But this guy was wearing heavy motorcycle boots, so the instep thing wouldn’t work. And these sinewy types could be surprisingly strong.
Maybe she ought to take up knitting. If only to get in the habit of carrying something long and sharp around with her.
Inside the Plugged Nickel Tom Petty was singing about American girls and she could feel vibrations against her butt, which was both reassuring and not. It meant there was life inside, but if she screamed, it was entirely possible no one would hear it. Out here in the deep dark sticks, they might mistake it for a fox or a coyote or maybe even a bigfoot.
“My car’s right over there.” Ezekiel gestured to an old Ford something deep in the “parking lot,” an expanse of flattened dirt, entirely unlit, near where her own truck was parked. “Let’s go heat each other up in the backseat.”
“Thank you for the invitation, Ezekiel,” she said brightly but firmly, “but I have to get back inside and finish my shift.” She took a step away from the wall, toward the door.
His hand shot out and closed around her arm.
And he held her fast.
She slowly looked up at him. Absolutely speechless with outrage.
She tugged just a little.
That son of a bitch didn’t let go.
Oh, poor Ezekiel. This wasn’t his lucky night. She was in the mood to do some damage.
“I’m going to need you to take your hand off me. Now,” she said very, very softly. It was very nearly a hiss.
“Aw, don’t be like that.” He used his grip on her arm to lever her back up against the wall. “In a few seconds you’ll be begging for my hands all over you.”
He was still standing too close for her to be able to get a knee up into his gonads.
But then he dumbfounded her by releasing her and turning his hand around to drag it down along her face in a caress. As if they were in a romantic comedy and he was the seductive hero.
She had a hunch this was a move he’d used with some success before.
She didn’t breathe. She kept her eyes even with his black ones. And when his hand reached her chin she turned her head, ever so slightly into his hand, like a cat surrendering to pleasure.
“Yeah, that’s it, baby,” he murmured. “I’m going to rock your—”
CHOMP. She sank her teeth hard into the meat of his palm like a puma.
There was no way his scream couldn’t be heard over the Tom Petty inside. It could have shattered windows.
He staggered back just a little, far enough for her to get her knee up, but just as she was about to deliver the coup de grace to his nuts, his eyes bulged, he made a hideous gargling noise and levitated about two feet off the ground.
It was a few seconds before she realized he was dangling from Eli’s fist. The various metal elements on his uniform—his badge, his gun—glinted like stars against the dark and came into focus first. Above that, his face was stone and as cold as that moon.
He’d snagged a handful of the guy’s vest and shirt and hoisted him like a sack of flour.
She spat on the ground, gasping. She tasted beer and smoke and salt from the peanuts Leather Vest had been scrabbling around in on the bar.
She wiped at her eyes, which were leaking tears of fury and sucked in a shuddering breath.
They didn’t make alcohol in a high enough proof to rinse the taste of that guy’s hand out of her mouth.
“She bit me!” Leather Vest wheezed.
Whiny asshole.
“Go inside, Glory.” Eli’s voice was calm as death, and she wouldn’t have blamed Leather Vest if he’d wet himself right there.
She was still furious. “Let me take a whack at him first. He looks like the world’s ugliest pinata hanging there from your hand.”
“Go . . . inside.”
She heard the words the fuck sandwiched in between the Go and inside clear as if he’d actually said them.
Her judgment might be a little awry but she wasn’t stupid.
She almost but not quite did as ordered. She pushed the door open and stepped inside, but she stayed next to the door frame, leaving it open a few inches.
Eli’s voice was almost conversational. “I can snap your spine like a twig and throw you down that embankment and everyone will think it was an accident. How many strikes you got on your record already, Ezekiel?”
Ezekiel didn’t answer. Which was answer enough.
Eli raised his voice. “You wanna charge him with assault, Glory?”
Of course he knew she was listening. Just as he’d somehow known she was about to fuck up again. She wondered just how much of her exchange with Leather Vest he’d overheard.
“She bit me! I . . . barely . . . touched her!” the guy wheezed out.
This was essentially true.
Eli loosened his hold and the guy’s feet touched the ground.
“Don’t charge him,” Glory called. “But he should know I’m part gypsy and I just cursed his privates. If he ever touches a woman against her will ever again, they’ll shrivel like raisins and fall off.”
She had no idea where that came from.
“Colorful,” Eli said neutrally after a moment.
She closed the door behind her.
Whatever Eli decided to do next, she didn’t want to see it.
But doubtless it would be by the book. Eli did love him some rules. Even if it destroyed the lives of people he loved.
She sat down at one of the scarred wood tables inside the Plugged Nickel and waited for Eli to come in and give her hell.
She managed to lift a hand in a sort of general farewell as Carl shooed the rest of the stragglers out the door. One of the speakers was making an unnerving zzzzt zzzzt sort of noise, like a fly caught in a spider web. Carl shut the music off.
The ensuing silence practically rang. She was alone but for Carl.
“Don’t bother getting up, Glory. I’ll just put the chairs up, Glory,” Carl told her, oblivious to the little drama that had gone on outside. “Don’t strain yourself, Glory. No need to help, Glory.”
