Revenge of the Chili Queens Page 16

  “Really? Gosh, I never thought to check that.”

  He gave me a sour look which I was fully justified in returning in equal tart measure.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do . . .” Nick eyed the bull, the height of the gate (well above both our heads), and me. “I’m going to start climbing from this side. You’re going to start climbing from that side. When I get to the top, I can reach over and help you to the other side. Got that?”

  I eyed the gate. The whole thing was made of chain link, like fencing, and every eight inches or so, a heavy metal bar went side to side across it. It looked plenty sturdy. No doubt it had to be to contain the beast. I looked over my shoulder and saw that even now, he was eyeing me up and snorting.

  “Maxie! Maxie!”

  When Nick called out to me, I swung around from the bull back to the gate.

  “That’s better.” His voice was firm and encouraging. His expression was as hard as stone. I wondered if he was trying to convince me—or himself—that it was actually possible to get me out of that enclosure in one piece.

  “Don’t worry about the bull,” Nick instructed. “Just keep your eyes on me. Okay, see what I’m doing?” He started up his side of the fence, bracing first one foot, then the other, on those heavy metal crossbars. They were narrow and he was wearing dress shoes. His foot slipped, and he slammed against the gate, righted himself, and started the climb again.

  “I’m going all the way to the top,” he said, and he made his way up another couple feet. “And you’re going to do the same thing. And when you get close enough, I’m going to grab your hands and help you the rest of the way. You got that?”

  I did, and it was a mighty fine plan. Or at least it would have been if not for the fact that the bull made another charge. I climbed as fast as I could, and I had sneakers on, so my footing was better than Nick’s. But with that bull coming at me full speed with murder in its beefy heart, I knew I wasn’t fast enough. I panicked. Okay, I admit it. I lost my cool and then my footing and then my nerve, and even though I wasn’t quite close enough for either of us to be balanced, I grabbed hold of both Nick’s hands before he had a chance to brace himself.

  The bull did a U-turn right at my heels, and, feeling his wet breath on the back of my legs, I screamed.

  What with all the scrambling and the squealing and with me holding on to him for dear life, Nick lost his balance. He tumbled and hit the dirt on my side of the gate at the same time I let go and slithered to the ground beside him.

  “Are you all right?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he jumped to his feet and snatched me up just as the bull got over to the other side of the pen, turned, and pawed the ground, ready to make another run at us.

  Nick pressed me toward the fence. “Climb!”

  “But Nick, I—”

  “Climb!” He lifted me off my feet and set me up on the second crossbar from the bottom, and I wrapped my fingers through the wire fencing.

  Nick poked me in the back. “Make it fast! Because I’m going to be right behind you!”

  Climb I did, and it was a good thing I spent all those hours dancing as the Chili Chick and was in good shape. When I got to the top of the gate, I raised my left leg like I was doing a high kick and swung it over the top crossbar, then pulled myself up to straddle the gate. From this altitude, that bull didn’t look so big anymore. But he still looked like he wanted to take somebody’s head off, and right about then, the nearest somebody was Nick.

  “Hurry!” I urged him, and I didn’t need to tell him twice. When I dropped to the ground on the other side—the safe side—of the gate, Nick was right behind me. We both landed on our feet a second before that bull slammed into the gate. The entire enclosure shivered and shook like we were on a fault line in the middle of a quake. The vibration hit me like a wave and shuddered through my bones. It knocked me back against Nick, who lost his footing, and we ended up in a heap in the chute carpeted with straw and decorated with bull droppings.

  With a grunt, Nick sat up, set me aside, and looked at what had been a gorgeous gray suit. He grabbed a handful of clean straw to scrape the muck off his sleeve, and I realized I wasn’t the only one who was out of breath when he asked, “Are you okay?”

  Was I?

