Motor Mouth

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 his 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.

“Just some kissing,” Hooker said. He put his hand over his heart. “I swear.”

“You’re not planning on doing any touching?”

“Okay, maybe some touching.”

“No.”

Hooker blew out a sigh. “Darlin’, you’re a hard woman. You’re doggone frustrating.”

“And it’s not going to do you any good to drag out your Texas drawl,” I told him.

Hooker grinned. “It got me where I wanted to go when I first met you.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not going to get you there now.”

“We’ll see,” Hooker said.

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“Come on, admit it,” Hooker said. “You want me bad.”

I smiled at him, and he smiled back, and we both knew what that meant. He held my hand, and we sat there, holding hands, staring out the windshield, watching the cleanup spectacle like it was a television show.

There were fire trucks and medical-emergency trucks from three counties and enough flashing strobes to give a healthy man a seizure. The medevac helicopter didn’t drop out of the sky, and no one seemed to be rushing around, frantically trying to save a life. So I was hoping that meant no one was critically injured. All but one of the fire trucks left the scene. And one by one the EMT trucks left, some with flashing lights. None of the EMT trucks sped away with sirens blaring. Another good sign.

Tow trucks and police were working on the outer perimeter of the crash, moving cars. The road was still blocked, but the problem was shrinking. A tow truck inched into the heart of the wreck.

“They’re going to try to get the coach off the Hummer,” I said to Hooker. “I’m going out for a better view.”

I was afraid to climb onto the car again. Too many lights now. Too many people looking around. So I stood beside the SUV with my sweatshirt hood up and my hands in my pockets, hunched against the cold.

After a lot of discussion, the tow-truck driver attached a chain to the coach and slowly winched it back. The rear on the Hummer had been squashed down to about three feet of compressed fiberglass and steel, so the coach didn’t actually have all that far to drop. It came off with a decent amount of grinding noise and a loud wump when it hit the ground. It bounced and jiggled a little, and then it went stoic, silently enduring its disgraced condition.

Now that the motor coach was off the Hummer, it was easy to see how Rodriguez had escaped. The right front had taken the biggest hit, and the shell of the coach had completely peeled back, leaving a gaping hole where the door used to be. Rodriguez had probably gotten yanked out of his seat and then found that the handrail had broken free of its moorings.

Hooker had his head out. “What’s going on?”

“They pulled the coach off the Hummer. And now I think they’re going in to investigate. Probably want to make sure no one’s inside.”

Hooker pulled his head back into the SUV and slunk down. They were about to discover poor Bernie Miller in the motor-coach bedroom. And he wasn’t exactly Sleeping Beauty.

I watched two cops enter with flashlights. Long moments passed while I held my breath. The cops came out and stood beside the bus. One was on his talkie. More cops came over. Some suits pushed through the crowd. A uniform unrolled yellow crime scene tape, securing the area around the bus.

I leaned into the SUV. “They found him,” I whispered to Hooker.

Hooker looked at me. “Why are you whispering?”

“It’s too horrible to say out loud.”

An unmarked cop car with its Kojak light flashing cut through traffic and eased up to the outer perimeter of the smashed cars. Two suits got out, followed by Spanky and Delores. They all power-walked to the bus, and even from my distance, I could see Spanky’s eyes go wide. He stopped and stared, mouth agape, arms dangling at his sides. If I’d been closer, I’m sure I could have seen the blood drain from his face and his breathing get shallow. He swayed slightly, and one of the cops moved him forward, toward the coach. They got to the door and stood talking. One of the cops was gesturing at the coach, and Spanky was appearing to listen, but I suspected nothing was registering in his brain.

I popped back into the SUV and grabbed a bag from the back. “I have my binoculars in here somewhere,” I said to Hooker. “I need to see this. I think they’re going to take Spanky into the coach. I bet they want him to ID the body!”

Hooker put his hood up and pulled the drawstring. “No way I’m going to miss this.”

I found the binoculars, and we both got out and stood beside the SUV. Spanky was obviously inside the coach with the police. Delores was at a slight distance, flanked by two uniforms. A news helicopter hovered overhead, and a mobile satellite truck from one of the Charlotte stations crept up to the tangle of cars.

I had the binoculars trained on the hole where the door used to be, waiting for Spanky to appear. A cop came into view first, then Spanky. A normal person would be horrified by finding his spotter dead on his bed. And Bernie was especially horrifying since we’d dug him up. On the heels of the horror, you’d expect sadness or at least a solemn respect for the dead. Spanky, true to form, was pissed off. And it would seem he wasn’t pissed off because someone had killed Bernie. Spanky was pissed because his coach was ruined. I’m not a professional at reading lips, but this was easy. Spanky was in a rage, stomping around, hands on hips, screaming the f word, his face brick red, the cords standing out in his neck.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He threw his hands into the air and pointed at his trashed motor coach. “How the fuck did this happen? Who fucking did this? Do you know how much this fucking coach cost?” he asked a cop.

