Motor Mouth

EIGHT

“Not many people working the day after Thanksgiving,” Hooker said, looking over my shoulder.

I was at my desk in my little cubicle at the Stiller R amp; D center, and I’d been the only person in the building until Hooker showed up.

“How did you know I was here?”

“Process of elimination. You weren’t home, and it’s too early in the morning for the mall to be open.”

“I wanted to look at race tapes. And I had some models I wanted to run.”

“Trying to gather evidence?”

“Yes.”

“Having any luck?”

“I went over Shrin’s car and found a chip on the engine. It’s in worse shape than the one I got off the sixty-nine, but I’m hoping Steven can do something with it. I looked at it under a microscope, but I only know enough to see some remains of basic circuitry.”

“What about the second chip? The sister chip to the one you found in the gearshift knob?”

“I didn’t take Nick’s car apart, but I looked in the obvious places and I didn’t find a second chip.”

“Maybe we should take it apart.”

I’d tossed and turned all night with a long list of crimes replaying in my head. Multiple counts of grand-theft auto, destruction of personal property, withholding evidence, assault and battery, mutilation of a dead guy! I didn’t want to add to the list.

“It would be good if we had permission,” I said to Hooker.

“I’ll call Bingo,” Hooker said. “It shouldn’t be a problem. The car is trash anyway.”

Bingo is Nick’s crew chief. He has three terrific kids, and a nice wife, and he was probably at the breakfast table eating leftover pumpkin pie.

I saved my computer program and swiveled in my seat, waiting for Hooker to get off the phone.

“Bingo wants to be here when you tear the car down,” Hooker said.

“No he doesn’t. He has a family, and he doesn’t want to be part of this. Tell him if we find something, we’ll tell him when it’s safe for him to know.”

By noon I was fairly certain there wasn’t a second chip. Either it had been removed, or for some reason it wasn’t part of the program.

Hooker was helping with the cleanup. “Most drivers know about cars,” he said, wiping down a wrench. “I pretty much only know about driving. I can change the oil, I know the language, and I know some engineering, but I can’t rebuild a carburetor. Didn’t have an aversion to it, just never got around to it. I’d drive, and the guys I hung out with would drink beer. And then they’d fix my car, and I’d drink beer.”

“You had a division of labor.”

Hooker grinned. “Yeah. We were all specialists.”

I wrestled the last tire back onto the car and tightened the lug nuts. “I love everything mechanical. I’ve been working with cars for as long as I can remember. I like the way they fit together. I like the way they sound, and the way they smell. I like the challenge of getting all the parts to work efficiently. I love my job in R and D, but sometimes I miss working in my dad’s garage.”

“Why do you suppose Shrin’s car didn’t have the second chip?”

I jacked the car down. “I don’t know. I guess someone could have removed it, but that would mean there was a third Stiller employee involved, and I find that hard to believe. The car was immediately loaded into the truck by its crew, so I doubt Horse or Baldy had access. I’m guessing that for whatever reason, the second chip wasn’t needed.

“I’m meeting Steven at four o’clock. I’m hoping he can tell me something interesting. And this time let’s remember to bring the remote. I thought it might be helpful if we took it with us for Steven to see.”

“This is very interesting,” Sikulski said, studying the new chip. “This is diabolical. It looks to me like this little gem self-destructed.”

He had all three chips under magnification and the guts of the remote exposed. He turned his attention to the chip I’d taken off the 69 engine.

“The two chips appear to be similar. Same size and same materials used in construction,” he said. “They’re both too damaged to get a good read on the circuitry. Do you see this little bump right here on the original engine chip? I suspect this is the self-destruct charge. It wasn’t activated. The remote you brought doesn’t talk to this chip. I could probably blow the charge manually, but it will melt what remains, and probably you don’t want to do that just yet.”

We left Steven with more questions than answers and couldn’t find much to say on the ride back to Huntersville.

“Would you feel safer at my house?” Hooker asked.

“Yes, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

He dropped me at my door and rolled away. I trudged upstairs and went to my desk to catch up on e-mail. A little after seven I took a break and looked out the window at Topper’s. Everyone was back from the holiday and the bar was filling up. I suspected Spanky would be there tonight to bask in his glory. It was the place Hooker would most like not to be, but I thought a Spanky spectacle held some potential. At the very least it was a diversion from my dead-end thoughts.

I swiped on some mascara and lip gloss, gave my hair a shot of hair spray, sashayed across the street to Topper’s, and claimed the bar stool next to my upstairs neighbor Dan.

“Has he come in yet?” I asked.

