be the first person you call, okay?” His frustration reached across the continent, over an ocean, and over most of another continent, to tug on the strings holding up my guilt.
“Got to go,” I said. “Marika’s fallen down a well of bad television.”
“Yeah, I have to go, too. Stakeout.”
“What are you staking out?”
“Hotel in Agria. We’ve got problems with some Germans. See you soon, Katerina
Makris.”
Melas knew better than to chop the S off the end of my name. It was mine from birth and I wasn’t giving it up without a fight. You can’t go around chopping letters off someone’s name because they don’t have a wiener.
“Bye,” I said, but he was already gone.
Now that the call had ended there was a small hollow in my chest and it was filled with a puddle of loneliness.
“He likes you,” Marika called out. “He wants to put his thing in your thing.”
I flopped down next to her on the couch. “I’m really glad you weren’t more descriptive than that.”
She sighed. “This is what happens when you have children. Everything you say is censored before it comes out. Before I used to talk dirty to Takis all the time. Now my idea of talking dirty is reminding him to change his underwear.”
There were some places in the universe nobody should go. Takis’ dirty underwear was one of them. I made a face and snatched up my phone again. None of the channels Marika landed on interested me, so I figured I’d do some hunting on the Internet. Melas had mentioned a German problem, and I was curious, under the circumstances. Probably there was no connection between his stakeout and the Germans who had passed their freshly made money to a local businessman in Makria.
Okay, yeah, so I was curious about what was going on in Melas’s world. It was a crush; I’d get over it.
The Internet came up empty-handed. Whatever was going on in Agria it wasn’t big enough to report or loud enough for people to hear about it. That or the cops were keeping it buttoned up tighter than a frog’s butt. Even the Crooked Noses Message Board was a dry haul; if it wasn’t organized crime they weren’t interested.
While I was at it, I searched the dead detective’s name. His picture came up instantly. There was no good way to get Reggie to identify him—or not—as the not-a-cop who came to the house. But given that in life the detective had resembled a reverse minotaur—body of a bull, head of a man—and had a glint in his eye like he wouldn’t be averse to time travel or showing up naked in an alley, I could see where someone might mistake him for a relentless robot.
“Can we order a pizza? Takis never lets me order pizza.” Marika's forehead wrinkled up. “Do we even have pizza delivery in Greece? Who knows?”
“Probably in the cities.” I tossed her my phone. “Go for it.”
She looked at the phone, looked at me. “What is that for? You want me to call and ... ask?”
“Okay,” I said. “I hate calling for pizza, too. I do it a better way.”
Thirty seconds later the pizza was on its way, thanks the power of the Internet.
“You can do that?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“Sure. I think you can do pretty much everything online.”
“Not everything ...”
“Yes,” I said, “even that.”
She crossed herself frantically. “It is a miracle ... or a curse. I am not sure which.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
~ ~ ~
Right on time, the doorbell chimed. The neighborhood dogs began to kick up a fuss. When I reached the kitchen with the pizza, Marika was already drooling. She wasn't alone; Takis and Donk were back.
“What did you do with the dead guy?” I asked Takis.
Marika passed him pizza-topped plate. He took a bite. “We put him in a tree house with makeup on his face. The cops will take him for a pervert.” He chuckled, cheese and crust tumbling around inside his mouth. Donk laughed, too, until Takis stared him down. “Do not laugh, boy. Death is serious.”
Marika dropped her pizza back in the box, teeth marks and all. “You left him in a tree house?”
Shrug. “Sure. Why not?”
“A tree house. A tree house children play in?”
“What is the big deal? I know it is not that time of the month ...”
“You put a dead man in a tree house? Are you crazy? A child could find him! Would you want our children to find a dead man?”
Takis shrugged, took another bite of pizza. “Eventually they will see dead bodies anyway.”
She yanked open the kitchen drawers until she found what she was looking for: Mom’s big chef’s knife. She pointed it at her husband, inches from his nose. “Our sons are not joining the Family business. They are going to school to be something. Go and get that man and put him somewhere else.”
“But—”
“Go!”
He hung his head. “Okay.”
Donk slouched after him. “Are you going to take that from a woman?”
“That is not a woman,” Takis said to the teenager, “that is my wife. One day you will learn the difference.”
I grabbed Marika’s poised wrist. “Put down the knife. You can kill him later, after they’ve moved the body, okay?”
“Can I throw pizza at him?”
“No—no throwing pizza.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m hungry.”
She sniffed. “I guess I could eat.”
