Cold Snap (16 page)

The road ahead was clear to the next corner.
Ari slammed the gas pedal. The Sonata picked up pace.

The man came out of nowhere. When Ari hit him
the xB shuddered while the pedestrian was flung up and sideways.
Ari stopped and jumped out.

The victim was sprawled between two parked
cars. Ari did not have time to check on him. He reached into his
pocket as the Sonata pulled up.

"Hey Ace, don't go postal."

Whirling, Ari found himself facing a small
man, his Oriental face broken by a wide grin. The victim began
brushing himself off.

The Rio came up from the other direction. Men
piled out of both cars. They were all laughing.

"You one hot driver, Ace," said a second man,
strolling over to the victim and smacking dirt off the back of his
shirt. When the victim winced, the second man pulled up his shirt
and pointed at his bare abdomen. "You got a bruise? Hey look, he
got a bruise! You're losing your touch."

The victim gave him a look of irate
puzzlement. "But you want bruises!"

"Not this time. This fish we let go."

Ari. A fish. He was feeling like one at the
moment. A clown fish. The men backed away cautiously as he stepped
forward and glanced inside the Sonata. On the back seat lay a rod
and trigger device that he had mistaken for a gun. It seemed to be
some kind of portable speaker. The scream on the road. The
swearing. They had been broadcasted from this thing.

"That's our Mojo Loudmouth," one of the men
grinned.

"Very clever." Ari briefly considered
shooting them.

"How did you know where I was?" he asked. For
an answer he received another cascade of laughter.

"Don't you care. Just stay away from A-Zed.
We don't like Jap smell."

"I'm not Japanese."

"Didn't say you were. Just smell like
one."

"Mi chin nom," said Ari.

Koreans to a man, their laughter twisted out
of recognition, until they sounded like a wardful of patients who
had undergone tracheas. Ari understood this was mind-numbingly
stupid behavior on his part. He had not seen a gun, but for all he
knew they were packed to the gills. Summoning up his memories of
meetings with Nodong missile representatives, he decided Koreans
were not overly sensitive regarding aspersions on their sanity. Not
even North Koreans. Of course, the men he met were more or less
salesmen. You could tell a salesman to shit in his socks and he
would do so with a smile, so long as he had a 50-50 chance of
cinching a deal.

The driver of the Rio, the one who had
brushed off the wholly convincing victim, signaled the others to
back away.

"You watch ass, Ace," he said, sauntering
back to his car. "Next time we don't just break fender. We break
face."

Ari considered cramming the whole lot of them
into a bean can, but settled for a blank face. People just hated
poker faces. Well, he did, at least.

As they pulled off, the sound man in the back
seat of the Sonata stuck out his sonic monster.

"EAT SHIT AND DIE!"

"Lick my testes!" he bellowed back in his
best non-amplified voice. Going around to the back of the xB, he
studied the two-inch gash in his fender. He felt eyes upon him and
looked up to see roughly a dozen perturbed suburbanites staring at
him from their front lawns. One man spoke up bravely:

"We don't tolerate gangs in our
neighborhood!"

"The gang banging is intolerable," Ari
agreed, getting into his car and driving off before anyone thought
to take down his license plate number.

Ari hated to admit he was rattled, but when
he almost ran down a line of school children at the Forest Hill
intersection he realized the need to compose himself. He braked at
the last moment. When the school crossing guard swiveled her
handheld Stop sign and threatened to behead him with it, Ari
lowered his window and jabbered vigorously. She looked him over,
gave the Scion's hood a hard slap, and returned to her charges.

Ten minutes later he was pushing a cart up
the grocery aisle in Walmart, grumpily dwelling on the miracles
Madame Mumford could wring from this lovely produce, while he could
only concoct vile pools and shattered remnants. He wondered if he
was the only man alive who could char a stew.

Hearing a cart approach rapidly behind him,
Ari quickly sidestepped and turned. Deputy Marshal Karen Sylvester
took rather sadistic glee in ramming his ankle tendons, and he
preferred to defer her delight.

"Deputy Karen," he said.

"Sylvester," she said, a little put out when
she missed her target. She looked at Ari's ankles longingly. "I got
your message. What's the emergency?"

