Motor Mouth

about you say Lucca killed Oscar? You could plea-bargain,” Hooker said. “They do that all the time on television.”
    Rodriguez had his arms folded across his chest and his mouth set in a tight line. He’d said all he was going to say.
    Hooker and I walked away and huddled.
    “We have a problem,” Hooker said. “Rodriguez isn’t going to confess to murder to the police.”
    “Gee, huge surprise there.”
    Here’s the thing. I’m not Nancy Drew. I grew up wanting to build and race stock cars. Solving crimes was never on my list of top-ten desired vocations. Don’t have any aptitude for it. And from what I knew of Hooker, ditto. So when you talked about being up the creek without a paddle, you were talking about us.
    “How about this,” I said to Hooker. “We make an anonymous phone call to the police to come get him. And when they get here he’s got the murder weapon on him.”
    Hooker looked over at me. “Would that be the gun that’s stuck in your pocket? The one with your prints all over it?”
    I gingerly removed the gun from my pocket. “Yep, that’s the gun.”
    “It might work,” Hooker said. “And I have the perfect spot for him.”
    Forty minutes later, we had Rodriguez locked inside Spanky’s bus. We’d shoved him in, chained him to the stairwell hold bar, and handed him his empty, freshly wiped clean, fingerprint-free gun.
    Hooker’d closed the motor-coach door. We’d jumped into the SUV, driven off Huevo property, and parked in the little airport lot where we hoped we looked unworthy of notice. We had a clear view of the road leading to Huevo Motor Sports. All we had to do now was call the police, and then we could sit and wait for the fun to begin.
    I was about to cross the lot and go into the building to use the pay phone when Spanky’s motor coach came roaring down the road and barreled past us.
    Hooker and I went slack jawed.
    “Guess I gave him too much chain,” Hooker said.
    “We really need to stick to racing,” I said to Hooker. “We’re total police-academy dropouts.”
    Hooker rammed the SUV into drive and took off after the coach. “I prefer to think we’re on a learning curve.”
    Rodriguez fishtailed to a stop at the end of the airport road. He made a wide left turn and headed for Speedway Boulevard.
    An average motor coach is about 12 feet high, 9 feet wide, and 45 feet long. It weighs 54,500 pounds, travels on diesel, and has a turning radius of 41 feet. It’s not as complicated to drive as an eighteen-wheeler, but it’s big and unwieldy and requires some care when maneuvering.
    Rodriguez wasn’t taking care. Rodriguez was overdriving the coach. It was rocking from side to side, sliding back and forth over the centerline of the two-lane road. The coach veered onto the shoulder, took out a residential mailbox, and swerved back onto the road.
    “Good thing he can kill people,” Hooker said, dropping back, “because he sure as hell can’t drive.”
    We followed the coach onto Speedway and held our breath as Rodriguez merged into traffic. Speedway is multiple lanes and heavily traveled. It was dusk, and cars were leaving the shopping center and seeking out fast-food restaurants for Sunday dinner. Ordinarily traffic on Speedway was orderly. Tonight, Rodriguez was causing havoc. He was straddling lines and oozing into adjoining lanes, scaring the heck out of everyone around him. He sideswiped a panel van and sent it careening across the road. A blue sedan hit the van and probably a few more cars were caught in the mess, but it was all behind us.
    “Do you think he knows he hit that van?” I asked Hooker.
    “Doubtful. He’s slowed down, but he still can’t control the sway on the coach.”
    We were coming up to a major intersection with traffic stopped at a light. The coach was cruising at 40 miles per hour, and I wasn’t seeing his brake lights.
    “Uh-oh,” I said. “This isn’t good. We should have put a seat belt on Bernie.”
    Hooker eased off the gas and increased the space between us.
    “Brake!” I yelled at Rodriguez. Not that I expected him to hear me. I just couldn’t
not
yell it. “
Brake
!”
    When his lights finally flashed, it was too late. He fishtailed and swung sideways, the right side of the coach scraping a truck hauling scrap metal. The right-front coach skin peeled away as if it had been cut with a can opener, four cars slammed into the left side, and the entire mess moved forward like an advancing glacier or lava flow or