Mrs.Wilberforce actually nudged Eli with her sharp little elbow.
He was six feet five inches and in many ways hard as nails, and there was a gun hanging at his hip, but Mrs.Wilberforce might actually make him blush.
The melting-chocolate eyes of Bethany sparkled up at him, reminding him that hewasactually (1) a catch, (2) a red-blooded man who had more than a few moves, none of which he’d deployed since he’d had Glory Greenleaf pressed up against a ponderosa pine, and (3) his resolve of the previous night. Every journey began with the first step, as they say.
“I can show you a little bit of the town if you like, Bethany,” he offered. “I know every bit of it like the back of my hand. Grew up here. I have a few free hours tomorrow, if you’d like to join me.”
Within the hour everyone in town would know he’d just offered to take out Bethany.
“That sounds wonderful, Deputy Barlow. I have a few days before I need to be onThe Rushset full-time, so my schedule is wide-open.”
That sounded a bit like innuendo, too.
He smiled at her as Mrs.Wilberforce beamed triumphantly. “Excellent. Call me Eli.”
Chapter5
Legend had it the Misty Cat Cavern got its current name because the previous owner, Earl Holloway, ordered a neon sign over the phone while he was falling-down drunk. He’dmeantto call the place the Aristocrat Tavern, and he’d pitched a fit when the sign came but he couldn’t afford another, so he hung the one he got and the name stuck. The place had begun its life in the Gold Rush as a saloon with a whorehouse upstairs, and it hadn’t changed much since then, architecturally, anyway. It was said a certain former resident, a prostitute named Naughty Nellie, who was murdered by a jealous miner, had allegedly never left. Some claimed to have seen her spectral face in the upstairs window in the wee hours of the morning, but then, most people who were anywhere near the Misty Cat in the wee hours of the morning were probably pretty drunk.
Poor Nellie couldn’t seem to leave Hellcat Canyon, either.At leastI’mstill alive, Glory pep-talked herself. And she had a plan.
The Misty Cat was now a wildly popular restaurant, and Glenn and Sherrie Harwood had owned it going on two decades now. The food wasn’t fancy but it was pretty flawless and always satisfying, the place was almost always packed, and you left feeling hugged, if only metaphorically. And thanks to some mysterious magical conspiracy between the ceiling height and the aged redwood and the depth of the place, the acoustics were marvelous. Glory had been a regular at the Misty Cat’s open mic nights ever since she was old enough to get in the door with her real ID. (In a small town, there really was no way to get away with a fake ID.) Its famed acoustics were why college and indie bands like The Baby Owls often detoured there on their way to bigger venues up and down California and Nevada and Oregon.
Glory timed her arrival at the Misty Cat for the lull, if one could call it that, between the breakfast and lunch rushes. She pushed open the door and the bells hanging from the handle leaped and jangled frantically.
Everything looked and smelled the way it usually did: the big white board over the grill read “TRY THE GLENNBURGER! SEVEN SECRET INGREDIENTS!” And Giorgio was behind the grill. He was downright soothing to watch when you were hungover after a late night: the slapping, scraping, clanging, and sizzling were like a sort of noisy industrial ballet. He had a certain charisma, maybe even hotness, if you liked your guys irritable and taciturn and enigmatic. Glory didn’t. He didn’t really hold too many mysteries for her. He’d grown up in Coyote Creek and had more relatives in jail than she did, and she’d gone all through school with him. And he rented the tiny flat upstairs at Allegro Music extra cheap (as well it should be, given that it was right over kids learning how to play trumpets and guitars and whatnot), and she’d once seen him shuffling off to the bathroom with his toothbrush and shaving kit tucked under his armpit when his own toilet had backed up.
Sherrie’s crimson hair was heading toward Glory like a beacon born aloft. It was the color she’d been born with, only more so, courtesy of a box she usually picked up at Costco or Walmart, whoever had her shade on sale that week, and her complexion was cured brown by decades of hot mountain summers. Usually the only thing brighter than her hair was her smile, which Glory basked in now, though today it was a contest between her smile and the orange and fuchsia striped shirt she was wearing. She and Glenn had four kids and Glory had gone to school with most of them, too.
“Well, hello, hon! Haven’t seen you in a while. We’ve missed you at the open mics! Did you phone in a to-go order?” Sherrie seemed genuinely delighted to see Glory.
“Um... no. No, I didn’t, actually.” In a flash everything at stake made her palms go damp.
“Oh... do you want a table, then? You can have a seat right over there, if you want. See where that pink flyer is?” Sherrie waved a hand.
It was a Baby Owls flyer.
That clinched it for Glory. She squared her shoulders. “Actually, Sherrie... I came in to see if you might be hiring. I heard you might be short a waitress, since Britt is moving on.”
What ensued in the wake of that sentence was a sort of cosmic record scratch.
Sherrie’s smile congealed.
Giorgio froze, spatula mid-air. He looked absurdly like a swarthy marching band conductor.
The only thing moving was the ceiling fan. Glory could see its reflection in the laminated gleam of the menus Sherrie was clutching.
“Oh!” Sherrie said brightly, finally. “Well!”
And that was all she said. Her smile didn’t shift at all.
But Glory could practically hear her brain gears whirring like the blades of the fan overhead.
And she didn’t say a word.
Glory cleared her throat again. “I didn’t know whether you’d hired anyone yet, so I thought I’d, you know, just, inquire...”
Sherrie had apparently come to some silent accord with herself, because she re-animated. “Well, hon, let me... let me just go and get you an application. We’ll need to get your particulars from you.”