Motor Mouth: A Barnaby Novel

I took a sip of coffee. “There are some worried people out there. They’re scrambling to find the hauler, and they’re going to want to find the idiots who stole it because those idiots know Huevo was stuffed into the locker.”

  “Good thing we’re the only ones who know we’re the idiots,” Hooker said.

  The waitress stopped at our table and filled Hooker’s empty cup. “Anything else, sweetheart?” she asked Hooker. “Everything okay with your breakfast?”

  “Everything’s great,” Hooker said. “Thanks.”

  She turned and sashayed off, and I gave Hooker a raised eyebrow.

  “Sometimes it’s good to be me,” Hooker said, finishing his pancakes.

  “So we’re sticking to our plan to check out the car and leave the hauler on the side of the road somewhere.”

  “Yeah, except I don’t know what to do about Gobbles. No one knows we’re involved, so we can go home and get on with our lives. Gobbles has a major problem. Gobbles’s life expectancy isn’t good. I have no idea how to fix that.”

  Hooker signaled for the check, and the waitress hustled over with it. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like another cup of coffee?” she asked Hooker.

  “No,” Hooker said. “We’re good.”

  “I hope she gets a melanoma,” I said to Hooker.

  Hooker pulled out a wad of cash and left it on the table with the check. “Let’s roll. I need clothes. We’re going to take ten minutes out to shop.”

  Miami weather is gorgeous in November, as long as there’s not a hurricane blowing through. It was shirt-sleeve, ride-with-the-top-down weather. Bright sun and no clouds.

  The top didn’t go down on the SUV, but we opened the windows and tuned the radio to salsa music. We were relatively mellow, all things considered. Beans was happy with his muffin. Hooker took off in search of a mall, and Beans stuck his head out the driver’s-side back window and his tail out the window on the opposite side of the car. His soft, floppy Saint Bernard ears flapped in the wind, and his big loose Saint Bernard lips ruffled as they caught air. Hooker drove out of Little Havana and headed southwest.

  Forty-five minutes later, Hooker had a bag of clothes. One-stop shopping for jeans, T-shirts, underwear, and socks, plus a canvas duffel bag. Life is simple when you’re a guy. We hit a drugstore and Hooker got a toothbrush, a razor, and deodorant.

  “That’s it?” I asked him. “Don’t you need shampoo, body wash, shaving gel, toothpaste?”

  “I thought I’d use yours. I’d use your razor, but it’s pink.”

  “A Texas tough guy can’t shave with a pink razor?”

  “Hell, no. I’d get kicked out of the club.”

  “What club is that?” I asked him.

  Hooker grinned at me. “I don’t know. I made that up. There isn’t any club. I’d just feel silly if I used a pink razor. I’d feel like I had to shave my legs.”

  We returned to the warehouse, I zipped myself into the borrowed jumpsuit, and I got back to work attacking those areas where I would have hidden a wire and microprocessor. I cut through the roll bar and every other piece of the frame where it could possibly run. I searched through the entire wiring harness. I disassembled the tach. NASCAR had already cut into the ignition box, so I didn’t have to check that. I pulled the engine out with the help of an engine hoist, and started going over it inch by inch with a flashlight and my bare hand, skimming the surface with my fingertips.

  “What are you looking for?” Hooker wanted to know.

  “If Huevo found a way to go wireless, he could stick the microprocessor directly onto the engine block. These things are so small, he could make it look like a casting flaw.”

  I very carefully explored two burrs in the surface. Neither proved to be anything. I found a third and eventually got it to lift off. I was pretty sure it was a chip, but it was too small to see any detail, and I’d partially mangled it trying to get it unstuck from the engine.

  “Is that it?” Hooker asked.

  “I’m not sure. It’s even smaller than I thought it would be, and it’s not in perfect shape. I need magnification to see it.” I dropped it into a plastic sandwich bag and sealed it. “If this isn’t it, then I’m stumped. I’ve looked everywhere I could think to look. I want to roll the second car out so I can check the engine for a similar chip.”

  A half hour later, I was convinced a second chip didn’t exist. I’d carefully examined every inch of the engine but hadn’t found anything.

  Hooker had his hands in his pants pockets, and he was rocked back on his heels. “Okay, Ms. Criminal Mastermind…now what?”

