by Alex A King
Lopez was out of reach, potentially forever.
Penka, Donk, and Eugene Bishop were captive, while this Winkler waited for ... what? Dad was still missing, and somehow he was tangled up with the Shitz-U operation.
I pulled out my phone. It only took a few minutes of tapping to discover that Winkler Enterprises was the same entity behind Shitz-U. Boy, the dough man running the joint must have thought I was seven kinds of stupid. And he was right. I should have done the digging then and there and unearthed the Winkler connection. I logged into the Crooked Noses Message Board, ran a search for Winkler Enterprises. The envelope at the top of the screen was red. I had a message sitting there from BangBang, a Crooked Nose who, I suspected, was onto me, thanks to my interest in the Makris Family and a slip of the fingers about being American. I’d been avoiding him (or her) since then, so the envelope stayed red.
Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt—it’s a messy thing, spilling all over the place.
Anyway, the Crooked Noses came through for me again, without realizing it. Winkler Enterprises had grubby fingers and toes in a lot of pies, worldwide. But Greece was a problem Winkler hadn’t been able to solve ... yet. Every time he tried to tiptoe into Greece’s crime market he wound up with a slapped hand and a bruised ego. And Winkler’s right-hand man?
One Kostas Makris. Katerina Makri’s son. Katerina Makris’ uncle.
As neither Shakespeare nor Sir Walter Scott said: Oh what a tangled web we weave when we’re butt-licking, family-betraying scum.
The puzzle pieces were in front of me, but the pictures didn’t line up.
Fourteen Christmases ago, Santa Claus dropped a jigsaw puzzle down our chimney. The pieces were double-sided. The edges were ragged. No smooth frame. Little Tomas could have had the teddy bears on the box put together in minutes, but I’d lacked the superpowers and the serenity to figure it out. This was the grown-up version of that puzzle, but unlike Santa’s gift I couldn’t dump this one on Goodwill. I had to keep working the pieces until the picture emerged. Dad was this puzzle’s teddy bears. Complete the picture; locate Dad.
Then he and I were going to have words about why he lied to me—and probably Mom—for years about his job. If he wasn’t a truck driver, what was he? Who was he when he wasn’t actively being my dad?
I laid my phone on the table. I wasn’t ready to go inside and face Grandma yet, not if she was amped up about my close call. Last thing I wanted was another lecture about what I could and couldn’t do. My plan was to sit here and wait until I couldn’t avoid going inside. The outhouse was conveniently located several feet away, so I procrastinate for a while.
My phone jittered on the iron tabletop. I flicked on the screen. My eyes bugged. Incoming text from Donk.
—Yo, baby, I need a ride.
Charming child
—Where are you? I texted back.
—Church. Help.
—I’m coming. Which one?
Nothing.
Saint Catherine’s. It had to be, otherwise he’d be more specific, right?
I glanced over at Grandma’s kitchen door. It was closed. Xander and Takis were on the other side. Every so often I could hear Takis murmur, followed by the rise of Grandma’s voice as she verbally stripped off a pound—or half a kilo—of flesh. Papou threw in his euro worth periodically.
—On my way.
I fired off the message and pocketed my phone.
There was no way I could dodge the questions at the garage and the front gate, so I skulked along the compound wall until I found a place I knew I could climb. For sure an electronic eye was observing me, but Grandma was aboveground in her kitchen, along with Papou. Aunt Rita had gone back to her apartment to do whatever she did when the night was stretched out ahead of her. As close as Makria was (slightly ironic considering makria meant far, far away) I could reach the village before anyone realized I was missing. But maybe they’d make it in time to be my rescue team.
I wasn’t stupid. The text had been typed in English, not Greek. Donk’s English was rudimentary at best. He couldn’t even spell his favorite curse word correctly. This was a setup and I knew it. But I wanted answers. Some of them would be in that church.
Okay, probably I’d find those answers snuggled up to more questions, but it was a loose thread I could yank.
