Outta Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel Page 3

  “On the outside of the wall.”

  Perfect. Something was finally going my way.

  Five minutes of crawling and Tomas stopped. He fiddled around, then light skulked in, thin and broken. “Here.”

  We popped out into a patch of wilderness on the far side of the compound wall. Nearby, the band was playing. People were talking. A thin finger of smoke nosed over the top of the wall. Someone was smoking—a big no-no as far as Grandma was concerned. Apparently she didn’t take it well when someone smoked on her property, and when Grandma didn’t take things well, murder happened. She’d probably get Takis to do it. He seemed like he was her go-to murder guy.

  Outside of the compound, I could breathe again. I’d been in a kind of stasis for days now, my body and brain crackling with unspent energy. Now that I had an idea where Dad was, I was desperate to get to him.

  That’s if I was right.

  What now? I needed transportation. Pilfering a vehicle from the family car pool wasn’t feasible. Only the core family members knew I was alive. Grandma didn’t even trust Melas enough to let him know I was still kicking. Takis and Marika. Aunt Rita and Grandma. Xander and now Tomas. Even Papou wasn’t in the circle of trust because he was as discreet as a bloodstain on white pants, was how Aunt Rita put it. Aunt Rita had never had a period in her life, mostly because she used to be a man and—as far as I knew—still had all her original parts. But I knew about bloodstains on white shorts, so I figured it was a good thing Papou was left out of the loop. Nobody forgets that stain. Ever.

  I’d been around the compound long enough to know where I was, where the road was from here, and that if I went north instead of south then the whole village of Makria would know I was alive.

  I hugged Tomas, promised him I’d be fine, and set off south on foot. Three days underground and the weather had changed. There was sun, yes, but it packed less punch. And a good thing, too, because these jeans weren’t made for Greece’s summer days. I settled my sunglasses on my nose and jammed a hat down over my hair, checked the map on my phone, and veered toward a thin trail that was less road and more like some guy with a donkey rode along here once a month. The main road might attract attention, especially if some of the funeral guests tired of all the fun and zipped past.

  Half an hour later I was on the edge of Volos, where the air had its usual carcinogenic texture and taste. My feet hurt. I was tired. I needed a nap. Being dead was a real drag. Being dead while being me was doubly a drag. On every periptero (the little booths that sold newspapers, candy, drinks, ice creams, and cigarettes) I passed, I saw myself. Baboulas’s only granddaughter was dead, so now I was headline news—again. It wasn’t that long ago that the papers wore my face, with an unflattering headline and article that said Greece’s crime princess had come home.

  Who killed Katerina Makris?

  My death was Greece’s very own Twin Peaks, but with worse coffee and no pie.

  I kept the bill of my hat down low and my sunglasses in place. The rest of my face I hit behind a paper coffee cup. Then I threaded through the city, and hopped on a bus bound one of the local villages.

  Greek buses have a driver up front and a conductor perched at the rear doors to collect fares and scowl. I gave the sour conductor my money and found a seat near the back, between a murder of crows and a wall of glowing tourists. The tourists’ chatter was as bright as their sunburn. German. The elderly widows were slowly sucking life from the rest of the bus with their judgmental gawking and razor sharp tongues. They were busy filleting someone’s reputation.

  I settled back in the seat and tuned out.

  Until I heard my name.

  “It is a good thing that Katerina Makri girl is dead,” one of the crows said.

  Clearly she didn’t know about the “s” I insisted on keeping. Normally only Greek men got an “s” at the end of their last names, but I was all about the equality. Plus giving it up would be like throwing away my nose or pinkie. That was my “s,” damn it.

  “Po-po, what is wrong with you? And you call yourself a Christian.”

  “I call myself a Greek, and her death is a good thing for Greece. Now they will all die out.”

  Behind me here was a small, hollow sound that sounded like a fist tapping on a skull. “What is in that head of yours?” a third voice said. “Baboulas has other children and grandchildren.”

  “I wonder who killed her,” one said. “I bet it was Baboulas herself.”

