Motor Mouth: A Barnaby Novel

  “We’re sort of safe here in the warehouse,” I said to Hooker. “Maybe we should roll the sixty-nine out and take a peek.”

  Hooker smiled. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist.”

  I entered the trailer through the rear-pocket doors. Hooker, Gobbles, and I pulled the two large toolboxes out of the aisle, onto the ramp, and rolled them out to the warehouse floor.

  We all got on the ramp, I powered us up to the second deck, we rolled the primary car out, set chocks to keep it stable, and I powered the ramp back down. We rolled the car off the ramp and onto the floor, and I got ready to go to work, helping myself to some disposable gloves, opening the toolboxes, releasing the hood latches.

  We’d let Beans out to stretch his legs, and he was running around, acting goofy, looking to play. Hooker took a hand towel from the tool chest, tossed it to Beans, and Beans caught it and tore it to shreds.

  “He’s just a big puppy,” Hooker said.

  “Keep your eye on him so he doesn’t eat a wrench or a lug nut. I’m going to borrow a jumpsuit from the Huevo hauler.”

  The first locker I tried was empty. I opened the door to the second locker and a shrink-wrapped body fell out. It was folded up, knees to chest. It was male. It was buck naked. It was completely encased in layers and layers of plastic wrap. With the exception of the gruesomely distorted face and open, unseeing eyes, the shrink-wrapped corpse looked a lot like 180 pounds of expired raw chicken parts packaged for supermarket bulk sales.

  I jumped back and slammed into the locker on the opposite side of the narrow aisle. A wave of nausea slid through my stomach, and the room dimmed for a moment. In my mind I was screaming, but I think the reality was that my mouth was open and no sound was emerging.

  Hooker looked in at me. “See a spider?” His eyes focused on the plastic-wrapped chunk of body parts on the floor. “What the hell is that?”

  I was breathless and too horrified to move. “I think it’s a d-d-dead guy. I opened the cabinet, and he fell out.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You need to come take a look, because I seriously think it’s a dead guy, and I’d like to get out of here, but my feet won’t go anywhere.”

  Hooker moved next to me, and we both stared down at the body. The eyes were open in a look of unblinking surprise, and there was a big bullet hole in the middle of the forehead. He was maybe in his fifties with a stocky build, and dark brown hair cut short. He was naked and bloody and grotesque. In fact, he was grotesque beyond seeming human, so that after the first shock wore off, it was like looking at a movie prop.

  “Shit,” Hooker said. “This really is a dead guy. I hate dead guys. Especially when they’ve got a bullet hole in their forehead, and they’re in a hauler I just stole.”

  I glanced at Hooker and saw that he’d broken out in a sweat. “You aren’t going to get sick, or faint, or something, are you?”

  “Race-car drivers don’t faint. We’re manly men. I’m pretty close to blowing chow, though. Manly men are allowed to do that.”

  “Maybe you should sit down.”

  “That sounds like a good idea, but I’m too freaked to move. And here’s more bad news. Do you know who this is?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “The plastic wrap has his face sort of distorted, but I think this is Oscar Huevo.”

  I clapped my hands over my ears. “I didn’t hear that.”

  Gobbles wandered in. “Holy fuck,” Gobbles said. “That looks like Oscar Huevo. Holy fucking fuck.”

  “Someone has to get me out of here,” I said. “I’m going to be sick.”

  Hooker gave me a shove, and we all rushed out and stood gulping air in the middle of the warehouse. Gobbles had started shivering. He was shivering so much I could hear his teeth chattering.

  “This is b-b-bad,” he said.

  Hooker and I nodded agreement. It was bad.

  “Who would want to kill Oscar Huevo?” I asked Hooker.

  “The list is probably in the tens of thousands. He was a brilliant businessman, but I’m told he was a ruthless competitor. He had a lot of enemies,” Hooker said.

  “We need to call the police.”

  “Darlin’, we’re standing in front of a hauler we just hijacked and vandalized. And the dead guy on the floor owns the car that just beat me out of the championship. And if that isn’t bad enough, two Stiller employees are involved in some really bad shit.”

  “Do you think Oscar Huevo is the billion-dollar cargo that was going to Mexico?”

  “I think it’s a good possibility.”

  We fell silent for a couple minutes, all of us absorbing the extent of the disaster.

