“I thought maybe it was cold feet.”
“I don’t get cold feet. Creepy-crawly scrotum and tight sphincter, a lot. Diarrhea, sometimes. Never cold feet.”
Beans got up, turned around twice, and flopped back down with a big dog sigh.
“Are we waiting for your sphincter to relax?” I asked Hooker.
“I don’t feel comfortable with this. I don’t like the car sitting out in the driveway. I know lots of people never use their garage, but this feels off somehow. And I can’t see Bernie driving a gray Taurus.”
Miller’s garage door slid open, and we both scrunched down in our seats. A car engine cranked over in Bernie’s garage. Horse jogged out of the garage and got into the Taurus. The Taurus engine caught, and the car backed out of the driveway and idled in front of Miller’s house. A blue Lexus sedan backed out of the garage, the garage door slid closed, and the Lexus pulled into the street and rolled past the Taurus. Bernie wasn’t driving the Lexus. Baldy was driving the Lexus.
“This isn’t doing anything for my sphincter,” Hooker said. “In fact, my nuts just went north.”
We followed the Taurus and the Lexus out of the subdivision, south on Odell School Road. After a couple miles the two cars pulled off Odell, onto a rutted dirt road that disappeared into a patch of woods. It was the sort of road used by kids for drinking beer, and smoking weed, and getting unexpectedly pregnant. Hooker cruised past the road and parked in a driveway that belonged to a small yellow-and-white ranch-style house. There was a bike and a plastic wading pool in the front yard. It was November and the pool was empty. We were maybe an eighth of a mile beyond the dirt road.
“Now what?” I asked.
Hooker swiveled in his seat and looked back at Odell. “We sit and wait. I don’t think that dirt road goes anywhere.”
Ten minutes later the two cars reappeared, turned back onto Odell, and continued south, driving past us without so much as a sideways glance. Hooker put the SUV in gear, and followed them.
The air was still cool, but the sky was no longer blue. Clouds had pushed in overhead and threatened rain. The Lexus took Derita Road, and the Taurus followed. We drove past the entrance to the airport. The NASCAR corporate building was to our right. The two cars continued on and finally turned onto Concord Mills Boulevard and minutes later drove into the mall parking lot.
Concord Mills is a monstrous mall. Over two hundred stores, a twenty-four-screen theater, race-car simulators, an indoor and outdoor go-cart track. It was a Saturday, early afternoon, and the lot was packed. The Lexus driver didn’t mess with trying to find a good spot. He went straight to the end of a line of cars where there was room to park. The Taurus parked next to him, both men got out, and they took off for the mall.
We were a row over.
“This is strange,” Hooker said. “Huevo’s henchmen driving two cars, one of which I’m guessing belongs to Bernie, and they go shopping.”
“Maybe it’s not Bernie’s car. Maybe these guys are staying with Bernie, and they’re driving their own cars. Maybe Bernie’s deeper in this mess than we originally thought.”
A drizzling rain had started misting onto the windshield. Hooker had his phone in one hand and the Dunkin’ Donuts napkin with Miller’s address and phone number on it in the other hand. He punched Miller’s number in and waited.
“No answer,” Hooker finally said.
We cut our eyes to the Lexus.
“Maybe Miller’s subleasing his house to the thugs,” I said.
Hooker nodded. “I guess that’s possible.”
We unbuckled our seat belts, got out of the SUV, walked over to the Lexus, and looked inside. Nothing out of the ordinary. Clean. No Dunkin’ Donuts napkins.
“Nice car,” I said, looking it over. “Except it’s got a drip in the rear.” I bent to take a closer look. “Uh-oh.”
“What uh-oh?”
“The drip is red, and I think it’s coming from inside the trunk.”
Hooker came over and squatted next to me. “Uh-oh.” He stood and knocked on the trunk. “Hello?”
No one answered.
Hooker ran his fingers around the trunk. “We need to get this open.”
I tried the driver’s-side door. Open. The morons hadn’t locked the car. I reached inside and popped the trunk.
“Double uh-oh,” Hooker said when the trunk lid popped up.
