Motor Mouth: A Barnaby Novel

  Hooker hauled himself up into the truck cab and angled behind the wheel.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “Why do you get to drive the big truck?”

  “I’m the driver. I always drive. It’s what I do. Anyway, have you ever driven an eighteen-wheeler?”

  “Yes. Have you?” I asked him.

  “Yep,” Hooker said.

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “I do. Your mouth gets this little crook in it when you lie.”

  “Give me a break here. I’m a testosterone-crazed race-car driver. I’ve gotta drive the boat.”

  “This is a truck.”

  “Truck, boat…it’s all the same. Look at it. It’s big. It’s a guy toy.”

  “You know about the air brakes, right?” I asked Hooker.

  “Yeah. Air brakes.”

  “And you know how to turn the headlights on? You’ve only got running lights right now.”

  “Yeah. Lights.”

  “This truck has approximately five hundred and fifty horses and an eighteen-speed transmission.”

  “Yep.”

  “The trailer’s fifty-three feet long, so you have to watch the turning radius—”

  “I’ve got it under control,” Hooker said. “Get in the car and follow me out.”

  Beans was sitting up, looking out the window at me when I returned to the SUV. He was doing heavy-duty panting and his forehead was wrinkled.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to him. “He’ll be fine. He knows what he’s doing.”

  Beans looked like that registered a seven on his bullshit-o-meter. I’d actually placed it a couple points higher on mine. I buckled myself in, cranked the engine over, and waited for Hooker to roll. I gripped the wheel and whispered under my breath, “Take it slow.” When the hauler crept forward, my grip went white knuckled and my breath caught in my chest.

  Hooker was smoothly moving the truck across the back lot, toward the front of the building, inching along without lights. He eased the hauler into the exit lane, and I fell in line behind him. This was the moment of no return. In minutes he’d be on the highway in a hijacked truck. Time for honesty. If we got caught, we’d be out of NASCAR and into Florida penal.

  My heart was pounding so hard it was blurring my vision. Even Beans was instinctively alert, no longer panting. I checked him out in my rearview mirror to make sure he was okay and we locked eyes. Probably it was my spooked imagination, but I swear he looked as terrified as I felt.

  Hooker left-turned the hauler off the diner property and his rear tires ran over the curb and took out a four-foot-tall pygmy date palm and an entire flower bed. I looked around in panic, but didn’t see anyone rushing out of the diner after him.

  “I didn’t see that,” I said to Beans. “You didn’t see it either, right?”

  Hooker maneuvered the truck out of the flower bed, onto the feeder road and then onto the highway, heading south. He turned his lights on, brought the rig up to speed, and we both went into cruising mode. After a few minutes, I realized cars were pulling up to the truck to get a better look. Every inch of a car hauler is a rolling advertisement for the car and the sponsor. They’re works of art. The 69 was decorated in Spanky’s colors with a bigger-than-life-size picture of Spanky and his race car.

  I called Hooker on his cell phone. “We have a problem,” I told him. “Everyone’s interested in the hauler. Some people are taking pictures. You should have brought the briefs to put over your head.”

  “Hard to feel righ teous when you’ve got your underwear on your head,” Hooker said. “Anyway, I’m taking the next exit. I saw a sign for ser vices. I’ll find a dark place to hide, and you can go to a gas station and steal something helpful.”

  Hooker crawled off the exit, turned right, and rolled down the road. After about a half mile, he came to a small strip mall that was lights off for the night. His turn signal went on, he slipped into the lot, and he disappeared behind the buildings. I made a U-turn and drove back to a gas station and convenience store.

  Ten minutes later, I pulled around the end of the strip mall and caught Hooker in my headlights. The hauler was at idle. The headlights and running lights were off. Hooker was lounging against the hauler.

  I parked and ran over with a small screwdriver I’d bought at the convenience store. I ripped the packaging apart and gave Hooker the screwdriver.

  “This was the best I could do. The garage was closed.”

