Josie Tucker Mysteries Box Set 2

by E M Kaplan

  Toward the end of the hall, as she approached the break room, she heard several voices, including Drew’s rumbly tones that she loved. She also detected more than one woman present, including a high-pitched, melodic laugh, which almost made steam shoot out of her ears.

  Ridiculous. She couldn’t live her life festering in negative thoughts and being insanely jealous of every woman who spoke to Drew or who worked with him. He was an extremely attractive man—not in looks alone, but in personality and prestige. A lot of women and men looked for partners who were doctors. For Josie, it had been a happy perk—almost a necessity with all the injuries and ailments she’d had in the past. But, no more. Those days were gone. And she would not allow herself to be insanely possessive of him. Only moderately so.

  Joke. That was a joke… Mostly.

  Josie paused outside the door and straightened her shoulders. Someone in the room said, “And then the patient said, ‘Now I know how a Muppet feels!’” They all laughed.

  Ha. Doctor humor.

  Lisa First was beyond this wall. Lisa First, the woman who had kissed Drew, was now chatting and laughing with Josie’s boyfriend.

  She took a deep breath and shifted her bag of burritos to her other hand. She would be mature about this. Responsible women who were going to be thirty—well, thirty someday—did not have adolescent histrionics over a man-stealing Doctor Barbie.

  Stepping through the door, Josie took in the situation and the players with a sweeping glance. Drew was leaning against a desk, arms crossed over his chest—a casual but defensive posture, which Josie appreciated. He smiled when he saw her. At a table, two more women sat with plastic forks poised over salads, but both of these ladies were brunettes—so they couldn’t be Lisa First.

  Across the room, however, digging in a large shoulder bag, was a tall, blonde, and fairly busty—Josie knew it—woman. From the way all occupants of the room shot furtive looks at the woman and then at Josie, there was no mistaking this glam-azon was indeed Lisa First.

  It’s totally fine. Josie would be an adult. She would hold out her hand and introduce herself like a normal human being with manners—or at least, she could pretend to be one.

  Lisa First stood up from where she’d been stooped over…and up and up. Damn, she was tall. She’d make a good match with a tall, swarthy guy—someone who looked like…well, Drew, who was also tall. Together, they’d be Doctor Barbie and Doctor Ken via Little Italy, a.k.a. Boston’s North End.

  The blood began to pound in Josie’s head behind her eyelids and in her temples. Her teeth clicked together in a snap as her feet moved with purpose toward Drew. As she got up to him, he dropped his arms, resting his hands on the desktop behind him. She thrust the bag of burritos into his chest, and he caught them in the crook of his arm.

  Looking deep into his eyes, she placed a hand on the back of his neck and brought his face down to her level for a kiss—but not just any kiss. She wasn’t rough, but she wasn’t gentle by far. No, not by a long shot.

  Her buss was possessive and definitive, long enough to be more suited to privacy, especially when the other doctors in the room started catcalling and applauding.

  Faces appeared in the doorway. Krissy was laughing, and she’d brought a couple of friends, who started clapping.

  Josie started to pull away, but the response of Drew’s mouth and tongue on hers made her draw out the kiss even more.

  When they broke apart at last, they were both breathing hard. Drew’s thick, dark hair was sticking up at a rakish angle, though Josie didn’t remember running her hands through it. His shirt collar was askew, and his cheeks were flushed. She imagined hers were as well.

  The room and the hallway were in an uproar with laughter and whistling. Josie patted Drew on the chest twice. Then she stepped back. Jabbing two fingers toward Lisa First, Josie pointed at the woman then back at her own eyes.

  I’ve got my eyes on you. Watch your step.

  To her credit, Lisa First gave a rueful smile and a defeated half-wave. The room parted for Josie as she walked out, head held up.

  Maybe she’d overdone it. The regret was starting to creep in despite the approval of the crowd—the literal pat on the back she received on her way out, probably from Krissy.

  But then she heard it.