The red drips were coming from Bernie Miller. He was curled up in the trunk, and he’d been shot…everywhere.
“I wish I wasn’t looking at this,” I said to Hooker.
“You aren’t going to hurl or faint or get hysterical, are you?”
I chewed on my bottom lip. “I might.”
“Look on the positive side. One less guy to beat the crap out of.”
“Yeah, but it’s a crime against nature to do this to a Lexus. The trunk upholstery is going to be ruined.”
This was my best shot at bravado. The alternative was uncontrollable weeping.
Hooker closed the lid. “These guys are stepping up the house cleaning. Since they loaded Bernie into his car and shot him off his property, I’m guessing they were going to make him disappear. The question of the day is…why have they parked him here?”
I glanced back at the mall entrance just as Horse and Baldy came out. They were each holding coffee-to-go cups.
“Looks like they parked him here so they could get their triple-shot cappuccinos,” I said to Hooker.
“Man, that’s harsh. Shoot a guy and then park him so you can get a cup of coffee. That’s so Sopranos.”
The rain had changed from misting to definitely raining, and the men were hustling toward us, heads down, getting wet. We ducked down and scuttled behind a van.
“You should make a citizen’s arrest,” I whispered to Hooker. “This is our big chance. We can catch them red-handed. Where’s your gun?”
“In the SUV.”
Huevo’s men were between us and the SUV.
“Do we have a plan that doesn’t involve a gun?” Hooker asked.
“You could call the police.”
Hooker looked over at the SUV, and his mouth tightened a little at the corners. “Do we have a plan that doesn’t involve a phone?”
The two Huevo men got into their cars, backed out of their parking slots, and drove away. Hooker and I ran for the SUV, and in seconds we were out in the drive lane, moving in the same direction as the Lexus. The rain was slanting in, the windshield wipers beating it away. I was forward in my seat, trying to see.
“I’ve lost them,” I said to Hooker. “I can’t see through the rain.”
Hooker was stuck in traffic. “I can’t see them either, and I can’t move. It starts raining and people get nuts.”
I had the phone in my hand, debating a police call. I had no license numbers to give them. And I had no credibility. The rain was washing the blood off the pavement.
Beans was on his feet and panting. Hooker cracked the windows for him, but Beans kept huffing.
“He probably needs to tinkle,” I said to Hooker. “Or worse.”
Hooker inched his way out of the lot, got back onto Concord Mills Boulevard, and pulled off when he saw an island of grass. Five minutes later, Beans and Hooker were back in the car, and they were both soaking wet.
“This sucks,” Hooker said. “We need to do something to turn this around, because it just keeps getting worse, and I’m losing my good mood.”
“Maybe you need lunch.” Food solved all problems in my family.
Concord Mills Boulevard crosses Route 85 and becomes Speedway Boulevard. Every possible fast-food chain has a spot on that stretch of road. Hooker took us to a drive-thru window, and we ordered bags of food. Then we cleverly concealed ourselves behind fogged windows and sheets of rain in the Cracker Barrel parking lot.
I filled our stolen motel ice bucket with water for Beans and gave him a bunch of burgers. Hooker and I had shakes and fries and burgers.
Hooker ate the last of the f
ries and slurped up the last of his shake. “It’s amazing how consuming large quantities of salt and artery-clogging fat always makes me feel happy,” Hooker said.
“Don’t get too happy. We have lots of problems.”
“We need to find those two guys.”
“How are we going to do that? We don’t even know their names.”
Hooker called Nutsy again. “I need some more information. There are two guys looking for me. They’re on the Huevo payroll. Probably working for Ray. Muscle in suits. One guy is big and has a snake tattooed onto the back of his neck. Dark hair cut short. Just recently got his head bashed in. The other guy is bald. I want to know who they are, and it would help if I knew where to find them.”
We moved the SUV back to the mall lot where we felt less conspicuous and waited. Hooker and Beans fell asleep, but I stayed awake. My mind wouldn’t shut down. It was making lists. Pick up the cleaning. Buy baby-shower gift for Nancy Sprague. Try to cut back on the swearing. Call mother more often. Forgive Hooker. Get car ser viced. Have lock fixed on apartment front door. Adopt a cat. Clean out hall closet. Get manicure.
