There must be at least fifty country-western bars in and around Nashville. Most are pretty nice places if you like cold beer and the western atmosphere of cowboy boots and Stetson hats. Many are the places where would-be country artists develop the style that one day makes them stars. They're a nice place to take a spouse or date out for a night out on the town and maybe a little dancing if the place has a dance floor. Then there are bars like the "Rusty Spur"
As the old joke goes, the Rusty Spur is the kind of place where if you don't have a gun when you go in, they give you one so you'll at least have a fighting chance. In truth, there wasn't much chance of any gunfight; the only light in the place came from the multitude of neon beer signs and the haze of smoke was too thick to see well enough to shoot anybody. It was the fourth time I'd been in there in the last two weeks. Howard Marshall's wife, Tina, seemed to like The Rusty Spur. I was getting worried; I was starting to like it too...well, I was starting to like the bartender anyway. She was...I'm getting ahead of myself, aren't I?
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Howard Marshall was a computer technician who did service calls for the computerized inventory control systems used by the big box stores. As a result of there being too few technicians and too many problems, he was on the road six days a week. He'd asked me to find out if his wife, Tina, was doing anything while he was gone.
In case you don't know me from my other stories, my name is Jerry Madison, and I'm a private investigator in Nashville, Tennessee. My company consists of me, myself, and I, and isn't one of those high-priced outfits that cater to business investigations and such. I do a lot of process serving and a few missing persons and cheating spouse cases. Oh, and I also work with a couple of lawyers and some insurance companies that don't want to pay the rates the big boys charge. My office is the living room of an apartment over a laundromat and beside a Chinese restaurant. I live in the rest of the apartment so my costs aren't that high, and I fill a niche between paying a lot to find out something and do-it-yourself investigation.
That's where Howard met me that Sunday afternoon in August. I began by asking him my standard "is your spouse cheating on you" questions.
"Howard, what makes you think something's gone wrong?"
"Mr. Madison, I email her every night, but it's usually the next afternoon before I get a reply. She always says her laptop is messed up, but everytime I check it, it's fine. I'm starting to wonder if she's doing something with another man."
"You ever try calling her?"
"No...I usually don't have time for that. Most days I work fourteen hours straight and then I'm so tired I just go back to the hotel and go right to sleep. I do text her during the day sometimes, though."
"Does she reply to the texts?"
"Yes, but it's usually an hour or so later."
"Does Tina work outside the home?"
"No. Tina's a software engineer, and she free-lances from the house -- business websites, remote IT support, stuff like that."
"Any money problems?"
"No, I make around seventy with all the overtime, and Tina actually makes more money than I do."
"Not to be nosy, but it's important if I'm going to know what to look for. How's your uh...intimate life?"
Howard grinned sheepishly.
"You mean, do we have sex. Sure, every Sunday. I usually don't get home until late Saturday night, so we save it for the next morning. Tina's not a big fan of sex, but it always sounds like she likes it. That's another reason I'm worried. It seems like she's been liking it more lately."
"Have you noticed anything unusual, like cell phone numbers you don't recognize on your bill, or maybe extra miles on your car?"
"I don't see her cell phone bill, because the company pays for mine and she pays for hers. I don't know about her car. She takes care of all that too."
I asked him some more questions about what Tina liked and didn't like, if she had any friends she might be visiting while he was gone, and a few others. I'd try to verify his answers by what Tina did during his absence.
I hoped that verification might show him Tina wasn't doing anything suspicious other than not answering his emails and text messages promptly, and I figured that just might be the case. By the time I'd made notes on everything he'd told me, I'd decided Tina was probably just as intelligent and as boring as Howard, and that nothing was going on except Tina was busy building websites when he emailed or texted her.
I asked Howard for the make, model, and color of her car, the license number, and a picture of her. He promised to email all that to me as soon as he got home. Howard wasn't much better at responding than he said Tina was. It was five the next afternoon when I finally got them.
