Chili Con Carnage Read Online Free PDF

with a man so stupid, and certainly no use trying to reason with him. Left with no options, I did the only thing possible.
    I grabbed the chili costume with both hands, and sent a clear message in the form of one quick bonk on Roberto’s head with the chili.

CHAPTER 3

    The next couple of hours went by uneventfully, which was fine by me. I didn’t have to defend my reputation, dodge Crazy Karmen, and since I made sure to avoid Sylvia, I didn’t have to deal with her, either.
    While I was doing the avoiding of Sylvia, I hung out in the RV, cleaned up the chili costume—and had a brilliant idea.
    One of the Showdown traditions Jack considered sacred was sharing a meal with his fellow vendors the evening before every cook-off began. It was always potluck, and the menu depended on what the vendors had around. Or what they could afford. When I spent summers traveling the circuit with Jack, some nights we’d feast on pork stew that was nice and spicy thanks to the handfuls of cumin, oregano, and chili powder he’d toss into the mix. Other nights, we went all-American with hot dogs and chips. My favorite nights, though, were when Jack cooked up a pot of his famous chili.
    What kind of chili?
    Well, that all depended.
    Jack always started with what he called his “secret recipe” and took off from there, riffing like a jazz musician as the flavors blended and he decided to up the tempo with a pico de pajaro pepper or a pinch of Saigon cinnamon, or slow things down with a teaspoon or two of licorice-flavored epazote.
    I don’t know if anyone else ever picked up on it, but I caught on early in my teen years—the way Jack cooked chili told me an awful lot about what was going on in his life.
    See, I could always tell when he was in love because when he had a new woman to think about, he’d add a couple ghost peppers or a Trinidad scorpion pepper, and then his chili was spicy enough to self-combust.
    On the flip side, it was easy to tell when Jack’s love life was on the fritz, because then he’d make a chili with smoky undertones and just a hint of cocoa powder.
    When things weren’t going well at the Palace, his chili was long on beans and short on meat. And when he was feeling flush, he’d cook up a pot of Texas Red with nothing it in but brisket and spices.
    Jack cooked chili like he lived his life. Out there on the edge. Never two times the same. And though his friends encouraged it, he firmly refused to ever enter a pot of his chili in any competition even though everyone knew that Texas Jack Pierce made the rockin’-est chili this side of the Rio Grande.
    And lucky me . . . before I could get too melancholy thinking about all this, I remembered there was one more small container of one of his concoctions in the freezer.
    I thawed the chili, heated it, and snuck it out to the Palace in a small Crock-Pot to keep it warm, then returned to the RV to change back into the Chili Chick.
    My timing was just right. By the time I got out front, there was a small crowd gathered around a sleek black Lincoln sedan that had just pulled up in front of the Palace. I didn’t need to be a foodie TV fan to know that could only mean one thing: Carter Donnelly had arrived.
    Now that I saw him, I recognized the face that smiled out from the covers of so many magazines at the grocery store. Carter wasn’t as handsome as he was boy-next-door good-looking, and obviously life in the food biz had been good to him. The cut of his clothes told me he shopped in places no Showdown vendor could afford. Heck, even his shoes fairly screamed money. Somewhere, an animal rights group was enraged by the death of the critter that had given its life for his loafers.
    “So that’s what the excitement is all about!”
    I was so busy watching the red-haired, ruddy complexioned chef make his grand entrance, I hadn’t registered the fact that Puff had walked up to stand next to me and was watching the action, too.
    Puff who?
    Puff. Simply Puff.
    If he