Congdon didn’t need to tell Eli about fucking up a shot. He was about to fuck up his own, if he didn’t leave for Sacramento in the next hour.
“Mr. Congdon, this woman is unforgettable,” he said swiftly.
It might have been a tactical mistake. He’d failed to keep all of the emotion from his voice.
And even as he said it he knew precisely how it sounded: some rube was deigning to offer an opinion to Wyatt “King” Congdon. Like some rube who was probably doing the woman in question.
“I won’t forget that she wasted my time, if that’s what you mean.” Congdon said this with a sinister sort of vagueness. His thoughts were already somewhere else entirely.
And then Congdon put his hands on his chair arms and leaned forward, preparing to get up out of his chair.
Like a mirror reflection, Chen did the same thing.
In one swift movement Eli whipped his handcuffs out and slapped one of them on Congdon and the other to the chair. Click.
Justin Chen sat back down hard in shock.
“What. The fuck . . .” Congdon yanked his arm upward. He wasn’t going anywhere.
He turned to Eli, his face white with the kind of fury that could curl and blacken the leaves on the trees for miles around.
Didn’t even singe Eli, however. He was made of stronger stuff.
“You’ll thank me later” was all he said.
Chapter 19
Before he got in his car, he’d dragged the cement planter outside and pushed it up against the door, then darted around back and did the same thing. Congdon and his assistant weren’t going anywhere.
“False alarm at the Misty Cat,” he calmly radioed Owen. “No need to respond to any other calls from there. I repeat: no need to respond to any calls there.”
Owen was quiet a moment. “Um . . . Eli? Everything okay?”
“I’ve got this, Owen,” he said tersely. “Just assume that I’ve got this.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Okeydoke, chief,” Owen said. “Good luck.”
Bases covered, Eli actually switched the siren on.
It occurred to him that what he’d just done was as melodramatically asinine as anything out of Blood Brothers. Irony of ironies. He could lose his job over this. He could lose his whole career over this.
There were a lot of coulds.
They were unimportant at the moment. Because his superpower was staring straight into the heart of a situation. If he’d let Congdon walk away, he’d have to live out his life with the knowledge that he hadn’t done a thing to make sure Glory didn’t miss this moment. And that was inconceivable.
If he didn’t find Glory within the next fifteen minutes, he’d go back and free the man and deal with the consequences then.
He floored it, siren wailing. He practically took the three turns between the Misty Cat and the Greenleaf house on two wheels, at speeds that would have made Franco Francone’s Porsche look like his old Fiero. In seven minutes rather than the seventeen it ought to have taken, he came to a screeching halt on the dirt road in front of it. He leaped out of the car, running past a gaping Mrs. Binkley holding a trowel in one hand, and hurdled the picket fence.
Law enforcement leaping out of cars in front of the Greenleaf house: Nothing their neighbors hadn’t seen before.
He thumped a fist three times on the door. “GLORY!”
He stepped back and waited.
It felt like his heart was pounding just that hard on the wall of his chest.
No response. He put his ear to the door.
The whole house seemed inordinately still. It was as if the wind had agreed not to stir a single blade of grass or leaf on a tree. Like the house was enclosed in some kind of dome.
His heart flopped over hard in his chest with dread.
He tried the door handle. “Glory?”
The door was unlocked.
He put his hand on his gun, and pushed it open slowly, right into their living room.
He almost didn’t notice her, because she was standing in the middle of the room, as motionless as the sofa. Striped in diagonal light and shadow from the vertical blinds.
She looked indescribably pretty: hair brushed to a sheen and hanging down her back, a top he knew she’d chosen because it was blue and had little frills at the arm holes and fit her like a corset. She was wearing a lot more makeup than he’d ever seen her use, all carefully applied.
“Honey . . .”
The word slipped out.
Something was really, really wrong.
He realized then that the reason he’d noticed the makeup at all was that she was stark white.
“What are you doing, Glory?” he said gently, reasonable as a hostage negotiator. “You need to grab your guitar and go. Wyatt Congdon is waiting for you at the Misty Cat.”
She swallowed audibly. “Can’t.” Her voice was a sandpapery whisper.
“You can’t . . . what?”
“Grab my guitar.” Now her voice was louder than it ought to be. As if she’d lost her ability to calibrate. She sounded almost blackly amused. “It’s gone.”
Shit.
“Glory Hallelujah Greenleaf, look at me.”
She obeyed. Reluctantly.
Her eyes were red-rimmed. The mascara she’d carefully applied was smudging beneath her eyes. Water resistant. Not waterproof.
God help the person who had made her cry. When he found out who it was, they were done for.
“Glory. From the beginning.”
She took a breath and exhaled. “Okay. Eli, I told Franco I wouldn’t go with him to Napa. Not ever. He apparently set this up because he’s not a complete dick and I schooled him. Long story.”
“If you say so,” Eli encouraged her. But a huge dark weight he hadn’t been fully aware was there lifted and sailed away, and suddenly he felt made of light.
