Free Killer Hair by Ellen Byerrum

“Don’t worry. This time around we should just be friends.”
    “What do you mean, ‘this time around’? What do you mean, ‘friends’?”
    Vic wasn’t wearing a scent, but something was making her dizzy. She reached for a canapé to keep her strength up.
    “I mean friends. Purely platonic. What do you say?”
    “I’d say just what the hell are you doing here? Why aren’t you in Colorado?” She didn’t need a “friendship” with Vic Donovan. Why aren’t you back in some rattlesnake den where you belong?
    “Why aren’t you?” He steered her to an empty table back by the wig heads. Every female eye—and a few others—followed them.
    “I live here. What’s your excuse?”
    “I’m living here too. Sort of. I didn’t realize I needed your permission, Smithsonian. Is there an application to fill out?”
    “You’re living here? Since when?”
    Vic explained that he had moved back East in stages, first from Sagebrush to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, as chief of police for a three-year stint, and finally all the way back to Virginia. Now he was helping his dad run his security consulting business, which these days had way too much work, and Boyd Radford was a brand-new client with a major employee theft problem. Vic’s dad was slowing down and he wanted Vic to take over the company, but Vic was on the fence. He still had a house in Steamboat Springs. Lacey recalled vaguely that Vic was a military brat who had grown up all over the country: grade school in Colorado Springs when his dad was at NORAD, high school in Alexandria, Virginia, when Dad went to the Pentagon. Now he was staying out in McLean, near his folks’ house, trying to decide whether to buy a place of his own here. He’d been in town all of two months.
    “And you just hadn’t gotten around to calling me yet.” Lacey smirked. She regretted it the moment she said it.
    “I didn’t even know you were here! I thought you were still in Denver someplace, where your folks are. Besides, why should I call you? You don’t even like me.”
    Lacey had spent an eventful two years covering Vic and his cops at very close range back in Sagebrush. She had followed him through homicides, suicides, scores of bar fights and drunken car wrecks, and even a case of stolen dynamite that drew a crowd of obnoxious federal agents. Vic had brought her along on the hunt, over the objections of the arrogant clods from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He was a natural as top cop, at dealing with people, the press, the crusty ranchers on the town council who couldn’t see why he needed patrol cars newer than Fred Flintstone’s. Lacey had developed her reporting skills in self-defense. She learned how to get Vic and his cops to tip her off on the dirt at the county sheriff’s office, and she used the sheriff and his deputies to get the inside scoop on Vic and his boys. And she’d have scooped up Vic in a minute and quit the police beat, if he’d really been unattached. If he hadn’t been such a roving lover boy. And if the whole town hadn’t been watching them as if they were Days of Our Lives .
    “I like you fine, you big jerk. So why’d they kick you out of Steamboat?”
    Vic snorted in exasperation. “Steamboat and I are fine, thank you. But corporate security is where the money is, and to move up in law enforcement I’d have to tackle a bigger city with bigger headaches. Or else run for county sheriff. We still elect ’em in Colorado, you know. And you remember how much I love politics.”
    “Let me get this straight, Vic. You’re moving to Washington, D.C., to get away from politics, and you’re trading being chief of police for counting shampoo bottles in a rat-infested warehouse? Wow, good career move.”
    “Well, it looks like your career is booming too, Smithsonian. I suppose you’re living in the District with your wacky old aunt, what’s her name? Minnie? Mamie? And I see you gave up on the newspaper biz. I should have figured a