  She didn’t know how right she was.

  “I bet it was one of those men.”

  The others listened in. I did, too.

  “I heard there were ten of them sharing her bed, if you know what I mean.”

  “We know what you mean,” the others said with a mixture of reverence and horror.

  “Nothing good ever happens to putanas.”

  Wait—what? Now I was a lady of the night. I don’t think so, bub.

  “I would not say that,” one of the other crows said. “They make good money, and some of them travel a lot. Rich men pay them to dance on yachts. How is that not good? I thought about doing it myself for a long time. Then I married Yiannis and he never took me anywhere and never let me have any money and all he had was an old fishing boat. After seven children my mouni is more of an outtie than an innie. No rich men would pay me to dance on their yacht now.”

  Desperate to get away from the widows, I vaulted off the bus near Baby Dimitri’s souvenir and shop. The doors were open. The chairs were in their usual position out front. It was basically a waterfront strip mall, where the colors were at all out war with each other. Normally Baby Dimitri, Godfather of the Night, Flip Flops, and Little Statues with Big Wangs, sat out front with his favorite gold-toothed henchman Laki. Today they were eating Grandma’s food, drinking her wine, and arguing about politics with my family. I kept my eyes on the cluttered sidewalk. No way was I going to peek inside to see who was manning the cash register.

  “Psst!”

  I stopped.

  Looked.

  Damn it, I swore I wasn’t going to look.

  Behind the counter was a large Bulgarian woman in clothes made for a small Bulgarian woman. We were kind of, sort of, friends … ish. Normally Penka peddled prescription medication from a nearby stoop, directly across the street from a crowded part of the beach. Most of her clients were the respectable kind of people who needed something stronger than caffeine to get them through their decent, well-paying days. But she attracted the beach crowd too, people who wanted to perk up or slow down … but who wanted their kicks to come with literature that explained the side effects and let them know when they should consult their physicians.

  “You want to buy some drugs? I have good drugs. Classy drugs, none of that sisa garbage.” In Penka’s mouth the word changed shape until it sounded like droogs. “Something to make your concentration like a laser, maybe.”

  I raised my glasses.

  She squealed and dropped down behind the counter.

  I trotted inside. “Penka, are you okay?”

  She was on the floor, rocking back and forth, praying.

  “Penka?”

  “I’m not crazy,” she whispered. “I’m not crazy.”

  I crouched down and patted her knee. “Penka?”

  She leaped up. “Begone, demon!”

  “What? I’m not a demon!”

  “Ghost?”

  I shook my head.

  Her forehead creased. “Hologram?”

  “No …”

  She clutched her head. “Oh my God, I have a brain tumor.”

  “I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure you don’t have a brain tumor.”

  “But … I can see you.”

  “Because I’m not dead.”

  The creases fell out of her forehead. “Then you should have opened with that. Now my outfit is messed up from sitting on this filthy floor.”

  As far as outfits went, Penka’s separates didn’t count as one. She was in scraps of fabric held in place with sweat and hope.

  “Baby Dimitri has you working here, huh?”

  She went back to the stool behind the cash register. “Just for today. He threatened to give my stoop to another dealer if I didn’t agree. He is at your, uh …”

  “Funeral,” I said. “I know. I saw him.”

  “Why are you pretending to be dead?”

  “Not exactly my idea.”

  “Baboulas?”

  I nodded.

  “Say no more. I do not want Baboulas to cut out my tongue for knowing too much.”

  “She wouldn’t do that.” I stopped. “Actually she might. How’s business?”

  “I am so bored that my classy drugs look good. You want to buy some?”

  “Can’t. I have somewhere to be.”

  “Maybe I should come with you and do your talking for you if you need to talk to someone, seeing as how you’re supposed to be dead. What if you give one of these Greeks a fright? They are not as strong as Bulgarians.”

  “What about Baby Dimitri?”

  “I’ll leave him a note telling him I’ve got woman troubles. Nothing scares an old Greek man like woman troubles.”

