Motor Mouth (Alex Barnaby 2)

“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?”