Cold Snap by J. Clayton Rogers Page A

a new section. Petite, Large, Divorcée....
    "I'm not clear on this," said Ari. "Of what
advantage is it to tell Diane her father will not be back?"
    "I tried the other way first, letting her
think he might come through the door any time. She became so wound
up that every noise she heard was Daddy trying to get back inside.
The day you came knocking at our door, she thought Ethan had
forgotten his key and she was racing to let him in."
    "But you stopped her because you thought
there was a madman at the door...?" Ari cast his eyes over the tubs
of ice cream within the glass counter.
    "I didn't know who was at the door."
    "You didn't want her to open the door to a
stranger...?" Ari persisted.
    "All right, I thought it might be Ethan."
    "Which only added to your disappointment when
you saw...me."
    "My reaction was less than gracious," she
said, deflecting Ari's smile with one of her own. He thought very
few people failed to improve their appearance when they smiled. The
Vice President might look like evil incarnate when he forced a
grin, but the President shined like a little boy.
    "It was perfectly understandable." He sought
an explanation that would suit American ears, and came up with the
all-purpose, "I was under a lot of stress. It must have shown."
    "No kidding. You took the beating of a
lifetime."
    "Oh, it wasn't all that bad." No, just beaten
to within an inch of my life.
    "I won't say 'if you say so', because I know
it isn't so. That was stress par excellence. But we weren't talking
about your behavior."
    "Ah, but you were under much stress,
too."
    Rebecca was in her late twenties, fresh and
attractive. She must have made a favorable impression on Bristol
when she appeared at office parties with her husband. There was a
juvenile element to the way men displayed their wives, like kids
showing off their toys. Ari had behaved similarly at one time,
until it became apparent how dangerous it was to show off one's
beautiful spouse in the Republican Palace...especially when a
sexual predator who wielded immense power was in the vicinity.
Someone like Uday Hussein, who on several occasions had approached
Rana, flashing his bucktooth grin and making his intentions clear.
But Uday no longer presented a problem. Ari had seen to that.
    "At least I wasn't beaten," Rebecca
sighed.
    "When one has lost contact with one's husband
or wife, it comes to the same thing," Ari said from experience.
    "That finally brings us to the point of being
here," Rebecca nodded, staring at her empty cup. She glanced up.
"Aren't you going to have anything? I hate eating in front of you
like this."
    "In the cafés of Paris, one can sit all day
with no more than a couple of espressos…"
    "Paris?" She lifted a hand to point at the
liquor store next door and the strip mall across the street. "We
don't offer much competition. None, actually. Here, you have to
spend money or vamoose."
    "'Vamoose?'" Ari inquired, liking the sound
of the word.
    "Skedaddle."
    Context was everything and Ari nodded, adding
these two new words for a hasty departure to his vocabulary. He was
preparing to rise for a better look at the ice cream tubs when
Diane sidled up, giving Ari a hard glance before telling her
mother, "My cone was real small."
    "You think so?" Rebecca answered
skeptically.
    Diane had treated Ari with brusque
assertiveness when she came to his house in search of Sphinx. With
her mother, however, she was more circumspect. Her reasoning was
softer, as though she was luring a mouse out of its hole, a tricky
procedure that failed more often than not. But the seeming courtesy
did not change Ari's mind about her, which was that she was a
wicked handful.
    Seeing the answer to her dilemma, Rebecca
revoked her doctrine of moderation. She got up and paid for another
cone for her daughter, thereby remaining a paying customer. Diane
retreated with greedy pleasure to join her friend.
    "We'd better rush things along or I'll have
to get her more. She'll gobble everything in sight