He was pacing and gesturing and somehow our eyes caught. I saw recognition register. For a long moment he seemed in suspended animation. Not sure what to think. Not sure what to do. Finally, he snapped his mouth shut, turned on his heel, and stalked back to the unmarked cop car. He pulled the door open and rammed himself into the backseat. Delores minced over in her high-heeled boots. The two plainclothes cops followed, looking like maybe they should check their bullets at the door so they wouldn’t be tempted to shoot Spanky.

“This might be a good time to try to leave,” I said to Hooker. “I think Spanky spotted us.”

The traffic wasn’t moving forward yet, but some cars had crossed the median and some SUVs had done the all-terrain thing and rumbled over curbs and climbed embankments to reach intersecting parking lots and ultimately other roads. The traffic jam wasn’t nearly as dense as it had originally been, and Hooker was able to work his way through the pack and go off-road.

The SUV lumbered over hill and dale, and as luck would have it, ended up at a fast-food joint. We bought a bag of food, stopped at a neighboring gas station and filled up, bought more food at the gas station convenience store, and skulked away.

Hooker drove north out of habit. We couldn’t go back to the warehouse. We were afraid to check into a motel. We didn’t want to involve friends. So we parked in a supermarket lot and fed Beans and started eating our way through a bag of doughnuts. I was on my second doughnut when Hooker’s phone rang. It was Spanky, and Hooker didn’t need to use the speakerphone function for me to hear. Spanky was yelling into the phone.

“You sonovabitch,” Spanky yelled. “I know you’re responsible for all of this. I saw you sitting there watching. You think this is funny, don’t you? You did this just to ruin my week. You knew I had a new motor coach that was better than yours. So you had it wrecked. And it wasn’t enough to waste Oscar and your poor retard rent-a-cop, you had to leave Bernie in my bed. You are such a dumb sick fuck.”

“Okay, let me get this straight,” Hooker said. “You think I killed three men and arranged to have your motor coach trashed because why?”

“Because you’re jealous of me. You can’t stand that I won the championship. And I know you put Oscar in my new truck, too. I’m gonna get you for this. You better watch your ass.”

Hooker disconnected. “Spanky’s an idiot.”

Hooker’s phone rang again.

“Uh-huh,” Hooker said. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.”

“Now what?” I asked when he was done.

“Skippy calling back. He wanted to remind me that the banquet was black tie.”

“It’s Sunday, and the banquet is Friday. There’s no way.”

“Obviously you’ve never been called into the NASCAR hauler after a race you just screwed up and had to face Skippy. Remember the time I flipped Junior the bird on national television? And the time I got pissed off and punted Shrub into the wall and caused a seven-car wreck? Trust me, we’ll make the banquet.”

“Where are we going?” I asked Hooker. “Where are we going to sleep tonight?”

“I thought I’d go to Kannapolis. I figure they won’t look for us there. No one intentionally goes to Kannapolis.”

“This is it?” I asked Hooker. “This is where we’re going to spend the night?”

“You don’t like it?”

“We’re parked in front of a house.”

“Yeah, we’re tucked between a bunch of cars that belong here. We’re invisible. And my buddy Ralph lives two houses down. He lives alone in one of these ramshackle little houses, and he’ll leave for work tomorrow at six in the morning. And he never locks his house. Got nothing worth taking, if you don’t count a fridge full of Bud. So we can go in and use his bathroom and not get busted.”

“That’s great, but I need a bathroom now.”

“There’s a patch of woods two blocks from here. I was planning on walking Beans and hiding behind a tree. You’re welcome to join me.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. Women don’t hide behind trees. We aren’t built for it. Our socks get wet.”

Hooker looked down the block at Ralph’s house. “We could probably trust Ralph to let us stay with him tonight. Ralph’s the one person who wouldn’t get accused of aiding and abetting. Nobody would ever think Ralph knew what he was doing. He’s a good guy, but his primary skill is his ability to open a beer can.”

Hooker searched for Ralph’s name and dialed it. “Hey, man,” Hooker said. “How’s it going? Are you alone? I need a place to crash tonight.”

Five minutes later, we were standing at Ralph’s back door. Hooker, Beans, and me. I had a bag of clothes. Hooker had a bag of junk food. Beans had himself.

Ralph opened the door and looked out at us. “Whoa, dude, you got a family.” He stepped to one side. “Me casa is your casa.”