  “Huh. You’d think he’d be desensitized to blood.”

  “I think he only likes it if it’s coming from a hole he made.”

  That made a complicated and misogynistic kind of sense.

  She grabbed her bulging tote bag and we left Baby Dimitri’s shop. Down the road we stopped and Penka ran into a kafenio for two coffees. She came out with coffee and a white box.

  “A snack,” she said. “This is harder work than selling drugs.”

  I opened my bag. “Here, let me pay for it.”

  “Technically Baby Dimitri paid for it. I swapped all this for a sleeve of Adderall and a dozen Xanax. Where are we going? Wait—don’t tell me. Plausible deniability if Baboulas catches us.”

  “I’m not a prisoner,” I said.

  “Oh, if you say so then it must be true.”

  “It is.”

  “Then why I do I feel like being with you will make me wade the onions.”

  “I don’t know what that means, but I like onions. Especially if they’re caramelized.”

  “It means you will get me into trouble.”

  “You wanted to come.”

  We rounded the corner, off the main drag and onto a ragamuffin street that had never heard of zoning laws. Shops mingled with houses. A couple of small local olive processing factories pumped brine onto the hot blacktop. The whole street smelled like Brooklyn mid-afternoon in July. We picked up the pace until the air dialed the stench down to sweaty feet, then I checked my phone’s map.

  Penka dug into the white box. It was crammed full of loukoumades. Loukoumades are Greek doughnut holes, but because Greece does everything better (according to my father … and every other Greek), they take those doughnut holes, fry them longer, and then drown them in syrup. Greeks figure when it comes to heart disease, olive oil has got their back.

  My target was around the next right turn.

  Chapter Three

  Two minutes later I was rattling a six-foot gate. Two panels. Padlocked. I could have picked the lock, but breaking into a school during school hours looks bad. The local high school was a one-building, two-story affair that contained grades seven through twelve. Stark white. No greenery whatsoever on school grounds, although there was a small forest out back, beyond the gates. The scenery was entirely concrete, except for deep, wide wooden steps that led to a lower level in the yard where two courts were set up: one for basketball, one for volleyball.

  “I swore once I left school I would never go back,” Penka said. “And now look at me. I can feel facts and knowledge trying to poke their fingers through my skin.”

  “That’s probably just the loukoumades,” I said. “There’s a lot of sugar in those things.”

  That didn’t stop her diving for another syrup-drenched nugget. She offered me the box. I dug out a sticky doughnut hole and contemplated the problem.

  “How do we get in?”

  “You should just yell.”

  “Yell?”

  She shrugged. “That is what Greeks do. They stand at the gate and yell until someone comes out.”

  That could work. She was right: that’s what Greeks did, and by lucky coincidence we were in Greece. Up until now I figured it only worked outside people’s houses.

  I cupped my hands and hollered, “Yoohoo!”

  “Yoohoo?”

  “What else am I supposed to say?”

  “That is the principal’s office right there.” She pointed to the nearest window on the bottom floor.

  I shot her a quizzical look. “Really?”

  “He is a customer, okay? And one time he asked me to deliver. Normally I do not run a delivery service, but he is a good customer. His name is Stamatis. Principal Stamatis”

  Worth a shot. I cupped my hands, this time calling the principal’s name.

  The window opened. A white-haired raisin stuck his head out. “Come!” he hollered. Standard Greek phone greeting. He squinted. His eyes skipped sideways to Penka. “Wait there!”

  His head vanished. Several moments passed, then one of the school’s double doors swung open. Principal Stamatis was a garden gnome with hyperthyroidism. As he hurried over, heavy keychain swinging from his hand, he popped two hard candies into his mouth.

  I nudged Penka. “What’s his poison?”

  “Dexedrine. He buys them by the bucket.”

  The principal shoved the key into the lock. His eyes were bright, his hands shaky. “Penka, Penka, did you bring me something?”