“Spanky? No. He’s waiting to make an entrance. He’ll be in around eight when he knows the place will be packed. Did you come to see the show?”

“I thought it might be fun.”

“It’s going to be painful. I had to get shit-faced before I could write the story for the last race. I can’t believe this guy won. There’s no justice in this world. I swear, halfway through the season it was like the sixty-nine car was driving itself.”

“Huevo had a good setup on that car.”

“Huevo had a magic setup on that car.” Cox looked around. “Where’s Hooker? He’s usually half an inch behind you.”

“He’s staying in tonight.”

“There were two guys looking for him earlier. Not from around here, but I think I saw them at Homestead. One guy looked like he’d had his head run over by a train.”

Damn! I’d started to relax a tiny bit, thinking maybe we left our problems in Miami. And now I was back to having that horrible hollow feeling in my stomach and my heart was beating a little too fast.

“Was the second guy smaller and bald? And did the big guy have a snake tattooed on the back of his neck?”

“Yep. Friends of yours?”

“No. Not friends.”

Hooker is the rock star of NASCAR. When he’s at the track, cameras are constantly in his face, and the fans follow him everywhere. Hooker genuinely likes the press and the fans, but there are times when there’s just a tad too much enthusiasm and Hooker ends up having half his clothes ripped off. And sometimes, in a state of ill-conceived adoration, the occasional fan will look a lot like a stalker. This year after a well-intentioned fan broke into Hooker’s condo and accidentally set the kitchen on fire trying to make a romantic breakfast for two, Hooker moved out of Huntersville and bought a large house on a large tract of secluded land in Mooresville. And a couple months ago, after a tour bus drove up Hooker’s driveway and dumped thirty people on his front lawn to take pictures, Hooker got security-gated, installed a large, steroid-angered gorilla in the little gatehouse, and had his property ringed with an electric fence. So I wasn’t worried that Hooker would be caught offguard by the two Huevo henchmen.

Nevertheless, I called to warn him. “I’m at Topper’s, and Dan says Horse and Baldy were looking for you earlier.”

“I’ll juice up the fence with a couple extra volts. I’m guessing you’re barside, wanting to see the Spanky spectacle.”

“Yep. Too bad you’ll miss it. It’s going to be awful.”

“Darlin’, you’re hitting a new entertainment low.”

I blew out a sigh because it was true. I disconnected and ordered a beer.

A half hour later, Spanky and Delores graced the room with their grandeur. As was expected, half the bar applauded and half booed. Dan and I did neither.

Dan threw back a handful of bar nuts. “I’m going to puke.”

“You can’t puke. You’re an impartial journalist.”

“No such thing. That crap went out with fedoras. To slightly change the subject, what do you make of Huevo’s murder?”

I sipped my beer. “I haven’t given it much thought. Do you have an angle?”

“No. But I think everything I’ve heard so far is wrong. Everyone is intrigued by the bite marks, but I don’t think they have anything to do with the murder. The medical examiner said they happened later, after Huevo was already dead. I think they’re accidental. I think someone killed Huevo and packaged him up to keep him on ice. Probably just used whatever was at hand. Which would lead me to think this wasn’t planned.”

“Someone just happened to have miles of shrink-wrap?”

Dan shrugged. “It’s a common household item, and some people stockpile. If you shop at the big-box stores, you buy in quantity to save money. The teams do it all the time. Anyway, my theory is that someone killed Huevo and needed to keep things neat, so they wrapped him. They had him sitting in a corner, waiting for it to get dark so they could dispose of the body, and their dog decided Huevo looked tasty.”

“So the killer had a big dog?”

“That’s what I’m thinking. And it was an inside job, because Huevo was found in Spanky’s truck. Someone was making a statement. And by the way, if I knew who the killer was, I’d send him a box of Godiva. Putting Huevo in Spanky’s new Avalanche was genius. I hear Spanky threw up when he saw it. Plus, they impounded the truck as evidence.”

“What kind of statement do you think the killer was making?”

“Don’t know. Sometimes people commit crimes and actually want to get caught, so they leave clues. Sometimes it’s an ego trip and they want to leave a calling card. Or maybe this was a kind of revenge crime. Maybe someone was pissed off that Spanky won. If it had been me, I would have killed Spanky and left him in Huevo’s car, but that’s just me.”

“Anything else?”

“According to the police, they scoured the parking lot and didn’t come up with any evidence that said Huevo was killed there. Huevo and his entourage were staying in one of the big hotels on Brickell. He had a power breakfast scheduled but never showed.”

“I can see you’re fascinated by this,” I said to Dan.

