by Holly Plum
“What y’all afraid of?” Lester said, slurring his words. “Y’all ain’t got no reason to be scared."
“Lester, why are you doing this?” Kristy asked, her voice quivering.
“Doin’ what?” Lester replied. “I ain’t doin’ nothing.”
Lester staggered over and kicked up dirt. “You hear me?” he said, then shouted so that his voice echoed through the hills, “I ain't doin' nothin'!”
Kristy whimpered softly. Mari placed a reassuring hand on her arm.
“Why’s everybody so serious?” Lester continued, though it was less of a question and more of an observation. “I did what I had to do to protect Vance’s secret.”
“What secret?” Benny blurted out.
"And tell that dang mutt to stop yapping," Lester barked at them.
“He'll stop when you explain yourself,” Mari calmly replied. She took a deep breath. The truth was about to come out, and if Mari wanted to know what really happened to Vance Gorden, it was now or possibly never. “You killed Vance Gorden, didn’t you? But how? You were seen eating burritos the entire time you were at the food truck lot. How did you manage to shoot a man without anyone noticing?”
“It was a pretty neat trick, wasn’t it?” Lester said proudly. He took a sip of his beer. “Nobody bothered to notice that I used a silencer.” Lester pointed his gun at Kristi. “Not that I need one now. Not here.”
Kristi raised her hands above her head and closed her eyes as if giving up.
“You don’t have to do this,” Mari continued, though trying to reason with a drunk was almost impossible. Lester jerked his gun away and stared at Mari disbelievingly. “You’ve only killed one man. You don’t have to kill four.”
"Three." Lester let out a disturbing cackle. "I can count ya know."
"Three and a bulldog," Mari corrected him, wishing that Tabasco would run off and save himself but he wouldn't leave Mari's side.
“What’s to stop me?” Lester responded.
“The police,” Mari answered. “You won't be able to cover up a murder like this. It'll be obvious that it was you and you'll end up in prison for the rest of your life.”
“I…uh…” Lester stammered, and Mari detected a flicker of fear in his voice.
“The choice is yours.” Mari tried to sound as reasonable as she could, but it was difficult. Her heart was pounding at a million miles per hour.
Kristy spoke up again. Lester pointed his gun from Mari to Kristi. A look of confusion crossed his face, the inner turmoil beginning to get to him.
“Lester,” Kristi said bravely, “whatever you found out here, you can keep it. I don’t care about Red Arrow's treasure. I don’t need it. Whatever it is, you can have it.”
Lester fumed and shook his head. “It’s not gold we’re talkin’ about. This is beyond gold. And very soon it’s all gonna be mine.”
“It’s oil, isn’t it?” Mari guessed. “Vance found oil out here.”
“Impressive,” Lester confirmed, offering a round of mock applause. “It only took you how many days to come to that conclusion? We're in Texas, folks.”
“That’s why you broke into the restaurant,” Mari went on, fitting all the pieces of the puzzle together. “And the food truck. You were looking for Vance's backpack because—"
“Because I needed his field journal,” Lester cut in. "I couldn't let these northerners here read about Vance's discoveries."
“You planted that bracelet to mislead me.” Mari shook her head as she thought of the pink bracelet that Tabasco had found at the restaurant. The one that had matched Kristi's.
“I knew you would snoop around and tell the police what you had found,” Lester admitted.
“What was in the journal?” Mari asked.
“You tell me, Detective.” Lester cackled into the night. The sound sent chills down Mari's spine. “How else would I have figured out that Vance knew there was oil on my aunt’s property? He hadn’t told anybody else. I never gave him a chance to. He wrote about it in his journal, which I'd been reading. That was how I knew he had been researching land prices because he was planning on buying the land out from under my Aunt Polly's nose.
"Why didn't you just tell your aunt about the oil?" Mari asked, bewildered.
