“No. Apparently word hasn’t gotten out that the hauler’s missing.”

I saw the waitress appear on the other side of the room but couldn’t catch her attention.

“NASCAR has to know,” I said to Hooker. “They track those haulers. They’d know when it went off their screen.”

Hooker shrugged. “Season’s over. Maybe they weren’t paying attention. Or maybe the driver called in and said the GPS was broken so NASCAR wouldn’t get involved.”

I clanked my teaspoon on my coffee cup and waved my hand at the waitress, but she had her back to me and didn’t turn around.

“Darlin’, that’s just so sad,” Hooker said, trading coffee cups with me.

I took a sip of coffee. “There are some worried people out there. They’re scrambling to find the hauler, and they’re going to want to find the idiots who stole it because those idiots know Huevo was stuffed into the locker.”

“Good thing we’re the only ones who know we’re the idiots,” Hooker said.

The waitress stopped at our table and filled Hooker’s empty cup. “Anything else, sweetheart?” she asked Hooker. “Everything okay with your breakfast?”

“Everything’s great,” Hooker said. “Thanks.”

She turned and sashayed off, and I gave Hooker a raised eyebrow.

“Sometimes it’s good to be me,” Hooker said, finishing his pancakes.

“So we’re sticking to our plan to check out the car and leave the hauler on the side of the road somewhere.”

“Yeah, except I don’t know what to do about Gobbles. No one knows we’re involved, so we can go home and get on with our lives. Gobbles has a major problem. Gobbles’s life expectancy isn’t good. I have no idea how to fix that.”

Hooker signaled for the check, and the waitress hustled over with it. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like another cup of coffee?” she asked Hooker.

“No,” Hooker said. “We’re good.”

“I hope she gets a melanoma,” I said to Hooker.

Hooker pulled out a wad of cash and left it on the table with the check. “Let’s roll. I need clothes. We’re going to take ten minutes out to shop.”

Miami weather is gorgeous in November, as long as there’s not a hurricane blowing through. It was shirt-sleeve, ride-with-the-top-down weather. Bright sun and no clouds.

The top didn’t go down on the SUV, but we opened the windows and tuned the radio to salsa music. We were relatively mellow, all things considered. Beans was happy with his muffin. Hooker took off in search of a mall, and Beans stuck his head out the driver’s-side back window and his tail out the window on the opposite side of the car. His soft, floppy Saint Bernard ears flapped in the wind, and his big loose Saint Bernard lips ruffled as they caught air. Hooker drove out of Little Havana and headed southwest.

Forty-five minutes later, Hooker had a bag of clothes. One-stop shopping for jeans, T-shirts, underwear, and socks, plus a canvas duffel bag. Life is simple when you’re a guy. We hit a drugstore and Hooker got a toothbrush, a razor, and deodorant.

“That’s it?” I asked him. “Don’t you need shampoo, body wash, shaving gel, toothpaste?”

“I thought I’d use yours. I’d use your razor, but it’s pink.”

“A Texas tough guy can’t shave with a pink razor?”

“Hell, no. I’d get kicked out of the club.”

“What club is that?” I asked him.

Hooker grinned at me. “I don’t know. I made that up. There isn’t any club. I’d just feel silly if I used a pink razor. I’d feel like I had to shave my legs.”

We returned to the warehouse, I zipped myself into the borrowed jumpsuit, and I got back to work attacking those areas where I would have hidden a wire and microprocessor. I cut through the roll bar and every other piece of the frame where it could possibly run. I searched through the entire wiring harness. I disassembled the tach. NASCAR had already cut into the ignition box, so I didn’t have to check that. I pulled the engine out with the help of an engine hoist, and started going over it inch by inch with a flashlight and my bare hand, skimming the surface with my fingertips.

“What are you looking for?” Hooker wanted to know.

“If Huevo found a way to go wireless, he could stick the microprocessor directly onto the engine block. These things are so small, he could make it look like a casting flaw.”

I very carefully explored two burrs in the surface. Neither proved to be anything. I found a third and eventually got it to lift off. I was pretty sure it was a chip, but it was too small to see any detail, and I’d partially mangled it trying to get it unstuck from the engine.

“Is that it?” Hooker asked.

“I’m not sure. It’s even smaller than I thought it would be, and it’s not in perfect shape. I need magnification to see it.” I dropped it into a plastic sandwich bag and sealed it. “If this isn’t it, then I’m stumped. I’ve looked everywhere I could think to look. I want to roll the second car out so I can check the engine for a similar chip.”

A half hour later, I was convinced a second chip didn’t exist. I’d carefully examined every inch of the engine but hadn’t found anything.

Hooker had his hands in his pants pockets, and he was rocked back on his heels. “Okay, Ms. Criminal Mastermind…now what?”

“The Huevo people will take one look at the sixty-nine primary and know someone associated with racing hijacked the truck,” I told him. “I wouldn’t care about that except it now involves us in a murder. So I don’t think we can return the hauler with the car in it. My suggestion is to unload the second car and make this look like someone took the truck because they wanted to steal the cars. It could be any car thief. Or some insane Spanky fan. And that would go along with Oscar getting dumped into Spanky’s truck like a drunken joke.”

“I think we should make everything disappear permanently,” Hooker said.

“It’s not that easy. We could drive the hauler to North Dakota but I’m afraid we’d be spotted. If we drive the whole truck into the ocean, it’ll still be sitting there at low tide. If we torch it, we’ll be left with a bunch of burned-out carcasses. I could dismantle the hauler piece by piece but that would take time…lots of time and hard work. The cars would go a lot faster. Give me an acetylene torch and a power saw and by the end of the day I can have the two cars reduced to unrecognizable junk that could be tossed off a bridge. Then we just leave the hauler on the side of the road somewhere, far away from Little Havana. And we can remove the aluminum foil from the GPS so the Huevo people can recover their truck.”

“I like it.”

“We don’t want to attract attention with the truck,” I said. “We don’t want to drive it around in daylight. And it would look suspicious if we took it out at two in the morning. Although in this neighborhood it might just be one more hijacked truck moving through its paces. I think we should take it out at four thirty in the morning, while it’s still dark, and it’ll look like some driver’s getting an early start.” I pulled a pair of gloves on and got back into the jumpsuit. “I’m going to chop up Huevo’s cars, and I could use a helper.”

“I guess that would be me,” Hooker said.

I checked my watch. Five forty-five. Felicia was expecting us for dinner at six.

“We’re almost done,” I said to Hooker. “Another hour of work and we can start carting this junk out of here. Let’s break for dinner and come back to finish up later tonight.”

Hooker stood looking at the mound of hacked-up car parts. “There’s a lot of shit here. And it’s heavy. We’re going to need a dump truck to get rid of this.”

“Forget it,” I told him. “I’m not stealing a dump truck. I’ll take it out piece by piece in the SUV.”

“Okay by me,” Hooker said. “It’ll take us days to do it that way and in the meantime I get to snuggle with you in Felicia’s little guest bed.”

I felt a dull ache start to throb behind my left eye. I was going to steal a dump truck, no doubt about it. As I saw it, my life was now divided into two parts. Before Hooker and After Hooker. The Before Hooker half had been a lot more sane than the After Hooker half. Hooker brought out the crazy part of me.