“There’s a story here. I can feel it. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. And I don’t think the dog is part of the murder, but I do think he’s a place to start looking. If we go on the assumption that this was an inside job, then we just make a list of everyone who has a dog big enough to have swamp-monster teeth.”

“Have you started the list?”

Dan’s face flushed. “Yeah, but so far there’s only one name on it.”

“Probably you need to work harder on the list.”

“My exact thoughts. There are probably tons of people out there with huge dogs with huge teeth. I just have to hunt them down.”

Spanky and Delores were posing for pictures and signing autographs at the far end of the bar. Hooker’d had some run-ins with Spanky, but my relationship with Spanky was much more distant and cordial. Until finding the chip, I had no real reason for disliking either Spanky or Delores. And for that matter, I still had no reason. According to Steven Sikulski, the chip could be signaled from anywhere on the track. Realistically speaking, there are only two people who would be effective at controlling engine speed. One would be the driver and the other would be the spotter. My money was on the spotter. I didn’t think Spanky was smart enough to pull off cheating at this level.

“An inside job for Oscar Huevo covers a lot of ground,” I said to Dan. “From what I can see, he wasn’t a popular guy. His wife hated him. His brother doesn’t seem too broken up. And he stepped on a lot of toes in two countries. And I hate to rain on your parade, but I’m not so sure of the dog thing. If the Huevos were involved, it was probably a hired gun. The Huevos don’t look like people who do their own killing.”

Dan signaled the waiter for another beer. “Ray Huevo wouldn’t hire out. He has people in his organization who would gladly do the job.”

I took a handful of nuts. “Are you telling me Ray’s a little dark?”

“Ray’s very dark. I did an article on the family a year ago. It was next to impossible to get information on Ray. He doesn’t talk to anyone, and he has offices in a separate building, a half mile from the bulk of Huevo Enterprises. I was eventually allowed entrance to the building but never got beyond the first floor. It’s the R and D arm of Huevo, and God knows what they develop there. People who’ve actually gone through the building tell me it’s filled with chemical labs and computer crap that looks like science fiction.

“I ended up writing nothing about him because I couldn’t verify anything beyond his business address. What I suspect is that anytime something shady goes down, it gets funneled to Ray. Ray has development funds that could buy a third-world country and half the politicians in ours.”

“Do you think Ray is dark enough to kill his brother?”

“I think Ray’s dark enough to do anything, but I don’t know what his motive would be for murder. It looks to me like Ray has his own little empire.”

The dust was starting to settle around Spanky and Delores. The crowd had thinned to just a few hangers-on, and Delores was looking antsy, as if she couldn’t wait to get home to her whips and chains and beat the bejeezus out of Dickie.

“I’m going to convey my congratulations,” I said to Dan. “Are you coming?”

“I spoke to them at the track. Don’t think I could get through it a second time.”

I dropped a five on the bar and made my way over to Spanky. I stuck my hand out and smiled. “Congratulations, you drove a really good race.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Where’s Hooker? I wanted to congratulate him on being second.”

“I’ll pass that along to him.” Probably should take the bullets out of his gun first.

“I saw you guys sitting on the dock. What the heck were you doing?”

“We were just hanging out.”

“It looked like you were watching us.”

“Nope. Just hanging out.”

Delores picked her nose up out of her cosmo. “Oh yeah? Well why did you start screaming when Ray’s assistant invited you to breakfast? It was real rude of you to be there in the first place when Dickie and me were guests on the yacht. We knew what you were doing. You were trying to ruin our good time. You were jealous because you weren’t on a yacht, because losers who come in second don’t get invited on yachts.”

And this is why everyone loves Delores. I wanted to talk to Spanky alone, but Delores was never more than three inches away. It was a wonder she let him drive the race car without her.

“Oh wow,” I said to Delores. “You’ve got a big black seed right between your two front teeth. Were you eating those little crackers that are mixed in with the bar nuts?”

Delores swiped her tongue across her teeth. “Is it gone?”

“No,” I told her. “You should go to the ladies’ room and check it out. It’s huge and black.”

“Euuuw,” she said. And she took off for the ladies’ room.

“I didn’t see any seed,” Spanky said.

“I wanted to talk to you. Alone.”

“I thought you were Hooker’s girl.”

“I’m his spotter. And I didn’t like what I was seeing on Sunday.”

“You mean me winning?”

“No. I mean you cheating. There was traction control on the sixty-nine.”

“I drove the wheels off that car. And it was all legal.”

“None of it was legal. The sixty-nine had a computer chip hidden in the gear shift knob, and the chip regulated engine speed.”

“Yeah, right. And Batman is going to be my crew chief next year. Lady, you’re looney tunes. You need to stop taking those drugs.”

