by Liz Ireland
Cody’s look implied that there were some in town who thought she’d reached that point a while back. “I’m sympathetic, I really am, but what can I do?”
“You could put me in jail every chance you get,” she pleaded.
He shook his head. “I told you—I can’t just lock you up for no reason.”
She gestured around the tidy, scrubbed cell. “It’s not as if you’re running a high-volume business in here. There hasn’t been so much as a phone call since we arrived. Face it, you’re the Maytag repairman of deputy sheriffs!”
“But it’s a matter of principle. I can’t just toss anybody in jail who wants to be here.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t tell me that if you let one person do it, you’ll have to let everyone. I haven’t heard that old saw since grade school!”
His lips thinned into a determined line, and she began to fear her plea was falling on deaf ears. “It’s just not right. My uncle would find out. And don’t ask how, because he always finds out things. And he would say that it’s not our job to make it easier for you to have a social life.”
“Okay, fine.” She lifted her chin. “But what’s the good sheriff going to say when I really start to run amok?”
Cody looked at her doubtfully. “We’ve handled you okay so far.”
She grinned. “Well, get ready. ’Cause you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, Cody Tucker.”
RUBY’S WARNING rang in Cody’s ears for the next week, keeping him on edge. Every time he turned around, he expected Ruby to pop out at him, or that he would be called to haul her out of some new scrape.
Why him? he kept wondering. Why couldn’t she have played on Sam’s sympathies, or Merlie’s even?
Then he thought of his uncle. Sam was the very picture of an old West lawman—tall, with dark hair and blue eyes and a rugged way about him, for all his kindness. When he needed to, Sam could produce an icy stare that could make a person feel as if Gary Cooper were glaring at him.
And Merlie…well, good grief. She might have a heart of gold thumping beneath those overalls, but who knew it besides Cody and Sam?
Looking at it that way, Cody decided it was obvious why Ruby Treadwell was preying on him to help her. Because he didn’t have a tough exterior. He wasn’t Wyatt Earp.
He should have been a rancher.
Feeling restless the next Friday, he turned his footsteps toward the center of Main Street, Heartbreak Ridge’s only street, where Althea’s Nail Boutique and Hair Salon nestled between the Western Auto and Trilby’s Drugstore. Since it was before nine, he ducked into Althea’s.
At one time, Heartbreak Ridge had boasted a fine barber shop; unfortunately, Henry Kirby passed on ten years ago. The men of Heartbreak Ridge lost one of their cherished friends and favorite meeting places, and what’s more, within a matter of weeks they’d all begun looking like hippies. A few sneaked to barbers in other towns, but it wasn’t the same. They missed the camaraderie of Henry’s. Some took to cutting their own hair, but seeing the results of such butchery proved too much for Althea, who started opening her boutique early in the morning for the benefit of both the men of the town and the women, who wearied of living around men with peculiar hair.
In the mornings there was usually a crowd, which in Heartbreak Ridge terms meant four or five men sitting around the pink vinyl bench drinking flavored coffee, waiting their turn for the proprietress’s scissors while surrounded by old posters of pouting fashion models in various stages of hair length and style.
This morning Althea was working her magic on Doyle Stumph, owner of the Stop-N-Shop grocery, who barely had any hair to speak of anyway. Cody’s cousin, Jim Loftus, was sipping a cup of chocolate almond mocha, and next to him on the pink bench sat Earnest Stubbs, flipping through the latest Glamour.
“Well!” Jim exclaimed, his round face lighting up when Cody ambled in. “If it ain’t the deputy!”
Cody smiled. His burly, friendly and ever-so-shady cousin always had something to talk about. Lately the topic was the raffle he was having to get rid of his old broken-down wreck of a house on Heartbreak Ridge, the bluff that stood a mile above the town. The whole town had laughed when Jim had announced his intention to charge strangers one hundred dollars apiece to enter his contest—the dilapidated house was barely worth that much. But to everyone’s shock, once the ad was published in several magazines and on the Internet, the envelopes started pouring in, each containing the money and a required one-page essay stating what the author would do with the house if he or she became the lucky winner.
