Motor Mouth

and two cranberry cakes. I pushed through the large glass door, took the steps to the sidewalk, and looked across the street just in time to see the SUV pull away, followed by the black BMW.
    My first reaction was disbelief. For a moment the earth stopped spinning on its axis and nothing moved. Time stood still. And then a horrible ache grew in my chest, and I couldn’t breathe. And my vision blurred behind tears. And I knew it was real. Hooker was gone. The bad guys had him. And these bad guys were a cut above Lucca and Rodriguez. Lucca and Rodriguez were thugs. I suspected Simon and his partner were polished professionals.
    I sat down hard on the cement steps behind me and put my head between my legs, sucking in air. Get a grip, I thought. This is no time to fall apart. I blew my nose in a Starbucks napkin. I sipped some coffee, trying to calm myself, trying to think. “Here’s what has to be done,” I said to myself. “You have to find Hooker before they hurt him. You need help. Call Rosa and Felicia.”
    I was still on the steps in front of Starbucks when Rosa pulled to the curb. I was wired on two cups of coffee and a piece of cranberry cake. I’d managed to stop the flood of tears, but I was feeling horrible that Hooker had been snatched by the bad guys. And I was determined to get him back in useable condition.
    Rosa was driving a magenta Toyota Camry that had been customized with a rear spoiler and a fluorescent red-orange-and-green-flame paint job. Felicia was in the seat next to her. And Beans was in the backseat, his nose pressed against the window, staring out at me.
    I slid onto the seat next to Beans and my attention was caught by the arsenal tucked into the pockets on the seat backs. Three semiautomatics, two revolvers, a stun gun, and a bear-size can of pepper spray. Plus what looked like a sawed-off shotgun on the floor.
    Felicia saw me looking at the guns. “You never know,” she said. “Better to be prepared, right?”
    Prepared for what? World War III?
    “What do we do now?” Rosa wanted to know. “We’re ready to go get those sonsabitches. Do you know where they took Hooker?”
    “No. But I know where they’re staying. It’s the little white hotel on Collins that has the big front porch with the rocking chairs. I thought we could start looking there.”
    “I know the hotel,” Rosa said, edging into traffic. “The Pearl.”
    I sat back and called Skippy.
    “I’m calling for Hooker,” I said. “Did you get anything on Anthony Miranda?”
    “Turns out there are a lot of Anthony Mirandas. There’s a drummer, a New York cop, a politician, a guy who has a Zurich-based export company?”
    “That’s the one. The exporter.”
    “I knew it would be the exporter. From what I read, he mostly exports guns and illegal military technology.”
    “Not good news. I was hoping for chocolate.”
    “Where’s Hooker?” Skippy asked.
    “You know how there are all those movie-star impersonators? You might want to try to find a Hooker double…just in case.”
    “I’m getting too old for this shit,” Skippy said. And he hung up.
    Rosa parked on the street, half a block from the Pearl Hotel. We left Beans in the car, guarding the guns, and Rosa, Felicia, and I took the lobby like here-come-the-hookers.
    The same immaculately turned-out guy was at the desk, and his eyes got wide when we all barreled in.
    “Oh dear,” he said. “Maybe too much of a good thing.”
    “Anthony is expecting us,” I told him.
    “He didn’t say anything…”
    Rosa was wearing a V-neck red sweater that showed a lot of boob squished so tight together a man would suffocate if he got his nose caught in her cleavage. “We’ve been invited for brunch,” Rosa said.
    “He didn’t order any brunch,” the desk clerk said.
    “Honey pie,” Rosa said, “we
are
brunch.”
    “But they aren’t here. They all went out about a half hour ago. Something about our coffee not being up to their standards, and they were looking for a Starbucks.”
    So maybe Rodriguez and Lucca told them about Hooker, and the Zurich chip buyers ran into him by accident. How crappy is that?
    “Anthony said we should go upstairs and get ready,” I told the clerk. “He said you’d let us in his room.”
    “Oh, no. I can’t do that. I couldn’t possibly.”
    “Okay, then we’ll get ready here,” Rosa said. And she stripped off her sweater.
    “Eek!” the desk clerk said. “No, no, no. You can’t do that in the