  “I got the icky c-c-creepy c-c-crawlies,” Gobbles said. “M-m-maybe we could just p-p-put Oscar back in the l-l-locker.”

  THREE

  A car door slammed outside the warehouse and Hooker, Gobbles, and I went rigid. A beat later the lock tumbled on the side door and Felicia Ibarra and her pal Rosa Florez walked in. Rosa works in one of the cigar factories on Fifteenth Street. She’s in her forties. She’s half a head shorter than me and twenty pounds heavier. And while I like to think of myself as having an okay shape, I’m built like a boy compared with Rosa.

  Beans gave a happy woof and took off at a gallop, chugging across the room like a freight train. He skidded to a stop in front of Felicia, put his two front paws on her chest, and she went down to the floor with Beans on top of her.

  Hooker gave a whistle, pulled a dog biscuit out of his pocket, and tossed it across the room. Beans’s head snapped around, his eyes opened wide, and he abandoned Felicia like she was yesterday’s news, thundering off in search of the biscuit.

  “He likes you,” Hooker said to Felicia, helping her get to her feet.

  “Lucky me,” Felicia said. “It’s a dog, right?”

  Rosa hugged Hooker and me. “We just came to say hello. We never see you anymore.” She looked over Hooker’s shoulder and went wide-eyed at the hauler. “Omigod, this is one of those NASCAR trucks, isn’t it? It’s the thing the car goes in. How does it work? Where do you put the car?”

  “The car goes in the top,” I told her. “The ramp is on hydraulics. It lifts the car and the car gets rolled into the bay on the top.”

  “And who’s this?” she said, eyeing Gobbles.

  “This is Gobbles. He also works for Stiller Racing.”

  “Ladies,” Gobbles said, bobbing his head.

  “Are you a driver?” Rosa wanted to know.

  “No, ma’am,” Gobbles said. “I’m a spotter like Barney. And during the week I do some detailing.”

  Felicia swept past me to the hauler. “What’s in the downstairs? I always wanted to see this. I just want to look in the door,” she said. “Just take a little peek.”

  “No!” Hooker and I said in unison, blocking the way.

  Rosa tried to see around Hooker. “Does this truck have one of those lounges with black leather couches where all the drivers have sex?”

  “We don’t all have sex there,” Hooker said.

  “Is there someone back there now?” Rosa asked. “Someone famous?”

  “No,” Hooker said. “No one’s back there.”

  “Your mouth is crooked,” Rosa said. “Your mouth always gets that little crook in it when you tell a fib. Who’s back there? It’s not a movie star, is it? I’m not giving up until I find out.”

  There was a loud woof and then a thud from inside the hauler. We all turned and looked and saw that Beans had gone into the hauler through the side door and was trying to get Oscar Huevo to play. He’d managed to knock Huevo over, and now he was jumping on him, making growly dog sounds. Huevo didn’t move or squeak, so Beans straddled him and sunk his teeth into what I suspected was Huevo’s shoulder.

  “Holy crap!” Hooker said.

  He threw a biscuit at Beans, and Beans snapped it up in midair. The next biscuit fell short, and Beans had to jump over Huevo to get it.

  I ran to the SUV and opened
the back hatch. “Get him to jump in,” I yelled to Hooker. “Throw some biscuits in here.”

  Hooker whistled and tossed the biscuits, and Beans galloped across the floor and sailed into the SUV. I slammed the hatch closed and leaned against the car, my hand over my heart.

  “What is that?” Felicia wanted to know, looking into the hauler. “It looks like a big bag of chicken parts. No wonder the doggie wanted to chew it. What are you doing with chicken parts? Are you having a barbecue party?” She elbowed Hooker out of her way and stepped into the hauler. “It smells funny in here,” she said, bending for a closer look. “I think these chicken parts are rotten.” She suddenly straightened and made the sign of the cross. “This isn’t chicken parts.”

  Hooker blew out a sigh. “It’s a dead guy.”

  “Holy mother,” Rosa said. “What are you doing with a dead guy?”

  I gave Rosa and Felicia an abbreviated version of the last six hours. Felicia made the sign of the cross at least ten times, and Rosa listened with her mouth open and her eyes half popped out of her head.

  “I gotta see this,” Rosa said when I was done. “I gotta see the dead guy.”

