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

this art installation was Zeus’s thunderbolt. Also, Melas was wearing too many clothes to be an actual Greek statue, but it was probably better this way. For both of us.
    “I know, I saw the video. Know what else I saw?”
    “Why don’t you tell me.” I rubbed my stomach. No more last meals for me. Next time I’d prepare to die on an empty stomach. “I ate a huge lunch and now I’m too tired to play guessing game.”
    “You and Stavros chatting, that’s what I saw.”
    “Technically you didn’t see that, you heard it.”
    His eye twitched. “What I also saw was the hood of your yellow car.”
    “Lots of yellow cars in Greece. It’s a happy color.”
    “Do those people sound like you?”
    “A lot of people sound like me.”
    “Were their names on the visitors’ list at the Larissa prison?”
    “Maybe. Who can say?”
    “I’m thinking you can.”
    “If the wind changes direction,” I said, “your face could be stuck like that.”
    He pulled the stick out of his ass and sat in the chair directly across from me.
    “That looked like Baboulas flying that helicopter,” he said.
    “Pretty much every Greek woman over the age of seventy wears black.”
    “And the guy on the ground looked like Xander.”
    “Lots of guys look like Xander.”
    “He’s a walking boulder. Almost nobody looks like him.”
    “ Almost nobody isn’t the same thing as nobody.”
    I fiddled with my phone and tried to play cool, which was harder than it sounded when it was this hot. The pool and fountains were tormenting me with their lapping and splashing. Yes, I could have jumped in the pool, but under this sun I’d fry. I’d already lost an anaconda’s worth of skin.
    “I think Stelios Dogas is here somewhere,” Melas said.
    “If he is nobody’s told me about it.”
    “Think he’s got something to do with your father’s abduction and that box with the … the …?”
    “Severed penis?”
    He looked slightly relieved that I’d wrenched out the word stuck in his throat. “With that.”
    It was sympathy that made me sigh and say, “Okay, I talked to Rabbit—Dogas—but I had nothing to do with the prison break. No, I don’t think he’s got anything to do with my father’s kidnapping. No, he hasn’t got anything to do with the box. He made it, that’s all.”
    “Made it?”
    “I guess the guy’s hobby is making puzzle boxes.”
    “So you’re saying he made it for someone else?”
    I nodded. “Someone offered him a trade.”
    “What did he get in return?”
    I told him and he grinned. “Sounds like a good trade.”
    “Oink.”
    The grin sprawled wider. “Guilty. So who commissioned the box?”
    “A guy called the Eagle.”
    He chewed on that a moment. “Never heard of him.”
    “That’s what Grandma said. She thinks he was bullshitting to get me out of there.”
    “I hate to say it, but she’s probably right. We’re not talking a good person here. The man was in prison for a reason.”
    “What did he do?”
    “They nailed him on public indecency, but that was an excuse. Name every crime there is, he’s done it.”
    I wondered if Greece had crazy laws like we had back home in some states. In Oregon we weren’t allowed to pump our own gas or use canned corn as fishing bait.
    “Fifteen years for public indecency, isn’t that extreme?”
    “Thirty years. There was a donkey involved.”
    Eww .
    My brain was quietly working through mental Pilates. Rabbit had thrown this Eagle person’s name out there with confidence. If he was a liar he was unflinching. I’d bet a very small amount of real money, or a large amount of Monopoly money, that the Eagle was a real person. Just because Grandma and Melas hadn’t heard of him, didn’t mean he didn’t exist.
    As soon as I could untangle Melas from my hair I was going back to the Crooked Noses Message Board to see if they knew of any references to this Eagle.
    If that failed, well, I wasn’t exactly without friends in the Greek underworld.
    Okay,