"May I register a complaint, first?"

"I've got ringing in my ears. They call it
tinnitus. I have to leave now and see my doctor."

"How is it you bought me such perfunctory
pots and pans when you stocked my safe house?"

Ari had grown accustomed to the deputy's
brimming silence, which would have amounted to gaping in someone
else. He could not understand why she should be so continually
astonished by cogent observations.

"Huh?"

"When I arrived at my new house, I found
aluminum artifacts! Even tin! Is this the way you treat guests in
your country?"

"I got you the same kind of pots and pans and
utensils that I use," she said. Her eyes narrowed, as if she
suspected this was leading up to something more reasonable, and
disturbing. But Ari had reached the crux of his complaint.

"You could not oblige me with cast iron?"

"'Cast iron' what? Hey, you want Cuisinart,
talk to Uncle Sam. Ever hear of a budget?"

Karen's short flared hair prickled the
air.

"Budgets are limitations. I wish to
expand."

"Then expand the damn budget. 'Emergency',
Ari. That's the word you used. What is it? Did you find a sniper in
your underwear?"

"I need you to lead me," said Ari as he
fondled an eggplant.

"Do I have to confess it? Then I confess it:
you constantly surprise me. Lead you where?"

"To a furniture store." Ari scowled at the
eggplant, as if he knew what he was doing and passing judgment. He
thrust it back into its bin with an angry fillip, as he had seen
all the best shoppers do. "I need to fill my house."

"You got the basics," said Karen, avoiding
his eyes. "That's all that was agreed to."

"I recall no such agreement."

"It was inferred. It's called 'reality'." She
paused, then added, "I'm glad you're looking better."

"For which I have you to thank," said Ari
sincerely, thinking of the meeting Karen had arranged with his
wife. "I won't forget."

"Are you sure?" Karen eyed the ranked
vegetables indifferently. She was a meat and sweets girl. "You seem
pretty aggressive this afternoon."

"I had a little bender on the way here."

"'Fender bender'? I guess that's what you
mean, unless you started early on the JD." She drew close and stood
on her tiptoes, as though to sniff his breath. Ari frowned and
jerked away.

"I hope and pray your tracking device wasn't
harmed."

"You're serious? You got dinged? Crap."

"I have insurance," he said.

"We gave you insurance papers."

"You mean I'm not properly covered?"

"Maybe you should bring the car down to our
garage." She gave her empty shopping cart a thump. "It's still
drivable?"

"Yes, alas."

"But now that you've brought up the GPS
tracker...mind telling me what you were doing way up in Caroline
County yesterday?"

"It's very natural up there."

"At a junk yard?"

"I stopped to ask if anyone could direct me
to the buffalos."

"You scare the shit out of me, Ari. And I'm
begging you not to tell me how harmless you are, again. So that's
the emergency? You want to see buffalos?" She thought a moment.
"They might have some at Maymont."

"In a herd?"

"I guess your problem's not urgent, or you
have told me about it by now." She glanced around. "We need to move
on."

"Are we becoming conspicuous?"

"Maybe. It's this spinach and stuff. Gives me
the willies."

"It was your decision to hold our
transcendental meetings at Walmart," he said.

"Crap, come on."

They moved on to the frozen foods department.
Ari peered through a frost-tinted freezer door.

"I'm getting the feeling you weren't joking
about a furniture store," said Karen, tossing a box of frozen
waffles in her cart.

"It's a matter of life."

"And death? Furniture? Really?"

"It's of excruciating importance to me."

"It's excruciating, all right. You want me to
set up a remedial English course for you? You seem to have dropped
a few loops."

"Pardon?"

"You used to talk like a butler. Now you talk
like the Dali Llama. I thought your skills were supposed to improve
if you lived in the country whose language you were trying to
learn."

"Ah, the diversion method."

"'Immersion'. I think you're
brain-damaged."

"Have you actually listened to the way your
countrymen speak?" Ari continued. He raised a finger. "Even here.
Stop and listen to the various dialects."

