Motor Mouth (Alex Barnaby 2)

The same immaculately turned-out guy was at the desk, and his eyes got wide when we all barreled in.

“Oh dear,” he said. “Maybe too much of a good thing.”

“Anthony is expecting us,” I told him.

“He didn’t say anything…”

Rosa was wearing a V-neck red sweater that showed a lot of boob squished so tight together a man would suffocate if he got his nose caught in her cleavage. “We’ve been invited for brunch,” Rosa said.

“He didn’t order any brunch,” the desk clerk said.

“Honey pie,” Rosa said, “we are brunch.”

“But they aren’t here. They all went out about a half hour ago. Something about our coffee not being up to their standards, and they were looking for a Starbucks.”

So maybe Rodriguez and Lucca told them about Hooker, and the Zurich chip buyers ran into him by accident. How crappy is that?

“Anthony said we should go upstairs and get ready,” I told the clerk. “He said you’d let us in his room.”

“Oh, no. I can’t do that. I couldn’t possibly.”

“Okay, then we’ll get ready here,” Rosa said. And she stripped off her sweater.

“Eek!” the desk clerk said. “No, no, no. You can’t do that in the lobby.”

“Here goes me, too,” Felicia said, unbuttoning her lavender-flowered shirt.

The desk clerk clapped his hands over his eyes. “I can’t look. I’m not looking.”

“Unless you want to see Felicia’s granny panties hit the floor, you’d better give me the key,” I said.

He shoved a card at me. “Take it. Take it and go! Get out of my lobby. Room 315.”

Felicia, Rosa, and I flounced off to the elevator

and rode to the third floor. I let us into the room, and we went through everything.

“This guy has no imagination,” Felicia said. “Look at his boxers. They’re all the same color. No pictures or anything.”

I turned on his laptop. Nothing on its desktop. Nothing interesting in his hard drive. I went into his mail program. Wiped clean. Nothing on his calendar.

“There isn’t anything here,” I said. “He must export everything onto a memory stick.” I looked around for a memory stick but came up empty.

“There’s a little safe in the closet,” Rosa said. “Probably he got the good stuff in there because it’s locked. Nothing in his jacket pockets.”

Felicia’s cell phone rang. “It’s my niece,” Felicia said, handing the phone to me. “Hooker is there with three men, and he wants to talk to you.”

“Hey,” I said to Hooker. “How’s it going?”

“It could be better. I’m here with three gentlemen who are interested in the computer chip. Turns out it’s not behind the picture of Jesus anymore.”

“I had Felicia take it. I thought I might need it to ransom you.”

“Oh man, that’s a relief. So you have the chip with you?”

I looked over at Felicia. “You have that little chip from the back of the Jesus picture, right?”

“Yes and no,” Felicia said. “I got it, and then when I was looking for the guns, I put the chip on the table, and Beans ate it.”