Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (31 page)

“Gifts,” I said flatly.

“The heart, the eyes …” His voice dipped to a seductive level. “…the other thing.”

Oh my God, gifts? There weren’t enough exclamation points in the world to express myself right now.

“Dude, are you high?”

He looked at me like I’d forgotten to bring my sandwiches to the picnic, and I realized I’d blurted in English. There wasn’t a Greek equivalent of “dude.” It was singular in its awesomeness. So I translated to Greek and lost most of my oomph. It’s the price you paid when you were bilingual but not completely versed in slang and the current cool lingo.

“I never take drugs. Even when I was in prison I was clean.” He looked mildly offended. “My body is a temple.”

A temple of crazy.

“Most guys send flowers. Or they let you know they’re interested via the age-old art of conversation.”

“That’s not how I do things. Not when it’s destiny.”

“Destiny?” I squeaked. “This isn’t destiny, it’s stalking!”

“It’s not stalking to kill for the woman you love, it’s romantic.”

“We have very different ideas about romance!”

He looked miffed. “You are the first woman I’ve killed for. I never loved anyone this much.”

“Love me? We’ve never even met! You don’t know anything about me.” My voice was beginning to climb the decibels. At the rate this was going I’d be able to shatter his skull a few sentences from now. “Anyway, if they were for me, why did you address them to Grandma?”

“I didn’t. Katerina Makri, that’s your name, yes?”

“Yes, but with an S on the end.”

He looked baffled. “Why would you have an S on the end of Makri? You’re a woman.”

“Well, I have an S. Deal with it.”

He glanced from Kyria Koufo back to me. “Nobody told me about the S.”

“Who cares?” she said. Her face said she definitely didn’t give a rat’s hiney. She wanted us dead, gone, out of her way.

Then I heard a
clang
from somewhere behind one of the doors. It was muffled and distant, the kind of
clang
that says, ‘
Help! I can’t quite reach the saw to cut these ropes
.’ I crossed my fingers, hoped it was Grandma. I’d do anything to spring her out of this nut house. Kook One and Kook Two were welcome to shoot each other, or whatever fate suited them.

“Go see what’s happening down there,” Kyria Koufo told Cleopatra, who had been quiet all this time. “Use more gas if you have to.”

Panic was beginning to snowball inside me. “Gas? What kind of gas?”

Cleopatra squeezed past us. She had the nerve to look slightly sorry, but not sorry enough to whack her lover over the head, grab her gun, and shoot Periphas in something non-vital, yet excruciating and crippling. The older woman watched her sway toward the door, which meant she missed the shadow moving past the living room shutters.

My heart stuttered. Someone else was here. Hopefully a rescue team.

Something primeval inside me—something that knew about things like prolonging a confrontation so that the cavalry has time to show up and slay the bad guys—said, “Your plan stinks, Varvara.”

Forget God’s laws: I had committed a Greek mortal law. Nobody calls a person an easy thirty years their senior by their first name. It’s a ‘ban-able from all good society’ offense

Kyria Koufo jabbed me with her gun. “Shut your mouth. You have no respect.”

“Sure I have respect … for people who deserve it. You’ve done nothing to deserve it. You’re a … a … drug dealer.”

“I am a businesswoman!”

I scoffed with a nonchalance I didn’t feel. “You’re a middleman. Not smart or rich enough to acquire the product, and not personable enough to sell it. You sit in between the important people like a leech.” I made slurping noises.

Periphas’ grin was on the far side of crazy. “My future wife is clever. A warrior! A woman fit for the Eagle.”

“And you.” I turned on him. “You’re this close to being a date rapist.”

“Not even once. I have been saving it for my wife.”

“Ugh! What’s wrong with you?” I yelled at him.

“Okay, honey, now we are leaving,” he said. “You talk too much, but I can fix that.”

“This is nothing,” I said. “Normally I talk so much more than this. I never stop—ask anyone.” I nodded to the shadow at his back. “Ask him.”

Periphas whirled around in time for Xander’s fist to smash his jaw. I snatched the gun out of Kyria Koufo’s outstretched hand, shoved her into the wall, with zero regrets or apologizes, and ran toward the door through which Cleopatra had vanished.

I was teetering at the mouth of a basement, wooden steps vanishing into the gloom. There was light but it was off to the side, almost entirely bled out before it reached the bottom of the steps. A small hissing sound was coming from the same direction. Then I heard a laugh, the disconcerting tittering of a drunkard.