After two hours, I woke Hooker up so he could change locations in the lot. “Do you think we’ll get out of this?” I asked him.
“Sure,” Hooker said. And he went back to sleep.
It was a little after four when Nutsy called. Hooker put his cell phone on speaker mode so I could hear.
“The guys’ names are Joseph Rodriguez and Phillip Lucca,” Nutsy said. “The big guy with the tattoo is Lucca. The little bald guy is Rodriguez. They’re part of Ray Huevo’s entourage. Security detail. Usually travel with Ray, but Ray’s in Miami, and these guys are here. So I don’t know what that means. I imagine it isn’t good since you’re in shit up to your eyeballs and you need this information.”
“Just want to send them a candygram,” Hooker said. “They’ve been nice to me.”
“Yeah, I bet. I don’t know where they’re staying. They’re operating independently of everything here. I’d guess they’re at one of the chains in Concord.”
Hooker disconnected and started calling hotels, asking for Joseph Rodriguez. He hit gold on the fifth try. The desk rang the room, but no one answered.
“Probably out looking for us,” I said to Hooker. “Got a couple bullets left with our names on them.”
“We need a different car,” Hooker said. “The police are looking for us, and the bad guys are looking for us, and everyone probably knows my plate by now.”
I hated to part with the car. It was reliable and comfy. I looked around the lot. “What we need is a different plate. Just swap ours for someone else’s. Most people would never notice if their plate was changed.”
Hooker scrounged around in the console compartment and came up with a small screwdriver. Fifteen minutes later, we had new plates, and Hooker was back in the car, drenched to the skin. He tossed the screwdriver back into the console and turned the heat up full blast.
“If I don’t get dry pretty soon, I’m going to start to mold.”
He put the SUV in gear and drove across the highway to the motel lot. He backed the SUV into a slot at the far end where we had a good view of the lot and the hotel back door. As good a hiding place as we were going to get.
We’d just settled in when the Taurus pulled into the lot. No Lexus. Hooker had his gun out. Rodriguez and Lucca got out of the Taurus and hunched against the rain. Hooker reached for the door handle, and another car pulled into the lot and parked. Hooker took his hand off the door handle.
“This is like when you’re taking a test in school, and you don’t know half the answers, and the fire alarm goes off,” Hooker said. “You’re sort of saved, but you know eventually you’re going to have to go back to the test and you’ll totally screw up.”
Rodriguez and Lucca crossed the lot and disappeared into the building. They were soaking wet, and their shoes and the bottoms of their trousers were muddy.
“It looks like they’ve been digging,” I said to Hooker.
“Yep, the boys have been busy.”
“You think they buried the car, too?”
“The car’s probably at the bottom of Lake Norman.”
Hooker’s phone rang. It was Nutsy.
“You know that property you bought for a future shop?” Nutsy said on speaker mode.
“On Gooding Road?”
“Yeah. I had to go by it a while ago, dropping my kid off at a friend’s house. Anyway, I think those guys you were asking about were on your property. I can’t be sure it was them, with the rain and all, but they seemed to fit your description. The big guy had a bashed-in head. They were just standing by their cars. Guess they were looking for you.”
“What kind of cars?”
“A Taurus and a blue Lexus.”
Hooker disconnected and thunked his head on the steering wheel.
“What?” I asked. And then it hit me. “Omigod, you don’t think they buried Bernie on your property? How would they know it was yours?”
“Everyone knows it’s mine. I didn’t buy the tool-and-die building, but I bought this warehouse. I haven’t started construction, but the warehouse has a big sign on it advertising it as the future home of Hooker Motor Sports.” Hooker rolled the engine over. “We’re going to have to check it out. It would be a smart move for them to bury Bernie on my land. It would tie everything up nice and neat. There are three murdered men. One has tooth marks that perfectly match my dog’s teeth. The other two are found on my property. All undoubtedly shot with the same gun. And I’m sure they’re counting on me being too dead to defend myself.”