Probably I should have sent them to Ladd’s Addition. Even if someone found the body they’d never make it out to tell anyone. Ladd’s Addition is basically the circles of hell, disguised as a charming wagon wheel-shaped historical district in southeast Portland. People went in and were never seen again. Could be D.B. Cooper was there, bumbling around for the exit.
We were down half a pie when the doorbell rang again. Rubbing my belly, I dragged myself to the door, squinted through the peephole. There were two men on the doorstep staring directly at me.
“Katerina Makris?”
They knew my name. That couldn’t be good.
“We can see your shadow, so don’t pretend like you ain’t home. Open the door.”
That was going to happen, like, never. Nobody sane opens the door for two strangers, not when they look like runaways from the set of COPS. The guy on the left was vanilla ice cream white but he had a do-rag wrapped around his head. He was a mean kind of skinny and his pants were riding low. If he turned around I knew I’d get an eyeful of his underwear. That kind of guy always calls people things like G or dawg or homes, when you just know he was raised in an upper-middle class home, with two still-married parents; the 'hood' was something they wore on their heads when it rained. The mouthpiece of the two was a Latino James Gandolfini, only not dead. His voice had that same breathless quality, like he’d run at least twenty-five feet to grab the last doughnut.
“Hell will freeze over before I open this door,” I said.
They sighed and went digging in their pockets for, I assumed, weapons. I hit the floor with an audible thump.
Marika was already down there. She leopard crawled to where I was cowering. “What is it? What is it?”
“Oh my God,” I whimpered. “They’re here to kill me.”
“Virgin Mary, no!”
She scurried away on all fours. I guess she wasn’t planning to die with me, which was a good idea. She had a passel of kids at home, who deserved to be raised by something better than Takis. She vanished into the kitchen on her hands and knees. There was clanking in one of the cupboards, then she came crawling back with a big gun. It was a monster of a thing, with protrusions all over the place. Looking at it, I wasn’t sure how you fired the thing; every part of it seemed designed to put holes in big, solid objects ... like underground bunkers.
“I bet my gun is bigger than their guns,” she said.
I gawked at the weapon. “Where did you get that?”
“Takis. He bought it from a man under a bridge, like last time we came to America. Do you want one? He bought more.”
“Are they in my house?” My voice was small, weak, a three-legged newborn kitten of a thing.
“Not all of them. He took some with him.”
The doorbell rang again. “Hey, we can hear you in there,” Latino James Gandolfini said. “You gonna open this door or you want us to open it for you?”
“We good at opening doors,” the other one called out.<
br />
The first guy lowered his voice. “A month on the street and it's like you’ve been living in the ghetto your whole life.”
“This be how I always speak, yo.”
I had a sinking feeling these two clowns weren’t here to kill me. Which was good and also bad. At least you knew where you stood with a killer. I peeled myself off the floor, peeped through the door’s one eye. They were holding up police badges, no guns in sight. Probably they had them stuffed down the back of their pants.
I wheeled around, looked at Marika, wide-eyed. “Get rid of that gun,” I said. “They’re policemen.”
“Ungh!” she said and scrambled back to the kitchen. Dishes rattled, then I heard the thump of Marika hauling ass up the stairs. My family wasn’t big on law enforcement, although they seemed to be okay with Detective Melas, provided he didn’t put his hands on me or his nose in Family business.
I peeled myself off the floor and tried to look like I had nothing to hide. It took me a moment; my transgressions were piling up. One more deep breath, then I opened the door.
The big Latino cop peered over my shoulder. “You’re jumpy. You expecting trouble?”
“Yeah, I’m jumpy. You look like criminals.”
“Vice,” the guy with the do-rag mumbled. “We gots to blend in.”
“Quit it, Gene,” the Gandolfini look-alike said. “This here is Bishop—Detective Bishop. And I’m Detective Lopez. We’re looking for a friend of ours.” Lopez glanced past me again. “We heard he might be here. You seen him?”
My fingertips were tingling. My chest was tight. “I just got back from Europe this morning. I haven’t seen anyone except my next-door neighbor and the pizza delivery guy. Is one of them your friend?”
“No. But we’re hoping you can help us find him.” His gaze stuck to my face. “Where did you go?”
“Greece.”
“Nice, nice.” He swayed his head back and forth like a cow. “They’ve got problems. Big money problems.”
“So I hear.”
“You haven’t seen him?”
“I do not think these policemen are good at being policemen,” Marika muttered behind me. She was back, sans guns.
Lopez jerked his chin in her direction. “What did she say?”