That was some fine sarcasm.
She was going to have to tell him she was quitting. No matter how much she needed a job, she could see now that she really couldn’t work here. The ugliness would suck her under like quicksand and not even she was equal to it.
She watched the second hand jerk its way around the old neon Schlitz clock over the door about five or so times until Eli returned and settled in across from her.
She couldn’t quite look up into his face yet. Not directly. She aimed her eyes somewhere past his shoulders, which meant aiming them some distance away, because his shoulders went on for yards, it seemed.
It wasn’t as though he didn’t know she was scrappy. He knew that if she was going to fight for anything or anyone, she always went all in, no holds barred.
But now that all the fury and adrenaline had ebbed, she was embarrassed. And ashamed. She didn’t want to need Eli. But she’d wound up biting a guy in the back of a seedy dive in large part due to her own stubbornness. And Eli, who knew her better than anyone, had probably anticipated it even if she hadn’t.
“His real name is Todd,” he said finally. “He has priors.”
The of course he does went without saying, so neither of them said it.
She didn’t ask whether he was cuffed in the back of Eli’s patrol car, or whether Eli had snapped him into a few pieces like he was made of Legos and hurled all the parts into the canyon. Probably not on the last one. After all, rules were rules. Eli did love him some rules.
She cleared her throat. “Thank you,” she said stiffly.
Eli just gave a short nod.
She couldn’t get a read on his mood, either. He was distracted and subdued, and he seemed full of the need to say something, but he wasn’t saying it. For a number of reasons, Eli never used superfluous words.
But whatever he said was always worth hearing.
His hair used to flop down over his forehead. He’d been a litt
le vain about it when he was a teenager. It was now buzzed no-nonsense short, which made the planes of his face—cheekbones like battlements; a right-angle jaw softened by the dimple in his chin; a nose with a slight bump, which she knew was from when he broke it trying to jump a big rock with his mountain bike back when he was twelve—seem even more uncompromising. He had this way of not blinking, and his eyes seemed silver in some lights and a sort of pale blue in others, and he had a way of fixing them on you that made you feel like the only important person in the world. It was like he could see right through to the contents of your soul, so you might as well yield your secrets.
She’d once found standing in the beam of his gaze the safest place in the world.
Useful quality in a cop.
He’d never been pretty. Not like her ex-boyfriend, Mick Macklemore, anyway.
Still, she never really wanted to look away from Eli.
His eyes dropped to the table, and she realized he was following the movement of her finger. She was tracing an old scar dug into the table. Someone had carved FUC into the veneer. She wondered whether they were someone’s initials or whether someone was rudely interrupted in the process of immortalizing the thing that she and Eli probably would have done to each other that night if they hadn’t been interrupted, too.
She jumped when, behind her, Carl noisily clunked a chair up onto a table, just in case she’d missed his earlier sarcasm.
And still neither she nor Eli said a word.
And for a brief vertiginous moment, it was like they’d never even met. Like that table between them was as vast as the sea and they were on separate skiffs floating farther and farther apart.
“Anyway, Todd won’t be bothering anyone around here anymore.”
“Well, that’s good news. I know how you love to get those bad guys off the street, Eli.”
Eli’s head went up slowly. And he stared at her in something like cold amazement.
But she couldn’t help it. She wasn’t even really sorry. Every time she tried to tamp the hurt and anger down, it popped out again, like Whac-A-Mole. She didn’t know how or if that could ever change.
He stood up, slowly, resolutely.
She looked up at him. Way up.
She felt the collision of their gazes physically. A ping at the base of her spine that rocketed through her like the puck on the carnival strong-man machine.
For a moment he stared down at her. But all he finally said was “You should make better decisions, Glory.”
And then he walked out the door.
Chapter 3
Eli stripped off his uniform a piece at a time and chucked it into the washing machine and threw in two of those squishy little detergent pods instead of one, because psychologically that’s what it took to get the scent of the Plugged Nickel out of his clothes.
He pivoted and frowned at his living room, which was the living room of the house he’d grown up in. Something seemed off.
And then he realized it was just a matter of contrasts. Glory was like an old rabbit ear antenna that tuned into his truest self. He felt funnier, freer, lighter around her. The whole world felt brighter.
And now the world had gone back to being a shade too dim.
Fuck it.
He scooped up the mail he’d dumped on the counter and sank down on the couch in his boxers to rifle through it: Bill, bill, discount coupon for a new restaurant in Hellcat Canyon, bill, bill, a shooting range coupon, an intriguing plump manila envelope from his mom in Sacramento, bill, bill, a postcard from his college ex-girlfriend, Courtney. He paused to peruse that one. Palm trees, big blue ocean, white sand beach. Admittedly a pretty appealing view. She’d taken a job in Miami and she’d wanted him to relocate with her. Plenty of law enforcement jobs there.
Instead, he’d broken up with her and had taken the job in Hellcat Canyon.
He turned it over and read:
Still think you’re crazy not to come here.
He sighed and tossed it aside.
He slit open the envelope from his mom and pulled something out. He unwound a few miles of bubble wrap and finally found a silver frame around a newspaper clipping.
