Motor Mouth

How about we think this out over breakfast. And maybe I can find a diner that has a defibrillator just in case you have a heart attack.”
    “I’m not hungry,” Hooker said. “I just want my goddamn dog back.”
    “Sure. I know that, but we need a plan. And you could think better if your eyes weren’t so popped out of their sockets, right?”
    “Are my eyes popped out of their sockets?”
    “If they popped out any more, they’d be rolling around on the floor.”
    I pulled into the first diner I saw, and I got Hooker settled into a booth. Hooker ordered a ham-and-cheese omelet, bacon, pancakes, home fries, juice, coffee, and a side of biscuits with white gravy. Good thing he was too upset to be hungry, otherwise he might have cleaned out the kitchen and the diner would have had to close.
    Hooker’s eyes were narrowed, his mouth was tight, and he angrily tapped his fork on the table.
    I firmly removed the fork from Hooker’s hand. “Did the killer guy have an accent? Did he sound Mexican?”
    “No. No accent.”
    “Did he say when he was going to kill you?”
    “He didn’t go into detail.”
    “Were there noises in the background? Could you tell where he was?”
    “It sounded like he was driving. I could hear Beans panting.”
    “Did he give any indication of where he was going?”
    “No. Nothing.”
    The food arrived, and Hooker forked in some omelet. I drank my coffee and stared into my empty cup. I looked around for the waitress but couldn’t find her.
    “Have you always had this waitress problem?” Hooker asked.
    “Only when I’m with you.”
    Hooker swapped coffee cups with me. The waitress appeared and gave him a refill.
    I ate the cereal I’d ordered and drank some more coffee. A tear slid down my cheek and plopped onto the Formica tabletop.
    “Oh crap,” Hooker said, reaching over, cradling my face in his hands, using his thumb to swipe the tears from my cheek. “I hate when you cry.”
    “I’m worried about Beans. I’m trying not to be crazy, but I feel terrible. I bet he misses us.”
    “I’m worried about him, too,” Hooker said. “And now some guy wants to kill me.”
    I snuffled the tears back. “Yes, but you deserve to die.”
    “Jeez,” Hooker said. “You really know how to hold a grudge.”
    “A woman scorned.”
    “Darlin’, I didn’t scorn you. I just boinked a salesclerk.”
    “There were pictures on the Internet!”
    Hooker’s cell phone rang.
    “’Lo,” Hooker said. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”
    He disconnected, and I gave him raised eyebrows. “Well?”
    “That was Ray Huevo…the grieving younger brother of the deceased Oscar. You remember Ray, the brother not eaten by the swamp monster, the brother you saw at the track with Horse and Baldy, the brother who undoubtedly knows the spawn of Satan who has my dog. He wants his cars back.”
    “That could be a problem. Does he care if they’re the size of a loaf of bread?”
    “Let’s walk through this,” Hooker said. “Someone killed Oscar Huevo, shrink-wrapped him, and stuffed him into a locker in the hauler. We’re assuming it was an inside job, but the truth is, those haulers aren’t locked and anyone could get in and dump a body.”
    “Not entirely true. You need a garage pass to get to the hauler area.”
    “That narrows it down to a couple thousand.”
    “Okay, so a lot of people had access. It’s still not that easy. They had to bring the body in somehow. And we know he was brought in, because there wasn’t any blood in the hauler. Even if they’d scrubbed it down, I think we would have seen some blood or signs of a struggle. Even if they shot him outside the hauler and dragged him in, we’d see blood. And he was naked, with a boner…okay, I guess that could happen in the hauler.”
    “No way,” Hooker said. “He didn’t have socks on. Nobody bothers to take their socks off to have sex in the hauler.”
    I cut my eyes at him.
    “Not that I would know from personal experience,” Hooker said.
    “The paper said Oscar Huevo was last seen having dinner with Ray. That was Saturday night. Both brothers were planning on attending the race, but only one showed up. No one saw Oscar at the track. A doorman remembers Oscar going out for a walk after dinner. No one remembers seeing Oscar return from the walk.”
    Hooker finished his pancakes and started on the biscuit. “So how did they get the body into the hauler without being seen? There’s always activity around the hauler.