“She would have sold it to him." Lester's expression turned dark. "Aunt Polly never liked me. She hates the drinkin' and the gamblin' and the swearin'. This land should belong to me, but Aunt Polly won't let me have it. In a few months, she and my uncle will be dead anyway and then the property will be mine. The oil will be mine. I knew I had to kill that Vance fella and I knew just where to do it. It was a cake walk."
"You're a monster!" Kristi shouted, her eyes filling with tears.
“I ain't no such thing," Lester argued, glancing at his gun.
“Why did you bother with my brothers and me?" Mari asked. "Why go through the trouble of breaking into my apartment and messing with my brother's car if you already had the journal?"
“To scare you off, of course,” Lester confessed. “I found Vance's backpack when I broke into your restaurant. I knew you would figure out what was going on if you kept digging. I had to distract you somehow."
"Lester put down the gun. You won, okay. You're very clever. We all admit it." Mari nodded, looking to Kristi and Benny. Mari moved her hands around in the darkness, searching for Tabasco. But Tabasco was now nowhere in sight. Mari gulped, but Lester slightly lowered his gun.
“Sorry about this, folks.” Lester raised his gun again. He aimed at Mari first. Mari's thoughts spun out of control as she tried to think of a plan. Not one idea came to her.
A howl sounded from near the ranch house. Lester turned and looked, a glint of fascination in his dark eyes. A second burst of light lit the sky as a second truck pulled up next to Lester's. It rammed into Lester's truck making him jump back and point his gun at the stars.
Lester roared in surprise a second later as Tabasco bit his leg. His gun fell with a thud into the dirt. The door of the second truck opened, and Officer Rick Kinney drew his gun immediately.
“My apologies, Mari, but I followed you here,” Rick said. "I'm glad I did."
"Me too," Mari whispered, feeling as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Rick handcuffed Lester and pushed into his car without a fight.
Officer Rick looked at Mari. "So, how about that date?"
Tabasco barked as he took his place at Mari's side.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The restaurant had never been busier. Everyone who worked for Lito Bueno’s Mexican Restaurant in any capacity had come into work. A line went through the front lobby and out the door. It would have been blocking traffic if there had been any traffic to block. But the whole town seemed to be at the Ramirez family restaurant. Across the street, Mr. Chun stood in the doorway of the Lucky Noodle watching his competitor with envy.
“How do you like me now, huh?” Mr. Ramirez chortled from the window as he glared at Mr. Chun. “Hundreds of people are lining up for my food.”
“Surely, the fact that the Lucky Noodle was just slapped with a health inspection notice has nothing to do with that,” Mari whispered to Chrissy.
“Of course not,” Chrissy replied. “Though in all fairness, we would’ve gotten the same notice if the health inspector wasn’t a huge fan of our smothered burritos.”
Mari studied Chrissy's expression, her eyes wide. “How do you know that? Wait a minute…" Mari thought back to their conversation about giving away free meals. "So that's what you've been up to? You've been bribing the health inspector with free food?"
“Maybe…maybe not.” Chrissy shrugged. “Like I said, everything I do is for the good of the restaurant.”
The two of them laughed.
“Mari, you have to get dressed quick,” Mari's mother yelled as she came running from the kitchen. “Your date is here.”
Mari checked the time. “Mom, I told you that I would plan my next date with Rick. I can't take a break now. We're swa
mped.”
“I can handle your tables,” Chrissy volunteered. “I've done it before. Besides, the majority of these people are only here for our new menu item.”
“Why don’t I get Rick to help us in the kitchen?” Mrs. Ramirez offered. “What could be more romantic than cooking together?”
“I could think of a few things,” Mari responded, but she didn’t argue. The staff needed all the help they could get making fresh tortillas. They were running dangerously low on their new special—the Red Arrow smothered burrito.
A Preview of KILLER SALSA by Holly Plum
CHAPTER ONE
Mari's bulldog Tabasco refused to come out of the office.
“I don’t understand what’s wrong with him,” Mari Ramirez said to her brother Alex. She brushed her dark brown hair to the side. “Normally, I can't get Tabasco to stay in the office because all he wants to do is run around the restaurant. Now, he won’t come out.”