  “The Huevo people will take one look at the sixty-nine primary and know someone associated with racing hijacked the truck,” I told him. “I wouldn’t care about that except it now involves us in a murder. So I don’t think we can return the hauler with the car in it. My suggestion is to unload the second car and make this look like someone took the truck because they wanted to steal the cars. It could be any car thief. Or some insane Spanky fan. And that would go along with Oscar getting dumped into Spanky’s truck like a drunken joke.”

  “I think we should make everything disappear permanently,” Hooker said.

  “It’s not that easy. We could drive the hauler to North Dakota but I’m afraid we’d be spotted. If we drive the whole truck into the ocean, it’ll still be sitting there at low tide. If we torch it, we’ll be left with a bunch of burned-out carcasses. I could dismantle the hauler piece by piece but that would take time…lots of time and hard work. The cars would go a lot faster. Give me an acetylene torch and a power saw and by the end of the day I can have the two cars reduced to unrecognizable junk that could be tossed off a bridge. Then we just leave the hauler on the side of the road somewhere, far away from Little Havana. And we can remove the aluminum foil from the GPS so the Huevo people can recover their truck.”

  “I like it.”

  “We don’t want to attract attention with the truck,” I said. “We don’t want to drive it around in daylight. And it would look suspicious if we took it out at two in the morning. Although in this neighborhood it might just be one more hijacked truck moving through its paces. I think we should take it out at four thirty in the morning, while it’s still dark, and it’ll look like some driver’s getting an early start.” I pulled a pair of gloves on and got back into the jumpsuit. “I’m going to chop up Huevo’s cars, and I could use a helper.”

  “I guess that would be me,” Hooker said.

  I checked my watch. Five forty-five. Felicia was expecting us for dinner at six.

  “We’re almost done,” I said to Hooker. “Another hour of work and we can start carting this junk out of here. Let’s break for dinner and come back to finish up later tonight.”

  Hooker stood looking at the mound of hacked-up car parts. “There’s a lot of shit here. And it’s heavy. We’re going to need a dump truck to get rid of this.”

  “Forget it,” I told him. “I’m not stealing a dump truck. I’ll take it out piece by piece in the SUV.”

  “Okay by me,” Hooker said. “It’ll take us days to do it that way and in the meantime I get to snuggle with you in Felicia’s little guest bed.”

  I felt a dull ache start to throb behind my left eye. I was going to steal a dump truck, no doubt about it. As I saw it, my life was now divided into two parts. Before Hooker and After Hooker. The Before Hooker half had been a lot more sane than the After Hooker half. Hooker brought out the crazy part of me.

  “If I get arrested and sent to prison, I’m never talking to you again,” I said to Hooker. “Not ever!”

  We drove the short distance to Felicia’s house, and Beans got excited the instant we opened Felicia’s front door. His eyes got bright, his nose lifted and twitched, and drool pooled in his mouth and oozed over loose lips.

  Hooker leaned into me. “This house reeks of pork barbecue and fried bread. Beans probably thinks he’s arrived at the all-you-can-eat buffet in dog heaven.”

  Felicia rushed over to us
. “Just in time,” she said. “Everyone’s waiting to meet you. Let me introduce you. This is my cousin Maria. And this is my other cousin Maria. And these are Maria’s two girls. And this is my good neighbor Eddie. And his boy. And my sister Loretta. And this is Joe and Joe’s wife, Lucille. And over there is Marjorie and her husband. They’re big fans. And you already know my daughter and Sister Marie Elena and Lily.”

  Beans was jumping around like a rabbit, going nuts over the food smells and the mix of people. I had the leash shortened and wrapped around my wrist, and he was yanking me forward, gaining inches in his quest to get to the pork.

  Hooker was chatting and signing autographs. No help there. I dug my heels in and leaned back, but Beans had me outweighed, dragging me toward the dining room in unrelenting determination. I reached out, snagged Hooker by the waistband on his jeans, and held tight.

  “Darlin’,” Hooker said, wrapping an arm around me. “You’re gonna have to wait your turn.”

  “It’s your darn dog!”