“I got up really early and I ironed my shirt. I was alone in the house. Mama has that job with Gary Shaw now? Well, she got up early and she’s out showing a house. I took a shower and did my makeup and then I said a little prayer . . . and I guess that’s not relevant, but that’s what I did. And when went back to my room to get my guitar . . . It’s always leaning next to my dresser in its case. Last thing I see at night, first thing I see in the morning. It was gone. I found this, though.”
She handed Eli a note.
Glory—I took your dad’s guitar to see if I could pawn it to pay for my carburetor. I should be able to get at least a couple hundred bucks for it. I’ll get it back to you, I swear, inside a month.
P.S. Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry
Eli swore so blackly and vulgarly Glory’s eyes went wide and a little real color flowed into her pale face.
“Eli, do you think it’s a sign?” she said desperately.
“A sign your dumbfuck younger brother took it and pawned it. Yeah.”
And now he realized he’d never really been angry before. What he felt now was a whole new emotion. A rage so transcendent it was almost holy. This must be how crusades began.
“I think he just panicked. I mean, we’ve all felt desperate. And technically it is Dad’s guitar. It’s not like it was willed to me or anything. I don’t think John-Mark knows what it’s actually worth. Four thousand dollars, Eli.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Holy shit,” he breathed.
“It’s a classic,” she said dryly. Her voice cracked. “The one lucky break my dad got. I’m starting to think destiny does not want me to leave Hellcat Canyon. Because come on. What are the odds here?”
Eli swiftly counted to ten to get a grip on his temper.
“Listen. That’s bullshit. Glory, it’s time to decide whether loyalty to your family is going to keep you from soaring the way you know you can. The way everyone in Hellcat Canyon knows you can. The way you want to and know deep down you need to or you will just die. They just don’t get it, or he would never have done this to you. This is a sign that you need t
o realize that you matter, Glory. You and your hopes and your dreams and what you want. Fuck John-Mark. For now, anyway. You are going to the Misty Cat, guitar or no guitar.”
Her hands went up to her face. Then she brought them down and filled her lungs with a deep breath.
He was getting through.
He took a step closer to her, the words coming in a rush.
“I know you think I broke your heart, Glory, with the whole Jonah thing. Maybe that’s even true. But here’s the thing: I will be damned if anyone else breaks your heart, and I don’t care whether they’re related to you or not. You are going to the Misty Cat. Now. If I have to drag you there in handcuffs. You’ve got to the count of three. One. Two. Th—”
But even as he counted, a smile grew softly, gradually, until she was clearly radiantly amused.
“Okay, I’ll come, Eli,” she said mildly. She was glowing now, with a light that he felt clean down to his soles. “You don’t have to resort to bondage.”
He was heartened by that little bit of wickedness. He pivoted and threw the front door open. “Then run,” he said.
And she did.
Eli had the engine started before she got the door of his squad car shut.
“I always knew you’d end up in a police car,” Mrs. Binkley crowed after her.
“Damn straight!” Glory shouted gleefully out the window.
And then because Mrs. Binkley would both hate and expect it, Glory levered her torso halfway out the window and hollered “YeeeeeHAAAAW!” when Eli hit the gas with a force that threw them both back in their seat.
She’d never said yeehaw! in her entire life.
He ran two stoplights, wove around two cars, nimbly dodged three deer nonchalantly traipsing across the road, and with a screech of brakes, halted in front of the Misty Cat.
He drove the two of them so fast he wouldn’t be surprised if he’d obliterated the laws of physics and arrived at the Misty Cat five minutes before he actually left.
There was a split second of loaded silence.
He didn’t offer to come in.
She didn’t ask him to.
They both knew she needed to do this on her own.
She smiled at him and no matter what happened next in his life, he’d given her this moment and that smile and just those two things right there seemed the entire point of his life.
“I almost forgot, Glory . . . you’re going to need this.”
And he pressed the key to his handcuffs into her palm.
Wow.
Power almost has a scent, Glory thought. Because the air in the Misty Cat felt oddly like the air before a snowstorm. Portentous. Charged. Icy.
Her senses were so raw and alert she could almost sense the molecules inside that familiar space had shifted somehow to accommodate the sheer volume of Congdon’s legend and ego.
Two men were actually sitting there. They were as silent as if they’d never spoken a word in their lives. The blinds were slit and they were striped like prisoners in shadows and morning sunlight.
Congdon looked up at her. His eyes were the sort of cool, clear blue-gray of old flashbulbs.
If she’d held her hand near him, she was pretty sure she would have pulled it back dripping with icicles.
Her second impression was that Wyatt “King” Congdon was a surprisingly slight man for someone who possessed terrifying power. He was that Los Angeles sort of skinny, and his complexion so alight with health and tending, he radiated in the Misty Cat like a parking lamp. He hadn’t a visible line on his face and only a few visible hairs on his head.
Sitting with him was a very good-looking young Asian guy with the hippest haircut she’d ever seen.
They didn’t do any of the things men usually did: they didn’t lean farther back in their chairs to give themselves a full-length view of her, they didn’t shoot to their feet and fall over themselves to impress, their pupils didn’t flare to the size of quarters.
