Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel Read Online Free PDF

pocketing my cake, and asking for directions to Litsa’s and Tomas’ apartment, I was on my way.
    I stepped sideways.
    Litsa’s door flew open. I looked at her; looked back at the fist I hadn’t had a chance to use yet.
    “Katerina! Could be I heard what Marika told you.”
    Could be. “Is Tomas in?”
    She nodded and ushered me inside, while simultaneously screeching, “Tomas!”
    Litsa was in her late thirties. She and her husband, whose name I couldn’t recall with her voice stabbing my eardrums, had three boys. She was the kind of woman who worked hard at looking cheap, and she succeeded beautifully. Her nails were real acrylic, her ponytail was clip-on, and her boobs had arrived in individually wrapped containers, before the surgeon stuffed them into her chest. The apartment was almost as spacious as the one next-door, but there was more fake gold and less good taste.
    “Sit,” she said, steering me into the living room. Litsa didn’t do things old school. Unlike generations before her, she didn’t keep a room for entertaining visitors. But then Grandma didn’t either. Her house didn’t have the space … or a toilet in her bathroom.
    Tomas Makris wandered into the room in Spiderman underwear and Transformers slippers. He had the family nose and black hair shaved close to the scalp. In his slippers he was about three-and-a-half-feet-tall, which seemed normal for a five-year-old. He looked at me with wide, dark eyes.
    “What’s it like being a foreigner?”
    My brain spluttered, but my mouth made up for it. “Foreign.”
    He nodded. “I figured.”
    “Are you in school yet?”
    “No. Kindergarten is keeping me back. I failed finger painting.”
    “Really?”
    “No.”
    I looked at his mother. “Does he know he’s thirty?”
    She shrugged somewhat helplessly.
    “What’s that?” His eyes were glued to the box in my hand. “Is that for me?”
    To crouch or not crouch, that was the question. On the one hand, he was five. On the other, he was thirty. I crouched, hoping it was the right move.
    “It’s not for either of us, but I was hoping you might be able to open it.”
    “English alphabet,” he said, inspecting the puzzle box. “Eight letters.”
    “Do you know English?”
    “I know puzzles and combinations. I can open anything.”
    “So I heard.”
    “I can also burp the alphabet. Want to hear it?”
    “Maybe later. It’s a pretty big achievement, though. I know grown men who can’t do it.”
    “It’s all in here.” He pointed to his diaphragm. “And you have to gulp a lot of air between letters.” He gave me a quick alpha, beta, gamma to demonstrate.
    I won’t lie: I was pretty impressed.
    “Let’s go,” he said. “I think better when I’m in my fort.”
    “I will bring coffee,” Litsa called after us.
    The boy’s fort was made of pillows, sheets, and a couple of traditional Greek chairs. It was a good fort, and he beamed when I told him so. He ducked under the sheet and held it up for me to join him.
    “Is it true you’re going to be Baboulas someday?” he asked once we’d both settled beneath the fort’s cotton roof. He dropped the “door.” Instant comfort. Nothing bad could touch me here. Not even the Goblin King or the boogeyman.
    “Not if I can help it.”
    You will be,” he said, with absolute certainty. “If Baboulas wants you to be, you will be.”
    “If I don’t want to be, then I don’t have to be.”
    He considered my words. “That’s not how it works.”
    “That’s how it works in my world, unless you have a tiger mother.”
    “What’s a tiger mother?”
    When I explained about tiger mothers, and how they’d claw out your heart if you got less than an A-plus in a test, he frowned. “Greek mothers are more like sea turtles. Except Baboulas. She’s more like an elephant.” He twiddled the dials. There was a small click. He handed it back to me.
    “Baboulas,” I said, reading the word.
    “They weren’t even trying.” The poor kid