Christmas Crime Read online

  Christmas Crime

  A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel

  Alex A. King

  Copyright © 2019 by Alex A. King

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  This book is for my dog Millie, who always desperately needs to check her pee-mail when I sit down to write.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Also by Alex A. King

  Chapter 1

  “Never run away from your problems,” my father said on a late October evening during my tenth year as we watched one of the neighborhood dogs squat and unfurl a long ribbon of poop on our front lawn. The afternoon before, Mom and I had conquered the last yard work of the year. She mowed, edged, whacked weeds. Leaves were my domain. I was allowed to jump in them after raking them into a pile, as long as I stuffed them into the designated black bags afterwards. Normally yard work was Dad’s responsibility but he’d been out on the road driving his truck, and Mom really wanted the yard to stop looking like crap—her word. The dog poop stood out like … like poop on freshly mown grass.

  No need for me to ask if dog poop was a problem. Mom’s father went to the big asshole-mart in the sky after raging against dog poop on his lawn, so I knew about the health risks of not picking up after pooches.

  Out on the freshly mown grass, the dog unloaded at least a week’s worth of meals. The owner, Mrs. Young who lived around the corner, continued to stare into space until the fuzzball on the end of the leash trotted back to the sidewalk. Then, without so much as acknowledging the steaming heap’s existence, she took off.

  “Re, gamo tin putana,” Dad muttered, mustering up several of his favorite Greek curse words—words I only ever practiced when I was alone and out of parental earshot. “After all the work your mother did, and now this mongrel comes along and shits all over it.”

  “Mike, language,” Mom said from the kitchen.

  “It’s not a mongrel,” I said, trying to be helpful. “It’s a standard poodle.”

  “I was not talking about the dog,” he said darkly. “That old goat thinks she can disrespect this Greek? Ha! My civilization invented her civilization!”

  He vanished into the garage. When he reappeared he was dressed from head to toe in black. “I need a plastic bag!”

  I followed him to the kitchen, where Mom watched him scour the whole room for a bag. Finally she took pity on him and presented him with a bag from under the sink, where she’d been stashing them for years.

  “Going to rob a house?” she asked.

  “A mission to right a terrible wrong against all Greeks and suburban lawns! You shit on my lawn, you shit on Greece.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  Dad poked holes in the air with his finger. “Every evening that dog goes shit, shit, shit on the grass. That woman never picks it up. Never! It is time she learned a lesson, and I am the one who will teach it to her. When I am done people will sing songs about me. They will put up a statue in Greece!”

  “I can just picture you as a statue,” Mom said, “waving a plastic bag. I don’t think this is a great idea.”

  “A great idea? No. It is the best idea because I thought of it. Nobody does revenge like Greeks.” Dad winked at me. “We invented that, too.”

  “Mike …”

  Too late.

  Mom and I waited by the window while Dad slipped out into the yard and scooped up the poop in his bag.

  “This can’t be good,” she said.

  “What do you think he’s going to do?”

  With the poop-filled bag in hand, Dad skulked down the driveway and vanished down the street.

  “The Hand of Poop Justice,” Mom said.

  “What is that?”

  “Your dad’s superhero identity.”

  “Dad is a superhero?”

  Arm warm and comforting around my shoulder, she flashed me a conspiratorial smile. “He thinks so.”

  Cool. My dad was a superhero. Not the superhero we wanted—I liked Captain America—but maybe the one we needed. Lawn poop was gross, especially when it squished on the bottom of my shoe.

  There was a yell from down the street. Seconds later, Dad reappeared. He wasn’t skulking now—he was running. And he had company. Mrs. Young was chasing him with a broom. She trapped him on the porch, where she pelted him with insults and swatted him with her broom.

  “I’ll teach you to rub shit all over my car!” she yelled.

  “Let me in, eh?” Dad shouted through the window at us.

  From the amused curve on her lips I could tell Mom was considering his request. “Should I go out and rescue him?” she asked me.

  “He did say I shouldn’t run away from my problems,” I said, “and if you open the door won’t you be helping him run away?”

  Like all good advice, I forgot to take it until it was too late.

  I know what you did this fall, you stupid pig.

  The note’s message didn’t change no matter how many times I scanned the flimsy sheet of paper some thoughtful person had stuffed under my Jeep’s windshield wiper earlier this afternoon, while it was minding its own business in my Portland, Oregon driveway.

  My name is Kat Makris. I’m pushing thirty years on this earth. And a month or so ago I killed a Russian man who, unbeknownst to me until almost The End, was family. In my defense, I’d like to say he was begging for it.

  Viktor Sokolov, half Russian, half Greek, shot—but didn’t quite kill—a government agent, kidnapped us both, hauled us off to Russia in a rusty old cargo ship, and then had the nerve to shoehorn me into a wedding dress. A nice dress, very princess-y, but the intended groom was my cousin. Laws exist against that kind of thing, although in Russia and Greece I suspected incest was a family affair. The wedding didn’t happen. Instead, Viktor threw a tantrum because he believed I had the audacity to erase a cassette tape containing codes to the missile silo skulking beneath his family farm. We tussled. The gun between us went off. And I bolted in my bloody dress and snuggled up a brown bear that was more interested in napping than eating my face.

