Motor Mouth

place when Dickie and me were guests on the yacht. We knew what you were doing. You were trying to ruin our good time. You were jealous because you weren’t on a yacht, because losers who come in second don’t get invited on yachts.”
    And this is why everyone loves Delores. I wanted to talk to Spanky alone, but Delores was never more than three inches away. It was a wonder she let him drive the race car without her.
    “Oh wow,” I said to Delores. “You’ve got a big black seed right between your two front teeth. Were you eating those little crackers that are mixed in with the bar nuts?”
    Delores swiped her tongue across her teeth. “Is it gone?”
    “No,” I told her. “You should go to the ladies’ room and check it out. It’s huge and black.”
    “Euuuw,” she said. And she took off for the ladies’ room.
    “I didn’t see any seed,” Spanky said.
    “I wanted to talk to you. Alone.”
    “I thought you were Hooker’s girl.”
    “I’m his spotter. And I didn’t like what I was seeing on Sunday.”
    “You mean me winning?”
    “No. I mean you cheating. There was traction control on the sixty-nine.”
    “I drove the wheels off that car. And it was all legal.”
    “None of it was legal. The sixty-nine had a computer chip hidden in the gear shift knob, and the chip regulated engine speed.”
    “Yeah, right. And Batman is going to be my crew chief next year. Lady, you’re looney tunes. You need to stop taking those drugs.”
    “You should ask Ray Huevo about it. And if you weren’t the one controlling the engine speed, you should also talk to your spotter.”
    “What’s Bernie got to do with it?”
    “The chip is controlled by a remote, and you and Bernie are the only ones who could effectively work the remote.”
    “I’m not asking no one about it,” Spanky said. “They’d think I was nuts. And how do you know all this?”
    I was pretty sure I’d accomplished my task. No way to know for certain, but I was betting Spanky didn’t know about the chip. I left the bar and crossed the street to my apartment. I put the key in the lock and the door swung open. The door hadn’t been locked. If this had happened to me a year ago, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Ten months ago, all that changed, and I got a firsthand education on breaking and entering. My brother had gotten himself into a lot of trouble, I’d gone to Florida looking for him and had stumbled onto his ransacked apartment. So finding my door unlocked when I was fairly confident I’d locked it was a little déjà vu.
    I backed away and called Hooker on my cell. “This is probably stupid,” I said to him, “but I just came back from the bar, and the door to my apartment is open, and I’m almost certain I locked it.”
    “Go back to the bar and wait for me.”
    A half hour later Hooker showed up at the bar. Only a handful of regulars remained. Most were watching hockey on the overhead television. Hooker wasn’t big news to this group.
    We went outside and looked up at my windows. No shadowy figures passing in front of the shades. We checked out the parking area. No gunner waiting with the motor running.
    “Okay,” Hooker said. “Let’s do it. Let’s go upstairs and see if anyone’s home.”
    “Are you sure? It seems kind of dangerous. What if someone’s actually there?”
    “I’d hate that. I was counting on looking like a hero without any actual bad-guy contact.”
    Hooker pulled me into the shadows and made a gesture for me to be silent. My apartment door opened wide, and Horse and Baldy came out. They walked to the parking area and got into a car. The engine caught and the car pulled out of the lot and disappeared into the night.
    “I have a cramp in a really uncomfortable place,” Hooker said. “Gobbles’s idea to move to Australia is starting to have some appeal for me.”
    I slipped out of the shadows, slunk to my door, and let myself in. Hooker grabbed my arm and jerked me back when I put my foot on the first step.
    Hooker had his gun in his hand. “Let me go first.”
    Ten months ago, when Hooker and I got involved in my brother’s disappearance we discovered some things about ourselves. One of the things we learned is that we can both be heroic if we have to…but we’d rather not. I was perfectly okay with letting Hooker go first. After all, he was big on driving the boat. And he had the gun.
    I followed Hooker up the stairs, all the time holding my breath. He paused when he