If you could call winning lucky in this case. Receiving the plumbingless pile of lumber perched on the edge of a cliff would be a dubious prize, at best. Unbeknownst to the contest entrants, the house resembled the artistic sketch Jim had made of it for his ads the way a blue-footed booby resembled a swan.
“How’s it going, Jim?”
Jim puffed up proudly. “Five hundred!”
Five hundred contest entrants? Cody was stunned. Five hundred times one hundred…Maybe he shouldn’t have been a rancher. Maybe he should have become a swindler!
“Five hundred suckers!” Earnest said, shaking his head. “Welp, the man said there was one born every minute.”
Looking into Jim’s face, you could almost see him doing the math. “Lord, I hope so.” He frowned. “Though lately it seems to me that the volume’s fallen off.”
“Maybe you’ll get a second wave,” Cody said.
Althea slammed down her scissors. “I’m shocked at you, Cody Tucker. Surely you don’t approve of your cousin’s scheme!”
Cody shrugged as he poured himself a cup of coffee. He did like the flavored kind, he thought, feeling a little traitorous to Henry’s memory. “Jim will be Jim.”
The stylist clucked her tongue and whisked Doyle’s nonexistent hair away from his nape. “And you used to be such an upstanding, high-minded boy,” she joked, then glared at Jim. “See what kind of influence you’re having? Now even our most model citizen is going to the dogs.”
Jim straightened, and his eyes widened innocently. “That’s not my fault. If anyone’s to blame, it’s that Ruby Treadwell!”
Cody froze. People were talking about him and Ruby?
Earnest looked at him, aghast. “Good Lord! You don’t have anything to do with that little hellion, do you?”
Cody shook his head frantically. “She just spent some time in jail last Friday, that’s all.”
“Best place for her!” Earnest said. Cody was surprised to see the normally sanguine hog farmer turn irate; maybe Ruby had that effect on people. “My son Lon made the mistake of taking her to the bowling alley in Fort Davis once, and he lived to regret it! Ruby got them booted out of the bowling alley.”
“For what?” Jim asked.
“Well, first she violated a few rules, like tossing herself down the lane instead of the ball.”
Cody frowned at this mountain-out-of-a-molehill scenario. “She probably just slipped.”
Althea tsked. “Listen to him sticking up for her!”
“Anyone’s likely to slip on those slippery floors,” he said.
“Not if she’d taken off her boots, she wouldn’t have,” Earnest argued. “And did she have to get in a shouting match with the alley’s owner? Lon said he was completely humiliated.”
Cody cocked his head, curious. “Were her brothers there?”
“Yes, thank heavens! Two of them just happened to be using a lane nearby and offered to take Ruby off Lon’s hands.”
“Those poor boys,” Althea said. “That gal is just a millstone around their necks!”
Cody wondered. Maybe there really was a reason she felt so frustrated and trapped. God knows he felt trapped sometimes in his job, but at least he knew that if he ever told Sam he didn’t want to be a deputy anymore, Sam wouldn’t twist his arm until he agreed to stay. Whereas it sounded like those brothers of hers really had Ruby in a jam.
“I don’t think she’s half as bad as people
say she is,” Cody said. For instance, what would the people here think if he told them Ruby was a virgin? He bet they wouldn’t even believe him.
Looking into their faces, he was sure of it, in fact. They were gaping at him as if he were a lost soul.
“Every town has their bad seed,” Jim declared, “and I guess Ruby’s ours.”
Cody couldn’t believe his ears. Jim was saying this? Jim? “Good grief, Jim, you’d hornswaggle your own granny!”
Earnest laughed. “But that’s not saying you should get mixed up with Ruby, Cody.”
“Especially when there are so many nice girls available.”
“There are?” Jim asked, clearly amazed by the notion. “Who?”
Doyle swiveled toward them. “How about Leila Birch?”
Cody realized he hadn’t thought about Leila for days.
“She’s been working at my store for a while now, and she’s a good little worker. Hasn’t called in sick once, in fact.”
Althea laughed. “Cody would be wanting to date her, Doyle, not hire her.”