BARLOW EARNS COMMENDATION
Sheriff’s Deputy Critical to Busting
NorCal Drug Trafficking Ring
Alongside the columns of text was a photo of him, caught by the news photographer mid-interview with a television reporter, all serious and strong jawed and buzz-cut. The caption read, “Deputy Eli Barlow of Hellcat Canyon was critical to the multi-agency law enforcement effort to take down a Northern California meth distribution network.”
The article recapped everything that had gone down to lead up to the awards ceremony.
Jonah’s name and photo were in that article, too.
Much smaller.
He was freshly buzz-cut, too.
But orange really wasn’t Jonah’s color.
“Jonah Greenleaf of Hellcat Canyon arraigned on charges of meth distribution” is what it said under his photo.
His mom had affixed a Post-it note to the back of the frame. It had a row of little tabby cat faces across the top. His mom was a sucker for anything with kitties on it. Funny, because she was one of the toughest people he knew.
So proud of you. Your dad would be, too.
Xoxo Mom
Every day he came home alive was a victory in his mom’s eyes. Still, she’d love putting that commendation in the family Christmas letter.
She only lived a couple of hours away, but she still liked to send him little gifts, clippings and so forth, so he’d have something to find in the mail. A few weeks ago she’d sent him his grandmother’s engagement ring with another little note: “In case you might want to give it to someone anytime soon.” She might as well have added: “P.S. You’re not getting any younger.”
He remembered seeing that tasteful antique, a ruby flanked by two little diamonds on a gold band, on his mom’s hand. His grandmother had been a tasteful antique herself, a patrician woman who had struggled to adjust to the idea of her Ivy League–educated daughter marrying Zachary Barlow, a small-town sheriff’s deputy.
His grandmother had learned to love his dad, though. She had a heart as huge as Hellcat Canyon. Just like his mom.
Eli glanced down and saw that his knuckles were white. Maybe he was hanging on to a lot of things a little too tightly.
He opened the coffee table drawer, shoved the frame in, and slammed it shut.
Which is what he’d done with every photo of Jonah.
Except for one. It was on the side of the refrigerator, way in the back, where he could only see it if he was reaching into the cupboard and could mostly pretend it wasn’t there. Glory was in that one.
If only he could slam all inconvenient emotions and memories into drawers and forget them.
Eli let his head fall back against the big plump macho leather couch—which was his one splurge when he was promoted to head deputy, though he was still getting used to how it looked in the middle of the family living room—and closed his eyes. And he released a sigh so deep and endless it was like he’d been holding it his entire life.
“It was your influence keeping Jonah on the straight and narrow, Eli. See what happened practically the minute you left Hellcat Canyon?”
That was his mother’s way of trying to comfort him. His mother had never quite approved of his friendship with the Greenleafs.
Hell. She might actually be right.
Jonah had always thought rules got in the way of getting what he wanted, which was having a good time. He was forever looking for short cuts, for loopholes, for shades of gray. And sometimes this was fun and sometimes with this was trouble and often even the trouble was fun, and he’d never had a rudder because he didn’t have a dad.
Eli was his father’s son. But he’d also learned all on his own that for him, rules were the short cut. Otherwise you unfailingly had to go back and learn something you’d skipped in an attempt to get what you wanted faster, or
stop to clean up some mess you’d made on the way.
Or, like Jonah, take a plea bargain and go to prison for five years for helping to transport meth one town over.
It amounted to the same thing.
Jonah had been a very small part of a big operation.
But it had been the biggest betrayal of Eli’s life. And even as he kind of understood how it all might have come about, the fury and hurt had been white-hot. Then cold and hard as granite.
His mom had never understand the appeal of the Greenleafs. Which for Eli was the loving chaos of their house. The defiance and resourcefulness and humor in the face of not-quite-poverty. How funny and quicksilver and kind and game for anything Jonah was, and how being with them had been like taking a hit of oxygen and was as colorful as Disneyland.
His mom may or may not have an inkling about his true feelings for Glory. She hadn’t wanted him to take the Hellcat Canyon job instead of heading to Miami, that was for sure.
Eli pushed himself up off the couch abruptly and strode to the fridge, reached back and pulled that one remaining picture down from under its magnet. He took it and a Snapple back to the couch with him.
It was a shot taken in spring. He and Jonah, gangly, floppy-haired, shirtless, impossibly thin and long-limbed in their cutoff shorts. Eli never really felt the passage of years until he saw himself like that. They were both about eleven years old, their skin golden-brown and smooth, almost shining like metal in the sun because they were still so . . . new. They were washing the battered old Greenleaf car and Jonah was aiming the hose at Eli.
And there was Glory in pink shorts and a white shirt, about eight years old, her black hair all the way down to her butt. Glory never did have the patience for braids. She opted for one big ponytail in the summer, either behind her, like an actual pony, or to the side or up on her head, like a fountain. Most of the time her hair sailed out behind her, because she liked to flourish it, like a magician with a cape. Her mouth was wide open and her eyes had disappeared and her arms were crossed over her stomach because she was laughing so hard, so hard it was like she could hardly bear it. He used to tease her that he could see all the way to her tonsils.
Wild at Whiskey Creek Page 3