  Beans made a lunge at a round little lady carrying a bowl of beans and sausage, planting his two front feet squarely on her back. They went down to the ground with a woof from Beans and an oouf from the woman, food flying everywhere. Beans flopped on top of the woman and snarfed up the sausage that had landed in her hair.

  Hooker muscled Beans off the woman, grabbed her under the armpits, and dragged her to her feet. “Sorry,” he said to the woman. “He gets playful.”

  “He should be in a zoo,” she said, brushing at the sauce on her shirt. “What is he? He looks like a Yak dog. Like a Chewbacca.” She felt on top of her head. “What’s this goo in my hair?”

  It was a glob of dog drool.

  “Must be from the casserole,” I told her, luring Beans away with a roll.

  “Everybody come eat before the food gets cold,” Felicia said.

  Felicia had her table extended to maximum capacity, and we fit around it cheek by jowl, with a couple kids sitting on parents’ laps. Every inch of table was covered with bowls of food…rice, beans, fried bread, pork barbecue, sweet potatoes, fruit casseroles, chicken, and who-knows-what.

  Maria passed a platter of fried sweet-potato cakes. “How about that Mexican race-car man who got killed? It’s all that’s on the news.” She turned to Hooker. “Did you know him?”

  “Only in passing.”

  “I heard he was ripped apart by a man-eating swamp monster.”

  Hooker and I glanced under the table at Beans. He was making sloppy wet snorking sounds, licking his privates.

  “Lucky bastard,” Hooker whispered. “Every time I try to do that, I throw my back out.”

  “I don’t know how that swamp monster got to South Beach,” Loretta said. “I get goose bumps thinking about it.”

  “Yeah, and how’d the swamp monster get all that plastic wrap? What’d he do, go rob a Winn-Dixie? Personally, I don’t think it was a swamp monster,” Maria said.

  “So what do you think?” Loretta asked.

  “Werewolf.”

  “How’s the werewolf gonna get the plastic wrap?”

  “Simple,” Maria said. “He eats the guy, only the guy’s too big to finish up in one meal. There’s a lot left over, right? So when the sun comes up, the werewolf turns into a human, and the human goes to the store and buys the plastic wrap and wraps the guy so he stays fresh.”

  “That makes a lot of sense,” Loretta said.

  Felicia made the sign of the cross and passed the fried bread.

  “If he wrapped him up to keep him fresh, then why did he leave him at the restaurant?” Lily asked.

  “Changed his mind,” Maria said. “Maybe the werewolf got indigestion. Like when I eat too many chiles and I get heartburn.”

  Felicia’s husband opened another bottle of wine. “It wasn’t a werewolf. There wasn’t a full moon. Werewolves need a full moon.”

  “Are you sure they need a full moon?” Maria asked. “I thought they only needed a piece of the moon. How much of the moon was showing when this guy was killed? Anybody know?”

  “I’ll show you a moon,” Luis said. “Anybody want to see a moon?”

  “No,” everyone said. No one wanted to see Luis’s moon.

  Two hours later we were still at the table, and Hooker and I were antsy to get back to the warehouse. Hard to relax when the hauler was sitting there beside a mound of scrap metal that used to be two race cars.

  “This has been great,” I said to Felicia, “but Hooker and I need to get back to work.”

  “What about dessert?” Felicia wanted to know. “I haven’t brought dessert out yet.”

  “We’ll be back later for dessert.” A lot later.

  “Should I come with you?” Gobbles asked.

  Gobbles had been tending bar and looked like he’d been drinking more than serving.

  “Going to leave you here, buddy,” Hooker said. “Some body needs to stick around and protect the homestead.”

  “That’s me,” Gobbles said. “I’m the homestead protectorer.”

  Turns out you work a lot slower when you’re full of pork and fried bread. It was close to ten o’clock and I was struggling with the last large piece of metal when Felicia opened the side door and peeked in at us.

  “It’s me,” she said. “I brought you dessert, but I’m afraid to come in and get jumped on by the doggie.”

  “It’s okay,” Hooker said. “He’s sleeping in the lounge in the hauler. It’s past his bedtime.”

  It was past my bedtime, too. Taking a car apart is hard physical labor, and I was exhausted.

  Hooker closed the door to the lounge and went to help Felicia. She was carrying two grocery bags and had a newspaper tucked under her arm.