~ ~ ~
A tour bus was pulling out of the parking lot. Its passengers were on their feet, dancing. When in Greece, do as the Greeks do sounded like better advice than the Roman equivalent. What the Romans did in the old days was puke up perfectly good food. Probably in those days Roman mothers couldn’t bring up the starving children in Africa because news traveled at the speed of whatever ships didn’t sink, so their pool of dinnertime threats was more geographically limited.
My palms were sweating. I wiped them on my black jeans and hoped that my body would be more cooperative once I got inside. The only thing to fear was fear itself ... and also crazy psychopaths. I wasn’t in the pool yet but I was already in over my head.
Makria’s denizens were scattered, some gravitating toward their homes, others reeled in by the allure of the village square. Fairy lights raced from tree to tree. Music rolled out of high-quality speakers. Things were cooking—things that wanted me to sit a while and eat them until my belt hit its unbuckling point. Every day in Greece wanted to be a Thanksgiving-level food celebration.
Shunning food and fun for church—that was new for me.
After a deep breath or ten, I tugged on the church door. It let out a low whine straight out of a horror flick, which really exacerbated my sweaty palms situation. The air was warm and dry but cooler than outdoors. The colored glass apostles made faces in the windows; they recognized a fool when they saw one. Over to the right, the candle stand was alive with flickering lights; Greeks prayed often and hard. I was standing in the narthex, directly in front of the Virgin Mary and her Son. Mary wore an expression of barely suppressed exasperation; there was a woman who could really use a babysitter and some ‘me time'.
Eugene Bishop was waiting, and he wasn’t alone. On the floor, backs to the altar, were Donk, Penka, and Father Harry. They were cuffed and gagged. They looked rattled. Bishop’s edges were just as rough. His clothes were long past fresh and his do-rag was askew. He was holding a gun and it was pointed in my direction.
“Lock the door behind you,” he said, “or I’ll shoot. First you, then them.”
Chapter 18
“Boy,” I said, “and I thought Lopez was the crazy one.”
“Where’s Oscar? Where’s my money?”
My heart was going all kinds of crazy, splashing blood through my body. It was making things hard to hear. I tried a deep, slow breath and exhaled, but that yoga Zen crap didn’t work on armed men.
“The NIS took him.”
He squinted. “Who?”
“The Greek CIA.”
“Fuck. That stupid fat fuck.” He pulled off his do-rag, tucked it under his arm, and rubbed his bald scalp. He’d been wearing the same sloppy pants and loose shirt for days now. He smelled like stale laundry and old sweat. His face had more hair than his head. “It wasn’t supposed to go down this way. Where the fuck is my money? Now what the fuck am I supposed to do?”
Find a synonym for ‘fuck’ didn’t seem like sound advice. Under stress, my brain was simpler than an abacus.
“You could put down the gun and go home.” As far as suggestions went, I thought that was a pretty good one.
“Can’t go home. Not until I kill you or convert you.” He made a sour face. “I don’t get why you’re so special. Everyone wants a piece of you, one way or another.”
“I don’t get it either. Why are the others tied up?”
“They’ve got to stay like that for now. The boss said so.”
“Shitz or Winkler?”
He looked surprised. “You know about Schmitz and Winkler?”
“Sure,” I said, lying through my teeth.
“Schmitz isn’t important
. Oscar always calls him Shitz, like his stupid business name.”
“I thought it was kind of clever, actually ...”
Behind me, the church door opened. A couple of tourists stuck their heads in.
“Can we ...?”
“No!” Bishop screeched. The door closed in a hurry. He redirected his anger at me. “I told you to lock the door!”
I glanced back. “No lock.”
“Why the fuck doesn’t it lock? What kind of door doesn’t lock? That’s the whole point of a door!”
Now that he was under pressure the whole homey act had fallen away. I liked the old Bishop better—that one didn’t point guns at me.
Behind him, Father Harry was trying to wave his hands.
“I think Father Harry knows,” I said.
Bishop rolled his eyes and sighed like I was killing him. “Go over there and pull down his gag.”
