Dedication
To everyone brave enough to start over in a new place.
May you be as happy as Britt and J.T.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By Julie Anne Long
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
You could turn over any given rock and find a more appealing collection of organisms than the folks gathered in the Plugged Nickel tonight, Eli thought.
Or to put it another way, it was a pretty typical night at the Plugged Nickel.
Of course, they all looked as innocent as a black velvet painting of dogs playing poker. If he possessed X-ray vision, he knew he’d see the odd unregistered firearm strapped to a back, knives shoved into boots, drugs safely hidden in butt cracks or rushing through the pipes in the men’s room. Much like actual dogs, they seemed to have heightened senses, at least for when the law was about to show up.
He hovered just inside the doorway and listened: Clink, hiss, slam, crash. The clink and hiss of bottle caps being yanked off, the bottles slammed on the bar for the customers, the empties hurled with gleeful violence into a big recycling bin. The mixed drinks here were strong, cheap, and careless—you could order the same one again and again, and it would never taste the same twice. The music was usually loud enough to vibrate the molars clean out of your mouth.
He hadn’t been inside the place for several months. Carl, the Plugged Nickel’s owner and bartender, had been uncharacteristically circumspect on the phone about why he might need Eli tonight. The Plugged Nickel generally didn’t invite the law to visit, which its customers appreciated.
“Well, there was an argument between four guys. And now there’s a poker game going on, Eli.”
“. . . And?” Eli could afford to be patient. Nothing was happening in Hellcat Canyon tonight. It was Tuesday, though bingo could get pretty cutthroat at the town hall, thanks to the rivalry between Elysian Acres and Heavenly Shores Mobile Estates. Given his clientele, Carl usually liked to police them himself, though a surprise visit from a deputy now and again kept them all from relaxing completely.
Carl cleared his throat. “. . . And I think the prize is a woman.”
Eli frowned. Nothing made ugliness go down faster than a drunken fight over a woman. Especially in a place like the Plugged Nickel, which in its storied history had primarily distinguished itself as a haven for people who had nothing to lose.
“Guess I can pay you a visit,” he’d told Carl, dryly.
He took a step deeper in and paused and leaned against the wall, getting the lay of the place. The Wall. That had been Eli’s nickname in high school. Because he was big and quiet and you couldn’t get anything or anyone past him on the football field. It had its advantages: it was how he’d honed a gift for swiftly noticing things—physical details and emotional nuances and minute anomalies, where Waldo was on a page or the perfect split-second gap on a football field to hurl a ball through to the receiver or how Glory Greenleaf’s lashes were a sort of mahogany color at the very tips, where the sun got to them. His powers of observation were probably in his DNA. His dad had been a cop, too, and they kind of came with the territory. But life’s vicissitudes had honed them.
He scanned the customers, mostly men, gathered at the scarred wood tables, and his eyes lingered on four guys seated at a table against the wall, heads close together. He knew three of them by name and reputation; the fourth was a stranger. Tension practically rose from them like steam.
And then he saw the real danger—in more ways than one—standing behind the bar.
His heart flipped over hard.
What the hell was Glory doing here?
He had a hunch this was why Carl had called him.
Her sheet of straight black hair was thrown carelessly over one shoulder; her chin was propped in her hands. Her soft old jeans molded the unmistakable curve of her behind. Her expression was complicated. A little amused. A little sad. A little wicked. A jaded, wistful quirk at the corner of her mouth, which, he knew, was where a dimple lurked. As if she’d set something in motion, an experiment, and hadn’t abandoned all hope of being surprised, but she wasn’t holding her breath.
Either she hadn’t yet seen him or she was deliberately ignoring him.
His money was on the latter. Given she’d managed to do that for going on nearly a year now.
So while he practically sprained his neck with the effort required to keep his eyes aimed at those men and not at her, he was conscious of the other customers shifting and rustling, either turning or straining not to turn to look at him as he wound his way through to the four men. His presence had the kind of weight that disturbed the atmosphere.
He paused next to the poker players.
The card players slowly, simultaneously leaned back in their chairs and put their cards down. Clearly someone with a badge had told them more than once to keep their hands where he could see them and it was a reflex now.
The guy Eli had never seen before kept a grip on his cards and looked up at him.
It was a long way up. Eli towered.
This guy had sulky lips and movie-star cheekbones and a narrow white scar running from his cheekbone to his chin. But he was aging fast in a way that Eli recognized. It came from a hard life of doing bad things. He was wearing a leather vest, which struck Eli as frivolous, maybe even a little vain. Jeans, t-shirt, a gun, boots—what more did a guy need before he left the house in the morning?
“Evening Dale. Hey, Boomer. How’s parole treating you?”
