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Nicole had never been a patient person, but she was polite. A long-suffering single mother of five had seen to that. All the chaos of the Haught household calmed when the four boys and their baby sister had tromped reluctantly into church, unruly red hair slicked back with Dollar Store grease. All the swatted wrists she’d endured when she hadn’t minded her yes ma’am’s and no sir’s over Sunday casseroles had ensured that she was practically a modern-day knight by chivalry standards.
So it was even more frustrating when she had to bite her cheek and watch Waverly smile at her in passing, like any other customer, and go over to the man waiting for a refill. The rope of a braid over Waverly’s shoulder brushed the ice tray as she slid a frosty bottle of beer toward him. Nicole had the absurd urge to jump the bar just to keep Waverly’s hair from getting wet.
“Tucker was really good in the play, I heard,” Waverly was saying, and the burly man, who looked like he could bend a shotgun into a pretzel if he felt like it, beamed. Or at least she assumed so – it was hard to tell under the beard.
“Good! Damn near Willem’ Shakespeare. Didn’t miss a single line.”
Waverly grinned. “Gets it from his daddy, does he?” and to Nicole’s annoyance, the man laughed. Which wasn’t fair of her at all. He seemed good natured. Like, if she pulled him over for a speeding ticket, he’d apologize so sincerely that she’d have to let him off.
Nicole was turning this over in her mind when she realized Waverly had asked her a question. She looked up and, mustering all of her charming reserves, said “Um?”
Waverly raised an eyebrow. “I just asked if you wanted another drink. I think you threw that one back in maybe two seconds? Thirsty?”
Was she ever. Nicole smiled sheepishly. “I guess.”
“Well,” Waverly said, taking the empty glass from between the clutches of Nicole’s grip. “If you’re really nice to me, I won’t even tell anyone that it’s apple juice. Wouldn’t want to tarnish the appearance of coplike ferocity or anything.”
“I can’t drink while I’m –“ Nicole started to protest.
“In uniform?” Waverly countered. “I guess that means next time you’ll have to – oh, Miss Collier, hey!”
As the newcomer to the bar pulled up a stool and began to chat with Waverly about what seemed to Nicole like a whole lot of absolutely nothing that couldn’t have waited for her to finish her damn sentence, she retreated under the shadow of her Stetson to slither out of Shorty’s with her dignity intact.
And it just kept happening. When she’d said “quite the popular girl around here,” she hadn’t meant it to this extent. I mean, good God, did she literally know everyone? Is that what happened in a town like Purgatory? Nicole’s hometown had been reasonably small, but there were – what – maybe a thousand people here? Give or take the cattle? Which was why it made no sense that she had only just been transferred here and was still so weirdly busy. You’d think a town this small wouldn’t have quite so many sudden and mysterious deaths. Or maybe they were just so bored out here that –
“Heya, Haughtstuff!”
Startled out of the sullen path she was trodding, Nicole looked up from her sandwich just in time to see that it was Wynonna who had plopped down on the bench beside her and was helping herself to one of Nicole’s chips.
“That’s one I haven’t heard,” Nicole said around a mouthful of rye.
“Clever, right? I have a couple stored for special occasions.” Wynonna stole another chip, but as if to make up for it, she pulled a pack of Twizzlers from her jacket and handed them over to a grateful Nicole. The two had bonded behind Dolls’ back about their shared love of junk food, which both of their superiors frowned upon. It had been mutually agreed that, for the good of the town, they would use the second drawer of Nicole’s desk as a stash so that they could both perform in peak condition. They were both suckers for a good Pull-n-Peel.
Nicole watched bemusedly as Wynonna bit straight into hers while Nicole, like a normal person, carefully began to peel hers into strings.
“Dolls let you out into the sun for a while?” she asked.
Wynonna gave a distinctly unladylike snort. “Waverly got him a whole new stack of history junk to look at. He won’t be ready to talk like a human again any time soon.”
Nicole looked up from her Twizzler. “Oh…Waverly’s here?” She had meant it to sound casual. That had sounded casual, right?
Wynonna raised her eyebrow – a trait the two sisters apparently shared. “Yes. She is. Fancy that, her coming to the place where she kind of has a job.”
Nicole’s face felt warm while she began to examine the finer intricacies of her sandwich. Wynonna’s voice was amused and gentle. “Relax, freckles. She’ll come by this way soon enough, and you don’t even have to make it look like an accident this time.”