“But I don’t want—”
Doyle spoke right over him. “Well, who would want to date someone who was unreliable?” he asked. “Take Ruby, for instance. She’s never had a job in town that I can think of.”
“She works on her family’s ranch,” Cody said, unable to keep from jumping to her defense. “She’s practically a top hand.”
Frowns met this declaration.
“Oh, Cody,” Althea said mournfully, “why don’t you ask Leila out someday soon, before somebody else snatches her up?”
Before Ruby snatches you away and corrupts you, was the underlying meaning Cody gleaned from her plea.
The trouble was, the more he thought about all the talk against Ruby, the more sympathetic he felt toward her, so that as the day proceeded, he became a little impatient to see her.
By that evening, he was parked behind a stand of live oaks near her house, waiting. He watched the Treadwell driveway for almost an hour, anticipating the moment when a red Ford Mustang, Ruby’s car, would peel out of the drive toward town.
Finally, as the last rays of sun were waning across the hillside and he was about to doze off on top of the steering wheel, Ruby’s car suddenly appeared. But it didn’t peel or streak off down the road. She turned onto the little country highway at a reasonable speed.
Cody waited a few minutes, then pulled his car out and followed a good distance behind. For years he’d heard Ruby was a crazy, reckless driver; he’d given her a few tickets. But he was beginning to suspect that she was mostly a fraud. Heartbreak Ridge’s own hell-raiser drove sedately all the way to the outskirts of town. When they started passing houses, she sped up, did a couple of gravel-spewing turns and zipped into the parking lot of the school gym, which doubled on select Friday nights as a dance hall for square dancing. In the parking lot, she skidded to a stop and parked so crookedly that her small car took up two spaces.
When she hopped out of her vehicle, Cody’s jaw all but dropped into his lap. Ruby’s getup was bar none the strangest one he’d ever seen her in. Overdone would be an understatement. Her hair was slicked against her head, and she wore a tall, sparkling rhinestone tiara. Her face was made up in dark blue eyeshadow with black pencil lining her eyes, deep blush highlighting her cheeks and lipstick as red as the jewels she was named after making her mouth a dark, sensuous slash. A ridiculously long hot-pink feather boa was wrapped around her neck and waist, and her dress—such as it was—seemed composed completely of translucent scarves so that she practically fluttered when she walked. She’d left her cowboy boots at home in favor of a little pair of white ballet shoes.
Cody killed the car’s engine with mixed feelings. Lord only knew why he was doing this. Maybe it was the memory of those eyes of hers, like bright, shiny marbles sparkling at him. Or perhaps it was the thought of a desperate virgin hurling herself down a bowling lane toward freedom. Maybe he had a weakness for people in a jam.
Before she could get any closer to the gymnasium door, he yelled after her. “Ruby, hold up!”
She turned in a flurry of feathers and scarves and waved at him. “Hi! What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here? And what are you doing in that outfit?”
“You sound like one of my brothers.” She crossed her arms, creating a racket because her wrists were weighted down with bracelets and bangles. “Don’t tell me you’re here to check up on me!”
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s Friday night, and I know you’re up to no good.”
Wine-dark lips pursed at him. “What makes you think that?”
“For one thing, you as good as told me you were going to pull some kind of stunt. For another, you look like someone dressed for the dance of the seven veils, not square dancing.”
She stomped her slippered foot, and scarves fluttered around her. “How did you guess?”
He grabbed her arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
Her dark eyes rounded. “I can’t go anywhere now—I’ve got work to do. I’ve been practicing all week!”
“Practicing what?”
“My striptease.”
Good heavens! Cody cast a glance towards the entrance of the gymnasium—the gymnasium that was probably stuffed with half the over-sixty population of Heartbreak Ridge and no telling how many others from surrounding towns, lured to their gym by some good old-fashioned square dancing. Fiddle music wafted on the hot summer air, and there would soon be whooping and hollering as men in their best Western shirts and women in flouncy piles of petticoats strutted their folksy stuff.
“Ruby, are you out of your mind? You might as well wait till Sunday and do your striptease in the Baptist church.”
She tilted her head as if considering the suggestion.