“Can’t complain, Deputy,” Boomer Clark said, polite as a boy scout. He was a blocky guy, a little dim, good-looking in a forgettable way, and an unpredictable drunk whose first impulse was to shed what he apparently viewed as the terrible burden of wearing clothes. Eli had once been compelled to pin a naked Boomer to the sidewalk on Jamboree Street and cuff him, which hadn’t been easy since Boomer had been a wrestling champ in school. It was an intimacy Eli hoped never to repeat. Even if an audience had gathered and clapped at the conclusion, and the Hellcat Canyon Chronicle had printed a photo of the excitement, in which Eli looked triumphant if a trifle queasy and they’d pixelated Boomer’s penis.
“Put in a garden this year, Eli,” Dale Dawber volunteered. “Got some squash, beans, artichokes. If you need tomatoes, I’ve got ’em coming out of my ears. Even built a trellis to train them. Working on building a greenhouse. For the tomatoes,” he hurriedly added.
“Good to hear your green thumb isn’t going to waste.”
Dale had produced a nice little crop of marijuana some time back. Law enforcement took issue, and Dale did some time.
“Heh.” Dale smiled at that. Albeit a little cautiously.
“Ramon,” Eli continued evenly. “How are things?”
Ramon Barros had gone to high school with Eli, and he knew Jonah. He said nothing. Ever since the thing with Eli had gone down, Ramon wouldn’t say a damn word to Eli if he could avoid it. He did nod, though. He didn’t have enough ne
rve to freeze him out completely.
A brief taut silence was interrupted by The Black Crows bursting out of the speakers. One of which was buzzing and was due to blow soon, Eli reckoned. Speakers didn’t have a long tenure here at the Plugged Nickel.
“We haven’t met.” Eli turned to Leather Vest.
The guy stared at him. “Ezekiel.”
Oh, brother. If his real name was actually Ezekiel, Eli would eat one of the pickled eggs that had sat on the bar since it opened in 1975.
“Your mama give you that biblical name in the hopes that you’d behave yourself?”
“Ha.” Ezekiel’s eyes were so dark it was hard to know where the pupil ended and the iris began.
The no-blinking thing was boring. For about a thousand reasons, Eli couldn’t be intimidated.
“You all know you can’t be betting in here, right?” Eli said it almost gently.
Not one of them was fooled by that tone.
They’d seen what Eli had done to Jonah Greenleaf, right here in the Plugged Nickel.
They all knew what Eli could do in general.
No one replied.
“Not playing for money. Are we, boys?” Ezekiel, or whatever the hell his name was, was all sly bonhomie.
The other three guys looked every which way except at Ezekiel, Eli, or Glory. Who, Eli was certain, was watching all of this raptly.
Eli hovered over them a moment longer, like a threatening weather system that could break any second.
“Well, I’ll let you get back to your game. Now that I’m sure you’re not betting. The Misty Cat Cavern might be interested in buying your extra tomatoes, Dale. The profits might be a little modest compared to your last crop, but what the hey.”
“Heh. Thanks for the tip, Deputy,” Dale said with more than a little relief. He seized his cards again.
Finally Eli moved over to the bar.
He leaned with his back against it, rested his elbows on it.
He didn’t look her in the eye. Not yet.
He finally spoke.
“Your TV broke, Glory? You were watching that poker game like it’s Game of Thrones.”
For a moment—that moment so like the one after you trip over something and you don’t know whether you’ll be able to break your fall—he thought she might keep freezing him out. God knows he’d never known her to do anything by halves.
“Watching men act like idiots is about the only thing there is to do on a Tuesday night in Hellcat Canyon,” she finally said.
“I hear knitting is another constructive way to pass the time.”
Anybody strolling by would have thought this was a perfectly innocuous conversation.
But Eli’s first memory of Glory Greenleaf was a blur and a splash: she’d hurtled past Eli and her brother Jonah on her plump five-year-old legs and thrown herself right into the swimming hole at Whiskey Creek just so she could say she’d done it first, just to impress her older brother and his friend, and just because it was something she hadn’t yet done.
Glory didn’t sit still for much, unless it was to play her guitar. Knitting would send her around the bend.
So that sentence was almost painfully intimate. It contained decades of memories.
And these were the first words they’d exchanged in months.
“Why?” she said finally. “You need a new Christmas sweater, Eli?”
When he was eleven, his aunt had sent him a Christmas sweater featuring three reindeer walking single file. He’d hated it until Glory pointed out that it looked like the reindeer were sniffing each other’s butts. And then he’d worn it all the time.
Heartened, he finally turned around to look at her.
Damn. It was like spring on the heels of a bad winter, looking into her blue eyes.
She was smiling faintly, too.
“Maybe.” He held her gaze.
Once he had talked to her more easily than almost anyone, Jonah included. But layer upon layer of unspoken things had created a nearly tangible barrier between them. Ironically, not unlike the glass that separates a prisoner from a visitor.
He suddenly felt just as much a prisoner as Jonah Greenleaf, trapped by his inability to say the words that would shatter that invisible barrier. He was trussed in a complicated knot of emotions, all of them volatile, none of them compatible.