  (For all I knew the palm size disc contained the 1980s’ greatest hits. Blasting a hole in Viktor had turned me off the idea of hunting down a tape deck so I could listen to the thing.)

  Yeah, Viktor Sokolov had it coming. Although I wished what he’d had coming hadn’t come from me. Murder, even the self-defense kind, was never on my bucket list, except for when I caught my former fiancé’s pie-hole gobbling someone else’s hotdog. Even then I’d only wanted to strangle Todd Burns until he was mostly dead.

  The cavalry—aka: my family—arrived after the gun went off, and carted me back to Greece, where I spent a day packing up the past few months of my life into bags before asking Grandma to give me a ride home in her private plane.

  Now I was hanging out on the roof of my Portland, Oregon home, watching for shady characters. Given that Christmas was a week away and the sky had been spitting rain since late September, it was hard to tell who was shady and who was just wet.

  “You planning to stay up there forever?” Reggie Tubbs w
anted to know. “I’m pretty sure that’s against some law or another.”

  “You’re a retired judge,” I told the old man who’d lived next door my whole life. I folded the note and shoved it into my pocket. “Don’t you know all the laws?”

  “I’ve forgotten more than I ever knew.” He staggered out of the chair and hobbled over to the edge of his front porch. Using one hand as a shade, he stared up at me. He was in his neighborhood watch outfit: robe and slippers. “How about you come down here and take a look at something for me.”

  “Is it your penis?”

  He laughed and wagged a finger at me. “You know me too well. What are you doing up there anyway?”

  “Looking.”

  “For?”

  “Trouble.”

  “Find any yet?”

  “Looking at some right now.”

  He cracked up. “There’s no flies on you.”

  “Only because it’s December and the flies froze to death back in October.”

  “You still planning to be up there come July?”

  Good question. I was thinking no but open to yes. “I’ll have to get back to you.”

  “You’ve been up there every afternoon and evening for a month!”

  “The house is too crowded. My place is full of animals. It smells like a barn.”

  The former judge was judging me. “Why don’t you have pets like a normal person? Adopt yourself a nice cat. Invest in goldfish. How about a dog? A dog will never let you down.”

  Dogs were nice. Cats, too. Goldfish died too easily to form lasting attachments but I wouldn’t mind owning my little Nemo for a while. Unfortunately nobody had ever given me a dog, cat, or fish. Instead, I’d been blessed—or not—with a pantheon of unusual beasts, including a Greek car and a rotund and holy cow. Thanks to Grandma’s deep pockets and connections—dubious and non-dubious—I had arrived home with all my pets present and legally accounted for.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Tubbs, why don’t you keep your pants on and not flash your wiener at people like a normal person?”

  “Touché. That’s French for ‘you got me there.’” Hands on hips, he slow walked to the curb and back. He waved his hand at the lawn—my lawn. “You gonna decorate this year?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Mike always decorates. I can feel Christmas breathing down my neck. Come to think of it, maybe that’s just gas. I’ve been eating a lot of dried apricots. They use sulfur to preserve those things. You can’t taste the sulfur but it’ll knock you down when it blasts out the other end.”

  “Dad’s not here, and I’m not really in the decorating mood.”

  “He still in Greece?”

  “As far as I know he’s planning to stay. The house is mine now.”

  Everywhere except on paper.

  “You get yourself a fancy job or something yet?”

  Not exactly. Not yet. Procrastination was my new middle name. But the time was coming when I’d have to get a job because I couldn’t buy the house with all this no-money.

  Whoosh. That was the sound of serious adulting rocketing my way.

  The truth was I was way overdue on the job-getting thing and I knew it. Shifting modes was proving to be harder than I had expected. How do you go from cousin-killer and morgue receptionist to nightly couch potato and 9-to-5 employee? Since returning to Portland I had achieved a whole lot of nothing much—not even inner peace. Instead I was paranoid, always watching over my shoulder and consequently tripping over things in my path. Greece and all its foibles particular to my mobster family had made me twitchy.

  “I don’t suppose you know any place that’s hiring?” I asked my neighbor.

  He chewed on that a minute while he stared across the street at the newest addition to our neighborhood. The woman who’d moved into the Carmichael house earlier this month was what men of Reggie Tubbs’s generation called a dish or a dame. Not Reggie though.

  “She’s a hot piece of ass,” he said as she marched down her driveway in yoga pants and makeup that said she’d do this exercise thing but she wasn’t about to ruin her face by sweating, thank you very much. The recent arrival was Baby Boomer age with a body sculpted by jazzercise and kale. We watched her stride down the sidewalk, sawing the air with vicious power arms and skinny thighs.

