The Adventures of Slim & Howdy

by Kix Brooks; Ronnie Dunn; Bill Fitzhugh

  36

  BRIANNA PROVED TO BE A LOVELY AND SPIRITED HOSTESS. Unfortunately, the next morning she woke up bright and way earlier than Slim had in mind. He sat on the edge of the bed rubbing his eyes and working his moldy sock of a tongue like a cow chewing cud. After a second, he blinked a few times and croaked, “What’re you doing?”

  Brianna was busy packing a suitcase. She held up something silky, trying to decide, pack it or not? “I told you last night,” she said.

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, I’m driving over to San Antonio for a wedding.” She rejected the silky thing. “I invited you to come along.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You didn’t directly answer the question,” she said. “Of course, you might not’ve even heard me. Looked like you were concentrating real hard on something at the time, like baseball or fishing.” She paused and shook her head. “So, anyway, you wanna come?”

  Slim’s head moved like something small and surprising had hit his forehead. “Love to,” he said with another couple of blinks. “But I gotta work.” Again with the tongue.

  “Well, Brianna isn’t going to beg,” Brianna said, suddenly referring to herself in the third person for the first time.

  So that was that.

  Later in the day, after a leisurely lunch, one of the she-tigers dropped Howdy back at the Lost and Found. Said she might come back tonight to hear Howdy sing. He said he’d like that, and then he smiled, and she smiled. But nobody expected any promises. Howdy said he’d be there, either way. She winked and drove off. He never saw her again. Wasn’t the first time.

  That night Slim worked the door while Howdy rocked the crowd.

  Jodie said she felt a little headache coming on around eleven, nothing debilitating, really, just annoying. She took a couple aspirins and kept slinging hooch. She gave last call a little earlier than she might have otherwise. By the time they got the last customer out of the place, Jodie had hit a wall, exhausted. Still, she had the moxie to clean up, close the books, and give Duke the envelope for Uncle Roy. After that she said she was taking the remaining receipts to the night deposit at the bank, then she was heading home for a hot bath.

  She left Slim and Howdy to lock up.

  “Will do,” Howdy said, stepping behind the bar. “Hope you feel better.”

  Slim walked over and laid the .22 on the bar. He climbed up on a stool and watched as Howdy started gathering bottles in front of himself. Curacao, Grand Marnier, triple sec, Rose’s Lime juice, Cointreau, gold tequila, silver tequila, and premium tequila. Then a blender, a shaker, some sweet and sour, and a bag of fresh limes, which he pushed toward Slim. He said, “Cut those in half for me, would you?”

  “With what?”

  Howdy gave him a cutting board and a knife before he organized his ingredients on the bar, grouping the orange-flavored liquors, then the tequilas, then the sweet and sour and other ingredients. Then he clapped his hands, pointed at Slim’s dark glasses, and said, “What do you know about the margarita?”

  “I like ’em on the rocks,” Slim said. “No salt.”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t know the margarita was invented in Hollywood, in the 1940s,” Howdy said. “For Rita Hayworth.”

  “You’d bet on that?” Slim said. “Because the way I heard it was—”

  Howdy pointed at the limes and said, “Just juice those for me, would you?” He slid the juicer across the bar. “You can tell your story later.”

  Slim snickered and started squeezing the fruit. “Yassah, boss.”

  Howdy continued by saying, “The story goes that a master bartender by the name of Enrique Bastante Gutierrez made the first margarita at the famous Tail o’ the Cock in L.A, for Rita Hayworth, whose full name was Margarita, after whom he named the drink.”

  Slim dipped his head and looked over the top of his shades, saying, “Margarita Hayworth?”

  “You can see why they shortened her name,” Howdy said as he poured some cheap gold tequila into the shaker with some ice and a glug of pale-green prefab margarita mix. He shook it, then strained it into two glasses. He slid one to Slim. “Now that’s the basic drink you’ll get at bars all over America,” Howdy said, giving his a sip and clucking his tongue to taste the thing. “Essentially, sugary limeade with a splash of tequila.”

  Slim tasted his. “Yeah, that’s not very inspiring,” he said. “About a C-minus.”