  Over the din of the gawkers, Drew’s voice came loud and clear. She could hear the smile in his voice as he said, “That’s my girl.”

  FULL SLAB DEAD

  An Un-Cozy Un-Culinary Josie Tucker Mystery

  EM Kaplan

  Copyright © 2017-2019 EM Kaplan

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by the author.

  FOR MY AUSTIN FRIENDS

  Amy & Matt;

  Lois & Buddy;

  Laura the Stick Lizard Lady;

  and my friends from BMC.

  MANY Thanks to

  Megan Harris, editor

  Katherine Cruz, editor

  The Josie Tucker VIPs

  Part 1: Spark

  Listen to the sizzle of a steak hitting a hot grill. The sound is as magical as the unexpected spark of chemistry on a first date.

  Imagine the first person to turn a slab of gory meat on a spit over a fire. Can you hear the pop and hiss of juice as it hits the hot coals? Cro-Magnon man wants food. His daughter adds a handful of roots and a parsley garnish.

  From a charred, fuzzy mammoth shank, we flash over to a glistening roasted pig, buried in leaves and savory smoke. The flame of history forms a filet mignon, perfectly pink, until it cycles back to a blood-red beef tartar. The evolution of cooking, the sublimation of a recipe, grows complex and intricate in the blink of an eye, as quick as a flying spark, roaring into an inferno.

  —Josie Tucker, Will Blog for Food

  Chapter 1

  Thunder rolled outside Ruby’s Gen-U-wine Texas Bar-B-Q Shack as Josie shook the water drops off her denim jacket. Through the speaker, Stevie Ray Vaughan wailed from the great beyond about the floods keeping him from his baby down in Texas. The downpour pounded on the corrugated tin roof overhead. The restaurant door slammed shut in a gust of rainy, smoky, barbecue-scented air as she squinted at the menu board above the counter.

  “Do you want a full slab or a half? Itty-bitty thing like you could make a fool out of me by tucking away a full slab of baby backs. That’s why I never try to guess a person’s order,” the woman behind the chest-high counter said and made a pshaw noise with her puckered, hot-pink lips.

  Josie hesitated like a deer caught in the headlights of a Ford F-250. Good thing the lunch rush was over and no one was goading her with impatient throat-clearing and watch-checking. Did she—Josie Tucker, food blogger extraordinaire and slave to her cranky stomach—want a full two pounds of fall-off-the-bone rib meat drenched in tangy fire-red barbecue sauce? Her eyes said yes, but her gut said, Are you out of your ever-lovin’ mind?

  She was two-for-two in eating at the local Austin barbecue places for her blog while her boyfriend, Drew, was at a Geriatrics medical conference in town. Two places in two days. Their hotel room mini-fridge was already packed with yesterday’s leftover containers of brisket, chicken, and ribs—and she suspected her over-taxed stomach had as little space left in it as well. She’d already felt a warning tremor from her midsection on the drive over to Ruby’s.

  And yet…

  “Well, now I feel like you’ve thrown down the gauntlet,” she told the woman, whose name tag said Georgia. “And I’m not known to back down from a challenge.”

  When the woman saw her reading her badge, she grinned with glossy white teeth. “Yeah, that’s my name although I’m a native, born and bred. Guess my mama thought the grass was greener over in the Peach State. But guess what? Eighty-three years old
and she still hasn’t ever left Texas.”

  “Not even for a day trip?” Josie’s mind was slightly boggled. In the past two years, she’d been back and forth from Boston to the western United States twice—and she wasn’t counting a stupid Vegas trip she would forever regret. If she could erase it from her memory bank, that would be super.

  “A day trip? Even if you start in the morning, you could drive all day and still be in Texas when the sun went down, I tell you what. You pack up your bags for a big adventure and you end up in Lubbock or somewheres. So if you really want to leave this state, you’ve got to plan ahead, if you know what I’m saying.” She fluttered her fingers as if shooing away the thought. “But that’s neither here nor there. I interrupted you while you were making the decision of a lifetime with your ribs. What’s it gonna be?”

