Janet Evanovich - Motor Mouth

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?”