“You should ask Ray Huevo about it. And if you weren’t the one controlling the engine speed, you should also talk to your spotter.”

“What’s Bernie got to do with it?”

“The chip is controlled by a remote, and you and Bernie are the only ones who could effectively work the remote.”

“I’m not asking no one about it,” Spanky said. “They’d think I was nuts. And how do you know all this?”

I was pretty sure I’d accomplished my task. No way to know for certain, but I was betting Spanky didn’t know about the chip. I left the bar and crossed the street to my apartment. I put the key in the lock and the door swung open. The door hadn’t been locked. If this had happened to me a year ago, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Ten months ago, all that changed, and I got a firsthand education on breaking and entering. My brother had gotten himself into a lot of trouble, I’d gone to Florida looking for him and had stumbled onto his ransacked apartment. So finding my door unlocked when I was fairly confident I’d locked it was a little déjà vu.

I backed away and called Hooker on my cell. “This is probably stupid,” I said to him, “but I just came back from the bar, and the door to my apartment is open, and I’m almost certain I locked it.”

“Go back to the bar and wait for me.”

A half hour later Hooker showed up at the bar. Only a handful of regulars remained. Most were watching hockey on the overhead television. Hooker wasn’t big news to this group.

We went outside and looked up at my windows. No shadowy figures passing in front of the shades. We checked out the parking area. No gunner waiting with the motor running.

“Okay,” Hooker said. “Let’s do it. Let’s go upstairs and see if anyone’s home.”

“Are you sure? It seems kind of dangerous. What if someone’s actually there?”

“I’d hate that. I was counting on looking like a hero without any actual bad-guy contact.”

Hooker pulled me into the shadows and made a gesture for me to be silent. My apartment door opened wide, and Horse and Baldy came out. They walked to the parking area and got into a car. The engine caught and the car pulled out of the lot and disappeared into the night.

“I have a cramp in a really uncomfortable place,” Hooker said. “Gobbles’s idea to move to Australia is starting to have some appeal for me.”

I slipped out of the shadows, slunk to my door, and let myself in. Hooker grabbed my arm and jerked me back when I put my foot on the first step.

Hooker had his gun in his hand. “Let me go first.”

Ten months ago, when Hooker and I got involved in my brother’s disappearance we discovered some things about ourselves. One of the things we learned is that we can both be heroic if we have to…but we’d rather not. I was perfectly okay with letting Hooker go first. After all, he was big on driving the boat. And he had the gun.

I followed Hooker up the stairs, all the time holding my breath. He paused when he got to the top then looked around. He motioned for me to stay, and then he went room by room, making sure no one was there.

“Looks like it’s just you and me,” he said when he came back. “If they were searching for something, they were neat about it. Nothing seems out of place.”

I filled my travel bag plus a couple brown grocery bags with clothes and other essentials. I hadn’t had a chance to buy food, so there was very little in the refrigerator to worry about. I flipped the lights off and gave one of the bags to Hooker. “From what I could tell, they did a decent search. Things were disrupted in drawers. My bed had been taken apart.”

“They were looking for the chip,” Hooker said.

“Fortunately, I have the chip in my pocket,” I said.

“I think it’s time to get help. It was probably time to get help yesterday, but I was hoping it would all go away. I think we should go to my house tonight. We’ll be safe there. First thing in the morning, we’ll call Skippy and see if he’ll send a NASCAR lawyer or at least a PR guy with us when we talk to the police.”

Gus Skippy is vice president of a bunch of stuff. He was originally a newspaper guy, and now he was a NASCAR problem solver, shrink, babysitter, spin master, fashion icon, and the corporate communications guru who butt-kicked and bullshitted NASCAR through the millions of sticky situations that occurred during a season. He hung out with a big guy named Herbert who was known as the honorary mayor of NASCAR. They were both good old boys from Carolina, and when you put the two of them together, they were the Odd Couple of NASCAR.

We went down the stairs, locked the door behind us, and walked one block. Hooker’d taken the precaution of parking away from my building. He was driving the black Blazer, and Beans was waiting, nose pressed against the back window.

Hooker drove north to Mooresville and the collection of back roads that led to his property. He had close to fifty acres, and had placed his house squarely in the middle, behind a stand of pines. The house was only minimally visible to passing cars. He’d combined parcels of land, and three small ranch houses had gone along with the land purchase. Two of the houses were rented out to crew members. The third house sat at the edge of Hooker’s driveway and served as a gatehouse. Butchy Miller lived in the gatehouse.