  Hooker rammed the screwdriver between the bay door and the outside rim of the truck and leaned into it. The metal bent and the lock gave. We searched the bay. No remote.

  “Try forcing the side door,” I said to Hooker. “We can’t get to the ceiling hatch or the back door because the aisle will be filled with the tool carts, but I can get to the lounge and maybe find a key for the other locker. Or maybe they left the remote in the lounge.”

  Hooker popped the side door, and I jumped inside and flipped on a light. I rapped on the ceiling and yelled up to Gobbles, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Gobbles yelled back, his voice muffled by the sheet-metal slab under him. “What’s going on?”

  “We can’t find the remote to open the back door.”

  I searched all the drawers and cabinets. No remote. No key. No helpful crowbars lying around. No power equipment that would slice through metal.

  Hooker appeared in the doorway. “I broke the screwdriver trying to get the second bay open. Did you find anything in here?”

  “No.”

  Hooker looked at his watch. “The drivers are probably out of the diner by now, calling the police.”

  “They won’t call the police,” Gobbles yelled down. “There’s something in here that’s worth a billion dollars, and they don’t want anyone to find it.”

  Hooker looked up at the ceiling. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “I wish,” Gobbles said. “I heard them talking outside the hauler. They were taking this truck to Mexico. You’ve got to get me out. They’ll kill me if they find me in here.”

  “We need a little more time and a lot bigger screwdriver,” Hooker said.

  “Okay, let’s not panic. We need time and tools and a better place to hide this thing,” I said. “Who do we know?”

  “Has to be someone we trust,” Hooker said. “Someone close. Someone with a garage or an airplane hangar or an empty warehouse. It would be good to get under cover for a couple minutes in case we have to cut Gobbles out.”

  “Felicia Ibarra,” I said. “We can use that abandoned warehouse behind her fruit stand.”

  Felicia Ibarra was a chunky little Cuban immigrant lady who was in her early sixties. She was surprisingly wealthy, owning an entire block of real estate in Little Havana that was just short of prime. And she was frighteningly kick-ass, having once shot a guy on my behalf.

  Hooker locked eyes with me for a beat. “Our motives might be good, but no matter how you spin it, this is grand-theft auto, big-time. If I get caught on the road in this rig, my career will be over.”

  “If you get caught, you’ll be dead,” Gobbles yelled down.

  Hooker was hands on hips. “That makes me feel a lot better.”

  “Let me drive,” I said to Hooker. “I could do grand-theft auto better than you. You’d just have to promise to come visit me once in a while.”

  “Yeah, right. I could almost live with that. See if you can disable the GPS. I’m going to try to rip some of this shrink-wrap off the outside so we’re not so recognizable.”

  I was able to squeeze my arm in far enough to reach a roll of aluminum foil sitting on the kitchenette counter. I ripped a couple chunks off the roll, swung out of the hauler, and climbed onto the back of the cab. The antenna had been placed in the usual location, between the exhaust pipes. I wrapped the antenna in aluminum foil and jumped off. Turns out it’s pretty easy to screw up a GPS system.

  Ten minutes later we’d done enough slash and peel that
we were able to get rolling.

  I followed Hooker back out to the highway and trailed behind him. The truck was for the most part white now and didn’t attract a lot of attention. We took 95 South to Flagler and went straight into Little Havana. We passed the Ibarras’ fruit stand, turned left at the next street, and rolled to a stop in front of the warehouse.

  I’d called Felicia, and she said the warehouse was ours to use, and she’d leave one of the garage doors open. Hooker lined himself up in front of the open door, pulled the truck into the dark warehouse, and I scooted in around him. I got out of the SUV, ran back to the warehouse door, and pushed the button to close it. When the door shut, I hit the button for the lights and overhead fluorescents flickered on.

  Felicia and her husband had bought blocks of real estate around their fruit stand at a time when real estate was cheap. Some of the properties were now leased to other businesses, and some of the properties lay fallow. This warehouse was one of the fallow properties, used occasionally for the storage of seasonal fruit. It was cinder-block construction, with three garage bays and enough room to hold six eighteen-wheelers or a kajillion oranges. The ceiling was high enough to accommodate the hauler. The lighting was adequate. The ambience left something to be desired, but then, we weren’t here for ambience.

