Outta Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel Read online

  “This is the first. She must be very special.”

  “Okay, so what’s the message?”

  “It is an important message. Very important.”

  “Okay …”

  “You do not believe my daughter?”

  “She?”

  “We are having a girl, at last, I feel it. Finally, one child who will not want to join the circus.”

  “Was that the message, that you’re having a girl?”

  “No. It was for you.”

  “Me?”

  She patted me on the head. “She says you should break out of this bunker and sneak away from the compound.”

  Technically I wasn’t a prisoner, but Grandma figured it would be best if I stayed out of sight for the foreseeable future. All my belongings were down here, stored in one of the bedrooms across the hall. This place was built to withstand payback from the Trojans.

  “Grandma will kill me.”

  “She says Baboulas does not want you dead or you would already be dead.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  Guilt picked up its fork, jabbed me in the side. I was totally planning to escape Grandma’s underground bunker.

  I had a good reason, too.

  I was pretty sure I knew where my father had been all this time.

  Chapter Two

  Marika bustled away, leaving me with a growling stomach and a burning desire to go full-on Escape From Alcatraz. As far as I know there are two ways to get in and out of Grandma’s bunker. The first is a cleverly disguised platform in the front yard of Grandma’s shack. Shack is an overstatement. Grandma’s position in life comes with a catch, and that catch is that she has to live in the original Makris family home, located in the opulent courtyard of the compound. Even after renovations the place is a dump, and that’s being generous. But when Grandma gave me a choice, I’d opted to stay in the hovel because Grandma was my last remaining grandparent, and she was suffering from a deadly combo of old age and cancer.

  Cancer had already snatched Mom. Now it was coming for my grandmother.

  The second exit is located in Xander’s apartment. A tunnel leads to a ladder, which leads to a hatch locked with a passcode. That hatch opens in his floor, under a rug.

  Neither choice was sound for a woman wanting to make a quick, quiet getaway.

  Lucky for me, I was a woman with resources—and by resources I meant feet and thumbs. The bunker had a third tunnel, which I’d had ample opportunity to explore while I was sequestered underground these past three days and nights.

  Not that there was much to explore. The tunnel led to a door. Locked. Steel. Garden-variety lock.

  Seeing as how I wasn’t technically a prisoner, Grandma had made sure I still had the company of my handbag. And in my bag there was treasure: lock picks—a gift from Aunt Rita—and my phone.

  This wouldn’t be my first ride on the lock-picking pony. Once I’d broken into Melas’s house, harnessing the power of YouTube.

  Now was the time. The whole family, right down to Marika, was at my funeral feast. After Marika left I’d spent a few minutes scanning and panning to make sure the biggest players were accounted for. Everyone except the sniper on the roof (cousin) and the daytime guard (also a cousin) who manned the guardhouse out front was accounted for. Grandma was rolling around in her wheelchair, thanks to a table dancing accident. At the time she was high, so I could see where it seemed like a good idea. To help the nausea from chemotherapy, Grandma prescribes herself pot koulourakia—cookies. And Grandma being Grandma, she has access to the best weed money can buy. Aunt Rita was singing an old Tzeni Vanou song on the stage in her Gilda dress—serenading a life-size picture of me. Holding a spoonful of taramasalata in one liver-spotted hand, Papou was trying to convince Yiorgos, his eagle, to eat. When that didn’t work, he pulled a small snake from his pocket and pitched it into the crowd.

  Nobody screamed. Nobody flinched. This crowd was tough; they didn’t flip out for anything less than gunfire.

  Across the courtyard, Melas was ignoring Hera, who appeared to be purring in his ear and rubbing against his arm. She’d arrived dressed for battle in a skintight black dress that gave her boobs no place to go except up and out. Her red lipstick practically screamed ENTRANCE.

  Xander was Xander. Black suit. Black tie. Crisp white shirt. Hands clasped in front. He stayed close to Grandma but his head was always on the move, hunting for trouble.