  It took me a couple seconds to do a quick inventory. No broken bones. At least none I could feel. No blood except for the thin stream of it that welled up around the sliver in my hand. If I had any other injuries, I honestly couldn’t say. But then, my head gyrated and my stomach lurched and the adrenaline pumped through my body so hard and so fast, it felt like the front of my skull was going to explode.

  “I’m . . .” I dared to take a look past the gate and into the pen and was just in time to see the bull huff out his opinion of us and turn to trot into a pool of sunshine at the far end of the enclosure.

  I picked straw—and other stuff—out of my hair. “I was on my way to get Ruth Ann’s cotton candy and—”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” Nick pulled a five-dollar bill out of his pocket. “I came looking for you and found this on the ground. It seemed strange to me, since I just saw you with a five.”

  “You came looking for me?”

  He got to his feet and offered me a hand up. My knees were rubber, so nobody could blame me when, even after I was standing, I held on tight to him.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why were you in there with that bull? That’s what I’d like you to tell me.”

  If I had the energy, I would have screamed. I pressed a hand to my heart. Yeah, like that would do anything to help the pounding. “Why were you looking for me? The last time I saw you, you were busy dodging about an alibi for the night of the murder.”

  “I did. I was.” He looked down at his tie, saw that it was smeared with goo, and, grumbling, untied it and tossed it aside. “I thought about it, and I decided I had to tell you the truth. I was going to tell you the truth. But then I found that five and what looked like the tracks of a golf cart right nearby, and it just seemed off to me. I don’t know why.”

  I had little memory of any of it, but it made perfect sense. I passed a hand over my eyes. “Somebody . . .” I gulped and swayed on my feet. Shock? Or was the smell on my skin and clothes getting to me? “Somebody put something over my head. Like a bag or a pillowcase or something. And then . . .” I flinched at the memory. “I think I got hit with a stun gun.”

  He backed up just enough so he could look me over, and I guess he didn’t see anything broken or any blood, either, otherwise he would have started bellowing like that bull and insisting on a trip to the hospital. Right about then, a shower sounded way more appealing than the ER.

  “And then you got dumped in here?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I guess I must have been out of it for a little while, and then I came to and . . .” I looked back at the enclosure and the two-thousand-pound killing machine inside it and gulped.

  Nick reached down into the straw and came up holding a cattle prod. “Well, that explains why he was not in a good mood,” he said with a look back at the bull. “This was no accident.” He said what I was thinking.

  “And it wasn’t meant just to scare me.” I said what he didn’t put into words. “Someone wanted me dead. And I would have been dead, Nick. If not for you.”

  He shrugged off the praise. “You would have thought of climbing the fence yourself.”

  “Maybe. Yeah. Eventually. But I was so out of it and so scared . . .” When I went to wipe a tear off my cheek, I realized my hands were trembling, and rather than let Nick think that I was wimpy, I dropped my hands and held my arms tight against my sides. “I couldn’t think straight.”

  “That’s perfectly natural when something like this happens, something life-threatening.”

  Rather than think about it, I looked past him down the chute the
bull had come out of. “And you didn’t see anyone? When you got here, there was no one around?”

  “Not a soul. Except for you.” He slipped an arm around my shoulders. “Let’s get you back to the RV so you can get cleaned up.”

  I wasn’t about to argue.

  But let’s face it, I wasn’t about to forget, either.

  “What were you going to tell me?” I asked him once we were safely away from the enclosure. “You said you came looking for me so you could tell me something. You said you were going to explain. You know, about your alibi for Monday night.”

  He breathed in deep, then thought better of it and made a face. It’s not like I could blame him. We both smelled like we’d just gone one-on-one with a rodeo animal, and even the sickly sweet smell of the kettle corn cooking nearby couldn’t mask that.

  “It’s like this.” Nick scratched a hand along the back of his neck. “I do have an alibi.”

  “Yeah, you said that. And now you’re going to tell me what it is.”

  “I am. Sure.”