  She thrust the white box at me. “Hold my loukoumades.” She went diving in her bag and pulled out a several cards of Dexedrine. Money changed hands.

  It was then that the principal noticed me. “Who are you?”

  “My apprentice,” Penka said. “She has questions for you.”

  The Dexedrine vanished into a pants pocket. He rubbed his hands together.

  “We will see if I have answers.”

  “I was wondering if you had any new employees,” I said.

  He nodded enthusiastically. “It’s the beginning of the school year and the school has several new faces. Why do you want to know?”

  “No reason.”

  He looked at me like I was several feet of intestines short of good kokoretsi; although in my mind it it was debatable if there was such a thing as good kokoretsi.

  I was bad at this. Really bad at this.

  “Okay, I’m looking for a man,” I said.

  “You should ask Penka,” the principal said. “She knows girls in that business.”

  Great. Now he thought I was a wannabe sex worker. “What? No! This is personal, not professional. Do you have a new janitor maybe? Someone who isn’t a teacher?”

  “No. Our janitor is Kyria Kalliopi. When she is not cleaning the school she is cleaning the ekklesaki up the street.”

  Ekklesaki. The little church.

  “Your gym teacher is Kyrios Pantalonis, yes?”

  There was a reason I’d chosen this school. Dad’s group of childhood buddies were renowned for their shenanigans. They’d given themselves Anglicized version of their Greek names decades ago, when Anglicizing everything was considered cool. Dad was Mikey Far. (Makris was a twist on makria, which means far away.) The others were Jimmy Pants, this school’s gym teacher; Johnny Deadly, mattress salesman; Fish, an accountant; and Tony Goats, former dentist. Tony Goats met a deader than normal dead end in the alleyway behind his clinic. You know what they say: never stick your dick or money in crazy. Goats did both. Cookie was the final member of their gang, and he was dead, too.

  The reason I was at the school was simple enough. The other day I’d caught the tail end of a conversation between Dad’s old pals and Grandma. Those old pals mentioned that wherever Dad was, he’d be in the last place anyone would expect to find him. There were two places you’d never find Dad: a school or Grandma’s house. He wasn’t in Grandma’s house, which left school. Dad hated schools. He always managed to schedule Very Important Things on parent-teacher nights. When I graduated high school, he had an explosive case of diarrhea that afternoon.

  It was a half-formed idea, predicated on the possibility that Dad had escaped his captors and gone into a voluntary hiding until the heat died down, and based on nothing except gut feeling and the knowledge that Dad was an iceberg and I only knew the part of him the people on the Titanic could see from their deckchairs.

  “Yes—you know him?”

  “Is he here?”

  “No. Today he is at a funeral.”

  Interesting. I hadn’t noticed him at the funeral or the after party. None of Dad’s old buddies had been there—not that I’d seen anyway. Mind you, I had other things on my mind at the time, like keeping an eye on family.

  “Does he live around here?”

  “Two streets away. A white house.”

  Interrogations weren’t my thing. Asking people for money was easier.

  “So you don’t have any new male staff?”

  He popped another candy into his mouth, waggled his finger at me.

  “I did not say that. You asked about a janitor.”

  I waited. Patiently. Sort of.

  “We have a new English teacher,” he went on.

  My Spidey senses tingled. “Does he speak good English?”

  “Of course. Kyrios Hatzis’ English is excellent. At least I think so. I do not speak much myself. ‘Hello.’ ‘Goodbye.’ ‘How much for a poor man’s special?’ ”

  My eye twitched. “How old is he?”

  He shrugged. “All these questions …”

  Was he going to shoot me down? I could almost feel the “Sorry, I have to stay home and wash my hair” skipping up his throat.

  “… you should come see for yourself, then you can decide if he is your man, eh?”

  “Not me,” Penka said. “I don’t do school. I will stay here with my loukoumades.”

  Probably a good idea with her current wardrobe. Penka was underdressed for everything except a rap video. I wasn’t sure a school full of Greek teenagers could handle all her jelly.

  “That would be great, thank you.”