"I'd rather not," Karen said uncomfortably.
"Listen, I'm willing to show you a furniture store. Not today. I
have stuff to do. I'll let you know. And you'll have to deal with
the sharks."

He gave her a bemused look.

"The salesmen."

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was a functional house, small, one story,
no basement. The architect could very well have been a one-legged,
one-armed, one-eyed man who considered the layout perfectly normal,
who had never seen a third dimension that met his approval. Who
considered four limbs redundant.

As Ari entered behind his host, Lawson called
out: "Freddie! You here?"

A young face appeared from a back room.

"Good. Dinner ready? What's left of my
stomach is growling."

Freddie stared at Ari.

"This is Mr. Ciminon. He's my guest. He was
pestering me at work, but then it was closing time and I thought
I'd let him pester me at home. You understand?"

Freddie nodded. "He eating?"

Removing his fedora, Lawson turned to Ari.
"You like baby food?"

"Is it like dahl?"

"I don't think so." He turned to the boy.
"Freddie, he's only here for a bit." He hesitated. "Help with the
coat, first."

Painfully shy, Freddie eased into the room
like a sickly commando, hugging the wall as far as he could, then
twisting past the furniture as though fully prepared to duck for
cover.

"Mr. Ciminon is a guest, not an assassin,
Freddie." He glanced at Ari with a dark eye that seemed to say, 'So
far as I know,' but apparently he considered such jokes unwise
around the boy. Easing over to his uncle, Freddie reached up and
curled his fingers around the coat collar and waited until Lawson
shrugged. The coat rode up and Freddie pulled down. He stooped a
little under the weight and hefted it onto a nearby coat rack.

"The gloves?"

"Just the one on the real hand. I don't think
Mr. Ciminon wants to see my phony."

Ari found this a little theatrical. Lawson
had already guessed that Ari had 'seen it all'.

"You want the jacket off?" Freddie asked,
reaching for the collar of Lawson's sport coat.

"Hold off for now. This is a formal
meeting."

Without waiting to be asked, or risk putting
Freddie to more embarrassment, Ari doffed his coat and hooked it on
one of the rack's wooden pegs.

"Make yourself at home, Mr. Ciminon."

"If that is the case, please call me
'Ari'."

"Ari Hairy," said Lawson nonsensically as
Freddie disappeared into the next room far more quickly than he had
entered.

"My sister's boy," said Lawson, working his
almost non-existent lips into a grimace. "A bit on the slow side. I
think she was taking Ecstasy when she conceived him."

And she wasn't executed for it? Ari thought
but of course did not say.

Lawson worked his way to an easy chair and
stiffly lowered himself down. Both he and the chair emitted a sigh
of pure pleasure. While Ari invited himself to sit on a pale taupe
couch, Lawson reached across to a pack of Pall Malls sitting on a
lamp table. Using one hand, he removed a cigarette and put it in
his mouth. He took out a lighter.

"You know, my company's planning to ban
hiring smokers?" he said. "Stupid fuckers."

"Indeed," said Ari, taking out his own
pack.

"You need to hold on a minute, now. This is
my venting period."

"Pardon?"

"You stupid fuck, that's the dumbest idea I
ever heard. I don't care who died and made you boss—you need to die
and make someone else boss. What's it like, staring at an asshole
every time you shave?"

Ari stared as Lawson drew a deep breath.

"Those are just a few of the things I should
have said today and didn't. We're not supposed to hold things in,
but that's what civilization is: a giant gasbag ready to blow.
Oh...forgot one: What are you gaping at, pighead? You never seen a
wounded vet before?"

Ari shrugged his confession. "I was marveling
at your wrath, not your wounds."

"Where is it you said you were from?"

"Syracuse."

"I presume you don't mean New York.
So...Syracuse. Great. What family do you hail from? I guess bashing
in a few heads is what you call seeing 'everything'."

"My family has departed the island."

"Not that family. You know. Family.
Provenzano, Piccolo, Bagarella..."

"Those people are alien to me."

"Yeah. Alien. That's good to hear. It
wouldn't do my reputation none too good bringing the Cosa Nostra
into my house. Sort of like inviting a vampire through your front
door."

"No Mafia, I assure you."