With wobbly knees, I stumbled over to the hostages. Father Harry’s gag wasn’t so much a gag as it was someone’s tube sock. My hands were boneless and shaky as I struggled to work the sock gag loose. While I was doing that I quietly checked out the others. Penka looked like she wanted someone to bleed ... after she stuck a knife in their eye. Donk’s vibe was two parts terrified, one part hopping mad. Like Penka, he’d probably cut someone, as soon as he finished doing time in the fetal position.
The sock popped free. It wasn’t, I noticed, a clean sock. Poor Father Harry. I hoped at least it was his own foot funk.
“Finally, God has answered my prayers,” Father Harry said. “Is Kyria Katerina here with guns?”
“Uh, no. No guns.”
“Henchmen?”
“Um ...”
His face fell. “So, it is just you then?”
I cleverly changed the subject by translating Bishop’s inquiry about the doors.
“The doors do not lock,” Father Harry said. “Your grandmother wanted the church to be open to anyone anytime, if they were in need of spiritual salve. Also during World War II the Nazis used to burn Greeks alive in their churches, so she figured it would be for the best to forgo the locks.”
I relayed the pertinent parts to Bishop, who rolled his eyes.
“Next person to walk through that doors wins a bullet,” he said. “I can’t have people just walking in here messing up my plans.”
Ignorant as I was of guns, I didn’t know what Bishop was carrying, how many rounds or bullets or whatever it had, or whether he was a good shot. Without that, I couldn’t figure out our odds of survival.
“What’s your plan?”
He gestured for me to stuff the sock back in the priest’s mouth. Sorry, I mouthed to Father Harry, hoping he would do the Christian thing and forgive me—if we made it out of here alive.
“Make you see the light, one way or another.” Bishop snorted at his own joke, which made one of us. “We left something in your house for you, Lopez and me. Did you get it? Winkler wanted to know if you’d go running to the police or call on your family to deal with the problem. Like a test of your character. Don’t pretend you didn’t find him—we put him there for you.”
My throat tightened. “You’re talking about the other cop,” I said slowly. “The dead one.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Did you and Lopez kill one of your own?”
“Nah. We would never do that. He was already dead, killed by one of his informants. It was an opportunity, that’s all, and we took advantage of it.”
I shivered. What kind of people looked at a dead colleague as a business opportunity? That was hardcore cold.
“Why didn’t you report the body?” he wanted to know. “We had a bet going, Lopez and me.”
“You mean your deceased friend, your co-worker, your compadre?” Bishop twitched. “Because the police would have asked too many questions, like why was there a dead cop in my house.”
“Lopez was sure you’d squeal.”
A few weeks ago I would have. But things had changed—I had changed. But what was I changing into?
“Why was this Winkler creep testing me?”
“Dunno. Winkler’s not big on sharing. The boss doesn’t have to be. Maybe the idea was to see if you could be corrupted. That’s what we do in vice: test people to see if they’re shit or potential shit.”
“I’m not shit,” I said. “I’m a mostly decent person. And those three people you’ve got tied up are mostly decent, too. One is a priest—maybe, possibly, could be decent all the way through ... although you never really know about priests. One’s a kid. The other one ... okay, she’s a drug dealer, but only prescription drugs.”
He nodded like he knew. “There are levels.”
“You don’t want to kill us, Bishop. You’re a policeman. You’re one of the good guys.”
“Not much money in being one of the good guys. There’s a lot of money to be made playing in the shade.” The gun dipped a bit. Was he having second thoughts?
“Not real money,” I muttered.
The gun leveled out again. “What’s that supposed to mean? Where’s my money?”
“The money Lopez dug up at Sesklo—the money he was supposed to share with you—it was fake. The Germans have been counterfeiting the euro.”
“What?”
I wasn’t sure that was true. Bitchface Hera and her men in black had also grabbed the cash, so maybe it was real, maybe it wasn’t. We’d never know. But Bishop didn’t know that.