Ralph was raw-boned skinny. His snarled brown hair was shoulder length. Baggy jeans hung frighteningly low on plaid boxers. His shirt was rumpled and unbuttoned. He had a beer can in his hand.

Hooker made the introductions, and then he and Ralph did one of those complicated bonding handshake things that men do when they don’t want to hug.

“We’re sort of hiding out,” Hooker said to Ralph. “I don’t want anyone to know we’re here.”

“Gotcha,” Ralph said. “Her old man’s looking for her, right?”

“Yeah,” Hooker said. “Something like that.”

Ralph draped an arm across my shoulders. “Honey, you can do better than him. He shops at Wal-Mart, if you know what I mean. Hangs out there on a Friday night with his bag of candy.”

I cut my eyes to Hooker.

“I haven’t done that for a couple weeks now,” Hooker said. “I’m changing my ways.”

Ralph scratched Beans on the top of the head, and Beans affectionately leaned against Ralph and pushed him into the refrigerator.

“Ralph and I have been friends since grade school,” Hooker said. “We grew up in the same town in Texas.”

“We both used to race cars,” Ralph said. “Only Hooker was always good, and I never had the killer instinct.”

Hooker got a couple beers out of the fridge and handed one over to me. “Yeah, but Ralph’s famous,” Hooker said. “He won the sixth-grade spelling bee.”

“Yep, I was pretty smart back then,” Ralph said. “I could spell anything. Pissed it all away. Can’t hardly spell my name anymore. Living the vida loca though.”

“Ralph hooked up with DKT Racing early on, and they brought him here to the stock-car capital of the world. And he’s still with DKT.”

“Probably could have a brilliant future there,” Ralph said, “but I prefer to keep my head up my ass.”

The kitchen appliances were avocado green and at least thirty years old. A blackened pot appeared to be stuck to a stove burner. The sink was filled with crumpled beer cans. Hard to tell the exact color of the walls and linoleum floor. No room in the kitchen for a table.

We moved to the dining room. Pool table in the dining room. Ralph had pulled a chair up to the pool table, and a pizza take-out box was open on the tabletop. There was one piece of pizza left in the box. It looked like it had been there for a long time.

“Don’t shoot a lot of pool?” I asked.

“Comes and goes,” Ralph said. “I like to use this for a dining room table because the bumpers stop the food from falling off.”

Beans walked up to the table and sniffed the pizza. He turned his head to look at Hooker, and then he looked at me, and then he put his two front paws on the table edge and ate the pizza.

The living room furniture consisted of a lumpy couch with a large burn hole in one of the seat cushions, a coffee table that was completely covered with beer cans, take-out coffee cups, crumpled burger wrappers, empty grease-stained French fry containers and fried chicken buckets, and a large-screen television occupying an entire wall.

“Bathroom?” I asked.

“Down the hall. First door on the left.”

I poked my head in and took a fast look around. Not terrifically clean, but there weren’t any dead men in it, so I thought I should be grateful. There was a stack of dog-eared publications on the floor. Mostly automotive with a few girlie magazines in the mix. A bottle of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo on the edge of the tub. Plastic shower curtain decorated with gobs of soap and streaks of mold. A single towel hung on a hook on the wall. Good chance that this was Ralph’s only towel.

Hooker, Beans, and Ralph were watching a game on television when I returned to the living room. They scooted over to make room for me, and we all sat there until close to midnight, drinking beer, pretending we were normal.

“I gotta go to bed,” Ralph finally said. “I gotta go to work tomorrow. Where are you guys staying?”

“Here?” Hooker said.

“Oh yeah,” Ralph said. “Now I remember.” And he shuffled off, down the hall, past the bathroom. A door opened and closed and then there was quiet.

“How many bedrooms does Ralph have?” I asked Hooker.

“Two. But he keeps his Harley in the second bedroom. He’s rebuilding the bike, and he doesn’t have a garage.”

“So we’re sleeping on this couch?”

“Yep.” Hooker stretched out on his back. “Hop onboard. We’ll sleep double-decker. I’ll even be a good guy and let you take the top.”

I rolled onto him, and he grunted.

“What was that grunt?” I asked him.

“Nothing.”

“It was something.”

“I just don’t remember you as being this heavy. Maybe we should cut back on the doughnuts.”

“Good grief.”

Beans came over to investigate. He looked at us with his droopy brown eyes and then he climbed on top of us and settled in with a sigh, his huge dog head on mine.

“Help!” Hooker gasped. “I can’t breathe. I’m squashed. And there’s a spring poking me in my back. Get him off.”

“He’s lonely.”

“If he doesn’t get off, he’s going to be an orphan.”

Five minutes later, we were all stretched out on the pool table.