The first locker I tried was empty. I opened the door to the second locker and a shrink-wrapped body fell out. It was folded up, knees to chest. It was male. It was buck naked. It was completely encased in layers and layers of plastic wrap. With the exception of the gruesomely distorted face and open, unseeing eyes, the shrink-wrapped corpse looked a lot like 180 pounds of expired raw chicken parts packaged for supermarket bulk sales.
I jumped back and slammed into the locker on the opposite side of the narrow aisle. A wave of nausea slid through my stomach, and the room dimmed for a moment. In my mind I was screaming, but I think the reality was that my mouth was open and no sound was emerging.
Hooker looked in at me. “See a spider?” His eyes focused on the plastic-wrapped chunk of body parts on the floor. “What the hell is that?”
I was breathless and too horrified to move. “I think it’s a d-d-dead guy. I opened the cabinet, and he fell out.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You need to come take a look, because I seriously think it’s a dead guy, and I’d like to get out of here, but my feet won’t go anywhere.”
Hooker moved next to me, and we both stared down at the body. The eyes were open in a look of unblinking surprise, and there was a big bullet hole in the middle of the forehead. He was maybe in his fifties with a stocky build, and dark brown hair cut short. He was naked and bloody and grotesque. In fact, he was grotesque beyond seeming human, so that after the first shock wore off, it was like looking at a movie prop.
“Shit,” Hooker said. “This really is a dead guy. I hate dead guys. Especially when they’ve got a bullet hole in their forehead, and they’re in a hauler I just stole.”
I glanced at Hooker and saw that he’d broken out in a sweat. “You aren’t going to get sick, or faint, or something, are you?”
“Race-car drivers don’t faint. We’re manly men. I’m pretty close to blowing chow, though. Manly men are allowed to do that.”
“Maybe you should sit down.”
“That sounds like a good idea, but I’m too freaked to move. And here’s more bad news. Do you know who this is?”
“No. Do you?”
“The plastic wrap has his face sort of distorted, but I think this is Oscar Huevo.”
I clapped my hands over my ears. “I didn’t hear that.”
Gobbles wandered in. “Holy fuck,” Gobbles said. “That looks like Oscar Huevo. Holy fucking fuck.”
“Someone has to get me out of here,” I said. “I’m going to be sick.”
Hooker gave me a shove, and we all rushed out and stood gulping air in the middle of the warehouse. Gobbles had started shivering. He was shivering so much I could hear his teeth chattering.
“This is b-b-bad,” he said.
Hooker and I nodded agreement. It was bad.
“Who would want to kill Oscar Huevo?” I asked Hooker.
“The list is probably in the tens of thousands. He was a brilliant businessman, but I’m told he was a ruthless competitor. He had a lot of enemies,” Hooker said.
“We need to call the police.”
“Darlin’, we’re standing in front of a hauler we just hijacked and vandalized. And the dead guy on the floor owns the car that just beat me out of the championship. And if that isn’t bad enough, two Stiller employees are involved in some really bad shit.”
“Do you think Oscar Huevo is the billion-dollar cargo that was going to Mexico?”
“I think it’s a good possibility.”
We fell silent for a couple minutes, all of us absorbing the extent of the disaster.
“I got the icky c-c-creepy c-c-crawlies,” Gobbles said. “M-m-maybe we could just p-p-put Oscar back in the l-l-locker.”
THREE
A car door slammed outside the warehouse and Hooker, Gobbles, and I went rigid. A beat later the lock tumbled on the side door and Felicia Ibarra and her pal Rosa Florez walked in. Rosa works in one of the cigar factories on Fifteenth Street. She’s in her forties. She’s half a head shorter than me and twenty pounds heavier. And while I like to think of myself as having an okay shape, I’m built like a boy compared with Rosa.