KM 03 Doing Crime by King Alex A

Author:King, Alex A. [King, Alex A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Published: 2015-10-16T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

There was light. Lots of eye-searing, yellow-white light. Looked like sunshine, now that I was thinking about it.

Strong hands peeled me off the ground.

“I’m sorry for all the bad stuff I did,” I babbled, “especially that one thing. And I didn’t mean to swear so much. Most of the time it’s just automatic, you know? I talk without thinking. Is that a sin? I know it’s not one of the Ten Commandments, so do you think we could maybe negotiate on the swearing thing?”

The hands turned me around until I was facing Xander.

Hey, Xander was dead, too. And the afterlife looked just like the courtyard at the Family compound. Maybe we were in limbo ...

“Can you talk now that we’re dead?” I asked him.

He raised his eyebrows.

“We’re not dead are we?”

He tilted his chin up then down.

“Forget everything I just said or I’ll smother you in your sleep, okay?”

Shrug. He feigned nonchalance but the depths of his eyes sparkled.

I brushed off my dress, tried to fix my hair. “What hit me in the back?

He held up his hand. In it was the German woman’s handgun.

“The woman ... is she okay?” I tried to peer past him, but he spun me around so my back was to the front of the courtyard. “Forget it,” I said. “I need to see this. She’s dead because ... well, not because of me, but she’s dead, and a few seconds ago we were having a conversation about Facebook and shoes.”

His fingers relaxed and I broke free.

And wished I hadn’t.

She was dead and broken, pretty much what you’d expect under the circumstances. Nobody could survive a blast that sprayed half their insides on the ground and all over what was left of that nice leather coat. Globs of blood and tissue slid down what used to be a white stucco wall.

Poor stupid woman, it didn’t have to end this way. She could have tried on my shoes, accepted a drink, ponied up more information about her employer. Instead, she pushed the button and went BOOM.

“Xander ... Did she actually blow herself up or was it one of those reflex things when you shot her?”

He looked at me like I was out of my tree for asking. Maybe I was, but it mattered.

“I’m going to be sick.”

And I was. I doubled over and unleashed a torrent of regret, disgust, and lamb souvlaki all over Grandma’s gardenias.

~ ~ ~

Back in Grandma’s kitchen:

“I’m sorry I puked in your gardenias.”

Grandma said, “It is a lucky thing gardenias like acid soil.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Then I kind of did you a favor?”

“Too far,” she said. Hey, it was worth a shot.

“She was going to kill you.”

“She could have tried, and she would not have been the first. Your father saved me one time—did you know? We were coming out of Ayia Aikaterini in Makria.”

Ayia Aikaterini, or Saint Catherine, was our namesake. Most Greeks had saints’ names. Those who didn’t had worthless, ungrateful parents. Names were heirlooms passed down from paternal grandparents to the firstborn children, from maternal parents to the next two.

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