  We all returned to the hauler and gaped at Huevo.

  “He doesn’t look real,” Rosa said. “He looks like one of those wax people. Like he was made for a horror movie.”

  Especially now that he had big tooth marks in his shoulder.

  “What are you going to do with him?” Rosa wanted to know.

  Hooker and I looked at each other, sharing the same thought. We now had a dead man with holes in him that perfectly fit Beans’s canines. We couldn’t just put Huevo back in the locker like Gobbles had suggested. Sooner or later it would occur to people that there’s only one dog on the circuit with teeth that big…and Hooker would be dragged into the murder mess. Even without that, I couldn’t put Huevo back in the locker. It felt disrespectful to dismiss him that easily.

  “I think he looks like fish food,” Rosa said.

  Felicia did another sign of the cross. “You better hope God wasn’t listening to that. Suppose this man is Catholic? It would be our fault he doesn’t get a prayer over his body. It would be a black mark on our soul.”

  Rosa cut her eyes to me. “Can’t afford to get too many more of those.”

  “Yeah,” Hooker said. “I’m standing in a hot hauler, staring down at a Mexican with a hole in his head. Wouldn’t want to push my luck by pissing God off.”

  “We should take him to his relatives,” Felicia said. “It’s what God would want.”

  “His relatives are in Mexico,” I said. “What would God’s second choice be?”

  “He must have somebody here,” Felicia said. “He wouldn’t be traveling alone. Where is he staying?”

  We all shrugged. It wasn’t as if we could go through his pockets and find a matchbook.

  “Not in a motor coach,” Hooker said. “Probably in one of the big hotels on Brickell Avenue.”

  “We need to put him someplace where he’s going to be discovered,” I said. “If we leave him in the hauler, he might be taken to Mexico and disposed of and his family would never know what happened to him. Hard to know the killer’s plans. We could leave him in the hauler and make sure the police find him, but it’ll be even more of a scandal for NASCAR. And chances are good that Hooker and Beans will be brought into the investigation. Hooker might even become a suspect. So I think we need to find neutral ground. We need to leave Huevo someplace not associated with NASCAR and someplace where he’ll be found and recognized.”

  “The Huevo corporate yacht is tied up in South Beach,” Gobbles said. “We could put him on the yacht.”

  “That would be nice,” Felicia said. “We could take him for a ride. I bet he’d like that.”

  “He’s dead,” Hooker said. “He doesn’t like anything. And that’s a terrible idea. We’ll get caught and arrested and spend the rest of our lives in jail. We’ll never get him on the yacht without being seen.”

  “Then maybe someplace close to the yacht,” Felicia said. “God likes the yacht idea.”

  “What, do you have a direct line?” Rosa wanted to know.

  “I got a feeling.”

  “Uh-oh, is it just a feeling feeling? Or is it one of those Miguel Cruz feelings?”

  “I think it might be a Miguel Cruz feeling.”

  Rosa looked at me. “That’s a serious feeling. Felicia had a feeling Miguel Cruz was in trouble, and an hour later he fell into a sinkhole on Route One, car and all, and broke his back. And another time Felicia told Theresa Bell she should light a candle. And Theresa didn’t do it, and she came down with shingles.”

  Hooker looked pained. He drove race cars. The only vision he really related to was a back bumper.

  “How about this,” Hooker said. “In the interest of moving on with our lives, let’s put Oscar in the SUV and drive him to South Beach. We can go to the marina and look around for a nice final resting place for him. Then we can check into a hotel for the night, and we’ll figure the rest out in the morning when we’re not so creeped out.”

  I nodded agreement. I was hoping I’d go to sleep and wake up and find out none of this had ever happened.

  “We gonna have to scootch him to the door,” Felicia said. She looked at Huevo through the plastic wrap. “Okay, mister, we gonna move you now. You gonna be home soon.” She looked over at Gobbles. “You and Hooker gotta grab hold of Mr. Dead Guy’s behind, or something.”

  Gobbles clapped a hand over his mouth and ran for the bathroom.

  “Gobbles got a weak stomach,” Felicia said. “He’d never make it in wholesale fruit.”

  “If we scootch him along, we’ll rip the plastic,” Rosa said. “I think we gotta carry him. I’ll get one side and Hooker can get the other side.”