“Maybe he knows where you’re going,” Alex replied, sleepily stretching his pinched frame.
Alex and Mari helped their family run Lito Bueno’s Mexican Restaurant, the only Mexican restaurant in their small Texas town. Mari was the manager, while her brothers Alex and David worked in the kitchen and occasionally waited tables. For this, they were modestly compensated by their father, who had been running Lito Bueno’s since before they were born.
Mari couldn’t blame Tabasco for not wanting to come out of the office. Summer was just ending, but that was hard to believe when the temperatures still hovered in the upper nineties. All the way up and down Main Street, trees were dying for lack of water. Recently, a German shepherd had passed out in the parking lot of Food and Stuffs, where its owner had gone to buy dog food, and City Hall had sent out a public advisory asking pet owners not to leave their pets in parked cars.
“I won’t leave him in the car,” Mari stated as if responding to an accusation. “And I can’t leave him here, or Dad will lecture me about responsible pet ownership again.”
“There's lots of shade at Chile Fest,” Alex responded. “Just bring a couple of water bottles, one for you and one for Tabasco, and you will be fine.”
The town's annual Chile Fest was a community event held at the end of every summer. For years the Ramirez family had competed against fellow restaurateurs and other amateur chefs in the “Best Bite in Town” competition to see who could make the best dish. Contestants were judged according to taste, aesthetics, and originality. Mari loved it because for a few days she was able to pretend she was competing on the fiercely competitive cable cooking shows she loved to watch.
This year’s competition would be like one of those cooking shows in another way. While the judges had been unable to afford prizes in previous years, this year they had announced the first prize of one thousand dollars. Mari was determined to win the prize money because parts of the restaurant were desperately in need of renovation though her parents would never admit it. Recently, the kitchen fryer had broken, and Mari’s Abuela had gone through a world of trouble frying things by hand in a skillet, badly burning her arm in the process.
Ignoring the dog’s whimpers, Mari grabbed him gently by the front legs and pulled him out from under her father’s desk where he had been hiding. She lifted him neatly under one arm and with the other grabbed a green plastic bowl that was sitting on the kitchen counter. Inside the bowl was a special salsa made from a secret family recipe. This was Mari’s competition entry.
Mari took her dog and the bowl of salsa and slipped out of the restaurant before her dad arrived to open for lunch. Maybe he wouldn’t have been upset if he had known she was entering family recipes into competitions for money, but she wasn’t going to take any chances. Mr. Ramirez had always said the family would survive on hard work and money earned the old-fashioned way. He turned his nose up at cooking shows and said the winners were accepting handouts, which was one of the most vicious insults in his arsenal. Most likely he would not have approved if he had known Mari’s intentions. She would explain it to him later after she had won the money and her wisdom had been vindicated.
As always, this year’s Chile Fest was held in the town square, a thin strip of road a couple of hundred yards long where the oldest and prettiest buildings in town all converged. As Mari pulled into an empty parking space outside the town's Pioneer Museum, a group of women she recognized from church walked past her carrying covered pots. They talked loudly, oblivious to the sweat dripping down their necks and dampening their button-down shirts. Mari got out of the car and followed them to the end of the block where a crew of volunteers was busy setting up tables, tents, and fences for the first day of the festival.
Inside one of the tents, Mari found a long table covered with a white cloth on which an array of colorful dishes was displayed. Here she was warmly greeted by Brandy Davos, a radiant and professional-looking young woman wearing blue jeans, a black camisole, and a purple button-down. She talked sporadically into a headset. In one hand she carried a clipboard, while she held a paper plate bearing the imprint of the Lucky Noodle in the other, the Chinese restaurant across the street from Lito Bueno’s Mexican Restaurant.
“Hey Mari, you made it,” Brandy said cheerfully. “If you would just set your bowl down right over here.” She motioned toward the end of the table near a hot plate stacked with egg rolls.
“This all looks great,” said Mari commented. “You think you’ll have everything ready by tomorrow?”