“Fake. The only thing it would have bought you is hard time.”
His hand shook. “Winkler wouldn’t do that to us. We held up our end of the bargain. I’m holding it up right now.”
I shrugged. “Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.”
Cavalier words from a woman who was this close to crapping her pants. Being on the wrong end of a gun was getting to be a habit, one I really wanted to kick. It wasn’t good for my blood pressure or my life expectancy. Even now my brain stem, heart, and legs were conspiring. They wanted to make a run for it. They were too dumb to realize there was nowhere to go—and there was nowhere I would go, not when there were three hostages. I had to keep him talking; if he was talking he wasn’t shooting.
“Winkler wouldn’t do that,” Bishop said again.
“Why not? Doesn’t sound to me like he’s one of the good guys.”
Doubt was creeping in. “What am I gonna do? I need that money.”
“You can go home,” I told him. “Put down the gun and walk away. Get on a plane and ...” I arced my hand through the air like a plane “...goodbye, poopy old Greece, hello PDX.”
He shook his head. “Winkler will know.”
“It’s not too late. Maybe my family can get you out of here without Winkler knowing.”
“Winkler knows everything.”
“What’s Winkler’s connection to my father?”
“I don’t know. Man, we didn’t know what to do when you drove on out to that place and figured out your old man’s workplace didn’t exist. Then when you went in and talked to that fat piece of Schmitz ...”
“Do you know my father?”
“Never met him.”
“Is he really a truck driver?”
“I don’t know. What do I look like ... Google? I don’t know shit. I do my job, collect my easy money, profit.”
“Easy fake money.”
Bishop made a face.
“Did you guys put the bomb under my car?”
Hands in the air, gun waggling at a precarious position: “Yo, it was a fake. Wasn’t even a good fake. We just wanted to rattle your cage, maybe consider that your precious family can’t protect your ass from everything. Not the way Winkler can. What do you say—join or die?”
A sound of disgust made it out of my mouth. “I can’t believe you said that. You sound like bad dialogue in a B movie.”
“Uwe Boll bad or Tarantino bad?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Tarantino is the king of great dialogue.”
“Just testing you,
” he said. “So join or die? You’re lucky you got choices. Most people don’t get choices.”
“I’m not joining any club where I don’t get to meet the president first.”
“Look at their faces.” He waggled the gun at Penka, Donk, and Father Harry. “Don’t you want to save them?”
“What happens if I join your little bratwurst club?”
“Then I let them go.”
“That easy?” I wasn’t buying it.
“Sure. Why not?”
“Did this Winkler give you that kind of power? Remember, this is somebody who tried to buy you off with fake money, knowing the moment you tried to exchange it back home you’d be in deep doo-doo. You think Winkler’s going to let you control a life or death situation? He doesn’t have that kind of faith in you. You’re ... ” I was in a church, which seemed like it would be the perfect place to pray for the right words. Too bad God and I didn’t make eye contact when we passed each other in the hallway. He’d turned His back on me when I begged and pleaded to keep my mother, and He’d done nothing since to make it up to me, like bring her back from the dead. “... disposable. Like, a tissue or a condom.”
He stared at me for entirely too long. Then he waggled the gun at me. “I made a decision just now while you were insulting me. I’m gonna shoot them, then I’m gonna use you to collect myself some sweet, real ransom money. I bet that old witch would lay some serious dough on me to keep you safe.”
There was sound on the other side of the stained glass windows, a bending of a twig, almost to breaking point but not quite. The apostles made pretty windows but they sucked at soundproofing. We all turned our heads, held our collective breaths for a moment. I really wanted it to be Family or the police.
Silence.
Bishop turned back around, gun in the business position. “So, I’m gonna gag you and tie you up on account of how you talk too much. This way you won’t get any dumb ideas about lunging at me when I shoot one of the others.” He tapped the side of his head. “I’m a thinker. Winkler should keep me around. Now stand still and don’t do anything stupid.”
“You ever shot anyone before, Bishop?”