And it was probably too late to learn eloquence. He’d spent a lifetime letting actions do most of the speaking for him.
Whereas Glory . . . Glory could sing a single word and make it sound like an entire story, full of nuance and ache. And she could write a song and then pull you into it when she performed, like it was a whole world unto itself. Eli had football trophies, a law degree, a gun, and a badge, but those felt like Muggle achievements compared to what she did, which was alchemy. She made it look easy. He knew it wasn’t. Most people thought she was utterly fearless. He knew she wasn’t. They’d grown up together, teasing and fighting and playing, but somewhere along the line he knew he’d be happy to just be Sir Walter Raleigh to her Queen Elizabeth. The person who laid his metaphorical cloak over mud puddles, making it safe for her to be her dazzling self.
He had a hunch it wouldn’t matter. There were probably no right or safe words at the moment, even if he could come up with them.
Maybe there never would be.
He was proved correct when the faint smile dropped off her face and she turned from him abruptly. “Maybe you can use all that free time in your squad car to make yourself a new sweater, Eli. You know, in between getting hardened criminals off the street.”
That sentence edged all around in little thorns.
A surge of impatience made his back teeth clamp down.
So be it.
He wasn’t sorry about what he’d done to Jonah. Only that he’d had to do it.
“I just might do that,” he said evenly. “Think I’d be good at it, in fact.”
Once the very idea of Eli with knitting needles would have made her laugh.
Now her expression closed up again and she folded her arms across her chest. Then realized what she was doing and lowered them and plucked up a coaster from the bar and twiddled it in her fingers.
Her nails were cut short as usual and painted scarlet, and she’d striped them, for some reason, in silver. Glory did a lot of things just because. He knew the fingertips of her left hand were callused from holding down the strings on her Martin acoustic guitar. They’d probably been tough since she was twelve. Unlike nearly every other member of her family, Glory was willing to put up with a little pain in the service of something beautiful.
He remembered how those fingertips had felt sliding up the back of his neck in the dark.
The bands of muscle across his stomach tensed to withstand an echo of that shocking pleasure, and everything else that came after that.
He’d been able to see the stars up through the branches of the pine she stood against before he’d closed his eyes.
She’d closed hers first.
That was the moment he’d realized with epiphanic clarity that even when they’d seemed to be moving in entirely different directions—when he was a jock dating the cheerleader who was always on top of the pyramid, and Glory was dating that stoner idiot Mick Macklemore who’d had a really enviable GTO . . . even when Eli had left Hellcat Canyon for the police academy and law school and other girlfriends and she’d stayed behind working one crap job after another and was still with that dip Mick Macklemore—somehow it felt like they were still moving toward each other. If life was essentially a big Rubik’s Cube, then every twist and turn, every meeting and parting, everything they’d ever said and done was necessary to get them to that moment at that party outside in the backyard up against that ponderosa pine.
She’d broken up with her boyfriend. He’d broken up with his girlfriend. He was returning to Hellcat Canyon for good. And she was finally leaving Hellcat Canyon for good.
Suddenly it was perfectly simple. The risk in making a move that could end
their friendship suddenly seemed to evaporate in light of the fact that he might be losing her forever. And as they’d talked, they’d moved closer, and closer, and he’d reached up to pull a tiny leaf from her hair. That was a signal.
She knew it.
And she’d closed her eyes first.
As if she’d been waiting for that moment all along, too.
About two minutes later their tongues were twined and his hands were down the back of her jeans and her hands were up the front of his shirt and hot on his skin and they were just about climbing each other when a loud, tipsy cluster of friends poured into the backyard.
They sprang apart, got swept off into different cliques, and then a half hour later Eli left to work the late shift and he couldn’t find her to say good-bye.
Two nights later, he’d arrested Jonah Greenleaf for meth transportation about five feet from where they both stood now.
And BAM!
Glory had brought the full force of her stubbornness down, guillotining Eli out of her life.
She wouldn’t return his calls. No one ever answered the door at their house.
She stopped showing up for open mics at the Misty Cat.
And as the months went on, he figured she’d finally left for San Francisco.
He was left to feel like a cut live wire, arcing and sparking. Haunted by that click of the cuffs as his own hands had trapped Jonah’s familiar hands in them and by the expression on Glory’s face when he dragged his best friend out of there. She’d been sitting across from Jonah, nursing a beer, because she didn’t drink all that much.
But then . . . Eli had popped into the Misty Cat a month ago on an open mic night on a hunch when he was duty. And there she was on stage.
He’d tried calling her one more time.
No answer.
Fuck it. He knew she was hurt. He knew she was furious.
But so was he, and he had every right to be.
Maybe, in fact, more of a right than she did.
That stiffened his spine. He was here on business, so he might as well get on with it.
“Carl was a little concerned those four gentleman believe they’re playing poker for your . . . let’s get Victorian about it and say favors, Glory. Which could get ugly. Know anything about that?”
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