Motor Mouth

grocery store, and I’d done some shopping while Hooker walked Beans. After the grocery store, we drove to the deserted factory and parked the two cars deep in the cavernous interior. Now we were standing behind the Taurus, wondering what the heck we were supposed to do next.
    “How about this,” Hooker said. “We haul him out of the trunk, and we chain him to that pipe over there. We can wrap the chain around his ankle and lock it. He’ll be able to move around a little, but he won’t be able to get away.”
    It sounded like an okay plan to me, so I held the flashlight and Hooker felt around for the trunk latch. He got the lid up, looked in at Rodriguez, and Rodriguez kicked out with both feet, catching Hooker square in the chest, knocking him on his ass. Rodriguez rocketed out of the trunk and hit the ground running. He tried to push past me. I whacked him hard in the knee with the flashlight and he went down like a sack of sand.
    Hooker was on all fours with the chain in his hand, trying to wrap it around Rodriguez’s ankle, but Rodriguez was a moving target, rolling on the cement floor, holding his leg, swearing and moaning. I threw myself on top of Rodriguez, Rodriguez let out an
oouf
of air, and I pinned him long enough for Hooker to secure the loop of chain with a padlock.
    I rolled off Rodriguez and looked at Hooker, still on hands and knees. “Are you okay?”
    Hooker dragged himself up to standing. “Yeah, aside from having size-ten footprints on my chest, I’m peachy. Next time I open a trunk with a killer in it, I’ll step back.”
    We waited for Rodriguez to quit swearing and writhing in pain, and then we dragged him across the room and chained him to the pipe.
    Rodriguez propped himself up against the wall, his knee outstretched. “You broke my fucking knee,” he said.
    “It’s just a bruise,” I told him. “If I’d broken it, you’d see swelling.”
    “It feels swollen.”
    “I’m sure it’s not swollen.”
    “I’m telling you it’s fucking swollen. You goddamn broke my knee.”
    “Hey!” Hooker said. “Could we forget the knee for a minute? We’re in an unfortunate situation, and we need you to answer some questions.”
    “I’m not answering nothing. You could cut off my nuts and I’m not answering nothing.”
    “There’s an idea,” I said to Hooker. “I’ve never cut off anybody’s nuts before. It might be fun.”
    “Messy,” Hooker said. “Lots of blood.”
    “How about this, we could hang him upside down until all the blood rushes to his head, and then we could cut off his nuts.”
    Hooker smiled at me. “That might work.”
    Rodriguez groaned and put his head between his legs.
    “I think he’s feeling sick,” I said to Hooker.
    “Maybe we should give him a break,” Hooker said. “He’s probably not such a bad guy. Only doing his job.”
    “You’re such a softy,” I said to Hooker.
    “Trying to be fair.”
    I was still holding the flashlight and I gave it a little waggle. “Can we at least beat the crap out of him?”
    “I know that was our original plan,” Hooker said, “but I think we should give him a chance to save his ass. I bet he could tell us some interesting stuff.”
    We both looked down at Rodriguez.
    “Shit,” Rodriguez said. “You’re playing me.”
    “True,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t cause you a lot of pain if you don’t cooperate.”
    “And if I
do
cooperate?”
    “No pain,” Hooker said.
    “What do you want to know?”
    “I want to know about Oscar Huevo.”
    “He wasn’t such a nice guy. And now he’s dead,” Rodriguez said.
    “I want to know how he got dead.”
    “It was an accident.”
    I had the flashlight trained on Rodriguez, making him squint past the glare.
    “He had a big hole in the middle of his forehead,” I said to Rodriguez. “It didn’t look like an accident.”
    “Okay, it wasn’t an accident. It was more like good fortune. Oscar and Ray got into a big fight. I don’t know what it was about, but Ray came out of it mad and decided he needed to get rid of Oscar. So Lucca and me got the job. Problem is, Oscar has his own muscle, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities to gracefully make Oscar disappear, if you know what I mean. We watched Oscar for a couple days, and we were worrying it wasn’t gonna happen, and then it got dropped in our lap.
    “Oscar had a girlfriend stashed in South Beach. He’d sneak out of his hotel on Brickell and spend the night with his