In Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel Read online

  IN CRIME

  A KAT MAKRIS GREEK MAFIA NOVEL #4

  ALEX A. KING

  Copyright © 2016 by Alex A. King

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by Alex A. King

  For my crazy Greek family, who make my characters seem comparatively sane

  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

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  The End

  Also by Alex A. King

  Disorganized Crime

  Trueish Crime

  Doing Crime

  Seven Days of Friday

  One and Only Sunday

  Freedom the Impossible

  Light is the Shadow

  No Peace in Crazy

  Pride and All This Prejudice

  Paint: A Short Love Story

  Lambs (as Alex King)

  For my crazy Greek family, who make my characters seem comparatively sane

  CHAPTER 1

  I was three the first time I asked for a baby sister and the first time my father said, “Ha-ha-no.” By the time I submitted my umpteenth request on my eighth birthday, his answer hadn’t changed.

  “Everyone I know has a sister,” I complained, in preliminary training for the but-everyone-else-is-doing-it days that were to come in my teens. “Or a puppy. If you guys won’t buy me a sister, can we get a dog?”

  The place was our kitchen. The time was spring. A two-faced Portland spring, where we’d get slapped with hot sun one day, then kicked in the face with a downpour the next. Dad was at home and Mom wasn’t dead yet.

  I was loved.

  But not loved enough for them to pony up the baby sister. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were right about parents and their lack of understanding.

  “Tell her,” Mom said across the table.

  Dad gave her two palms-up. “I don’t want to tell her.”

  I plunked my elbows on the table, cupped my chin in my hands. “Tell me what?”

  “The thing I do not want to tell you.”

  Even at eight-years-old I could have told you his logic had no logic in it. Long-dead philosophers rolled in their dusty graves—except maybe Empedocles, who jumped into Mount Etna, where he came to a boiling and bubbling end.

  “Which thing?” I asked.

  He made a face, waved his hands, Greek-style. “The thing.”

  My eyes narrowed as I hunted for a loose end to pull. “Is this about Santa Claus? Because I already know he’s not real. Ditto the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”

  Dad looked at Mom. “Thank God. Think of the fortune we will save on presents this Christmas.”

  “Think of all the money we’ll spend on therapy later, though,” Mom said.

  “I bet Baboulas isn’t real either,” I said, referencing the villain in all Dad’s bedtime stories. Baboulas was part monster (which was really saying something, given the genetic abnormalities featured in Greek Mythology), part terrorist, part avenging dark angel, and all boogeyman. In his stories, Baboulas had eyes and ears in places no eyes or ears should exist. “You mean like how crickets have ears on the knees, and butterflies taste with their feet?” I asked him once. “Don’t be silly,” he’d said. “How can anything taste with its feet, eh? That is what a mouth is for.”

  Pointing to his mouth now, Dad said, “Listen to me. Baboulas is worse than real.” He tapped his head. “Baboulas lives in here.” Tapped his heart. “And in here. And also in a dirty hole in the ground.”

  I’d heard it all before. “Back to the thing. Tell meeeeee.” Patience wasn’t my strong suit, then or ever. I was positively humming on my chair.

  “You are enough for us, Katerina. One perfect child, eh?”

  “Is that a cop-out? Because that sounds like a cop-out.”

  Mom nodded. “Total cop-out. You’re a coward, Mike.”

  “Maybe I am,” he said. “But I am a coward who is alive.”

  #

  For ten-year-old me, life was always shinier when I had new shoes. Grown-up me hadn’t changed much. Today I had new shoes: pretty yellow espadrilles with ballerina ribbons that tied around my ankles, and life was looking pretty shiny, mostly because I was staring up at the sun, thinking, Why me? Jesus freakin’ Christ on a cow, why me?

  Something hard poked me in the back. “Walk,” Marika said. “And do not say anything. You promised, remember?”

  Marika is my cousin’s, cousin’s, cousin’s wife. She’s built like mama bear’s bed in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, all squishy pillows and soft blankets. In contrast, her husband Takis’ biggest ass is on his head. If he could make his pants reach that far he’d never need a belt. When she’s not on the job as my backup bodyguard, Marika dresses like an explosion in a florist shop. Her heart is made of molten gold, and these days she carries a huge bucket handbag stuffed with guns she barely knows how to use.

  “I don’t want to,” I said.

  “This is easy. Very easy. A child could do it.”

  I glanced back over my shoulder. “You have children. They could do it.”

  She jabbed me again. “All you have to do is go inside, get the thing off the shelf, and give it to the man behind the counter.”

  “I don’t think he needs it.”

  “You are very funny—almost as funny as that one comedian.”

  “Which one?” Because that was kind of important. No one wanted to be one of the new crop of hipster comedians whose idea of comedy was yet another coffee shop anecdote about how the barista at Starbucks wrote their name wrong on the cup.

  “One of the not-funny ones. Hurry up because I need to pee. I had three frappes this morning and my bladder is about to explode.”

  “You couldn’t have had just one?”

  “You have met my children, yes? Would you face them without all that coffee?”