Nicole was about to protest when Waverly did emerge from the building across from them. She looked up from fussing with her bag and, for a hot second, she and Nicole met eyes. Nicole bit at her lip and tried for a smile and a little wave. Waverly took three steps toward them –
- Right into the path of another young officer, a shy boy named Mike. Or Mark. Or something. And they chatted. And then they hugged.
“Who is that guy?” Nicole demanded. “Does she know everyone?”
Wynonna couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah. Welcome to my world. We’re just the lowlies who get to dwell in the shadow of her mighty glow.” The words sounded bitter, but Wynonna’s tone did not – in fact, she almost sounded proud. Sure enough, when Nicole looked up, Wynonna was smiling.
“He barely even works here,” Nicole muttered. “I think he brings the coffee.”
“Huh, that’s funny.” Wynonna stood up and stole one more chip, walking backwards as she grinned at Nicole. “Here you guys are, getting all this free coffee, and yet you keep on asking about cappuccinos…”
She retreated, laughing, as Nicole debated whether to bury herself alive beneath the bench or throw her drink at Wynonna’s smart-mouthed head.
In a week, Waverly had spoken to exactly twenty-three people Nicole had never even seen before. And it wasn’t like she’d been here that long, but – well, there were only so many places to go in town, and she’d been to pretty much all of them. Were they oozing out of the ground? Did they multiply just to make it harder for Nicole to get close?
By Saturday, she had all but given up on getting in any sort of decent conversation with Waverly, accepting her fate of being town-blocked by everything with a pulse in a thirty mile radius. Since she hadn’t been in Purgatory very long, Nicole didn’t have much in the way of social plans. The best she could figure, she’d do some laundry and then take her truck to get looked at. It was making a noise she didn’t appreciate, which made her a little bit nervous. Purgatory wasn’t exactly gentrified, but her rookie paycheck didn’t allow for a lot of wiggle room.
The mechanic she did, in fact, know. They’d met at the little video rental store when they were both eyeballing Die Hard on a dusty DVD at the same time. She was a woman in her late forties with bottle-blonde hair and shar-pei skin from too much time in a tanning bed. They’d wound up getting a beer together instead, their relationship based on mutual respect for being a woman in a “man’s” field and for their ability to quote along with Bruce Willis by heart.
“Charlene!” Nicole called into the empty bay. “Charlene, I’m just gonna drop it off out here, okay? I’ll leave the keys in the – whoa!”
Cop’s reflexes ensured that Nicole didn’t fall when someone knocked into her, but she did have to do a bit of a dance to stay upright. She threw her arms out to steady the minor tornado who, as it turned out, was Waverly.
“Oh golly, I’m sorry, I was just trying to get to the – oh, it’s you!” Waverly said all in a rush, blinking a few times when she realized who she’d rammed into.
“It is me,” Nicole confirmed, wondering if she should let go of Waverly’s sun-warmed bare arms. “You okay, there? You seem – wait.” She grinned crookedly. “Did you say ‘golly?’ You genuinely use that word?”
Blushing, she noted, made Waverly’s cheeks look rounder. “Um. No? Yes. Definitely not.”
“That’s adorable.” The grin grew wider. “What are you doing here?”
“I had to pick up Champ’s truck,” Waverly explained. Nicole’s face fell. Waverly must have noticed, because she hurried to finish with – “Mine took a beating, and he owes me. So I’m helping myself to it for a day. Or two.”
Nicole tried to parse that sentence out, as there were several things worth questioning there, but she settled on frowning concern. “Took a beating? When? How? Are you alright?”
“Oh! I. Yes! I’m fine. I just…um…” Clearly fishing, Waverly wrung her hands before finally settling on, “A cactus! Yep, just rammed right into it. Wasn’t paying attention, and here it comes, outta nowhere – super dangerous. But I’m fine, and my truck is fine, just kind of dinged, and so…I…” She stopped at the look on Nicole’s face. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
Nicole shook her head, which sent her loose hair brushing against her back. To her secret delight, Waverly seemed momentarily distracted by that.
“I’ve never seen your hair down,” Waverly said absently. “It’s beautiful like that.”
