Motor Mouth (Alex Barnaby 2)

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.