  I didn’t want to face Marika’s kids at all. Marika and Takis had a handful of sons who would take over the world someday. Unfortunately they’d take it over in a Planet of the Apes kind of way, one banana at a time.

  “Nobody I know better see me,” I muttered.

  “That is why we came to Volos.”

  “Then why don’t you buy it yourself?”

  “Just go,” she said. “It will be over before you know it.”

  She sounded reasonable for a woman holding an ice cream in each hand and a box of cakes stashed in her bucket-sized shoulder bag. I sighed and skulked into the drugstore alone.

  A doorbell jangled overhead. Dust stirred. On the shelves, products inched toward—and surpassed, in some cases—their Best By dates. The windows quietly begged for some one-on-one time wi
th Windex and a paper towel. Behind the counter a man in a white coat was silently judging me over the rim of his wire glasses. Why was he judging me? He didn’t even know me. For all he knew I was in his store for something totally innocuous, like Band-Aids. I wasn’t, but I could have been.

  I snatched a pink box off the shelf, scurried to the counter.

  “This isn’t for me,” I said.

  “What for do I care? All I want is your money.”

  “Someone told me to buy it.” I flung a desperate look over my shoulder at Marika, who was pacing on the sidewalk outside, alternating licks between ice cream cones. Some bodyguard she was—although her bodyguard status was probably dependent on the outcome of the pregnancy test I was attempting to purchase for her. “It’s for a friend.”

  “Everyone who buys one of these buys it for a friend. There is no friend—only you.” The cashier dropped the pink box in a see-through plastic bag. His gaze slid to my bare fingers. “No wedding ring, eh?”

  “I thought you didn’t care.”

  “Caring is one thing. Judging is another, Despinida Makri.”

  Great. Just fan-freaking-tastic. So much for anonymity. Since I’d been the in newspaper, linked to my grandmother, A.K.A. Baboulas, A.K.A. Greece’s most notorious mob boss, I had less and less privacy every day. People I didn’t know knew my face.

  I snatched the bag off the counter, dropped the money in its place. “Keep the change.”

  “There is no change.”

  “Well then consider it a tip for your oh-so excellent service.”

  There was movement behind me, the kind that happens just before something truly awful happens. Movement like this occurred that November day in Dallas on the grassy knoll. It happened again outside The Dakota apartment building when Mark Chapman decided to imagine a world without Lennon in it. And it was happening again today.

  To me.

  I turned around and looked right into the eyes of Dina, the girlfriend Dad had abandoned when he made his escape to the United States. Her gaze cut straight to the bag in my hand, where Marika’s pregnancy test was advertising itself, on account of how the bag was transparent.

  “It’s not for me,” I said, preemptively striking.

  Dina was a tallish garden gnome of a woman, all hips, boobs, and a waist as thick as her head. The woman’s entire wardrobe was black; she’d been in mourning since Dad dumped her without formally dumping her. Her home was a shrine to my father. Her life was dedicated to his memory. That he’d married my mother and had me was just a temporary blip, as far as she was concerned. We were the shit that happens, Mom and I.

  “I say nothing,” she said, all evidence to the contrary. “But know that I am silently judging you.”

  “How silent can you be if you’re doing it out loud?”

  Her chin jutted out an offended angle, the way only a Greek chin can. “You must get that attitude from your mother. Does your father even know who she was?”

  Yikes. Someone must have skipped Sex Ed that day. “It’s not for me,” I repeated.

  “Was it Detective Melas?” She leaned into my personal space, plunging me deeper into a lemon-scented hell. “You can tell me.”

  “They were in the newspaper together,” the pharmacist said. “I bet it was him. But there was that other one, too, the one carrying her under his arm. A man does not carry a woman like that unless he has stuck his p—”

  “Elias,” I hollered.

  Like he’d been shot out of a cannon, Elias flew into the shop. His hand wasn’t on his gun, but it was hovering dangerously close. He quickly scanned the area for a threat, then, finding none, relaxed. We were going to have to talk, Elias and I, and redraw the parameters of what I considered a threat.

  Elias is my bodyguard. The wiry, thirty-something Greek started his career as an assassin, but Grandma had offered him a deal he didn’t want to refuse. His old boss was dead and the man had to eat. Living at the family compound didn’t suck, either. Grandma provides comfortable apartments for family and the handful of employees who live there.

  “You okay?” he asked me.

  “Can you shoot them?”

  He looked Dina and the pharmacist over. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Baboulas said I am only allowed to shoot people if they are threatening your life.”

  “They kind of are.”

  “This is why you have two bodyguards,” Marika said, hauling ass into the pharmacy. There was no sign of the two ice creams she’d been licking moments ago, but there was a splotch of chocolate fudge on her shirt. As ravenous as she’d been lately, it wouldn’t last long. “Baboulas never put conditions on who I can shoot. Which one do you want me to kill first?” For the next thirty seconds she wrestled with the huge shoulder bag. “I cannot get it out. Never mind, I can shoot them right through the leather. I think this is the barrel down here.” She lifted the bottom of the bag, aimed it at the pharmacist. Then she frowned. “No, I think it is up here.”