Grandma.

“Who paints your face?” she was saying. “A monkey? It looks like a baboon wiped his rainbow-colored
kolos
on your face.”

No prizes for guessing who she was talking to. Couldn’t be anyone but Cleopatra. Was the faux Queen of the Nile armed? I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t be sure. Good thing I had a gun now, even if there was an excellent chance I’d be too scared to use it. Last time I’d gotten lucky—or unlucky—and the gun hadn’t fired. Still, never underestimate the terror of knowing you’re standing at the wrong end of a gun. Just because it’s broken or unloaded, doesn’t mean it can’t kill you.

I took the steps slowly, lowering my weight in the next best thing to silence. On the other side of the door there was a fight happening. But Periphas and Kyria Koufo didn’t stand a chance against Xander.

At least I hoped they didn’t.

“Shut up, old woman!” Cleopatra said.

“You put the mask on my face, idiot. My Virgin Mary, Varvara always picks the stupid ones.”

“I know what to do,” Cleopatra snapped. “I work for a dentist!”

“Not anymore. Wee … you are unemployed like the rest of Greece!” Grandma was higher than a runaway balloon. “Want to see me do a cartwheel?”

“No!”

“
Pfffft
. You are no fun. Clowns are supposed to be funny.”

I didn’t think so. Clowns were freaky as hell. Even before Stephen King dreamed up Pennywise, clowns were on my ‘Hell No’ list. To me the ultimate monster would be a clown wasp. Or a wasp clown. Imagine one of those bearing down on you, rictus grin oil-painted on its face.

Slowly, I turned to face the puddle of light. It was overflowing from an old bulb dangling overhead, the bulk of its aura contained by a flimsy metal shade that looked a lot like a cheesy UFO prop from a 1950s B-movie. Beneath it was an old-fashioned dentist’s chair, and reclining was Grandma, nebulizer mask over her mouth and nose. Cleopatra was standing to her left, wielding … nothing?

What kind of bad guy was she, anyway?

Grandma cackled. She pulled her mask to one side, said, “Ha-ha. I know something you do not know.”

Nitrous oxide was a partial time machine. It had shunted Grandma’s mentality back to those awkward and obnoxious tween years, when her mouth was busy scribbling checks her body and current position—in the present, strapped to a dentist’s chair—couldn’t afford.

“What?” Cleopatra asked in a bored voice.

“BANG!” Grandma dropped the mask back into place, took a deep breath.

Was that my cue? I couldn’t tell if it was a cue, or an inside joke, or a random flapping of my grandmother’s juvenile tongue.

Just in case …

I felt up the gun. Damn it, this was a handgun, not a pistol. There was no hammer to cock, no loud click to strike fear into Cleopatra’s heart—if she had one.

So I whistled and said, “Yoo-hoo, I’ll make ya famous,” in English.
Young Guns 2
’s best line didn’t sound nearly as cool in Greek.

Cleopatra whirled around to face me. I stepped into the light. Her gaze dropped to take in the gun in my hand. She rolled her eyes. “You’re not going to shoot me, you spineless cow.”

“I have a spine. It’s straighter than yours.” I put on my concerned face. “Have you been checked for scoliosis?”

“What?” Her mouth was all protest, but her back was trying to snap itself into a straight line.

“Step away from my grandmother.”

“I was trying to free her.”

“Yeah right.”

She sighed like I was major pain in her ass—probably not the first—and flicked open the straps around Grandma’s ankles. Grandma’s foot shot up, nailing Cleopatra in the chest.

“Careful of her implants!” I yelled.

“These are real!”

I tilted my head. “Both of them?”

While Cleopatra was busy trying to think up a lethal comeback, Grandma clipped her ear with a shoe.

“Stop it,” Cleopatra squealed. “I’m trying to help you.”

“Some help you are,” Grandma said. “You cut the gas.”

“Grandma!”

The door at the top of the stairs swung open with an audible creak. Something stumbled through. I whipped around, but staring into the light had temporarily zapped my bat skills.

Curse words rolled toward us, a tumbleweed of insults and suggestions about what we should do in hell, and with what and whom. I didn’t fancy the bull, the goat, the Romani, or the rolling pin, but as little as we knew each other, Kyria Koufo had no way of knowing my preference for attractive human males.

As she landed at the bottom of the stairs, I realized I now had a problem: two targets, one gun. Given that Grandma seemed to be kicking around like a donkey, I went with Kyria Koufo and swung the gun in her direction.

