Free Desert Ice Daddy by Dana Marton

for every bit of information about his mysterious friend.
    Akeem was fourteen when his mother died, no other relatives in the States. He would have gone into the foster-care system if not for his grandfather, the sheik, who had sent for him. He’d told Flint once that he had almost refused to go. It’d been hard for him to swallow that the old sheik had cast out his mother.
    “Was it like this?” She nodded toward the barren land that surrounded them.
    “Much bigger. In some places it’s all stones, other places it’s brush like this, even grass, then there are vast areas with nothing but sand. No TV, no video games. It was a shock to my fourteen-year-old system at first.”
    “And then?”
    “And then I started to see the beauty of it, the honor of the men of the desert. I’d never seen the place before, but I still felt a connection.” He shook his head. “Can’t explain it. It was like…The best I can explain is collective memory.”
    “But you came back.”
    “First chance I got.” He gave a lopsided smile. “I’m American.”
    He was unlike any man she had ever known: strong, honorable, carried himself with dignity, had always been there for the others. Flint considered him his brother, more so than the half brother they shared and hated discussing. Like Flint, Akeem had achieved great success. But sometimes she wondered if he ever felt at home anywhere.
    She hadn’t. Not in a long time. Not even at the ranch, despite the best efforts of Flint and Lora Leigh and Lucinda.
    They walked on in silence, stopping only to drink. Akeem had brought along several bottles. Hopefully enough to last them until tomorrow.
    Tomorrow, she would get Christopher back. She had to believe that.
    They sat out the noon heat under a group of acacia trees and talked about his business. When the temperature cooled to bearable, they resumed walking again. They stopped for the night early, could have walked more given the light but decided it was better to save some energy for the next day. Who knew what it would require of them?
    She helped him pitch the tent. They ate cold rations of smoked meat, bread and apples, courtesy of Lucinda, then drank sparingly.
    “Should we light a fire?” she asked, not that it was that cold yet, but might get chilly toward dawn. Unless, by some miracle, Flint found them. He would be looking if they didn’t get back to the ranch in a couple of hours.
    “Better not.”
    Which meant, heaven help her, that they were going to have to snuggle for heat. She wasn’t sure she was ready for that.
    Okay, so she’d thought she’d been ready back when she was seventeen, when Akeem had first come home from Aggie, Texas A&M University, with Flint on a visit. He’d starred in the overwhelming majority of her girlhood fantasies. Which culminated on that fateful night at nineteen when she’d been so summarily rejected.
    The whirling sound of a helicopter interrupted the flow of memories before they could have made her blush.
     
    A KEEM WATCHED AS T AYLOR cocked her head, her blond hair falling in waves over her shoulder.
    “Police?” she asked.
    “Either that or one of Jackson’s choppers, or Flint’s Falcon. We shouldn’t call attention to ourselves until we know for sure.”
    The tent was small and a nondescript beige color that blended into the desert like camouflage. There were bushes around that were bigger. They had a fair chance that they might be mistaken for another boulder from a distance.
    But as the chopper dipped low to scan the flat land, it did come to hover right on top of them. Akeem looked through the mosquito netting of the window. “Cops.”
    “Oh, man.”
    He waited for them to set down, trying to figure out what to say. They were about to catch some serioustrouble for not telling the authorities about the ransom demand, for coming here alone. And they’d be summarily taken out of Hell’s Porch, questioned for as long as the cops saw fit. When the next call could come at any