  If I didn’t know better—and I did, I knew that Nick doesn’t get rattled and he doesn’t get embarrassed and he isn’t self-conscious at all—I would have said that he was rattled and embarrassed and self-conscious as hell. But then, his cheeks flushed a dusky red that reminded me of a Dundicut pepper.

  “I was . . .” A muscle jumped at the base of Nick’s jaw. “I was with Ginger.”

  It took a moment for what he said to sink in, and another second for me to put two and two together. It took even longer for me to close my flapping jaw. “Ginger? Our Ginger? Ginger with the great wardrobe? The drag queen from the plaza?”

  I guess I said all this kind of loud, because Nick looked at the people who crowded around the nearby midway food trucks and clamped a hand on my arm to drag me away.

  “Yes, Ginger the drag queen,” he said from between clenched teeth. “Do you have to tell the world? And before you ask, yes, the cops know. I told them. Ginger told them. They know exactly where I was.”

  It is not often that I am at a loss for words, but at that moment, I couldn’t get even one past the sudden lump that blocked my throat. What was the emotion that robbed me of my voice? Was it surprise I was feeling? Or outrage?

  Was it jealousy?

  We were near the center of the fairgrounds midway, and the Ferris wheel whirled on one side of us, the merry-go-round on the other. I locked my legs and refused to move another step, and I realized that the crazy emotion that slammed me like a professional wrestler (or a two-thousand-pound rodeo bull) was jealousy, all right. Like every other jealous woman, anytime, anywhere, I was not about to wait even another minute to hear the whole story.

  I untangled myself from Nick’s iron grip so I could throw both my hands in the air. “First I saw that DVD of all those cute guys over at Dom’s place and I thought he was gay. And now . . .” I could barely believe it. “You? Why didn’t you tell me, Nick? Because I’ll tell you what, I would have been just fine with the whole friendship thing, and I wouldn’t have wasted my time and a whole lot of really good fantasies on you, either.”

  His eyes lit. “You fantasize? About me?”

  I guess throwing my hands in the air once didn’t dispel all the nervous energy that had built inside me because I did it again. “Not anymore, that’s for sure. You should have told me. You should have told me you were gay!”

  Suddenly, I felt like I was looking at Nick in a fun house mirror. His expression froze into a mask of astonishment, then melted into what was almost a smile. That lasted maybe a second. Then again, he scooped me into his arms so fast, I didn’t have time to see. Exactly one half of a nanosecond after he clamped his mouth over mine, I didn’t care.

  The kiss was long and luxurious. It was slow and wet, but not in that slobbery sort of way some guys kiss. Nick, he knew what he was doing, and when my knees buckled and I leaned against him, I didn’t even care that he smelled as bad as I did, like straw and beast and bull droppings.

  “There.” He stopped as quickly as he started, and with his hands on my shoulders, he set me back on my feet, but he didn’t give me time to catch my breath. “Now you want to tell me who’s gay?”

  I touched a hand to my lips. Yes, I know it’s cliché and all, but I swear they were burning. “Not you.” I stepped forward, all set for another kiss in spite of the crowds that drifted by and their oohing and aahing and the one guy who called out, “Get a room!” My own curiosity stopped me in my tracks.

  “Then what were you doing out on a date with Ginger?” I demanded.

  “Did I say I was on a date?” Nick, it seemed, was not as comfortable with public displays of affection as I was. He took my hand and hauled me through the crowd and over to the Showdown side of the fairgrounds.

  “I wasn’t on a date with Ginger,” he said once we got there. “I was doing Ginger a favor.”

  “Helping her pick out a new gown?”

  Nick was in no mood for jokes. He stopped under the awning in front of Jorge LaReyo’s tamale stand, but Jorge took one whiff and told us we’d better move on or someone would think he was cooking with month-old meat. I knew we wouldn’t get even that nice of a reception from Sylvia, so when we got back to the Palace, I led the way around back where we stood in a strip of shade.