Pretty women with excellent racks were as common in their world as trees were in Hellcat Canyon, and came in as many varieties.
“I’m terribly sorry to keep you waiting.”
Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. Like she was hearing it through a pillow.
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Her pounding heart was sending blood to her ears, that was why. Rhythm. Everything about the body was a rhythm, she realized then. It was an oddly comforting thought.
“If I’d had a choice,” he said tersely. “I wouldn’t have, Miss Greenleaf.”
He gave an illustrative tug.
He was handcuffed to the chair! Holy crap. That might be the hottest thing Eli had ever done.
Pushing the planter up against the Misty Cat door so they couldn’t get out was the second hottest.
Congdon’s voice was pleasant and even and scary as hell.
Boy, was he was pissed. So pissed he didn’t bother to introduce himself or the man sitting with him.
It could already be over, as far as she knew. Given the handcuffs and her tardiness. But she’d made bravado a way of life, and everything up until now had been a mere practice run for this moment.
“I won’t keep you waiting any longer, then.” She drew in a long breath.
And she turned away from them and slowly walked toward the stage. In her current condition, the few feet seemed to elongate as if she were standing before a funhouse mirror.
And she put a little bit more swing into her hips, just because.
She pivoted.
The temperature in the room had changed ever so slightly.
They’d liked the back view quite a bit.
And she knew she could do this. She would charm them to the soles of their feet. She would win their cynical little dollar-sign shaped hearts. She would make them genuinely love her. Love her. She would make them forget themselves and everything else but her voice, and for the next three minutes, she would pull them into the world of her song, a world in which she was the empress and they were the minions.
She knew how to do it, too, with a guy like Congdon:
She would take control.
“If you would be so kind as to give me a beat.” She slapped her hand on the table near the stage in an undulating, martial rhythm. “Bass, SNARE, bass bass SNARE. You know how to do that, right?”
Congdon froze. Then he nodded irritably to the other guy.
Who did as ordered.
He slapped his hand down on the table. Bass, SNARE bass bass SNARE. He had good rhythm.
She moved her shoulders into the beat, and then her hips, and she heard the music in her head as plainly as if her whole body was an orchestra.
And opened her mouth to sing.
She loved the acoustics in that room and today they really loved her back more than ever.
She sang to those two men as if they’d broken her heart and won it all over again. She sang her songs to them as if Eli himself were standing there, and she knew in that moment of pure epiphany that he might as well have been, because he seemed to be with her all the time, anyway. She understood now that his love was the filter through which she saw and felt everything.
Her voice all raw emotion, turning notes into playthings, leaping octaves as effortlessly as she and Jonah and Eli used to skip the stones over Whiskey Creek.
And the sound of her own voice rising in that room seemed to fill her soul like a sail.
She felt invincible and euphoric and utterly peaceful.
And for the duration, those two men did not so much as twitch a hair.
She recognized thrall when she saw it. It meant they wanted to absorb every single particle of sound.
And she released the last word of the song like a sigh, which trailed into vapor on an impossibly high note.
It rang in the room.
She closed her eyes briefly. And when she opened them, like a fragment from a dream, Giorgio emerged from the kitchen and casually handed her a guitar and slipped back into the shadows.
I’ll be damned, she
thought. It was the Alvarez acoustic Dion had been repairing.
Eli must have coordinated that little loan from behind the wheel of his squad car. And somehow gotten word from Dion to Giorgio before Giorgio left his apartment above the music store for work.
You are never alone, Eli had said to her.
She realized the two men hadn’t said a word yet.
She slung the strap of that guitar around her neck as tenderly as if it were a lover’s arm, and in a way it might as well have been Eli’s. Both of those men shifted in their chairs and Wyatt Congdon actually reached with his free hand to touch the back of his own neck as if he could feel her hand on him.
She looked at them in silence for a moment.
Congdon’s pale eyes thoughtful, his assistant’s fixed and stunned. In a good way.
But there was something she needed to do.
She stepped down from the stage. In the silence, her boot heels rang like gunshots as she moved toward them.
And she slipped the handcuff key from her pocket and laid it down in front of Wyatt Congdon.
In the silence of the Misty Cat, the little metallic clink echoed as if she were betting her last dime.
He stared down at the key.
Then up at her, thoughtfully.
His eyes were gray. A gold fleck, like a pirate doubloon, floated in the iris of one of them.
“You wrote that song?”
“Yes, sir.”
She saw evidence of a real thaw in the way his face subtly softened and lit.
“Sing another.” He made it sound like a suggestion. His voice had gone gentle, almost abstracted. Something thrummed in it. If he’d been a mere mortal, she might have called it glee.
“Yes, sir.”
She turned around. And she put just a hint more swing in her hips on her way back to the stage. Let them enjoy that view again.
Justin Chen leaned across to Congdon and whispered, “Your flight is . . . and should I . . . do you want me to . . .” He gestured to the handcuff key.
Wild at Whiskey Creek Page 26