  Hooker cut the engine, swung down from behind the wheel, and jogged over to some empty fruit crates stacked against the rear wall. A couple crowbars and a mallet lay on the floor by the fruit crates. He grabbed a crowbar and in seconds had the remaining storage-locker door open. The remote plus a bunch of power cords were in the locker. I plugged the truck into a 220-volt outlet so we didn’t have to run on generator. And then I plugged the cord with the remote into its receptacle. I pushed the control button, and like magic the entire back panel of the truck slid to horizontal and became a ramp. I used the remote to raise the ramp to the second deck, and Gobbles inched his way around the primary car and crawled onto the ramp. He lay there spread-eagled, hand to his heart.

  “I thought I was going to fucking die,” he said. “Swear to God.”

  I powered us down, and when we reached the cement floor, Hooker grabbed Gobbles and dragged him up to his feet.

  “We need to talk,” Hooker said. “I want to know what’s going on.”

  Gobbles shook his head. “You don’t want to know. It isn’t good.”

  “I just hijacked a hauler because of you. Talk to me.”

  Gobbles blew out a sigh. “I’m in a mess. A couple weeks ago this guy come to me and said he represented a company that was working on this new traction-control technology that they needed to test. He said it was a big secret, and they needed someone who could keep his mouth shut. They were going to pay in cash, and I needed cash real bad. I’ve got two kids I love, and a wife who wants to suck every last cent out of me, and wicked-bad lawyer bills. They said all I had to do was push a button on a remote when the car was going into a corner. Last week it was your car, and this week it was Shrin’s. You got loose last week and tore up a fender, but this week…I almost killed him. I swear, I never thought it would cause a crash like that.”

  I cut my eyes to Hooker and saw his face flush, and I was pretty sure he had some steam coming off the top of his head. “You aren’t going to hit him, are you?” I asked Hooker.

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “We don’t actually have time for that.”

  “Just one good shot,” Hooker said.

  “I didn’t have it figured out,” Gobbles said. “I thought it would give us an advantage. Everybody wants traction control on their car, right? I thought it was a fluke that Hooker spun out on it. When it made Shrin’s car go loose today, I knew there was something else going on. As soon as I pushed the button, both cars spun out.”

  “What about Clay? Why did you think Clay was involved and deliberately run down?”

  “They had someone on the inside, doing whatever they needed to do to the engine. I didn’t know who it was. Didn’t want to know. The night I saw Clay get run over, I said to myself Clay was the one fixin’ the engine. I don’t know why they run him over. Maybe he wanted more money. Or maybe they didn’t need him anymore and were cleaning up. But I’ll bet you anything Clay was the one on the inside.”

  “And you didn’t say anything to the police.”

  “I didn’t want to drag us all into a big cheating scandal,” Gobbles said. “I still thought I was doing a good thing for the team. I thought Shrin’s car had something on it that would help us. Now you see why I was in a tight spot there. It’s not like I didn’t want to do what was right. I just couldn’t decide what was more right than the other. And I didn’t even know any names. The big guy and the little guy always come to me. They just show up. I’ve been calling them Horse and Baldy.”

  “To their face?”

  “Hell, no. They’re friggin’ scary. I yessir them to their face.”

  “You’re talking about the two men you pointed out to me when we were on the roof? The two men with Huevo.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why Horse?”

  “I met them in a men’s room once, and I, you know, looked. And the other one, the smaller guy, is obvious. He’s bald as could be.

  “Anyway, after the race I was supposed to give Horse and Baldy the remote, and they were supposed to give me my money, but I was worried about what happened to Clay. And I didn’t know if the traction control just worked wrong or if they intentionally wrecked our cars. I thought I’d play it safe, and I’d stay someplace where there were lots of people, like the garage area. I hoped they could find me and get the remote, and I’d be done with it, and nothing bad would happen.

