The Adventures of Slim & Howdy Read Online Free

tell you what.” Howdy pointed ahead of them. “Take a right at the light up there.”
    “Where we going?”
    “Place called Lucky’s,” Howdy said. “Good pulled pork and cold beer at a fair price. You hungry?”
    “I guess.”
    “Me too.”
    Slim pulled into the parking lot underneath a flickering sign with two neon cowboy boots and a pair of tumbling dice that rolled out to snake eyes. Slim looked at the losing roll, then turned to Howdy and said, “Lucky’s?”
    Howdy shrugged as he walked past Slim. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “Maybe they’re being ironic.” He held the door open. “After you.” Like he was the maître d’.
    “That’s all right,” Slim said. “You go ahead.”
    As they stood at the door, neither of them gave any thought to the car pulling into the parking lot behind them. If they had, they might have noticed the girls inside giggling and slipping jeans over their bathing suits.
    6
    SLIM AND HOWDY WERE LEANING WITH THEIR BACKS against the bar, drinking beer, waiting for their food. George Jones was on the jukebox covering Haggard, a tune about a guitar player working the Holiday Inn in downtown Modesto.
Yeah,
Slim thought.
Been there. Done that.
    It was a slow night, maybe a couple dozen customers in the place, mostly couples, mostly happy. But there were a few in there by themselves, heartbreak written all over their faces, hunkered over their doubles, wishing things had turned out different. Man at the end of the bar, for example, sorry he’d cheated on his wife. Even sorrier he got caught. Kept telling himself she’d be back, and each drink made that seem more likely. Then there was the old guy in the booth in the back mumbling under his breath about not having that kind of money and cursing the Cowboys ’cause they didn’t cover the spread. Again. “Go on,” he mumbled. “Break my damn leg. See if I care.”
    These were the people Slim couldn’t help but notice. Hard-luck cases and those prone to making bad choices. Sad faces and tragic lives. People who needed praying for ’cause they didn’t have a prayer to begin with. Things you could write songs about. It was a honky-tonk truth: heartbreak came by the case in a place like this.
    Just then, an old B.W. Stevenson song came on the jukebox. The catchy up-tempo melody pulled Slim out of the dark and he started to hum along.
    “That’s a good song,” Howdy said. Then, singing, “She takes my blues away.”
    “Always liked it.” Slim nodded. “ ‘Shambala’ too.”
    That’s when the two girls blew through the door like TNT, their hips swinging like church bells in the tower. Everybody looked up for a moment. Howdy nudged his new pal and said, “Well now, maybe
this
is why they call it Lucky’s.”
    Howdy didn’t recognize them as the girls sitting by the pool at the Settler’s Cove. He’d only seen them from a distance then, with their hair tucked under baseball caps and those skimpy two-piece suits that would barely cover two big apples and a slice of pie. And, truth be told, he hadn’t been studying their faces at the time.
    Slim had been so focused on getting his guitar back that he couldn’t have said whether the apartment complex even had a pool, so, as far as he was concerned, they were just two gals who, in the dim light, weren’t out of the question.
    One was blonde, the other chestnut. They looked a little old for their age, which appeared to be midtwenties. If you were a betting man, like the guy in the back booth, you wouldn’t put money on either one being a debutante or a recent pledge for Kappa Kappa Gamma. Both wore tight low-riding jeans and skimpy half-shirts that revealed pierced belly buttons, little muffin tops, and those sexy little tattoos in the smalls of their backs.
    “It’s like a welcome mat,” Howdy said wistfully.
    Slim gave a derisive snort at that. “Just ’cause a girl’s got a tattoo there doesn’t mean she wants to have sex with you.”
    Howdy peered out from