  Josie decided to come clean. “The truth of the matter is, I had barbecue yesterday. I’m going to have it today and then again tomorrow.” That statement, spoken aloud, made Josie want to double over in submission and lay prostrate on the nearest flat surface. Even the trendy stamped concrete floor under her gray Chuck Taylor low-tops would do. After lunch, her stomach was going to hate her. Even more than usual.

  What else is new.

  “Three days in a row? You got some kind of slow, drawn-out death wish for your arteries? Because as much as I love me some good old fashioned brisket and ribs, that’s a lot of red meat for one woman. Unless you’re from out of town, because then it makes perfect sense. Taking a tour of the sights, tasting the local fare. So where’re y’all from?”

  Having correctly ferreted out Josie’s non-native status, Georgia propped her meaty elbow on the tall countertop and rested her chin in her hand. Her hot-pink fingernails matched her lipstick, which Josie found to be an impressive, yet personally foreign expression of femininity.

  Georgia’s question was simple enough, but Josie didn’t know how to answer it. She’d been born in Massachusetts and lived there currently in an apartment near Fenway Park with Drew, but her heart was stuck in Arizona where she’d spent her formative teenage years after her dad had died.

  “Boston,” she said, finally settling on an answer, though it didn’t feel exactly right. She sometimes still felt as displaced as a tumbleweed on Boylston Street. “I’m doing a food tour of Austin-area barbecue places for my blog. I was at The Mineral Lick yesterday and I’ll go to Smiley’s tomorrow. Then to Off The Bone later in the week.”

  If her belly could take it. So far, so good.

  Until this week, her notoriously testy digestive system had been quiet since her brief stay on a college campus a couple months ago. During that trip, she’d more or less fasted—not because she’d thought it might clear up her stomach problems, but because the food wasn’t fit for human consumption. Plying her tum-tum with spicy, tomato-based sauces every day of this vacation was no doubt hastening the inevitable.

  Never mind the Very Important Question—which called for all caps—she was preparing to ask Drew. Yes, that question. Her standard MO was avoidance on that front. But this was just a simple vacation. No dead brides. No stalkers. No recurring nightmares. No crazy plots in which she could get embroiled. She was just here to eat excessive amounts of animal flesh, take a few pictures for her blog, and otherwise enjoy the week with Drew.

  “Some of the barbecue places in this area have an intertwined history, did you know that?” Georgia asked. When Josie shook her head, the woman plowed ahead, tossing out tidbits of gossip like hand grenades. “My uncle, Conrad Ruby, who owns this place, is also the uncle of Billy Blake. Now, Billy is the sad-sack owner of Smiley’s and the least smiley person you’d ever want to know. Conrad—who may or may not have been directly related to Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who took down that blackguard, Oswald, who shot America’s one true king, John Fitzgerald Kennedy—used to co-own Smiley’s with his cousin back in the 80’s. Those two boys had a big falling out, and Conrad went off to start his own place, this place, Ruby’s Gen-U-wine. Since then, their rivalry has been epic, the stuff of history books. Well, local history books, at least.

  “When Conrad sponsored a local softball team, Billy sponsored their biggest competitors. When Billy phoned in a donation to the local Shriners’ telethon, Conrad called them up and beat the amount by a dollar. It just went on and on over the years. Never got very ugly, though. Just little things to show they were annoyed with each other.

  “The big exception to our barbecue relations is Off The Bone. They’re not any part of this Shakespearean tale. Off The Bone is relatively new, just eight or ten years old. A young couple from the Carolinas—ACC region, if you’re a sports fan. Hook ‘em horns, by the way—opened that place, and they have the nerve to serve Carolina vinegar sauce on their menu. Landsakes, that’s just evil. The rumor is, she’s actually a vegetarian at home.”

