Disorganized Crime Page 21

  "Jesus," I said, nose clamped between my fingers. "Must have been a big dog."

  "Several dogs, I'd say."

  "Maybe not even dogs."

  I considered the options. Dog, human, or bear, that thing had to die. Preferably in a bonfire. I picked it up by one strap, dumped it in Melas's arms.

  "Can you get rid of this?"

  He recoiled in horror. "You can't ride that thing without a helmet."

  I swung my leg over, started the engine. "Of course I can."

  "It's illegal. I'll have to give you a ticket."

  In an increasingly shitty mood, I gave the gas all the hell I could muster, then kicked off. "You'll have to catch me first."

  Certain of my victory, I fist-pumped the air.

  He caught up to me three blocks away, scribbled a ticket, stuck it to my forehead when he was done.

  "That's what you get," he told me, before speeding away in his cop car.

  I was going places. In circles, mostly. I couldn't remember exactly where my aunt had stashed her safe house, so I called her. It was that or get lost in the olive grove. The Mount Pelion region was a jungle of olive trees; pinpointing her slice was nigh on impossible.

  "Sorry about your helmet," I said when she showed up in the pink convertible. Along the way she'd picked up a wig. Stick straight. Blunt bangs. Looked like it had been dyed by Heinz.

  "What happened?"

  I told her. Instead of laughing, her face grew increasingly grim. It was late afternoon and she had a five o'clock shadow sprouting up under her foundation.

  "It's that mouni."

  What was her name again—Dad's ex. "Dina?"

  "When your father first ran away she did that all the time. Kaka in our cars, kaka in the mailbox. I don't know where she got it all from. She must have been collecting donations."

  Bile lurched up my esophagus. I kicked it back down with a big gulp. "I guess she really missed Dad."

  She scoffed at that. "Before your father, her mouni was like a train station. Men came, men went. She let them ride the choo-choo for free. She didn't find chastity until she met Michail. Now she's a born-again virgin."

  "So you think she did this?"

  "Who else? She knows the scooter. She must have mistaken you for me."

  The list of people I knew in Greece was short. The list of fecal freaks I knew in Greece—or anywhere on earth—was even shorter.

  "Let's go see her," I said.

  We jumped into the Peptomobile. Somewhere along the beach I recognized one of the Family's fleet of cars behind us.

  "Do you know we're being followed?"

  "Yes."

  "Is it Takis and Stavros?"

  "Yes."

  "So does Grandma know I'm back?"

  "Yes."

  "How?"

  She tapped a manicured fingernail on her temple. "Mama is like God. She knows everything. If there is something she doesn't know, she beats it out of the person who does know."

  "She doesn't know where Dad is."

  "She's beating a lot of people lately."

  Well, that was both proactive and disturbing. "I thought she wasn't doing anything."

  "She had us clean up the dungeon, just in case."

  "We have a dungeon?"

  "Under the tennis court out back."

  Strange place to put a dungeon, but what did I know? My experience with dungeons was limited to one date—a date that, up until that point—had shown promise. Rod Fisher had his own hair, a job, and he didn't live in his parents' basement. These days, dating a guy under thirty was risky. There were a lot of closet basement dwellers out there. They'd walk you through the back door, take the staircase leading down instead of staying on the first floor, where the living room should be. Rod seemed aboveboard until he said, "Wanna come see where the fun happens?"

  Fun was good, so the three screwdrivers I'd consumed said, "Yes."

  He walked me down to a fully stocked sex dungeon—not that I'd ever been in one, but hey, you see things when you spend enough time on the internet. Once I saw a guy do things with a liter-sized bottle of Sprite that didn't seem like they'd be physically possible. It's amazing what you can achieve with the American can-do spirit and a tub of coconut oil.

  But a bonafide dungeon for prisoners and torture? Nope, I had never seen one outside of a movie. And I hoped I never would.

  "Yikes," I said.

  "Don't worry, it's only other bad people who end up in there. Mama has rules and standards. No women, unless they are criminals. No children. No civilians. Only the bad guys."

  I thought about the Baptist and how he was a former cop. "You kind of are the bad guys." Did I say kind of? I meant totally.

