“Skippy. He wanted to make sure I remembered about the banquet. He said murder charges wouldn’t exempt me.”
It was Sunday, and Skippy was probably already in New York preparing for an entire week of NASCAR promotion with the top-ten winning drivers. And he was justifiably worried that he’d have only nine guys safely tucked away in their rooms at the Waldorf. Probably at this very moment his thumbs were flying over his BlackBerry, composing a damage-control article on Hooker and me that could be shipped out to the media at a moment’s notice.
Hooker reached into the car and popped the trunk. “Get in,” he said to Rodriguez.
Rodriguez paled. “You’re kidding.”
Rodriguez was thinking about Bernie Miller. Thinking about how easy it was to shoot a guy in a trunk. And I was thinking I liked seeing Rodriguez coming to terms with it. This wasn’t the movies. This was real life. And shooting people in real life wasn’t nice. Especially when you were the guy getting shot.
“I could shoot you now,” I said. “Be easy to get you in the trunk with a couple bullets in your head.”
I couldn’t believe I was saying this. I had to get somebody else to kill a spider. And I hated spiders. Not only was I saying all these dumb tough-cookie things…I was almost believing them.
Rodriguez looked into the trunk. “I’ve never climbed into a trunk before. I’m gonna feel like an idiot.”
Guess this was one of those situations where having cojones doesn’t do you a lot of good, eh?
Hooker made an impatient sound and raised his gun, and Rodriguez went into the trunk headfirst. He had his ass up in the air, looking like Pooh Bear going into the rabbit hole, and I almost burst out laughing. Not because it was all that funny, but because I was borderline hysterical.
A bunch of high school kids walked by on their way to the mall.
“Hey, it’s Sam Hooker,” one of them said. “Dude!”
“Hey, man, can I have your autograph?”
“Sure,” Hooker said, handing me the gun. “You got a pen?” he asked the kid.
“What’s with the guy in the trunk?” one of the kids wanted to know.
“We’re kidnapping him,” Hooker said.
“Way to go,” the kid said.
The kids left, and we closed the lid on Rodriguez.
“You drive the SUV, and I’ll take the Taurus,” Hooker said. “We’ll take him to the factory.”
I reattached the hose and wires on the Taurus, jogged to the SUV, Hooker backed the Taurus out, and we took off.
ELEVEN
It was late afternoon. We’d stopped at a grocery store, and I’d done some shopping while Hooker walked Beans. After the grocery store, we drove to the deserted factory and parked the two cars deep in the cavernous interior. Now we were standing behind the Taurus, wondering what the heck we were supposed to do next.
“How about this,” Hooker said. “We haul him out of the trunk, and we chain him to that pipe over there. We can wrap the chain around his ankle and lock it. He’ll be able to move around a little, but he won’t be able to get away.”
It sounded like an okay plan to me, so I held the flashlight and Hooker felt around for the trunk latch. He got the lid up, looked in at Rodriguez, and Rodriguez kicked out with both feet, catching Hooker square in the chest, knocking him on his ass. Rodriguez rocketed out of the trunk and hit the ground running. He tried to push past me. I whacked him hard in the knee with the flashlight and he went down like a sack of sand.
Hooker was on all fours with the chain in his hand, trying to wrap it around Rodriguez’s ankle, but Rodriguez was a moving target, rolling on the cement floor, holding his leg, swearing and moaning. I threw myself on top of Rodriguez, Rodriguez let out an oouf of air, and I pinned him long enough for Hooker to secure the loop of chain with a padlock.
I rolled off Rodriguez and looked at Hooker, still on hands and knees. “Are you okay?”
Hooker dragged himself up to standing. “Yeah, aside from having size-ten footprints on my chest, I’m peachy. Next time I open a trunk with a killer in it, I’ll step back.”
We waited for Rodriguez to quit swearing and writhing in pain, and then we dragged him across the room and chained him to the pipe.
Rodriguez propped himself up against the wall, his knee outstretched. “You broke my fucking knee,” he said.
“It’s just a bruise,” I told him. “If I’d broken it, you’d see swelling.”