“We will,” Brandy replied, as they left the cool shade of the tent and wandered outside among the rows and rows of booths. “This year’s Chile Fest is going to be our biggest and best ever. Not only do we have the cook-off, but there’s also going to be a dance contest, a couple of eating contests, carnival rides, a magician, a mariachi band, and loads of prizes.”
“Amazing,” Mari responded as they passed a small tent where a group of teens was playing horseshoes. A man with a shaved head and a beer belly walked by them carrying an ice cooler. Behind him, two guys used a dolly to unload cartons of beer from the back of a white van.
“It is amazing,” Brandy said. Even when talking to someone one-on-one, Brandy always sounded as though she was being interviewed on the local news. “Yeah, I’m right here.” Brandy touched her headset. “What? Are you serious?” She turned to Mari. “I’ve got to run. Some of the kids broke into one of the tents and started a food fight and now there is pudding everywhere.” She dashed off in the direction of the judging tent.
Left to herself, Mari decided to walk around and check out the festival. As it happened, the two guys with the dolly were setting up a beer garden in the alleyway between the town chapel and Frederick’s Emporium. A girl no older than five was being marched away by a woman in a matching yellow dress, who was also trying to explain that beer was for grown-ups. In front of the emporium, a paunchy, middle-aged man with a pencil mustache has set up an art booth. Mari stopped for a minute to admire the rows of colorful paintings of sunsets, wildflowers, and empty train tracks. There was even a picture of a restaurant that looked suspiciously like her own.
“I see you went straight to it,” the artist said. He watched Mari study the painting of Lito Bueno's Mexican Restaurant. “I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but for you, I’m willing to give half off.”
“Is that my family's restaurant?” Mari asked.
“Yep, I’m a local artist,” the man said in a jovial voice. “Every portrait you see here was painted in town and represents a local landmark. So I’ve got pictures of the Emporium, the elementary school, the deserted gas station, the Catholic church, the yoga center, and much more.”
“Amazing,” Mari commented, hoping to stop him before he listed every home and building in town.
“This isn’t the only portrait I’ve done of a local restaurant,” he replied. As with Brandy a few minutes earlier, Mari had the distinct feeling he was trying to sell her something. He held up a canvas bathed in a red and gold sunset. Below, customers ate in th
e window of a diner. “You recognize this?”
“That looks like the Lucky Noodle,” Mari answered. “Is this what you do for a living?”
“Painting?” the man said, waving one hand with an air of practiced modesty. “This is just for fun. I run my own pizza place.”
“Rosetti’s Pizza?” Mari raised her eyebrows.
“No, the other one.”
“Oh, Bubba’s,” Mari added. “I’ve been meaning to go there.”
“So has everyone in town,” the man mumbled.
“Then you must be Bubba.” Mari set Tabasco down and extended her hand. “I’m Marisol Ramirez. Mari for short.”
“I know," Bubba replied. "I saw you coming out of Lito Bueno’s Mexican Restaurant when I was across the street working on this.” He motioned to the painting of the front entrance of Lito Bueno’s.
“You mean Mr. Chun let you paint inside his dining room?” Mari asked.
Bubba frowned, as if not liking the question. “Well, he didn't exactly know what I was doing."
“No, but when I found out,” Mr. Chun interrupted, suddenly appearing behind them so that Bubba and Mari both jumped, “I had him thrown out for upsetting my customers.”
“I doubt anyone, but you was upset,” Mari responded, who had known Mr. Chun for over twenty years and didn’t care how much she annoyed him.
“Excuse me,” Mr. Chun said, his arms folded. “Who are you to tell me what my customers do and don't like?”
“I offered to pay for the ruined upholstery.” Bubba shrugged.
“You offered to pay?” Mr. Chun chuckled. “A free pizza is not payment.” He spat on the ground as if to suggest that this was the worst insult.
“Paintings and pizza, to be fair,” Bubba added.
Mari suspected that this was why he had painted that portrait of the Lucky Noodle, and why it continued to languish in the booth unbought.