Filing the look in Waverly’s eyes away for later, Nicole tried for regained bravado. “Thank you. But if dealing out compliments gets you out of hot water, then I get to pull that one whenever I need it, too.”
Waverly looked up. Her hand came up to rest on Nicole’s – which, she realized with some horror, had begun to gently stroke the downy peachfuzz on Waverly’s arms. Eyes uncharacteristically serious, Waverly chewed at her lip.
“Listen – Officer Haught –”
“Nicole.”
“Right. Nicole. Would you believe me if I said I wish I could tell the truth? And that I don’t want you to think that I think less of you for not doing so? And that if I could tell the truth, to anyone, you’d be the first person to –”
“Waverly Earp, get your scrawny ass back here! The hell you think you’re doing?” Both girls jumped apart at the stormy voice interrupting them. Nicole didn’t even bother with mentally cursing anymore. Only once had they managed to finish a full conversation, and that had been their very first one. Now it was just a matter of how many words she could squeeze in before another Friendly Neighbor decided to join their private party.
“Hi Charlene,” Nicole said, resigned.
“Nicole,” Charlene said by way of greeting before soundly smacking Waverly on the rump. Waverly gave a little indignant yelp.
“Hey!”
“Don’t you ‘hey’ me. I was by your mama’s side when she brought you into this world, and I’ve got half a mind to take you right back out of it. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
“Notice what?” Waverly asked, all innocence.
Charlene snorted. “Officer, are you aware that this young lady is a thief and a criminal?”
Nicole looked down at the top of Waverly’s head. “Uh…you are?”
“Of course not!” Waverly protested. “I prefer the term ‘reconnaissance expert.’”
“What’d you steal?”
Waverly pulled a set of keys from her pocket – how, Nicole had no idea. She’d never seen anyone manage to squeeze into tighter jeans. “It wasn’t stealing. It was tactical collection for a matter of national security.”
“What the hell is gonna help the nation that you can find in my garage?” Charlene demanded.
“Just…this one…car?” Waverly said hopefully. “That I need to take a look at? That might’ve come in for repairs two nights ago? Wiiith scorch marks?”
Charlene furrowed her already wrinkled brow. “The one where the inside’s all burnt up? You know about that?”
“It’s…wow, you know, this would be so much easier if I had a badge. Okay, well, thanks anyway. We’ll get out of your hair, Charlene.” Waverly looped her arm through Nicole’s and began to lead her away.
When they were out of earshot, Nicole glanced over her shoulder. “So I’m not getting my truck fixed?”
Waverly winced. “I’m sorry. This all seems really weird, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I never pegged you as a run-of-the-mill kind of girl anyway.” It was the truth, but the little smile it drew from Waverly made Nicole stand straighter. “But I would like to know what you’re up to that is getting you into situations where your car is broken, you steal someone’s property in order to break and enter and investigate a car with scorch marks. Or why the Department doesn’t seem to be involved with this.”
“If I told you I had another crazy night?” Waverly asked, hopefully.
“Then I’d tell you I was sorry I missed it again – but only because it sounds like you need someone watching your back.”
“Pretty sure you do a lot of that anyway.”
And darned if Nicole didn’t know at all what to say to that. No one had ever tied her tongue like Waverly Earp, and it was unnerving and exciting and frustrating. And Waverly was looking extremely pleased with herself, which made it all so much worse.
“Officer Haught, are you warm? You’re looking awfully red.”
“It’s 95 degrees out today. And we’re in direct sunlight,” Nicole countered, shoving her hands in the pockets of her shorts.
“So we’ll go inside somewhere. Apple juice can be on me.”
“I’m not in uniform,” Nicole pointed out.
“Then we’ll sneak into Shorty’s. I don’t open for another two hours, buuutt…guess who owns the only set of keys, now that Shorty…well.” Waverly quickly shook off whatever sadness was threatening to settle over her. “Yes? Breaking and entering? Just you and me.”
Something shivered through Nicole that made her legs feel like Jell-O, and it had something to do with Waverly’s voice, and something to do with those sweet doe-eyes, and her mama always told her that her desperate heart was gonna be her death someday.
Waverly hadn’t let go of her arm, and Nicole wasn’t about to dispute that.
“Sure.” She smiled down at Waverly and nodded. “Just you and me.”
The rest of the entirety of Purgatory, for once, could kindly take a back seat and wait.