Motor Mouth (Alex Barnaby 2)

“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.