“I—”
Boomer’s groggy voice came from the other side of the privacy curtain. “Knock it off, Teacup. It’s too early.”
I leaned away and turned to get a look at the owner of the gun. The early morning light coming through the dingy window behind my cot was enough to see the humor in Teacup’s face. I sat up on my elbows.
“I get it,” I said. “Hazing the new guy?”
“Nah,” Teacup said, his voice dropping the Russian inflection. “Just having a little fun. I keep telling them to put an Xbox in the joint, but they haven’t done it yet. They’ve got them in at our staging stations in Jordan and Libya. If they don’t get one here soon, I’m going to go out and buy my own.”
“Yeah… You might want to go ahead and do that.”
“He put a grenade in my boot once,” Chachi called over. “Pin pulled and all. Woke me up for a full week.”
Teacup smiled happily. “Yeah. That was a fun one.” He turned and started walking away. “Come on, gents. I went out and got strapatsada for everyone. Better get to it before it gets cold.”
One by one, we slowly got up and made our way to the common area. Boomer said a quick blessing over the food, asking God to keep his team safe and for help in finding Kathleen. Then we ate. The strapatsada was seasoned to perfection. The eggs had been cooked in a puree of olive oil, thyme, pepper, and tomatoes, before a sprinkling of feta cheese was added.
Back home, Denny, the cook at The Reef, was always hunting for a new recipe to try out. This dish was definitely going to have to get on his list. We ate in relative silence and were nearly finished when Chachi’s phone rang. He looked at his number and then back at us. “It’s Solon, my ex-brother-in-law.” He stood up, answered it, and walked away from the table.
“Come on, big money,” Boomer muttered.
Chachi returned a few minutes later. “Okay,” he said, “here’s the deal. Solon’s been running his tattoo shop for over a decade. So he knows some pretty hard dudes. Last night, he put his ear to the ground and thinks he can get us in front of a guy who might know something. Given the scenario, he’s not comfortable talking about it over the phone.”
“So what’s next?” Boomer asked.
“Since the whole team doesn’t need to go in on this one, I figured you would want yourself and Savage to take the lead. So he’s expecting the two of you. I let him know I wouldn't be coming but to call me if anything changed. Oh, and he’s a cool guy, but a little heads up… He’s from the streets. Think the leader of a Mexican gang in L.A. circa 1990. That’s Solon.”
“So Savage should wear his Raider’s jacket?”
Chachi shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.”
“Let’s be gone in five,” Boomer said, “Chachi, are the sedan keys on the table?”
“Should be. I put them back.”
“You don’t ever put them back,” Teacup said.
“Well, I did last night.”
“Right…”
I returned to my sleeping area, got my shoes on, slipped my SIG into the back seam of my jeans, and met Boomer at the front. “You ready?” I asked.
His aviators were over his eyes and the car keys in his hand. “You’re damn right. Let’s roll.”
We took Motorway 1 south into the heart of Athens and merged onto Motorway 8, riding it west toward the coast and the Bay of Phalerum. Chachi’s contact had indicated he was willing to talk, but not beneath the gaze of the neighborhood where he lived and worked. So he sent us farther west, where he could talk freely without fear of being observed.
After exiting the motorway, our directions took us through a neighborhood of single family homes, past a series of quaint shops and local eateries, and down a sandy lane that terminated at a public park atop a cliff overlooking the bay. A full repertoire of playground equipment was positioned around a wood-framed pavilion providing shelter for a dozen brightly painted picnic tables.
Boomer pulled into an unmarked parking space, and we got out. Two young mothers stood near the slide watching their small children play. An older man sat on a bench near the cliff’s edge, staring at the vastness of the bay spread out before him. The only other person was a sturdy man sitting at one of the picnic tables, preoccupied with the contents of his phone.
We made our way over, and as we stepped beneath the pavilion, he looked up, pocketed his phone, and stood up. “You Chachi’s friends?” We confirmed, shook hands with him, and took our places across from him.
His features were large, his head shaved, his fingernails painted black, and a tattoo of the Virgin Mary decorated his forearm.
A steady breeze ran off the bay, stirring my hair and the palm trees that flanked the park. In the distance, a container ship moved south out of the Gulf of Elefsina, no doubt heading for the Port of Piraeus several miles to the south.
I thanked Solon for meeting with us. “I hear you and Chachi were related at one time?”
“Yeah...yeah. He was married to my younger sister for a while. Me and Chachi always got along. I went to America to visit them a few years ago for their Thanksgiving holiday. He and I smoked cigars, drank a lot of whiskey, and even went to the range to shoot some of his guns. If I’m honest with you, I like him a hell of a lot more than I like my sister.” He chuckled to himself. “She’s a selfish brat. Chachi’s way too good for her.”
“He’s a good brother,” Boomer said. “He’s saved my ass more than a few times.”
“Yeah,” Solon said. “That’s Chachi for you. Anyway, he came by my tattoo shop yesterday. I was like, damn, I didn’t even know you were in town. Then he told me about the
