Free Disorganized Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel by Alex A. King Page A

woman, as far as I'm concerned."
    "America has made your brain soft. Your parents should have raised you Greek. Your Aunt Rita has three sons with his second wife."
    "She's married?"
    "Three times. Number Three—already I forget her name—is doing sex with one of the cousins."
    "And you're okay with that?"
    Grandma shrugged. "She is not my wife. If she were my wife …" Her sentence fell off a cliff, into what I suspected was a pit full of very sharp things.
    Time to change the subject. Behold, my smooth transition.
    "You said we had to wait on the kidnapper to make their demands before you could do anything. I'm going to wait at home, just in case they call there."
    "No. Your family needs you and you need us."
    "What do you need me for?"
    "When there is trouble—and there is trouble—family is the only thing you can trust."
    This was a woman who hadn't seen the Jerry Springer Show , or Maury , or that balding, grinning Texan. Or any of the reality TV shows plaguing American television. Fact was, sometimes family was the last thing a person could trust. Every American knew that.
    "Did you know Baby Dimitri didn't have Dad?"
    "Yes."
    "So why send me there to make a fool of myself?"
    "I knew he did not have Michail, but that does not mean he did not take him."
    "You mean you suspected someone outsourced the muscle to Baby Dimitri?"
    "At first I thought yes, but now I do not think it was him. Are you a brave woman, Katerina?" she went on. "I think you are. You stormed into Baby Dimitri's shop like an avenging angel."
    More like a smart-ass, with a mouthful of checks my body couldn't afford to cash. I was hot-stuff with Xander as backup, fixated on his phone, and at the time I had been amped up on a cocktail of jet lag, desperation, fear, and confusion.
    Come to think of it, I still was.
    "Not so much brave as deluded."
    "Bravery is not something you feel. It is something you do. I have been brave many times, but not once have I felt brave. In this family we need brave people, or the family will not survive."

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    I slept for a week . Or maybe twelve hours that felt like a hundred and sixty-eight. When I got up it was slowly. I ran a hand down my legs to make sure I hadn't gone Rip Van Winkle. Slight stubble but not a full forest. Phew!
    After losing fifteen minutes to a shower, I wandered into the kitchen and found my aunt but no Grandma. She was drinking brown sludge and daintily picking at the hairy stuff I'd watched Grandma bake.
    She blew me a kiss. "The best thing about being a man under the hood is that I can eat more without gaining weight."
    "You're so lucky," I said, sliding into the seat across from her. I wanted coffee, the kind with foam and milk and a squirt of vanilla syrup, not engine sludge. "Where's Grandma?"
    "In the gardens. She does all the gardening herself. I keep telling her to hire a gardener or two, but does she listen?"
    "No?"
    "No."
    Stubborn. Or maybe she just really got her kicks doing the gardening.
    "So what's the deal with Xander, does he ever speak?"
    "Xander, Xander. Oooh la la . He is a tasty dish. Very sad history, that man. Very sad. Tragic."
    I looked at my aunt, both eyebrows raised—the international expression of, Just hurry up and tell me before I explode .
    Aunt Rita wasn't biting. "I am not one to gossip. But his story is very sad."
    Argh! Why wouldn't people here just speak plainly? Just one question answered in a straight line; question leads to satisfying answer. But no. Ask a simple question and they gave me alternate routes, codes, and detours leading to nowhere but frustration and confusion.
    The screen door opened and Grandma shuffled in, no sign that she'd been playing with compost and worms. "Are you ready, Katerina?"
    "What for?"
    "Church."

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    T he massive garage doors had retracted, showing off the family's car collection. No limo for us today. The cousins who kept the motors running around here had parked a shiny black SUV in front of the fountain, where Thetis