  Xander is an adopted family member of sorts. Grandma accidentally slaughtered his whole family when she only meant to murder most of them, leaving Xander orphaned when he was tiny. He knew about all about it, but whether he harbored a grudge or not, I wasn’t sure. If he cut off all our heads one night while we were sleeping, I wouldn’t exactly blame the guy.

  My cousin Stavros and Elias, my bodyguard, were near the pool, talking. All the arm waving they were doing, there was a good chance they’d take flight. Takis was off to the side, glaring at them.

  Anyway, they were accounted for. Which meant it was time for me to hustle.

  I worked quickly … for someone who had no serious idea what she were doing. YouTube’s instructions were clear, but it’s not like this was my day job. Until recently, when my place of employment not-so-mysteriously burned down and my boss was shoved down the steps, I was a bill collector. My Greek family approved of the job but they didn’t understand the part where I asked for money nicely, with a helping of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘would you please let Mr. Whozit know I called if he should conveniently come back from death?’

  Twiddle.

  Tweak.

  An ominous click … followed by a more promising click.

  My tongue poked out of my mouth slightly while fiddling with the lock, because poking my tongue out made things easier.

  Then, finally, the lock yielded. The door, not so much. I gave it some shoulder.

  Nothing. A lot of nothing. The door wasn’t going anywhere, which meant neither was I. Not unless I wanted to waltz out of one of the other exits, and I didn’t fancy coming face to face with the people who had orchestrated my untimely—yet perfectly timed—demise.

  I blew out a sigh of pure frustration. “Jesus on a jet ski.”

  A voice cut into my thoughts. “You need help? Because you sound like someone who needs help. And here I thought you were the one smart Makris.”

  Yikes!

  Heart lodged in my throat, alongside my equally wimpy lungs, I jumped back several feet and prepared for war. That meant cowering with my arms wrapped around my head.

  There are moments in life when you come this close to peeing a little. This was one of those times. Let’s just say it was a good thing I’d gone to the bathroom one last time before I launched my escape.

  My escape, which was going nowhere, by the way.

  The voice was thin and distant, mostly because it was traveling through several inches of metal door. I put my ear to the door and listened.

  “Just let me know, okay?”

  Male. No one I recognized.

  “Who is this?” I lowered my voice, whispered conspiratorially. “Are you Abbe Faria?”

  There was a masculine chuckle. Clearly I wasn’t the only one around here who’d read The Count of Monte Cristo. “If I knew the location of a huge fortune, do you think I would be here?”

  “That depends. Where is here, and are you going to tell my grandmother?”

  “Tell her what? That we talked through a door? Where is the crime in that?”

  He had a point. He also kept on talking, even though I hadn’t answered him.

  “You want a coffee? Come, I have coffee. You have something sweet, yes? Something sweet would go well with coffee.”

  My stomach rumbled, reminding me that Marika was missing in action with my promised plate of goodies. She was too busy topside, eating her way from one end of the catering table to the other. The most dangerous place in the world right now was between Marika and food.

  “Not that it’s not a great idea, but we have a door problem. I unlocked it but it’s not opening”

  Metal scraped metal. Hinges groaned. The door swung open.

  Standing there was a face it took me a moment to recognize because I’d only seen it in pieces before, glimpsed through a letterbox-sized opening in a door—one of the cell doors in Grandma’s dungeon. (Dungeon was a bit of a misnomer. The dungeon had an antechamber that was all straw, shackles, and concrete, but the place where the actual detaining went on had more in common with a Holiday Inn than it did Gitmo.) The mystery prisoner. Makria’s only homeless person. Allegedly. He was sporting a monobrow so thick, so serious, that it would have given Frieda Kahlo an inferiority complex. Sixty was a cloud of dust behind him. Dirt was his contemporary. His pants were high waisted, his shirt was folded to the elbow, revealing faded tattoos. Anchors, mostly, and a pair of boobs that might have been perky once, but now looked like deflated airbags.

  He eyed my empty hands.