He tugged on her arm and started toward the car.
“Hey! Who do you think you are, Eliot Ness?”
“I’m giving you what you want.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “What?”
“A free night in jail.”
She dug her feet in, but a smile beamed across her face, a smile so bright that like a bolt of lightning it nearly stopped his heart. “Oh, Cody! Just this once?”
That unexpected smile made him capitulate completely. “For as many Fridays as it takes to get your brothers to ship you out of town.”
She hopped with glee, and then she spun, sending her seductive little scarves swirling around her. For a brief moment, Cody was sorry he wouldn’t get to see her sexy gymnasium striptease, but when he remembered the many other eyes that would be on her, he was glad to have cut short the career of Heartbreak Ridge’s budding Gypsy Rose Lee.
She tripped behind him toward the truck. “I’ll never forget this, Cody. When I’m out of Heartbreak Ridge and having my romantic adventures, I’ll never forget that I owe it all to you.”
He nodded as he climbed into the truck and buckled his seat belt. “Fine. Send me a postcard. Just don’t tell anyone around town I did this.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
He lifted a brow dubiously.
She crossed her arms, clanking those bracelets again, and looked contentedly out the window. Crazy or not, Cody decided, there was something sexy about all those feathers and bangles and gauzy little scarves she was wearing.
And something definitely crazy about the way his mind kept trying to imagine what it would be like to tug her toward him by one of those veils, pull her into his arms and kiss Ruby’s delectable ruby lips.
3
“DISORDERLY CONDUCT?” Sam leaned against his desk, amazed. “Where?”
Cody rocked on his heels, trying to act casual. Unfortunately, retired Boy Scouts didn’t make the best liars.
“At the gym,” Cody answered, deciding to stick as close to the truth as possible. Otherwise he’d never get away with this. “During the square dancing.”
“I didn’t hear anything about trouble over there,” Merlie said.
&n
bsp; “How could you? It just happened.”
Merlie leveled a suspicious gaze on him. “Nothing gets by me in this town.”
“Who lodged the complaint?” Sam asked.
“Well, um…” This was where the matter turned truly thorny. “I guess you could say I did.”
Merlie and Sam exchanged stunned glances.
“The fact is,” Cody admitted quickly, “she didn’t actually create a disturbance. She just almost did. So I decided to use my…deputal discretion.”
Merlie whistled. “Deputal discretion! You hear that, Sam? Your nephew’s creating whole new words and avenues of law!”
His uncle looked flabbergasted. “Almost? You can’t arrest someone for almost creating a disturbance!”
“Well, I did,” Cody announced. “Unofficially, of course. I fully intend to let her go in a few hours.” When his uncle continued to stare at him, he lifted his arms in innocence. “You two go back into the front office, take a look at that getup she’s got on and tell me it wouldn’t have caused an uproar. And I happen to know that she was planning a striptease.”
It was hard not to flinch under his uncle’s continued scrutiny.
Merlie cackled. “Looks like we’ve found Cody’s Achilles’ heel, Sheriff. Show him a gal in a short skirt and a feather boa and he suddenly forgets all about things like habeas corpus and the Constitution.”
“I didn’t forget. I just interpreted them…differently.”
“I gotta hear this,” Merlie drawled, sinking into Sam’s chair. If that was a breach of jailhouse etiquette, no one noticed. Most of the time Merlie ran the place, anyway.
“Well, it’s true that you’re not supposed to arrest someone before they’ve done something wrong…in most cases,” Cody began. “But say there was a bomb threat at the school, and when you arrived on the scene, you found a man outside the building with a ticking, brown-paper-wrapped package. Wouldn’t you take him in?”
Sam rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t nominate him for criminal mastermind of the year, that’s for sure. But yeah, I guess I’d take him in.”
Encouraged, Cody rushed on. “Well, that’s sort of what happened in this case. Last weekend when Ruby was here, she warned me that she was going to pull another stunt, and so I decided to keep an eye on her this evening and followed her to the gymnasium. Believe me, Uncle Sam, when she got out of her car in that feathery getup with all that makeup, there was no doubt in my mind what she was about to do.”