  “Exactly.” Howdy tasted his again before dumping the remainders from both glasses into the sink. “It’s not awful,” Howdy shrugged. “It won’t kill you to drink a few, but that’s the best you can say for it.” Howdy rinsed the shaker and added a new scoop of ice. “But people settle for it every day, like that’s as good as it gets.” He poured some 100 percent blue agave tequila into the shaker, measured an amount of Cointreau, then added fresh lime juice. He shook his head slightly and said, “I never understood that.”

  Howdy went on to make a brief, if haphazard, argument that it was the same way people seemed to settle for so many things in life. They settled for things that were easy and adequate but not perfect and told themselves they loved it because perfect took too much work and even then there were no guarantees. But otherwise, he said, and all too often, you end up one day looking back at a decision and thinking, Why didn’t I hold out for something better than that?

  “That’s a cliché because it’s true,” Howdy said. “I mean, how many people you know who are miserable, and got nobody to blame but themselves, because they settled for something less than what they really wanted?” He put the top on the shaker as if to cap his argument.

  “But not you,” Slim said. “You’re holding out for perfect, aren’t you? No matter what the cost.”

  Howdy was squinting when he looked up from under his hat and said, “What?”

  “You’re holding out for Marilyn,” Slim said. “Or a Marilyn.”

  “A Marilyn?”

  “An imagined ideal,” Slim said. “The search for which has left many a man as unhappy as anybody who ever settled for less.”

  Howdy chewed that over for a second before he rattled the cocktail shaker a couple of times. “What’s your point?”

  “Well, if you can’t have Marilyn,” Slim said, “you can at least have a part of her. Something almost perfect.” Slim gestured at the bottles and said, “The margarita recipe.”

  Face to face with the truth, Howdy smiled and said, “Nah, it’s nothing like that.” He poured the chilled drink into the two glasses.

  “I was just guessing.” Slim hoisted his drink and said, “Here’s to perfection.”

  Howdy joined the toast and they tasted the drinks.

  “Now that’s a damn fine margarita,” Slim said. “A-plus.” He drank some more.

  “Yep.” Howdy nodded at first, then shook his head. “But it’s not Marilyn’s.”

  Slim eased a concerned look over the top of his glass and said, “You’re not going to throw it out are you?”

  “Hell no,” Howdy said. “Holding out for perfection’s all good and well, but it’s no reason to throw out premium tequila.” Howdy was taking another drink when the phone behind the bar started to ring. He turned and looked at the caller ID. It was Jodie’s cell phone. Howdy answered, “Lost and Found, now under new management.”

  “Yeah,” Jodie said. “And I bet you’re drinking all the good tequila.”

  “Hey, boss, you’re the one left us here with the keys,” Howdy said.

  “There’s a sucker born every minute,” she said. “But that’s not why I called. I don’t think I locked my office. Make sure it’s locked before y’all leave, okay?”

  “No problem,” Howdy said. “Feel better.”

  After Howdy hung up, Slim said, “I know a guy in Corpus who swears the margarita was created for Peggy Lee at a bar down in Galveston by the renowned mixologist Santos Cruz.”

  “He can’t prove a thing,” Howdy said as he began working on a new recipe.

  Slim said the marga
rita story he always thought had the ring of truth to it, involved a woman named Bertita who tended bar at a place on the cathedral square down in Taxco, Mexico.

  “Bertita?” Howdy said skeptically. “So how come it’s not called a Bertita-rita?”

  Slim opened his mouth to address this question when the phone began to ring again. Howdy looked, it was Jodie. He answered by saying, “Why can’t you just let us drink your tequila in peace?” He paused for the retort, but none came. “Jodie?” He could hear something coming over the connection but he couldn’t tell what it was. Odd noises of indeterminate origin. “Jodie? You’re breaking up.” The sounds were muffled, garbled, and disturbing in their uncertainty.

  Somewhere in all this Howdy thought he heard Jodie’s voice, though she wasn’t speaking clearly, maybe she wasn’t even speaking, but it was her voice making some sort of sound. Then a sudden crack followed by a grinding noise followed a moment later by what might have been a car door slamming or a gunshot. “Jodie?!” Howdy looked at the phone. They were still connected. “Are you okay?” But there was nobody at the other end. All he could hear now was what sounded like crickets chirping. Then the connection dropped and Howdy hung up.