“It feels swollen.”
“I’m sure it’s not swollen.”
“I’m telling you it’s fucking swollen. You goddamn broke my knee.”
“Hey!” Hooker said. “Could we forget the knee for a minute? We’re in an unfortunate situation, and we need you to answer some questions.”
“I’m not answering nothing. You could cut off my nuts and I’m not answering nothing.”
“There’s an idea,” I said to Hooker. “I’ve never cut off anybody’s nuts before. It might be fun.”
“Messy,” Hooker said. “Lots of blood.”
“How about this, we could hang him upside down until all the blood rushes to his head, and then we could cut off his nuts.”
Hooker smiled at me. “That might work.”
Rodriguez groaned and put his head between his legs.
“I think he’s feeling sick,” I said to Hooker.
“Maybe we should give him a break,” Hooker said. “He’s probably not such a bad guy. Only doing his job.”
“You’re such a softy,” I said to Hooker.
“Trying to be fair.”
I was still holding the flashlight and I gave it a little waggle. “Can we at least beat the crap out of him?”
“I know that was our original plan,” Hooker said, “but I think we should give him a chance to save his ass. I bet he could tell us some interesting stuff.”
We both looked down at Rodriguez.
“Shit,” Rodriguez said. “You’re playing me.”
“True,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t cause you a lot of pain if you don’t cooperate.”
“And if I do cooperate?”
“No pain,” Hooker said.
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to know about Oscar Huevo.”
“He wasn’t such a nice guy. And now he’s dead,” Rodriguez said.
“I want to know how he got dead.”
“It was an accident.”
I had the flashlight trained on Rodriguez, making him squint past the glare.
“He had a big hole in the middle of his forehead,” I said to Rodriguez. “It didn’t look like an accident.”
“Okay, it wasn’t an accident. It was more like good fortune. Oscar and Ray got into a big fight. I don’t know what it was about, but Ray came out of it mad and decided he needed to get rid of Oscar. So Lucca and me got the job. Problem is, Oscar has his own muscle, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities to gracefully make Oscar disappear, if you know what I mean. We watched Oscar for a couple days, and we were worrying it wasn’t gonna happen, and then it got dropped in our lap.
“Oscar had a girlfriend stashed in South Beach. He’d sneak out of his hotel on Brickell and spend the night with his girl, and then his guy, Manny, would pick him up and bring him home real early in the morning. Manny’d drop Oscar off a couple blocks from the hotel, and it’d look like Oscar was out getting exercise. Oscar was laying low on account of the divorce. Figured why stir up any more trouble than he already had. So Manny’s supposed to pick Oscar up, only Manny’s eaten some bad clams or something and he can’t get himself out of the bathroom long enough to get his shoes on. That’s how Lucca and me got the call to go get Oscar.
“We drive over there and it gets even better. The girlfriend opens the door and tells us Oscar’s in the bathroom, and he’s in trouble. Turns out he took some of that stuff to, you know, help him out in the sack, and his dick won’t go down. He’s buck naked in the bathroom, and he’s trying everything he knows, and hi
s dick won’t go down. So we shot him.”
“That explains a lot,” Hooker said.
“Yeah, I honestly thought it would help his situation, but even after we shot him, his dick wouldn’t go down,” Rodriguez said. “I’m telling you, I’m never taking that stuff.”
“What about the girlfriend?”
“We shot her, too. One of those unfortunate necessities.”
“Had to be messy,” I said.
“Hey, Lucca and me are professionals. We’re not stupid about this. We shot them both in the bathroom. Wall-to-wall marble. Easy cleanup. Had to use a brush on the grout, but overall it wasn’t bad.”
We were discussing a grisly double murder and Rodriguez was telling us all this in the same sort of conversational tone a person might use to pass on a favorite lasagna recipe. And I was responding with the same enthusiasm a new cook might show. I was simultaneously horrified and impressed with myself.
“Tell me about the plastic wrap,” I said to Rodriguez. “What was that?”