  Gaze stuck to the ceiling in the God help us position, Elias crossed himself, forehead to chest, shoulder to shoulder.

  “You can’t shoot me,” Dina said. “I am family.”

  Marika and I gawked at her. Dina was in no way family.

  While I was trying to cobble together a pithy comeback, something about how dating Dad and sleeping with Aunt Rita before she became Aunt Rita didn’t give Dina family rights, the drugstore door swung open again. The bell chimed.

  “Heeeey,” the newcomer said. “Is somebody making a party here?”

  The groan started in my toes, gathering steam as it paraded through my body, up to my mouth. By the time it emerged it had collected an eye-roll to go with it. The new arrival was Baby Dimitri, Godfather of the Night, Shoes, and Souvenirs. In fact, he’d sold me the espadrilles currently on my feet. He’d even kicked in a discount, seeing as Grandma was in the same industry. Baby Dimitri is one of those sixty-something guys who dresses for Florida in the late 1960’s. His shoes were white, the crease on his pants so sharp you could sever a hand. Knowing Baby Dimitri, he’d used them to slice off a limb or two. Today half his face was hidden behind a pair of sunglasses that made him look like Ground Control calling to Major Tom. He hadn’t come alone. With him was his sidekick Laki, a walking twig with a penchant for things that went BOOM. Molotov cocktails, mostly. Possibly also missile launchers.

  “Katerina is pregnant,” Dina said.

  Baby Dimitri beamed. He held up both hands. “I came here for my protection money, and what do I get? Good news! Katerina Makris-with-an-S, congratulations! Who is the lucky man?” He grabbed me by the shoulders, kissed both my cheeks. “Tell me, has Baboulas cut off his poutsa yet? Does he know his life expectancy plummeted the moment he touched you?”

  Behind him, Laki grinned. It was the grin of a man who preferred gold to enamel, but couldn’t afford the whole set. “You want me to make fire on him?”

  “I’m not pregnant,” I yelped. Stuffing the contraband in my cross-body bag, I gathered up what was left of my dignity and stomped out of the drugstore.

  The sun bored into my skull via my eye sockets. As I was shoving my sunglasses onto my nose, a white van skidded to a halt at the curb. No writing on the side. Too clean to be anything except Bad News. Sure enough, the side door slid open and a banana jumped out and planted herself in front of me, legs slightly apart, hands on hips. The banana’s name was Hera. National Intelligence Service (Greece’s CIA) agent, Detective Melas’ ex-girlfriend, and all-around bitch. She has a face like an angel, a Sports Illustrated body, and she hates my guts. It wasn’t her guts I hated—just her pulse. Today she’d coordinated her outfit with her blonde hair—a yellow jumpsuit I’d last seen in Kill Bill, but sleeveless, and with enough cleavage to hide at least seven dwarfs.

  My sundress was a similar yellow, but next to Hera’s banana I was more of a Canary melon. Technically I’m proportionate, but Hera is enough to make any woman wish she’d spent her teens cultivating a
n eating disorder. She’s tall, blonde, skinny, and tan. I’m a brunette with sunburn on my sunburn. Average is my middle name—or could have been, if only my parents were hippies.

  I tilted my head slightly. “Do I want to know where you’re hiding your sword?”

  “Very funny.” She wiped her gaze up and down my dress. “I heard you were pregnant with Nikos’s baby. When are you having the abortion?”

  “Christ on crutches! I’m not pregnant with his baby! I’m not pregnant at all!”

  “You’re not?”

  “No!”

  “Never mind,” she said, and jumped back into the van. The door slammed and the NIS vehicle sped away.

  Marika came trotting out behind me, still tussling with the gun in her bag. She eyed the retreating van with a disapproving look.

  “What did that one want?”

  “She thought I was pregnant with Detective Melas’s baby.”

  Marika gasped. Clutched her chest. “You are pregnant with his baby? Why did you not tell me?”

  My mouth fell open. A passing bug flew in, realizing its mistake when I began to choke. Marika thumped me on the back.

  “Do not eat bugs. I am not certain, but I bet it is not good for the baby. Although maybe the extra protein ...”

  “There is no baby!”

  “I was in denial the first time, too. And the second. And—”

  “This time?”

  Her gaze cut to the plastic peeking out the top of my bag. “Heh. I forgot.”

  I pulled the box out of my bag, slapped it into her hand. “I didn’t. Take the test.”

  “Do you want to get another one for you?”

  “I’m not pregnant! I haven’t had sex for so long my hoo-ha has cobwebs and a dusty Gone Dick Fishin’ nailed across the entrance!”

  She stared at me, agog. When she recovered she said, “You know what you need? Sex. That will fix your bad mood.”

  Wrong. What I needed was to get as far away from my family as humanly possible. I was starting to understand why Dad had bailed on his relatives all those years ago; it wasn’t the crime, it was the crazy. His family members—and mine, by default—were out of their damn minds. I had to find Dad before I wound up in a padded room, eating bugs and muttering about how the Master would be coming for me soon.