  “Ginger, she . . . he . . .” Nick crinkled up his nose, and it wasn’t because of how we smelled. “That whole cross-dressing scene, it’s not exactly my thing. I’m never even sure what to call them.”

  “Ginger’s a she. At least when she’s in costume. And she . . .” I leaned forward, urging him to fill in all the blanks that left my mind reeling.

  “She was performing at a club on Monday night after the fund-raiser. She does this Dolly Parton thing. You know, with the wigs and the dresses and the . . .”

  He didn’t explain any more. He didn’t have to.

  Ginger as Dolly. Just thinking about it made me grin, and I wished we were going to be in San Antonio long enough for me to attend one of her shows.

  “Is she any good?” I asked.

  I guess Nick never considered this. He nodded, shook his head, shrugged. “Like I said, not exactly my thing. Besides, I wasn’t paying all that much attention to Ginger’s performance. See, she does a show at this club every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Late. And there’s this guy who’s been hanging around. You know, a real stalker type. He’s been making Ginger really nervous. She talked to me about it earlier in the evening and asked my advice, and she was so upset, I told her I’d stop over at the club and see what I could do.”

  “Was he there?”

  “Yeah, and as soon as I saw him, I got why he made Ginger uncomfortable. He was one of those guys who has a real bad vibe coming off him. I should have told you right away where I was. I just felt—”

  “Embarrassed?”

  Deep color stained his cheeks. “Yeah. Not that I care or anything. Those guys, they can do whatever they want. With whoever they want. It’s just not my thing.”

  “And you told Detective Gilkenny?”

  “She never batted an eye. But then, after a few years on the force, I’m sure she’s heard it all. Just like I had when I was on the job.”

  “And when you told her, she didn’t think you were gay?”

  “I’m not sure if she did or if she didn’t. I don’t think she cares if I am or I’m not.”

  “And you’re not.” I thought back to the kiss and to the way the touch of Nick’s lips made my head spin like the Ferris wheel and my body feel as if I’d stood in the Texas sun too long. “You’re not.”

  “I’m not. But I knew you’d think I was, and that’s why I didn’t want to get into it with you.”

  “Except you did.” Believe me, I wasn’t talking about getting into a discussion about gender or wardrobe or Nick’s choice in entertainment. I was talking about th
e kiss.

  I guess Nick knew this, because the tiniest smile touched his lips. “I did. We did.”

  “And we didn’t get into it just because we had this near-death experience and you were feeling relieved and glad to be alive and you wanted to celebrate with the first woman you could find?”

  “There are plenty of other women around,” he said.

  I inched closer and grinned.

  He stepped nearer and made a face. “You smell awful!”

  “There’s one way to a woman’s heart! And you’re no treat yourself, by the way.”

  “So I’m going to change.” He backed away a step. “And I’ll catch up with you later.”

  It wasn’t what either of us wanted—not right then, not right there—but I could see his point. Landing in the sack when I smelled like I smelled with a guy who smelled like Nick smelled . . . talk about a buzz kill!

  “Except, Nick!” I stopped him before he could walk away. “What happened?”

  He gave me a blank look and I elaborated. “What happened with Ginger? And the stalker?”

  Nick brushed a hand through his hair. “I took him outside the club and had a little . . . er . . . talk with him. He won’t be bothering Ginger again.”

  “Because you told him if he did, he was going to get arrested?”

  Nick smiled. “Because I told him I was Ginger’s boyfriend and if he ever came near her again, I was going to break both his legs.”

  CHAPTER 15

  After all the excitement (not to mention a much-needed shower and a quick change of clothes), the last thing I felt like doing was working the Showdown for the rest of the afternoon. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to. Tumbleweed was looking for someone to get over to Alamo Plaza early with the paperwork for that night’s event—The Chili Queens Help the Homeless—and I was happy to volunteer. Rest and relaxation. That’s what I needed. And to me, the plaza sounded like a better place to find it than the fairgrounds, where I’d been wrangled and almost mangled.