Motor Mouth

likely die and he’d never find his cars. He wants those cars back bad.”
    “Here’s a thought?why don’t you offer to
pay
Huevo for the cars in exchange for Beans?”
    “Yeah, that sounds fair. A million plus for a Saint Bernard whose only talent is drooling.”
    “It’s not his only talent. He says hello by knocking people down to the ground. And he can stand on three legs and scratch his ear with his foot. And he has pretty brown eyes.”
    “Like me,” Hooker said. “Except I can’t scratch my ear with my foot.”
    “Yep. You and Beans are the perfect pair.”
    Hooker grinned at me and reached for his cell phone. He went to punch in Huevo’s number and water leaked out. “It’s dead,” Hooker said. “Drowned.”
    “Can you get Huevo’s number off it?”
    “No, but I can probably get a number from Butch.”
    Ten minutes later, Hooker put the Ibarra phone back in its cradle on the kitchen counter.
    “Well?” I asked.
    “Huevo said he doesn’t want the money. He wants the cars.”
    “Maybe it’s the chip that he wants. Maybe you should call him back and offer him the chip.”
    Hooker was fidgeting with the gearshift knob we’d lifted off the 69 car. He was turning it upside down and right side up, examining it. “This is a work of art,” he said. “Huevo’s machine shop has designed this knob so it’s strong and comfortable in your hand with minimum weight.”
    He set it on the table with the threaded side down and there was a barely perceptible
plink
. He picked the knob up and a tiny metal disk was left lying on the table.
    I pushed the disk around with my finger. It was silver and slightly smaller than a contact lens.
    “It looks like a watch battery, but it doesn’t have any markings,” I said to Hooker. “And I don’t know what the heck it was doing inside the gearshift knob.”
    “Maybe this is the traction-control thingy.”
    “Impossible. It doesn’t connect to anything. I cut the shifter in half. No wires. The microprocessor has to send electricity to a mechanical part to get the engine to slow down. We only know two ways to send electricity. One is over a wire. The other is a lightning bolt.”
    “Then what is it?”
    I turned it over in the palm of my hand. “I don’t know. I’d like to see inside, but I’m afraid I’ll destroy it if I try to open it. It wouldn’t be a problem if we were in Concord.”
    “I don’t want to go to Concord. I think Beans is in Miami, and I’m not leaving until I get him back.”
    “Then let’s find a jeweler.”
    A half hour later, Hooker stood over a case filled with diamond bracelets. “Most women would forgive me if I bought them one of these bracelets.”
    “Don’t kid yourself. A woman might take the bracelet, but she wouldn’t forgive you.”
    “That explains a lot,” Hooker said.
    “Wasted your money on a bunch of diamond bracelets?”
    He smiled sheepishly. “I’ve bought a few.”
    I was with the jeweler who was laboring over the little metal button. He had it in a miniature vice, and he was trying a variety of things, none of which was working. Finally he took it out of the vice, put his tiny tools away, held the button between his thumb and forefinger and whacked it with a hammer. The metal shell cracked open and the inside of the button was exposed.
    We all stared down at it.
    “What is it?” Hooker asked.
    I borrowed the jeweler’s loop and examined the button. “It looks like a circuit board. And it’s welded onto something that might be a miniaturized battery.”
    “So, this could be it,” Hooker said. “Except it’s not attached to anything.”
    “Yeah. But maybe it talks to the chip that was stuck on the engine.”
    I pulled the plastic bag out of my pocket, put the damaged piece-of-something on the counter, and looked at it under the loop. It was for sure a chip. I could see the circuits.
    “It’s a chip,” I said to Hooker. “I don’t know why you would need two, though. I’d think the chip on the engine would do it all.”
    I put the two chips back into the plastic bag, slipped the bag into my pocket, and we left the jewelry store and walked out into the mall. We were at a touristy waterside section of Miami with shops and food courts opening to a marina. It was tropical and colorful and the stores featured ashtrays that were decorated with flamingos, rubber alligators made in China, beach towels, T-shirts, lamps shaped like palm trees, sunglasses, sunscreen, sun visors, and bags