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him he must be some kind of asshole to think that she needed protection from a Pat Hastings pass, and why hadn’t he just tossed her over his shoulder like a caveman and stormed home?
    They stood listening to the beach sounds for a moment. Pat lit another cigarette.
    “You’re not hiding any cookware in your pockets, are you?” Pat said, exhaling to the sky.
    Dan gave a halfhearted laugh. Back in those days, he thought that was what finished marriages—a little grabass in the kitchen.
    “Not my finest hour, Patrick. Thanks for the reminder.”
    “I wore a cast for two months. Bones just wouldn’t knit right.”
    Dan decided to change the subject. He needed to get away from that memory of fighting like a fool, like an asshole, of letting his temper rule the day.
    “I tell you what,” he said. “Being back in the States about killed me.”
    “Yeah. Once you unlock the golden handcuffs,” Pat said.
    Pat didn’t need to finish the thought. They both knew the cliché: Come out from under the covers of State Oil life and you can hardly stand the sight of the bright world before you. You barely know how to pay taxes. You miss the gold souq and the extravagant vacations. You miss the power of the income and the right to complain about it. Hell, you even miss the possibility of having it out with a cane-wielding mutawa over the length of your wife’s abaya. On the outside, too much was uncertain, and company life was hard to part with. After college, he and Carolyn had come to the Kingdom at Rosalie and Abdullah’s urging. What will I do without you idiots around? Abdullah had asked. The money was easy, no taxes, free housing, a pool, and great schools for the kids. Things were great until they weren’t, when Carolyn started staring out windows for long stretches, sleeping through the afternoons. She missed her family, missed driving, missed the Pacific. So they left.
    Now expats were leaving in droves. Not for the first time in Saudi Arabia, the religious freakos had started speaking with their swords, and everyone—Saudi, American, Brit, Lebanese, Bangladeshi—was anxious.
    “Were you in town when they took the hostages over at Palm Court?” Dan asked.
    “Yeah, at the office. They sent us home for the day, but I live in the Grove so I didn’t feel much better there.”
    “Shit. I went to Abdullah’s. A Saudi home seemed like the safest bet. Didn’t want my ass within ten miles of anything expatriate.”
    “I went down to Ras Ayatin pretty soon afterwards and the compound was like a ghost town. People dropped everything and left,” Pat said. “I almost did too. My best mate out here, Richard Cleig, lived next door to the English bloke who got dragged down the street behind the car at Palm Court.”
    Dan shuddered. Palm Court was the nicest expat compound in Al Dawoun, a heavily guarded city within a city that housed foreigners and served as the corporate headquarters of several global oil groups. Last winter, he had fought hard to get B-Corp to put him up there, dreaming of Olympic-sized pools and five-star restaurants. They’d shot him down, citing the prohibitive length of the waiting list, but Dan knew it was just too expensive for the company tightwads. So he stayed on at Prairie Vista, with its single National Guardsman keeping watch, its splintery, faded sign and constituency of rotund British and American men whose cynicism wilted the frangipani flowers as they passed the perimeter hedgerow. Thank God for those B-Corp tightwads, or he may have ended up with a jihadi smile—that toothless, bloody grin that gaped at the base of the throat. Nine people at Palm Court were killed when the radicals stormed the compound, separating Muslims from kuffar, unbelievers. With a shiver, he wondered if the heart stopped in moments like those, when disaster confronted the fragile body.
    “What the hell are we still doing here, man?” Dan asked. “You forget things so quickly. Even a bloodbath. Just get lost in