  "There are levels."

  "Sounds like a video game."

  "Sometimes it feels that way."

  We parked at the open end of Dina's street and hoofed it up to her cakebox home. No sign of her in the front yard. Maybe she was still hiding behind her locked door.

  Aunt Rita folded her arms on the top of the gate. "Dina!" After a lengthy pause she hollered the woman's name again.

  Nothing.

  "Come," she said, and pushed through the gate. The front door was unlocked, but my aunt told me that was nothing unusual around here. Nobody ever broke into anyone's house.

  "Aren't we breaking in?"

  "The door was unlocked."

  Her circular logic made a deranged kind of sense, so I followed her inside.

  Dina's house didn't want sane visitors, and it said so with an overabundance of red paint, yards of white lace, and photographs of Dad. A vaguely familiar perfume haunted the shadows, and below that, the smell of an unflushed toilet.

  I sniffed and wished I hadn't. "What is that?"

  She stopped rummaging through Dina's mail to inhale. "Love's Baby Soft."

  "They still make that?"

  "That or she hoarded."

  Aunt Rita vanished into the living room. I lingered in the hall, where Dad was all over the walls. Pictures from the old days, before he became uncool, the way all parents do. This was a Dad I didn't know. A motorcycle-riding Dad with acid-wash jeans and a fauxhawk. Dad with a mullet. Dad with his arm around Dina, his attention on something beyond the camera's scope.

  My father was a great guy—I loved him more than anything in the world—but this was too much of a good thing. Dina's place was a shrine to his awesomeness. She even had a room dedicated entirely to Dad, including a crocheted doll with brown button eyes. It was sitting on her pillow.

  "Look at this," Aunt Rita called out.

  I wandered into the living room. The couches were plastic-covered. The pictures were iconic. Lots of gold, lots of saints with Dad's face. Draped across the coffee table was a rectangular tablecloth embroidered with his name. She'd bunched it up in the middle, holding it in place with vase so that a triangle of wood was visible. It looked neat and intentional.

  My aunt sniffed. "Everybody does that here with tablecloths. I don't know why—I only know we do it. I do it, too."

  I pointed out the embroidery. "I guess she was serious about Dad."

  "He must have a magic penis."

  Ugh. There are some things you just don't want to hear, you know? I trotted to the kitchen, opened the swinging door. Galley-shaped. Floors and counters clean enough to eat off. On the counter was a tray of tulle wedding favors.

  I gagged. My hand shot up to cover my nose. I backed up—fast—smashing into Aunt Rita.

  "My Virgin Mary, what is that?"

  Crap, and lots of it. And it said something about my aunt—I wasn't sure I wanted to know what—that she wrinkled her nose and made a disgusted face instead of shielding her nose.

  "Dina made special bonbonieres," I said.

  "Jesus. Who does that?"

  "Dina, apparently."

  "That woman's got big problems in her head. Speaking of Dina, she's not here—dead or alive. Come on. Let's sit outside and wait for her. If her house wasn't filled with kaka we could
hide in the shadows and scare her when she comes home."

  We traipsed back outside to the barren yard. Before we had a chance to get comfortable, a face came at us over the fence. The old man had Dumbo's ears, a nose that could open cans, and eye whites the color of lemons. Looked like his liver had retired to one of the islands without forwarding the address to the rest of him.

  "You looking for Dina?" he asked.

  "Maybe," Aunt Rita said. "Have you seen her?"

  "Earlier she was here."

  "When was that?" I asked.

  "Before she went out."

  My aunt leaned over, muttered, "This is like pulling toenails, but with less screaming."

  I shuddered. "When did she go?"

  He took his sweet time deciding on an answer. "Before you came. What do you want with her?"

  "She won something," I said.

  "What did she win?"

  Think fast, Kat. "A year's supply of bread."

  He pondered that for a moment. "That's a good thing to win."

  Didn't I know it? Greek bread was amazing. Hot, fresh, none of those preservatives nobody can pronounce. "It is pretty good," I admitted.

  He sucked air through his teeth. "What happens if she doesn't claim her prize?"