  I got disposable gloves from the box in the tool chest and gave them to Hooker and Rosa. They took opposite sides of Huevo. Hooker got his hands under Huevo, then turned white and started to sweat again.

  “I can do this,” Hooker said. “No problem. I’m a big, tough guy, right? I don’t go all pukey just because I’m carrying a dead guy around, right? It’s not like I’m gonna get cooties, right?”

  “Right,” I said. Trying to be supportive. Glad I wasn’t the one with my hands under Huevo’s dead ass.

  Hooker and Rosa got Huevo out the hauler door, down the ramp, and set him on the cement floor. We all took a couple steps back and fanned the air.

  “We gotta rewrap Mr. Dead Guy if we’re taking him for a ride,” Felicia said. “Mr. Dead Guy don’t smell good.”

  I ran to the hauler and came back with boxes of plastic wrap, some duct tape, and a can of room freshener I’d snitched from the bathroom. We sprayed Huevo with Tropical Breeze, rewrapped him in plastic, and secured him with duct tape.

  “I think he looks good,” Felicia said. “You can hardly see where he got chewed on. He looks like a big present.”

  “Yeah, but some of the smell is still leaking through,” Rosa said. “We’re gonna have to strap him to the roof rack.”

  I hustled back to the hauler and returned with three air fresheners shaped like pine trees and designed to hang in a car. I tore their cellophane wrappers off and taped them to Huevo.

  “That’s better,” Felicia said. “Now he smells like a pine tree. It’s like being in the forest.”

  “Good enough for me,” Hooker said. “Let’s get him in the car.”

  Hooker and Rosa picked Huevo up and walked him to the SUV. A big shaggy head appeared in the back window, nose pressed against the glass.

  “WOOF!” Beans said, eyes riveted on Huevo.

  “You got a real sicko dog,” Rosa said to Hooker. “You’re not gonna be able to put Mr. Dead Guy back there with Cujo. Mr. Dead Guy’s gonna have to go in the front seat.”

  I moved the front seat back as far as it would go, and Hooker wedged Huevo in and closed the door. Huevo looked like he was intent on the road ahead, knees bent and pressed against th
e dash, feet on the edge of his seat, arms tucked in at odd angles. Probably best not to dwell on how his arms got to look like that.

  Felicia and Rosa slid onto the backseat, and Beans snuffled them from the cargo area at the rear of the SUV. Gobbles, fresh from the bathroom, climbed in with Beans.

  Hooker stared in at Felicia and Rosa. “You don’t have to go with us to South Beach. It’s late. You probably want to get home. Barney and Gobbles and I can handle this.”

  “That’s okay,” Rosa said. “We’re gonna help you.”

  Hooker draped an arm around my shoulders and whispered into my ear, “We have a problem, darlin’. I was going to leave Huevo sitting in front of a Dumpster. Taking him to the marina is a stupid idea.”

  “I heard that,” Felicia said. “And you’re not leaving that poor Mr. Dead Guy sitting by a Dumpster. Shame on you.”

  Hooker did an eye roll and took the wheel, and I squeezed in next to Rosa. Hooker drove north to First Street and headed east. He wound his way through downtown Miami and picked up the MacArthur Causeway bridge to South Beach. It was after midnight and there weren’t a lot of people on the roads. Hooker turned south onto Alton and pulled into the lot by Monty’s Restaurant. Miami Beach Marina and Huevo’s yacht were just beyond a fringe of trees. And the entire marina was lit up like daylight.

  “I wasn’t counting on so much light,” Felicia said.

  “Maybe we could steal a car and leave him in valet parking,” Rosa said.

  “What’s to the side, past those trees?” Felicia wanted to know. “Looks like there’s a driveway going somewhere.”

  “It’s for deliveries to Monty’s,” Hooker said.

  “I think we got a delivery,” Felicia said.

  Hooker cut his eyes to her. “You sure it’s okay with God?”

  “I’m not getting any messages,” Felicia said. “So I’m thinking it’s okay.”

  Hooker dimmed his lights and pulled into the driveway, close to the delivery door. We wrangled Huevo out of the front seat and set him on the little cement pad in front of the door.

  “How they going to know what to do with him?” Felicia asked. “Maybe no one recognize Mr. Dead Guy.”