  Slim said, “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know.” Howdy shook his head. “Something that . . . It sounded weird.”

  “Call her back.” Slim stood up as if it might help.

  Howdy punched in her cell number. After a few rings he looked at Slim and shook his head. “Voice mail,” he said.

  Slim picked up the .22 and said, “Let’s go.”

  37

  AS THEY RAN OUT TO THE PARKING LOT, SLIM YELLED, “Gimme the keys.”

  “I don’t think so,” Howdy replied as he fished them from his pocket.

  “It’s my turn to drive.”

  “We ain’t got time to take the scenic route,” Howdy said. “I’ll drive.”

  “You’re the one wasting time,” Slim said. “Gimme the damn keys.”

  Howdy complied since Slim had beaten him to the driver’s-side door and had the sort of grip on the handle that he didn’t look like he was going to relinquish. “All right, you can drive,” Howdy said. “But I call shotgun.”

  Slim snatched the keys dangling from Howdy’s hand, then jumped in. He said, “Speaking of guns, Jodie carries that .38 with her all the time doesn’t she?” He turned the key and the engine chugged a few times but wouldn’t catch.

  “I think so,” Howdy said.

  “All right, good.” Slim pumped the accelerator a few times and tried again, but it still wouldn’t turn over. Ruur-ruur-ruur.

  “She’s not afraid to use it either,” Howdy said, thinking back to the day they saw her firing (and firing at) Link. He gestured at the accelerator. “Ease up on the gas.”

  “Come on, you piece of crap!” Ruur-ruur-ruur.

  “It’s not the truck,” Howdy said. Ruur-ruur-ruur.

  Slim turned the key again and again as he pumped the accelerator like Buddy Rich on a kick drum. “Come on!” Ruur-ruur-ruur.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Earnhardt, but I think you flooded it.”

  -Ruur-ruur-ruur. Boom! Howdy just about jumped through his hat when the truck backfired and roared to life. He didn’t need to look at Slim to know that he had one of those don’t-tell-me-how-to-start-a-truck smirks on his face. “Ha!” He popped the clutch and shot out of the parking lot.

  Much to Howdy’s surprise, Slim was willing and able to drive like a bat out of hell when the occasion called for it. He ran lights, cut through lawns, and passed anybody not doing approximately sixty. “You know the limit here is twenty-five,” Howdy said as he white-knuckled the door on one particularly hairy turn.

  “Now you’re going to complain that I drive too fast?” Slim could only shake his head. “Just shut up and hang on.”

  “No, I’m impressed,” Howdy said. “Didn’t know you had these kinds of skills.”

  Slim leaned into a wild left turn, jumped the curb, and clipped a couple of garbage cans, spewing wet, rancid trash over the hood, the windshield, and half the block.

  “Watch those cans,” Howdy said. He leaned forward to see what had landed on the windshield and found himself staring into the rotting eye of a Guadalupe spotted bass, or what was left of it, after being pulled from Devil’s Lake and filleted. “Eww.” He reached over, hit the wipers, and launched the fish carcass over the cab.

  Howdy pulled the Lost and Found phone from his pocket and tried Jodie again. A second later he flipped it shut. “Still goes to voice mail,” he said.

  Slim took one hand off the wheel to point up the road. “Is that it?”

  “No, the next one,” Howdy said. “Ceniza Street.”

  Slim made the turn at forty with Howdy leaning out the passenger window like he was trying to keep a catamaran from capsizing.

  Slim screeched to a stop in front of the house, a modest rancheria sitting on a half acre at the end of a cul-de-sac. The landscaping was the standard southwest mix of wild flowers, cacti, succulents, and native grasses. The prominent botanical feature was a mature century plant with its blooming rosette of spiny leaves.

  The front yard was divided by a curving flagstone path. Jodie’s truck was parked in the driveway. The only light came from the front porch, nothing on inside.