  "Why wouldn't she? Who wouldn't want a year of bread?"

  "Somebody on a low-carb diet," my aunt said. She had a point.

  "I could use a year of bread," the neighbor said. "The pension isn't what it used to be."

  "Non-transferable," Aunt Rita said.

  He scratched behind his ear, creating a blizzard of dry, dead skin. "Could be she's be dead."

  We both looked at him.

  "How do you figure?" I asked.

  The old man shrugged. "That's what happens on the TV. People come around, wanting to give somebody a prize, but then it turns out that person is dead or kidnapped."

  "Did Dina look dead or kidnapped?"

  "No. She looked angry. But that's how she always looks."

  Aunt Rita nodded. "That's Dina all right. Anything else you can tell us?"

  "She sings a lot," he went on. "Always Jenny Vanou songs."

  I looked at my aunt. I wasn't up-to-date on Greek singers.

  She clued me in. "Sad, dramatic songs."

  "Like torch songs?"

  She nodded. "But without the fire."

  "Sometimes there was fire," the neighbor said. "She was always burning effigies. But she was a good neighbor. She never stole firewood and she kept the tsiganes away."

  Tsiganes. Yiftes. Gypsies. Roma. Romanies. Greece had a Roma problem. Or—depending on who you asked—the Roma had a Greek problem. For years, the government had been trying to integrate the two people, but both parties had long memories and the ability to pass on a grudge through their DNA. Greeks remembered when Romanies used to come knocking on their front doors, begging for money, and the Romanies remembered when the Greeks gave them rude hand signals and threatened to beat them with brooms. Nothing short of a memory wipe was going to smoosh them into one happy patty anytime soon.

  "How did she do that?" I asked.

  "By being creepier than they are," he said.

  Romanies didn't strike me as creepy, but what did I know? I was one small step up from a tourist. I thought their color-clashing outfits were daring and fashion-forward.

  We waited around a long time, sitting in Rita's chairs. Okay, so once or twice I went back inside to use the bathroom, where there were, thankfully, no monuments to Dad's greatness. It's possible that a couple of Dad's pictures ended up in my pocket. I'd send them back after I had them copied.

  Neighbors walked back and forth, going about their business and everyone else's. Some of them stopped and stared. Others were more discreet about it: they did their staring while they walked.

  I wondered if Takis and Stavros were enjoying themselves. They'd parked at the end of the street, several cars away from the Peptomobile. If this was their idea of discretion, they sucked at their jobs.

  Aunt Rita and I eventually abandoned our posts. Dina wasn't high priority. She was more like an annoyance, a fly my aunt wanted to zap. On the way back to the safe house we stopped to grab pizza, Greek-style. Which meant it had an oilier crust, more sauce, and less cheese than pizza back home. The cheese was a mix of a mozzarella and cheddar.

  "Mama knows you're in Greece." Aunt Rita grabbed the pizza and we trotted back to her car. "So do you want to ditch the safe house and come back to the compound?"

  "So she can drug me again? Forget it."

  "She won't drug you again."

  I gave her a look and she shrugged. "Could be she'll put you in the dungeon."

  My cousins followed us to the not-so-safe house. We knew they were there, and they knew we knew. With that much knowledge whizzing around, they abandoned all pretense and took up tailgating.

  When we arrived at the safe house, Aunt Rita and I sat on the car's pink hood, inhaling pizza, while Stavros and Takis cast sad puppy eyes in our direction.

  No sympathy. If they wanted pizza they could buzz off and get their own.

  Chapter 15

  The night was one noisy SOB in the olive grove. Goat bells clanged. Wind stage-whispered. Boy cicadas serenaded the girls. I contributed with my occasional, "Get off my front lawn!"

  The sun beat me up by about two hours. Thanks to the crowd of olive trees shading the safe house's aluminum roof, it couldn't reach in and slap me out of the sack, so I indulged. Dad's status as an abductee, and the knowledge that my time on this earth was possibly even more limited than my high school biology teacher led me to believe, ultimately shoed me outside. The pump water was frigid, and something was snuffling around inside the outhouse—probably Greek giant hornets—so I changed clothes and took the scooter for a spin, desperately seeking a McDonalds or a similar establishment where the bathroom had hot water and a bug-free commode.