  “I brought the paper,” she said. “It has a big story about the dead guy. I didn’t know if you saw it.”

  “Does it say he was killed by a swamp monster?” Hooker asked.

  “No. It says the medical examiner believes the man was attacked by a large dog. And that he was already dead when the dog attacked him.”

  “Time to get out of Dodge,” Hooker said.

  I agreed, but we couldn’t leave before cleaning house.

  “What’s this?” Felicia said. “What’s this pile of stuff?”

  “Car parts,” Hooker told her.

  “Are you making a car?”

  “No,” he said. “We unmade a car. Now we have to get rid of the parts.”

  Felicia was pulling containers out of the bag and setting them on a toolbox. “That’s a lot of parts. How are you going to get rid of them?”

  “Dump truck,” Hooker said.

  “You got one?”

  “Not yet.”

  The last thing to come out of the bag was a thermos of coffee and two cups. “I know someone who has a dump truck,” Felicia said. “Rosa’s uncle owns a junkyard. Sells scrap metal. He’s got a nice big dump truck.” Felicia had her purse on her arm. She took her cell phone out of her purse and punched in a number. “You eat your dessert, and I’ll get the dump truck,” Felicia said.

  “We can’t have anyone else involved in this,” Hooker said.

  “Don’t worry. We keep it nice and quiet.”

  I poured the coffee and Hooker and I laid waste to the dessert. Bananas drenched in rum, some kind of fruitcake smothered in whipped cream, fried dough balls coated with cinnamon sugar, a chocolate cake that had obviously been soaked in booze, an assortment of little cookies, and some sort of parfait that was crumble cake, fruit, whipped cream, and liquor.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever gotten buzzed from dessert,” I told Hooker. “My life is dirt, but I’m suddenly feeling very happy.”

  Hooker gave me a sideways glance. “How happy are you?”

  “Not that happy,” I told him.

  Hooker blew out a sigh.

  “You wouldn’t take advantage of me in a drunken state, would you?” I asked him.

  “Darlin’, I drive stock cars. Of course I’d take advantag
e of your drunken state. It’s practically required.”

  A truck engine rumbled outside the warehouse, and there was a short blast from an air horn.

  “That’s Rosa,” Felicia said, going to the bay doors. “I’ll let her in.”

  “Tell her to back in,” Hooker said. “I’m going to cut some of the lights.”

  The door to the middle bay rolled up, and we could see red brake lights attached to a massive industrial-grade dump truck.

  “You’re clear,” Felicia yelled. “Back it up.”

  The truck inched into the warehouse, stopping a couple feet short of the pile of scrap metal. Felicia hit the button that rolled the bay door back down. The driver’s-side door to the truck opened, and Rosa swung out, wearing four-inch heels that were clear plastic and rhinestones, a tight black spandex skirt, and a red sweater with a low scoop neck that showed a lot of cleavage.

  “I was on a date when you called,” she said to Felicia. “You guys owe me big-time for ruining my love life.”

  Hooker was smiling, hands in pockets, rocked back on his heels. “Where’d you learn to drive a dump truck?” he asked Rosa.

  “My first husband was a truck driver. I used to go on the road with him sometimes. And sometimes I helped my uncle in the junkyard. You gotta know how to do a lot of different things in my family.”

  A car horn beeped outside the warehouse.

  “That’s probably my uncle,” Rosa said. “I told him you’d autograph his hat if he loaned us the truck.”

  I sensed Hooker do a mental grimace.

  “You didn’t tell him about the hauler, did you?” Hooker asked.

  “No. I told him there was a big secret in here and he couldn’t come in. So he’s waiting outside for you.”

  Rosa, Felicia, and I started throwing pieces onto the dump truck, and Hooker trotted to the door with a pen. He opened the door and took a step back.

  “Rosa, there must be fifteen people out here!”

  “Yeah,” Rosa said. “You’re such a popular guy. Everybody loves you. Just hurry up because we’re saving the big, heavy pieces for you to put in the truck.”

  Twenty minutes later Rosa went to the door, opened it, and stuck her head out. “Hey, Mr. Rock Star, you want to stop signing autographs and help us out here?”