  Josie blinked, as if clearing her vision would straighten out the details in this barbecue pitmaster family tree. She needed a spreadsheet…or a flowchart. No. Absolutely not. Though she could feel herself getting sucked in, she didn’t want to hear any of this drama. She was here to find out what kind of dry rub they used on their ribs and if they used mustard or oil to get the rub to adhere to the meat. In Memphis, for instance, she knew they tended not to use barbecue sauce on their ribs—just to enjoy the crust or “bark” of spices on the meat. But Texans were pretty much married to their sweet, spicy tomato-based sauce. She hoped—

  “And have you heard Smiley’s is haunted?”

  Dog-gone it. Against her will, her interest was piqued. She wanted to know more, but she could resist temptation, right? Wrong.

  “Haunted? As in…inhabited by ghosts?” She tried and failed to keep the Archie Bunker skepticism out of her voice. None of the websites or tourist info about Smiley’s had mentioned ghosts or anything supernatural. Keeping the naysayer out of her tone was harder than tamping down her interest in why people would think it was haunted.

  Georgia whipped her head around and yelled toward to the kitchen, “Manny, come mind the counter. I got some educatin’ to do for my new friend.”

  #

  Here’s where I should run screaming, right?

  Josie plunked her denim-clad butt down on a metal bench that looked like it had once been a bleacher seat. The table in front of it was wooden and heavily scarred with names, lop-sided lovers’ hearts, and cheers for something called the Hutto Hippos. She couldn’t imagine they’d be a school mascot in these parts—hippos were from Africa, not Austin—but what did she know?

  Georgia slid a plastic oval basket lined with wax paper in front of her. It was filled with the most delectable looking half slab of ribs Josie had seen in…well, the last 24 hours. She dug her phone out of her pocket to take a couple of artsy, angled photos for her blog. Although she wasn’t the best photographer, she could add on an Instagram filter with the best of ‘em.

  Now all she needed was a little peace and quiet to enjoy her lunch, to savor the flavors and let her world-class taste buds—which was The Times’ description of her, not her own—do their magic so she could translate the whole experience into pithy words for her readers. After a few rapid-fire clicks, she set down her phone and leaned over the basket of ribs, inhaling deeply. She had discovered some subtle but important differences in the local barbecue lexicon and was developing a theory that she wanted to further—

  Georgia lowered her substantial weight on the bench opposite Josie, jostling the table. In her hand was a cardboard Shiner Bock six-pack, which wasn’t full of beer bottles but yellow and red squeeze bottles. Each condiment bottle held one of Ruby’s barbecue sauces to put on her ribs or…white bread? Josie frowned at the stack of slices on the side of her order.

  “Wonder Bread,” Georgia explained. “An American tradition. The best thing since, well, sliced bread. Soaks up the grease in your gullet like nothing else. White and fluffy, just like the first loaf that came off the assembly line in the 1920s.”

  All right, so I have a
lunch companion. I’m okay with that. She’s part of the local flavor. I’ll get her picture. That exquisite manicure alone deserves a spotlight.

  Josie searched the table for a fork or a knife to hack apart her ribs, which was only a half-slab of them, she was relieved to note as she ran her hand down her poor concave stomach. Her tank was not up to snuff in terms of its normal capacity, but she forged onward. No utensils in sight. The only thing she found on the table was a centerpiece of utilitarian brown paper towels. The big roll didn’t have tear perforations, as if it had been intended for a restroom dispenser but brought out to mop up the dining room clientele instead.

  “You just go ahead and dig on in. Don’t let my gabbing stop you.” Georgia nodded to the steaming slab of meat in the nested wax paper in front of Josie.

  As if. Nothing was getting between Josie and her food.

  She picked up the charred end of the last rib on the slab with two fingers…and came away with a bare bone as the tender meat fell onto the wax paper in a succulent heap. Drool pooled in her mouth. She didn’t know whether to stick her face directly into the basket like it was a trough or prolong her anticipation by pulling away another bone. If she did it again, she could watch the meat fall off and imagine how it would melt on her tongue. Very little chewing required.