  The scooter puttered along the coastal road. Eateries went where the money was, and where the money was was on the beachfront roads, where tourists flocked to their establishments in between bouts of sun.

  I was cruising when I spotted a familiar face on the steps of a tired old beach house. Penka, the Slavic dealer of prescription drugs, was peddling pills with a colleague. Her sidekick was spaghetti thin, a redhead with an upper lip in dire need of wax. The hair wasn't natural but the mustache was homegrown.

  I watched as Penka swapped a foil packet for a wad of euros. Her customer was respectable, clean. He looked like a school teacher.

  "Hey! You're not in jail," I called out, waving. Her customer pocketed the foil and hurried away.

  "Always they arrest me but they never keep me."

  "How does that work?"

  She shrugged, almost popping out of her tank top. "Luck. And maybe I threaten to put Bulgarian curse on them."

  That would do it. Greeks took curse threats seriously. Dad was always sending me off to school with a black and blue eye pendant pinned to the inside of my shirts. He tucked garlic between my mattress and the springs. Occasionally, when Mom wasn't looking, he spat on me.

  Penka waved me over. "You looking to buy? Because I no sell hard drugs." She said drugs in English but pronounced it droogs. "You want sisa, you go find Russian whore."

  "Screw you," the hairy-lipped friend said. "Russia shits on Bulgaria."

  Penka rolled her eyes at me. "Tasha is Russian."

  Evidently. "Does she sell sisa?"

  "She sell all the things, including her holes."

  Tasha shrugged. "I am smart businesswoman. I diversify."

  I glanced around, scoping the traffic to see if I had a tail this morning. If I did, they were Grandma's A team, because they rocked at hiding. The other guys could take lessons, maybe learn something.

  Back to the dealers. Tasha was glassy-eyed, obviously sampling her wares, checking it for defects. No need, I wanted to tell her. Looked like it was working fine, zapping synapses, turning her skin to pizza. Not Penka, though. She was clear and raz
or sharp. Probably the cops cut themselves on Penka all the time, which is why they shook her loose not long after they reeled her in. The two women were on the streets where things got dirty, which made me wonder if they knew the Baptist, in or out of uniform.

  "I'm looking for someone," I said. "Maybe you've seen him?"

  "Do I look like I see anybody? I am blind." Penka closed both eyes and felt around to prove her point.

  "Great acting. I almost believed it."

  "Really?"

  "No."

  "Too bad. I want to be actress. Go to Bollywood."

  "You mean Hollywood?"

  "No, the Bollywood. I like dancing." She shimmied on the step. The stoop shook with her.

  "Keep trying," I said. "Maybe get a dog to help with the act."

  She sighed like she was gunning for an Oscar. "Who you look for?"

  "A guy they call the Baptist."

  Tasha leaned forward, pressed her elbows into her knees. Her breath was sour and her pits had tufts of hair like a troll doll. "Is he lost?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Then why you look for him?"

  "Do you know him?"

  "Maybe I do." She shrugged one-shouldered, losing a strap. "Maybe I don't."

  "They say he's an ex cop." They was Melas, but I didn't tell them that. I was loyal-ish to a fault. "He ever come around?"

  The Russian woman shrugged. "Not here. He eat higher up food chain."

  "What if he did come around?"

  "I would give him what he want," Tasha said. "Anything."

  "I hear he kills people. Criminal people."

  "Greece is not so safe now," the Russian dealer told me. "I come Greece to run away from violence. And what happens? Violence. I come just before country turn to shit. Lucky me."

  Penka was focused on the beach behind me. "Not me," she murmured. "If I saw him I would run. I know what he does and how he does it. The police, they let it go because he was one of them. He does their jobs." She spat on the ground, the wet flecks boiling away before they had a chance to dampen the concrete. "Our last boss was his victim. the Baptist drown him in rain puddle."

  My stomach churned. I lost all feeling in my fingers and toes. "What happened?"

  "What do they do? Nothing. The police come, take the body, then nothing is what they do. At doing nothing they are genius."