  “There’s a Hipster Burger opening up down the street,” Reggie Tubbs said at last. “You might fill out an application there, see what shakes out.”

  Hipster Burger. Even the name sounded ironic. “I suppose I could check them out.”

  “You do that. Tell them the judge sent you. Ten bucks says you’ll get the job. It’s not much but it’ll get you off that roof.”

  I blinked. Someone nearby was chopping onions. “Thanks, Mr. Tubbs.”

  He flipped an “it’s no big deal” wave at me and vanished indoors, robe flapping around his bare shins.

  Life was harsh on the roof. Wind whipped over the peaks, probing for weaknesses. Cold, intrusive rain spat in my face. My oversize puffy coat was doing its job, standing between winter and me. Using a gloved hand, I wrestled with my phone to check the time.

  I was about to have company.

  But first, I needed more coffee. One eye on the woman across the street performing a second lap of the block, I poured coffee—white, sweet—into a cup from my jumbo-sized thermos and took a big slug. Perfect. None of that Greek mud served in demitasse cups. I paired the coffee with an Oreo. It wasn’t Grandma’s koulourakia, but then it also wasn’t laced with marijuana or hallucinogens either.

  My phone rang. Not it’s usual ring. It was the other one, the one that said the person on the other end wanted to see my face. Since coming home I’d been Skyping and Facetiming with half the family.

  This afternoon it wasn’t family. It never was at this time.

  Butterflies breakdanced in my stomach as I tapped the little green dot and Detective Nikos Melas’s face filled the screen with its chiseled edges, its fading golden god tan, brandy brown eyes, and dark hair. He was at his desk at the tiny Volos police station near the foot of Mount Pelion, leaning back in his chair, boots on the desk. He was wearing a grin and some clothes but it was hard to focus on the clothes when he smiled at me that way.

  Things with Melas are complicated. He’s in Greece and I’m not. He’s the law and my family is the definition of corruption—at least on the outside. On the inside lurked more complications. On a personal level, I’d kept one of Grandma’s secrets. Melas wasn’t happy when he discovered Grandma had his workplace bugged. He was less thrilled when he discovered I knew about the hidden camera. He’d wanted me to side with him, but we weren’t there yet and might never be. Then there was Xander, another complicated complication of the complicated male kind.

  “Are you on the roof?”

  “Always,” I said. “Are you still at work?”

  He angled his phone down so I could get a load of his desk. Always crowded, tonight his desk was overflowing with files. Detective Nikos Melas’s branch of the Volos Police Department kicked it old school, because if there’s one thing the Greek government doesn’t have it’s cash—unless you’re a corrupt politician, in which case there is always extra dough for an all-expenses-paid vacation and a couple of less-than-difficult women looking for a good time on Greece’s euro.

  “Wow,” I said, ever so eloquently.

  “Working overtime,” he explained.

  “Crime on the rise?”

  “Winter is our quietest time. People are too cold to steal anything except firewood and the occasional chicken. This is all paperwork from summer.”

  “How much did my family generate?”

  Dad’s side of the family is the most notorious branch of the Greek mafia. Generating paperwork for the police is what they do for funsies.

  Melas patted a tall stack on the verge of collapse. “This is all you. Not your family—you.”

  Despite murdering my crazed cousin, crime is so not my thing. I like to think I’m a decent person. I br
ake for pedestrians and animals. I’ve never had so much as a parking ticket. And my Jeep comes equipped with a blinker I use before turning corners and switching lanes.

  Before I could open my mouth to protest, Melas laughed. Warmth spread through me, all the way to my deprived lady garden.

  “I am joking,” he said. “But maybe you can help me solve a mystery.”

  Gloves muffled the sound of me cracking my knuckles. “I watch all the detective shows, so I know a thing or two about solving mysteries.”

  “Okay. Where is your family?”

  “Is this one of those trick questions?”

  He tilted his chin up then down, indicating a Greek no. “Since you left, I have stopped by the compound almost every day. Kyria Katerina will not speak to me. Nobody will let me in the gate. Only your father will speak to me. We have dinner in Volos every Sunday.”

  That used to be our thing, Dad’s and mine. For years after Mom died we bickered over where to eat on Sunday evenings. Dad insisted on variety. Always a different restaurant. Now I knew it was because he didn’t like to establish routine. Routine—out in public anyway—meant vulnerability if his enemies were watching. I knew that now. Back then I figured he was melodramatic and Greek.

  “How is he?”

  He chuckled. “I think Kyria Dina is keeping him busy.”

  “Dina? How? Why?”

  Dina is Dad’s ex-girlfriend, the one he never bothered to dump before he fled Greece for the Grandma-free arms of the Americas. In the padded and doily-filled room that is Dina’s brain, she and Dad have been a thing all these years. Mom and me? Figments of our own imaginations. Now that Dad is back in Greece, she had been hunting him … in between shady jobs that may or may not involve selling her cooch and spying for weirdoes like my now-dead cousin Viktor.