  “Where are the sweets, eh?”

  “Sweets?”

  “To go with the coffee. You promised me rose loukoumia last time, but I do not have rose loukoumia.”

  “Why not?”

  He rapped a knuckle on my head. “Because you did not bring it, so what is your word worth, eh? A klasimo, that is what.”

  A fart. Lovely.

  “Stay there,” I said.

  “Where is there for me to go? Do not answer, that is one of those rhetorical questions. Go, go, get the sweets.”

  The bunker had a fully stocked pantry off the comfortable kitchen. A walk-in room stuffed full of culinary supplies, complied in case war broke out overhead. Or maybe so Grandma had somewhere to go to get away from the family and the hovel bequeathed on her.

  That hovel, by the way, was destined to be mine someday. Guess how excited I was about that.

  I yanked open the pantry door, began to scan the shelves, and found loukoumia. Five kinds. I grabbed a box of the pale pink rose cubes and hoofed it back to the tunnel’s end. Makria’s only homeless person yanked the box out of my hand and dived right in. Lips powdered, he mumbled, “What are you waiting for?”

  Through the looking glass I went … and into his cell. White walls. White marble floor. Bookcase. Desk and chair. Carpenter-made, not assemble-it-yourself-and-lose-a-finger-and-possibly-your-sanity. Poster of Anna Vissi on the wall. Anna Vissi is Greece’s Madonna, without the dodgy British accent and the revolving bedroom door. In the corner, the cell had a small bathroom.

  “Can you make Greek coffee?”

  I looked at him. “On purpose?”

  He thumped a fist on his chest. “Greek coffee will put hair on your chest. Of course you are a Greek girl so probably you already have hair on your chest.”

  “It was one hair, and when I plucked it it never came back.”

  “It will,” he said darkly, “and it will bring friends. Okay, I will make the coffee.”

  “Can I pass on the coffee?”

  “No.”

  Alrighty then. I found a wall to lean on while he whipped out a camping-sized gas burner, a briki (a 12 oz. long-handled pot for making Greek coffee), coffee, and sugar. It wasn’t long before the thick mixture began to bubble. He filled two little cups and gave me one.

  “Why are you leaving Katerina’s bunker?”

  Grandma and I share a first name, on account of how Greeks pass their names on to their grandchildren. If you don’t, you may as well cut out their hearts, you ungrateful kolopetho—butt child. Just because Dad ran away from Greece to escape his mother, didn’t mean he wanted to disrespect her.

  “It’s for a good cause, I promise.”

  He made a face. “I already know what your promise is worth, remember? So save me the disappointment and tell me what skata you have planned.”

  “You’re never going to let the loukoumia thing go, are you?”

  “At my age grudges are what keep me alive. That and knowing I have enemies out there, still breathing. Keep your friends close, keep your enemies alive, and be angry about many things. That is the secret to long life.”

  “You should write motivational book.”

  “Was that sarcasm?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Keep practicing and one day you might be good at it.” With thick fingers, he dug around in the box, popped another powdered cube in his mouth. “You should know that I am stalling you.”

  Of course he was, because everybody in the area was one of Grandma’s patsies. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. “So Grandma can stop me from leaving, I gather.”

  “Yes. But I think it would be more interesting to let you leave. You are not a prisoner, so what harm can it do, eh?”

  Great. “So how do I get out of here?”

  His hand performed a showman’s flourish “Through the door.”

  The dungeon door led to an escalator, which led to a closet on the main building’s bottom floor.

  “The door that leads to a broom closet? There’s a funeral party going on up there. I can’t just walk out into the middle of it.”

  “Whose funeral?”

  “Mine.”

  He laughed. “You Makris … you always make me laugh. Never mind the front door, there is another way. But you cannot tell anyone about this, okay? This is the entrance and exit the children use to sneak in and out of here. I like hearing them play. They are good company for an old man. And that little one, Tomas, po-po, that one is clever.”