  Howdy went to the front door and knocked. Slim peeked into windows and checked around back before returning. “No answer,” Howdy said.

  “Back door’s locked,” Slim replied. “Some windows are open but the screens are intact. I don’t think anybody’s in there.”

  They stood there for a minute looking at the scene, looking for anything that seemed unusual. But nothing seemed amiss at first glance.

  “Maybe the headache was a ruse,” Howdy said. “Maybe she was having a rendezvous she wanted to keep secret. Just met somebody here and went off with ’em?”

  “No, she was eating aspirins like bar nuts,” Slim said. “The headache was legit.” He looked around then shook his head. “Besides, that doesn’t explain that weird phone call.” Slim shook his head again. “I don’t think she was planning to go out, at least not voluntarily.” He went back to the truck and grabbed a couple of flashlights, tossed one to Howdy.

  Based on where her truck was parked, they figured Jodie would have walked past the century plant and hit the flagstone path about halfway to the house. They retraced this path using the flashlights. The ground was hard-packed so it was tough to make out any footprints. They walked around for a minute before Howdy’s flashlight caught a reflection, and he said, “Got something.”

  Slim came over with his light, shined it where Howdy’s was. “Damn,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Howdy said. “Damn is right.” He bent down and picked up the silver and turquoise necklace Jodie had been wearing that night. It was snapped in half.

  “Now what?”

  “No idea,” Howdy said as he pulled out the phone and hit redial. Somewhere in the near distance they heard something strange, a haunting and oddly familiar melody. Slowly, Slim and Howdy turned around until they were looking across the yard. In the darkness, a faint blue glow rose from within the gray-green leaves of the century plant as Jodie’s ring tone—the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—wafted from the leaves of the agave. The phone played the opening four bars before going to voice mail.

  They walked over and peered into the plant. Slim said, “Where’s Clint Eastwood when you need him?”

  38

  FIVE MINUTES FROM JODIE’S HOUSE THERE WAS A ONE-STORY brick building that looked like it could have been an appliance repair shop. The front was all plate glass, perfect for the display of secondhand washers and dryers but, as this was the Del Rio Police Department, the items on display were somewhat more tragic than Maytags with broken drive belts.

  Slim and Howdy pulled into the parking lot and the wash of fluorescent lights shining through the big windows. Inside, handcuffed to a bench along one wall, they could see two drunks, a
smacked-up hooker, and a sullen teenage runaway, all waiting for their dose of justice or whatever else was meted out at this place. Across the room, behind a battered desk, sat an overworked cop with a bitter cup of burned coffee.

  When Slim and Howdy walked in, triggering the electronic door chime, Senior Patrol Officer Joel Hernandez looked up from processing some arrest reports. His expression landed him somewhere between suspicious and surprised. They didn’t get a lot of walk-in business this time of night, and precious little that was sober.

  The chime forced the hooker’s opiated eyes open and she reacted as though Slim and Howdy were the character witnesses she’d been waiting on all her life. She pointed at them with the glue-on nails of her uncuffed paw. “Ask these two,” she said. “I ain’t been anywhere near Laredo in the past three weeks.”

  Officer Hernandez pointed at her. “Rosy, shut up.”

  She opened her mouth to respond but nothing came out. Then she closed her eyes and rested her chin on her Dolly Partons, which were being supported by an industrial-strength bra.

  Officer Hernandez pushed back from his desk, looked at the two men. “Can I help you?”

  “Yeah,” Howdy said. “We need to report a crime.”

  Officer Hernandez made a show of looking at the clock on the wall. It was two thirty in the morning. “Don’t you have a phone?”

  “We were in the neighborhood,” Slim said.

  Howdy nodded. “So was the crime.”

  “Great,” the cop said. “Just what I need.” He yanked a new form from one of the stacks in front of him, grabbed a pen, and said, “What’re you reporting?”

  “We’re not sure,” Howdy said.

  Officer Hernandez stared at Howdy for a few seconds, twirling the pen. “Maybe you’d like to figure that out and come back another time.” He put the pen down. “Like when I’m not working.”

  Slim shook his head, thinking about what Jodie might be going through. “You guys need to get on this now.”