The story goes that Butchy was the local high school football hero who got lost in a bottle of steroids, bulked up to skin-popping proportions, shrank his wiener into uselessness, and developed anger-management issues. He consistently lost at poker, and he scared the hell out of anyone, living or dead. Hooker considered him to be the perfect security guard, and had installed him in his gatehouse, not because he actually needed a security guard but more because he frequently needed an extra hand for poker.

Hooker stopped at the side of the road and looked at his gatehouse. “The lights are off.”

“It’s late. Butchy’s probably asleep.”

“Butchy’s afraid of the dark. He sleeps with the lights on. When he goes out, he leaves the lights on so it’s not dark when he comes home.”

Hooker unbuckled his seat belt. “Stay here. I’m going to take a look.”

He quietly jogged to the house and disappeared in deep shadow. He reappeared on the far side, and I could see he was peeking in windows, inching his way around. He got to the front door, opened it, and stepped inside. Minutes later he emerged, closed the door, ran to the truck and got in.

“Butchy’s dead,” Hooker said, putting the truck in gear, pulling onto the road. “Shot in the head. Like Huevo.”

“Omigod, I’m so sorry. He was your friend.”

“We weren’t exactly friends. It was hard for anyone to be friends with Butchy. It was more like having a three-hundred-pound paranoid rottweiler on the property. Still, I feel bad that he’s dead. Especially since I’m probably to blame.”

“Was he shrink-wrapped?”

“No. He was sprawled on the living room floor. He had an arsenal in that house, so he must have been taken by surprise. Or maybe this was done by someone he knew.”

“Someone like Bernie Miller?”

“I don’t think he knew Bernie. The Huevo people tend to keep to themselves. And Bernie is new to the area. Bernie came on the scene as Spanky’s spotter at the start of the season, just like you. He used to race modifieds, had a bad crash last year and screwed up his knee. Couldn’t drive anymore. Got a job spotting for Huevo and the sixty-nine car.”

We were barreling down a dark country road. “Where are we going?” I asked Hooker.

“I don’t know. I wanted to put some space between us and the crime scene. I deliberately tripped the silent alarm when I left. If there’s anyone at the main house, the police will walk in on them when they come to investigate.”

“And they’ll find Butchy?”

“Yeah, the police will find Butchy and take care of him. He’s a local boy. Everyone knows Butchy.”

“You don’t think we should go back and wait for the police?”

“Darlin’, right now I’m more afraid of the man with the gun than of the police. One thing’s going to lead to another with the police, and they’re going to want us to stay in the area. I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I’m afraid we’d be like shooting fish in a barrel.”

Hooker drove to a budget chain motel in Concord. I registered us under a phony name, paid in cash, and hoped no one saw Hooker and Beans sneak in. It was a generic motel room with dark industrial-grade carpet and a dark floral bedspread designed to hide cheap wine stains. No Childress Vineyard wine consumed here. This was a wine-by-the-gallon-box-type room. It felt like I’d stayed in a gazillion of these rooms since I’d started the race season. We found a plastic ice bucket, which we filled with water and set on the floor for Beans.

Hooker and I crawled into bed and then thrashed around, unable to sleep all night. We gave up at daybreak and tuned the television to the local news.

The camera crew was set up in front of Hooker’s gatehouse. The gatehouse was ringed in yellow crime scene tape. The tape cut across Hooker’s driveway entrance, limiting traffic. The on-scene reporter was talking about Butchy. Shot in the head. Found in his living room. No one at home in the main house. Police are looking for Sam Hooker. Wanted for questioning.

Hooker had his head in his hands. “I feel really bad about Butchy.”

I leaned against him. “You were nice to Butchy. You gave him a place to live when he had no money. You gave him a job when no one else would hire him. You invited him into your poker games.”

“I got him killed.”

“You didn’t get him killed.”

“I set the wheels in motion.”

I wanted to comfort Hooker, but I didn’t have a good answer for him. At the moment, I was low on intelligent thought. I was tired. I was confused. I was scared.

I pulled a knit hat out of one of the clothes bags and tugged it onto my head. “I’m going to take Beans for a walk and then I’ll get us some breakfast.” I zipped a winter jacket over my long-sleeved T-shirt and pocketed the room card and the keys to the SUV. I clipped the leash on Beans and led him out of the room, down the hall, and out into the crisp morning air.

The sky was flawlessly pale blue. The sun not yet visible. It was cold enough for my breath to make frost clouds, and I could feel the cold air clearing my head, jump-starting my brain. Beans and I were the only ones in the parking lot. We crossed the lot to a hardscrabble grassy field and walked around until Beans was empty. I loaded him into the SUV and set off in search of coffee.