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

friend. Singular.
    And not exactly a friend. Penka was more like a Bulgarian drug dealer who traded prescription drugs for thick wads of cash. She worked for Baby Dimitri, Godfather of the Night and Trinkets. We kind of bonded while she was chained to a bench at the police station. Last week I went with her to a funeral for her friend Tasha, a Russian dealer and prostitute, who’d been murdered by the Baptist for the crime of being a police informant.
    Melas stared at me. “What are you thinking?”
    “I’m not thinking. Ask around, it happens a lot.”
    “Liar. You’re always thinking.”
    “How can you tell?”
    “Smoke coming out your ears.”
    “You don’t know anything about me.”
    “I know you want me.”
    “I don’t want you or anything like you.”
    “Sure you do,” he said. “You’re afraid to admit it.”
    “That’s date-rape logic.”
    His eye was this close to twitching. I brought out his inner neurotic. Luckily for one of us—maybe both of us—his phone buzzed. He picked it up, scrolled one-fingered. Then he stood.
    “Leaving so soon?”
    He blew a sigh. The hair flopping over his eyes fluttered. He shoved it back into place with an impatient hand.
    “Got to go. But I’m not done with you yet.” It was almost awkward, the way he stood there, like he couldn’t figure out what to do with me. Behind his eyes a solo round of kiss-kill-marry was taking place.
    I decided to toss the poor guy a bone. Probably not the same bone he wanted to toss me, judging from the decision that had finally happened in his head, and that had now worked its way into his eyes and settled on his mouth. He was smirking. Definitely smirking. My underwear was a wall he wanted to blast through. My continent was something he intended to conquer. He wanted to go Alexander the Great on my ass.
    “Fire!” I shrieked.
    He cocked his head. “What?”
    I waved my hand at his phone. “It’s an emergency, whatever it is. Hurry. You know where to find me when you’re done.”
    He shook his head and wandered back the way he’d come, bewildered. A moment later I heard the roar of his wheels spinning dust and stones.
    With Melas out of the way I went on an intelligence hunt. The Crooked Noses didn’t have anything for me in their archives. I could have started a new topic but what if someone in the Family was keeping tabs? An inquiry about this Eagle, on today of all days, might backfire.
    There was no other choice: I had to take my investigation to the streets of Greece. They weren’t particularly mean, but they were throwing up sheets of skin-melting heat.

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    I found Penka on her usual stoop. She wasn’t alone. Sitting next to her was a scrawny kid, more bantam rooster than human. He was dripping in gold chains with chunky euro sign pendants. His oversized tank top revealed his distant relationship, twice removed, with the gym. The back of his saggy, baggy pants wasn’t visible from the street, but I instinctively knew there would be a mile of boxers when he stood.
    Penka had perched her significant-sized self on the far end of the stoop. She was wearing red shorts and an off-the-shoulder top that didn’t want to be there. Her hair had been recently re-dipped in a bucket of bleach and styled with a blender. Her customers liked her to look cheap. It made them feel better about their habits. The stoop was attached to an empty beach house, built in the fifties and, by the looks of it, abandoned not too long after. The house stuck out like a recently whacked digit in the row of apartments and motels that had sprung up in the 80s and 90s.
    “You want to buy asshole?” She hooked her thumb at the kid, who was still at least a couple of years away from his twenties. “Here, I have one. I give it to you cheap.”
    “Wow, thanks. Too bad there’s only room for one in my underwear.”
    “You keep laughing, fatty,” the kid told Penka. “You’d be sucking my dick if my uncle told you to.”
    “Who’s his