  Tomas was five, and he was adorable and savant-level smart.

  “Lead me to it.”

  He retrieved a key from his pocket, unlocked his cell door. It swung open without a protest. From there we went to the metal door that separated the civilized part of the dungeon from the medieval. Several cells, all bars. No privacy. Each came with a bucket and a pile of straw that someone must have replenished regularly because it always looked fresh.

  “Here,” he said. He pointed to a wall on the inside of a cell.

  “Looks like a wall to me.”

  “That is the idea. Touch that stone there.”

  I touched the stone.

  “Wiggle it.”

  I wiggled it. Nothing.

  “Wiggle harder. What are you, a girl?” He made a fist and patted his bicep. “Put some muscle behind it.”

  The rock wasn’t going anywhere. A curse danced on the tip of my tongue. It didn’t involve the common Greek sexual shenanigans between farm animals, saints, and someone’s mother, but it did involve the man standing behind me and himself.

  Clang.

  I spun around in time to see Monobrow turning the key in the lock.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I am doing?”

  “Locking me in here so I don’t make a getaway?”

  “Ha! Wrong! I am locking you in here so you can escape. For a clever person you are not too clever.”

  I scratched my head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Now that you are motivated to escape, you will work a little harder to move that rock, eh?”

  He tossed me a wink and vanished back the way we’d come.

  Fabulous. Now I really was a prisoner, unless I could get the rock loose. If Monobrow was telling me the truth to begin with. I flopped down on the ground cross-legged and considered my options. I had two. Pop the rock loose and find the exit, or chew my way through. My dentist was good but she wasn’t that good.

  What did I have?

  I went digging in my purse, found a metal nail file and got to work, digging at the mortar holding the rock in place.

  “What are you doing, Thea Katerina?”

  I jumped. Little Tomas was standing on the freedom side of the cell. Awww, he was adorable in his little suit and tie.

  “Tomas!” I figured I should probably tell him the truth so he wouldn’t be scarred for life. “I’m alive, not a ghost.”

  He shrugged, completely nonchalant. “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “I knew you weren’t really dead.”

  “How?”

  “I saw you get shot. I knew the bullet wasn’t real. I watch a lot of wildlife documentaries and I know a dart when I see one. Do you want to see it? I picked it up.” He went diving in his pocket and pulled out the pointy dart. It was teeny tiny, not at all like I expected. But then the shooter wasn’t trying to take down an elephant.

  The shooter. Grandma wouldn’t say who pulled the trigger. Probably she didn’t want me to wring their neck for being an accomplice.

  “Do you think anyone else saw?”

  His chin tilted up-down. “They were all too busy going crazy, the way grownups do. Baboulas made everyone go away, but nobody notices me. I saw you twitch when Theo Xander put you into the body bag.”

  “Xander did?”

  He nodded. “He wouldn’t let anyone else touch you, probably because he didn’t want anyone to know you were alive. Why were you pretending to be dead?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I like stories. I’m smart but I’m still five.”

  He gave me one of his adorable little boy smiles and my ovaries ached. Then something occurred to me.

  “Wait. How did you get in here?”

  He pointed to the next cell over. “There’s a tunnel behind the rock.”

  Huh. “Thanks,” I called out. “You put me in the wrong cell!”

  Monobrow stuck his head out the door. “Sometimes my mind is not as sharp as it used to be. Do not tell your grandmother, eh? She will never let me forget it.” He unlocked the cell, patted me on the head as I pushed past. All that white on his mustache, looked to me like he’d taken to snorting loukoumi straight out of the box.

  “Show me,” I told Tomas.

  He zipped into the next cell, pulled a rock out the wall. Behind it there was a hatch with a handle. One turn of the handle and the hatch revealed a roomy tunnel.

  He gave me a worried look. “You won’t tell anyone?”

  I crossed my heart and hoped to die—again.

  He crawled into the tunnel. I followed.

  “Who built this?”

  “The legend says your baba did.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded.

  “Where does it come out?”