  “I hung with you in the garage for as long as I could, but they didn’t show, and I was afraid I was going to miss the plane, so I started walking back to the rental van. They came from out of nowhere in the parking lot, and Baldy had a gun, and I freaked. I took off and ran back to the garage. I don’t think they ran after me, but I didn’t care. I didn’t stop running until I was back in the garage area. Only thing, the haulers were all leaving and there weren’t a whole lot of people there anymore. The sixty-nine was still open, and there wasn’t anyone around, so I climbed in and hid behind the backup car. It seemed like a smart thing to do at the time. Hard to think good when you’re running from someone who wants to shoot you.”

  “You said Ray Huevo was involved.”

  “They were standing alongside the truck, and I was trapped inside, and I could hear everything they said.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “It sounded like Horse and Baldy and someone else. The third guy was pissed because I got away. He said it was Horse and Baldy’s responsibility to clean up after themselves. Then he said there was a billion dollars’ worth of trouble that had to be shipped out, and Huevo wanted to make sure it got to Mexico.

  “Horse said arrangements were complete. He said the item was in the hauler, and the drivers had instructions to take the hauler to Mexico.”

  I was an engineer, and a spotter for a race team. I’d toyed with the idea of being James Bond for a moment back there, but the moment had passed and I didn’t really want be involved in this…whatever it was.

  “I think we should turn this hauler over to the police,” I said. “Let them go through it and solve the mystery.”

  “Don’t they need to have a reason to do a search?” Gobbles asked. “Do you think they’d have enough cause to search it from what I’d tell them?”

  Hooker and I looked at each other and shrugged. We didn’t know.

  “I watch CSI: Miami all the time,” Hooker said, “but they haven’t covered this.”

  “They’re going to hunt me down and kill me,” Gobbles said. “My kids won’t have a daddy. They’ll be left with my money-grabbing ex-wife. And she’ll get married to some asshole who knows all about the stupid man in the freakin’ stupid boat, and he’ll probably have a lot of money and take them all to DisneyWorld. And my kids will forge
t all about me.”

  Hooker looked at me. Confused. “Man in the boat?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  “I was thinking while I was locked up,” Gobbles said. “We could search the hauler, and we could find the billion-dollar thing. Then maybe we can go to the police with our evidence and get the bad guys arrested. Then they’ll be in jail, and they won’t be able to kill me. I came up with an alternate plan, but I don’t like it as well. It involves kidnapping my kids and moving to Australia.”

  “I can’t wrap my mind around this,” Hooker said. “I don’t think it’s a sure thing that we can send the bad guys to jail. And I’m having a hard time imagining a billion dollars’ worth of technology.”

  “I think it’s on the car,” Gobbles said. “I think they fixed it so my car would spin out, and Dickie’s car would win. I think NASCAR just isn’t looking in the right spot.”

  “Why would they want to take the hauler to Mexico?” I asked.

  “Huevo’s R and D team is in Mexico,” Hooker said. “He has a shop in Concord, but all research and development is done in Mexico. It’s on a separate campus a couple miles from Huevo corporate headquarters. If the sixty-nine had some incredible technology installed on it, they might want it taken back to R and D. Oscar Huevo is chairman of the board of Huevo Industries and the driving force behind Huevo Motor Sports. His little brother Ray runs R and D.”

  “And Ray was at the race today,” Gobbles said. “Barney and me saw him talking to Horse and Baldy.”

  I have to admit I could feel my curiosity ratchet up. Gobbles was suggesting there was a billion dollars’ worth of illegal technology on a race car that was at my disposal. As a member of the racing community, I was incensed that the technology might have been used to cause a crash. And as a car junkie and engineer, I was dying to get my hands on it.

  Hooker glanced over at me. “You’re looking like Beans when he sees a thirty-two-ounce steak left unattended on a kitchen counter.”

  “At least I’m not panting and drooling.”

  “Not yet,” Hooker said, “but I know you’re capable.”