“Freeze,” I said.

“My baby,” she said, “what are you doing?”

Huh? Oh. That wasn’t meant for me. In the dark it was hard to tell. Given the spontaneous declaration of love Periphas had tossed my way there was no knowing if it was contagious or not. But no, as she shuffled closer it became obvious her attention was on the walking Makeup Gone Wild advertisement.

Cleopatra straightened up. “It’s not right keeping an old woman tied up in the basement.”

“That’s not an old lady, it’s the devil.”

“I have been called worse and by better people,” Grandma said. Then she giggled—giggled!

Giggling usually has an age limit. After that it’s a sanity problem.

Or, in Grandma’s case, a nitrous oxide problem.

“She would kill us both if she could,” Kyria Koufo said. “That’s why she came here—to kill us.”

“Not her.” Grandma nodded to Cleopatra. “You. You went behind my back and betrayed me. It had to be done.”

The world tilted. I couldn’t get off so I leaned against the wall to wait it out.

“Because you are a fool,” Kyria Koufo hissed. “I handed you the keys to a vault of gold but you turned it down, snatched the keys away, and threw them in the ocean.”

“Listen to all the drama,” Grandma said. “You should have been on the stage!”

Kyria Koufo reached for the gun I was holding. “No,” I yelped and slapped her fingers. I channeled my inner crab, scooting sideways until I was free of her, then I switched animal spirit guides and launched into a leopard crawl.

BANG!

We all jumped. Everyone was looking at me.

“It wasn’t me,” I said. “Upstairs.”

BANG!

Then silence.

I scurried toward Grandma.

Something clanked overhead. I jumped up and began unbuckling the rest of Grandma’s restraints. Kyria Koufo lunged at me and managed to miss, colliding with the tank of nitrous. I jerked Grandma out of the chair. She got a nice, soft landing, courtesy of my body, but at least she didn’t break a hip. Cleopatra wrestled Kyria Koufo to the ground.

“Shoot the tank!” Cleopatra said.

Shoot a person? I couldn’t do that. But I was pretty sure I had the guts to shoot a tank of nitrous oxide.

I pulled the trigger. There was a loud boom, followed by ringing in my ears as the gunshot’s sound waves raced across the room and buried themselves in the underground wall.

As I stood up, I saw the jagged little hole in the tank, accompanied by a loud hissing. But no fireball.

“Nitrous oxide isn’t flammable,” I said to no one in particular, mostly because they couldn’t hear me after the gun’s roar. High school science told me it wasn’t flammable, but panic has a way of kicking perfectly good knowledge aside so that it has room to show off.

I grabbed Grandma, steered her toward the stairs.

“Xander’s up there,” I yelled. “Maybe the police now, too.”

In that same moment the basement door opened. A man-shape loomed over us, and because there wasn’t much light visible around his edges, I knew we were safe.

“Take her,” I told Xander. “And don’t take anything she says personally. They loaded her up on happy gas.” He scooped Grandma up into his arms, and vanished up the stairs.

Which left me alone with Cleopatra and Kyria Koufo, who were giggling like a pair of idiots, slapping at each other, pulling hair. Throw in some Jell-O and I’d have a pay-per-view event. Hopefully it wouldn’t be long until the police arrived. They could sort these two nuts into separate piles. But until then I was staying put.

Suddenly, another shape filled the doorway at the top of the steps. This one was smaller, more slightly cut than Xander.

Periphas was still alive.

My breath caught. I held it captive in its bone cage.

He limped down the stairs and dropped his backside on the bottom step. The eagle was gone. He had a red, flooding hole in his left shoulder. His breathing was shallow, ragged. He glanced over at the women, but he couldn’t see me. The thin light was like cornstarch, thickening the shadows. He swayed on his makeshift seat. Xander must have mistaken him for dead or incapacitated, which was the only reason he was sitting here now. He pushed up off the step and shuffled toward the tussling, giggling women.

“Where is she?” he rasped.

The two hens cackled.

“Where?”

Any other member of my family might have stepped forward, tapped him on the shoulder with the stolen gun, said “Peek-a-boo.”

Not me. I was less Makris, more chicken.

Behind him, I inched toward the steps. The plan was to bolt up the steps, slam the door, and wait for someone bigger and tougher than me to take care of this three-person mess in the basement—hopefully someone with a shiny badge and the law on their side.