We drove a half mile and Hooker cut off into a strip mall that was anchored by a Wal-Mart.
He parked and gave me a wad of cash. “Buy a shovel…just in case. I’d go in but I’m afraid I’ll be recognized.”
Twenty minutes later I wheeled a shopping cart out of the store and into the rain. I had two shovels, a flashlight, and a box of giant-sized garbage bags. All just in case. I also had a bag of dog food and three gallons of water for Beans, plus dry clothes for Hooker. And I’d run next door to the supermarket and gotten a rotisserie chicken, some cookies, and a six-pack of beer. I loaded everything onto the backseat and jumped in.
I opened a bag of cookies and fed one to Hooker. “I hope we don’t have to use the shovel. Digging up a water-logged corpse isn’t high on my list of favorite things to do.”
TEN
The rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, the sky was heavily overcast, the light was somewhere between gloom and the twilight zone. Hooker’s property was on a country road that was dotted with small race shops and supporting businesses. The structure was classic cinder-block warehouse, smaller than the warehouse we’d gone to earlier. It was surrounded by a cement apron that led to three bays in the back and a door in the front. Beyond the apron was hard-packed dirt and scrubby grass. Beyond the dirt was woods.
Hooker drove to the rear and parked. We got out and walked the property. We stopped when we reached a piece of ground at the far back corner that was newly disturbed. It was slightly mounded and the smell of freshly dug earth hung heavy in the air. There were footprints and tire tracks in the surrounding mud. Details had already been obscured by rain.
“Fuck,” Hooker said. More a sigh than a swear.
I was in total agreement. “How did this happen?” I asked him. “This is a nightmare. I didn’t sign up for this.”
Hooker turned and trudged through the muck, back to the SUV. I followed him, no longer caring where I stepped. I was in mud to my ankles. My hair had succumbed to the relentless drizzle and was plastered to my face. My jeans were soaked through to my underwear. And I was cold clear to the bone.
Beans popped up when Hooker opened the side door. Beans was wearing his excited now what expression, looking like he wanted to be part of the adventure.
“Sorry, big guy,” Hooker said. “Too much mud. You’re going to have to stay in the car.”
Here’s
the irony of it. The dog would have loved to roll in the mud, and he had to stay in the car. I wanted to stay in the car, and I had to wallow in the mud.
I grabbed a shovel and the flashlight, and I followed Hooker back to the gravesite. I took a stance, rammed the shovel into the dirt and flung the dirt about ten feet to my side. I just kept ramming the shovel in and throwing the friggin’ dirt away. I looked up and found Hooker watching me.
“You keep digging like that and you’re going to rupture something,” Hooker said. “And you have that look on your face like your underwear’s riding up.”
“I’m wearing a thong. It’s always up.”
“Oh, man,” Hooker said. “I wish you hadn’t told me that. It’s all I’m going to be able to think about.”
“Then I’m happy to be able to supply a diversion, because the other things we have to think about aren’t pleasant.”
Actually, I was digging like a demon because I was furious. There was no justice in the world. This had all started out as a good deed, and good deeds weren’t supposed to end like this. Where’s the reward for being a good person? Where’s the satisfaction?
I plunged my shovel into the dirt and hit something solid. Not a rock. A rock would go chink. This hit with a muffled thud that caused my breath to catch in my chest. I pulled my shovel back and a ragged scrap of material clung to the shovel tip. My mind went numb, and I froze with the shovel a foot off the ground. Cold horror slid through my stomach, my pulse pounded in my ears, and it was lights out. I heard someone call to Hooker. I guess it was me.
When I regained consciousness, I was in the back of the SUV and Beans was standing over me panting. Hooker’s face hovered beside Beans’s big dog head. They both looked worried.
“I think I found Bernie,” I said to Hooker.
“I know. You turned white and went face-first into the mud. Scared the crap out of me. Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. Do I look okay?”
“Yeah. A little muddy, but we’ll get you cleaned up and you’ll be good as new. You can breathe through your nose, right?”
“Yeah. Now that we’ve found him, what should we do with him?”