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I'd formed a picture of Tina from my notes. She had to be short and a little dumpy, probably with little tits and a big ass. In my imagination, she wore thick black glasses and kept her hair in one of those ponytails that stick straight out the back like the ass end of a duck because the hair is too short to hang down.
One look of the picture of the black-haired woman in shorts and a halter top told me my vision was all wrong. It also told me if Tina didn't like sex a lot more than Howard thought, Mother Nature had sure wasted a lot of beautiful body parts.
Judging by the doorway she was standing in, Tina was about five eight or nine, with shining black hair that fell in waves around her bare shoulders. Those bare shoulders led down to breasts that really needed more than the halter-top to hold them up. Her bare midriff had a very sexy little tummy, and her shorts covered an ass I was sure would be just as smooth and tight as the long, slender, bare legs below. The smile on her pretty face said she knew how she looked and was proud of it.
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I had a bunch of summons to serve that week, so it was Thursday morning before I parked my minivan with the blacked out windows half a block from their house and waited...all fucking day. Tina never came outside, probably because it was hotter than hell.
I can't keep the engine running in the minivan when I'm in the back with my cameras, so I didn't have air conditioning. The thermometer in the minivan said it was a hundred and four inside, but it felt a lot hotter than that. By six, I was wringing wet with sweat and on my eighth bottle of water from the cooler. My porta-potti, an empty gallon milk jug, was getting full too. Another half-hour was all I planned on being stewed alive before heading home for a shower and then a cheeseburger and scotch at Joe's. That plan changed when Tina walked out her front door and got into her white SUV.
I could see I hadn't been wrong about her breasts and ass. Tina was wearing a white shirt, one of those that's fitted everywhere, except it didn't fit around her breasts. I was too far away to see how many buttons she had to leave undone to make room for them. I wasn't too far away to see how her bra pushed her breasts into twin mounds of seduction with an equally seductive cleavage between.
She had on jeans that...well, I've never been able to figure out how women get into jeans that tight without greasing up their legs and ass. I know...the jeans stretch, but still...
Anyway, her ass was round and tight and made the low-rise jeans come alive when she walked. She'd topped, or rather, bottomed it all off with a pair of turquoise cowboy boots.
After Tina drove past me, I followed her out of the subdivision and then to one of the little towns that blend into the outskirts of Nashville. She turned into a parking lot full of dirty, beatup, four wheel drive pickup trucks in front of a bar called "The Rusty Spur," got out and went inside.
I'd caught all that on my video camera, and decided that was enough for one night. Ordinarily I would have gone in and caught some more video of Tina doing whatever it was she did there, but not that night. I know a thing or two about honky tonk bars. My khaki slacks and polo shirt wouldn't have fit in, and if you don't fit in at some of these bars, you're apt to be less than gently escorted back out by the regulars. Yes, I have been, and it hurts.
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I was careful to park the minivan on the other side of the block on Friday. Tina probably didn't notice it the day before, but if it was in the same place the next day, she would. At the least, that would tip her off to my surveillance. At the worst, she might think she was being stalked and call the police. I could show the patrolman my PI license and then be on my way, but then I'd have to rent another car in order to keep following her.
At seven, Tina walked out her front door again, this time in a snug, stretchy, pink tank top and jeans that fit just as tight but had rhinestone stars over each nice ass cheek. Her boots were pink too.
After she left her subdivision, Tina turned the same direction as the night before. I followed her to the same bar.
Tonight I was prepared. My jeans were well worn, complete with a fake snuff can ring on the left hip pocket. My long-sleeved shirt was a washed-out red plaid, and my black cowboy boots were nicely scuffed. I don't have a cowboy hat, but my camo ball cap would be an acceptable alternative in any of these joints. I needed the cap for another reason too. There was a micro video camera in the center one of the five eyelets in the front and a transmitter with battery fastened inside that would send anything I looked at back to the recorder in the minivan.