“Ray figured he had a way to get rid of Oscar and Suzanne. He figured he’d take Oscar back to Mexico and bury him someplace where the widow Huevo would look guilty…like in her flowerbed in the hacienda backyard. Ray wanted to make it look like Oscar had gone back to Mexico and had it out with the missus. And the perfect way to get him to Mexico was in the hauler since it was already supposed to take the car back to the R and D center. Only thing was, Ray said we had to make sure we didn’t get anything dirty. He didn’t want blood smears all over the hauler. And he didn’t want Oscar stinking things up.
“We would have put him in a big garbage bag, but there was only one left in the kitchen at the girlfriend’s condo, and we used it on the girlfriend. So we were left with the plastic wrap. Good thing there was a lot of it. A couple giant rolls. I don’t know what they were doing with all that wrap. Probably something kinky. Oscar had some odd tastes. Anyways, we found a couple boxes by the Dumpster outside the condo, and we put Oscar and the girlfriend in the cardboard boxes and carried them out like they were going into storage. We tossed the box with the girlfriend into the Dumpster. And we brought Oscar onboard the hauler. We thought he was hidden better in the locker, so we threw the box away and stuffed him in.
“Originally we were gonna put Oscar onboard when the hauler made a rest stop, but it had an engine problem and it turned out we were able to transfer him at the track. We drove up just as everybody was leaving. The two drivers went to take a leak, and we got the box out of the SUV we were driving and into the hauler. It was real sweet…until you stole the truck.”
“Guess we ruined the plan,” Hooker said.
“Big-time. And you got the gizmo. Ray don’t like that you got the gizmo. He needs it bad. He’s on a rant.”
“What’s so special about the gizmo?”
“I don’t know exactly. I guess it’s one of a kind.”
Hooker had his phone in his hand. “Now all you have to do is tell all this to the police.”
“Yeah, right,” Rodriguez said. “How many murders you want me to confess to? Maybe I’ll get off easy and they’ll only fry me twice.”
Hooker looked over at me. “He’s got a point.”
“You could change the story,” I told Rodriguez. “You could say Ray killed Oscar. We don’t care if you tweak the facts a little.”
“Right,” Hooker said. “We just want to look squeaky clean, so we can get on with our lives.”
“Ray was always with people,” Rodriguez said. “He’ll be able to account for his time.”
“Okay, how about you say Lucca killed Oscar? You could plea-bargain,” Hooker said. “They do that all the time on television.”
Rodriguez had his arms folded across his chest and his mouth set in a tight line. He’d said all he was going to say.
Hooker and I walked away and huddled.
“We have a problem,” Hooker said. “Rodriguez isn’t going to confess to murder to the police.”
“Gee, huge surprise there.”
Here’s the thing. I’m not Nancy Drew. I grew up wanting to build and race stock cars. Solving crimes was never on my list of top-ten desired vocations. Don’t have any aptitude for it. And from what I knew of Hooker, ditto. So when you talked about being up the creek without a paddle, you were talking about us.
“How about this,” I said to Hooker. “We make an anonymous phone call to the police to come get him. And when they get here he’s got the murder weapon on him.”
Hooker looked over at me. “Would that be the gun that’s stuck in your pocket? The one with your prints all over it?”
I gingerly removed the gun from my pocket. “Yep, that’s the gun.”
“It might work,” Hooker said. “And I have the perfect spot for him.”
Forty minutes later, we had Rodriguez locked inside Spanky’s bus. We’d shoved him in, chained him to the stairwell hold bar, and handed him his empty, freshly wiped clean, fingerprint-free gun.
Hooker’d closed the motor-coach door. We’d jumped into the SUV, driven off Huevo property, and parked in the little airport lot where we hoped we looked unworthy of notice. We had a clear view of the road leading to Huevo Motor Sports. All we had to do now was call the police, and then we could sit and wait for the fun to begin.
I was about to cross the lot and go into the building to use the pay phone when Spanky’s motor coach came roaring down the road and barreled past us.
Hooker and I went slack jawed.
“Guess I gave him too much chain,” Hooker said.
“We really need to stick to racing,” I said to Hooker. “We’re total police-academy dropouts.”
Hooker rammed the SUV into drive and took off after the coach. “I prefer to think we’re on a learning curve.”
Rodriguez fishtailed to a stop at the end of the airport road. He made a wide left turn and headed for Speedway Boulevard.
An average motor coach is about 12 feet high, 9 feet wide, and 45 feet long. It weighs 54,500 pounds, travels on diesel, and has a turning radius of 41 feet. It’s not as complicated to drive as an eighteen-wheeler, but it’s big and unwieldy and requires some care when maneuvering.
Rodriguez wasn’t taking care. Rodriguez was overdriving the coach. It was rocking from side to side, sliding back and forth over the centerline of the two-lane road. The coach veered onto the shoulder, took out a residential mailbox, and swerved back onto the road.
“Good thing he can kill people,” Hooker said, dropping back, “because he sure as hell can’t drive.”
We followed the coach onto Speedway and held our breath as Rodriguez merged into traffic. Speedway is multiple lanes and heavily traveled. It was dusk, and cars were leaving the shopping center and seeking out fast-food restaurants for Sunday dinner. Ordinarily traffic on Speedway was orderly. Tonight, Rodriguez was causing havoc. He was straddling lines and oozing into adjoining lanes, scaring the heck out of everyone around him. He sideswiped a panel van and sent it careening across the road. A blue sedan hit the van and probably a few more cars were caught in the mess, but it was all behind us.
“Do you think he knows he hit that van?” I asked Hooker.
“Doubtful. He’s slowed down, but he still can’t control the sway on the coach.”
We were coming up to a major intersection with traffic stopped at a light. The coach was cruising at 40 miles per hour, and I wasn’t seeing his brake lights.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “This isn’t good. We should have put a seat belt on Bernie.”
Hooker eased off the gas and increased the space between us.
“Brake!” I yelled at Rodriguez. Not that I expected him to hear me. I just couldn’t not yell it. “Brake!”
When his lights finally flashed, it was too late. He fishtailed and swung sideways, the right side of the coach scraping a truck hauling scrap metal. The right-front coach skin peeled away as if it had been cut with a can opener, four cars slammed into the left side, and the entire mess moved forward like an
advancing glacier or lava flow or whatever bizarre disaster you could conjure up. There was one last crunch and the behemoth bus came to rest on top of a Hummer.
A headline flashed into my head: Bonnano Motor Coach Humps Hummer on Speedway Boulevard.
We had fifteen to twenty cars between the motor coach and us, not counting the cars directly involved in the crash, and cars were in gridlock behind us.
“I really want to run up there and take a look,” Hooker said, “but I’m afraid to get out of the car.”
“Yeah,” I said to him. “You’d probably have to sign autographs. And then the police would come and take you away and do a body-cavity search.”
I climbed out of the window and stood on the ledge to see better.
Caught in the glare of headlights and smoky road haze, a lone figure ran between wrecked cars. He had a chain and part of a handrail tethered to his ankle. Hard to tell from my vantage point if he was injured. He approached a car stopped at the intersection, yanked the driver’s door open, and wrenched the driver out of the car. He angled himself into the car and drove off with the chain caught in the door and the handrail clattering on the pavement. So far as I could see, no one stopped him or followed him. The driver of the stolen car stood in frozen shock. Sirens screamed in the distance.
I slipped back inside and took the seat next to Hooker. “Rodriguez carjacked a silver sedan and drove off into the sunset.”
“He did not.”
“Yep. He did. Still had the chain and handrail attached.”
Hooker burst out laughing. “I don’t know who’s more pathetic…him or us.”
I slouched in my seat. “I think we’d win that contest.”
Beans sat up and looked around. He gave a big Saint Bernard sigh, turned twice, and flopped down.
“This could take a while,” I said to Hooker. “They’re not going to sort this out in fifteen minutes.”
Hooker reached over and ran a fingertip along the nape of my neck. “Want to make out?”
“No!” Yes. But not here and not now. I wasn’t going to give in on a freeway. If we were going to have make-up sex, it was going to be good. It for sure wasn’t going to be in the backseat of an SUV.
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