“I’ll pass that along to him.” Probably should take the bullets out of his gun first.

“I saw you guys sitting on the dock. What the heck were you doing?”

“We were just hanging out.”

“It looked like you were watching us.”

“Nope. Just hanging out.”

Delores picked her nose up out of her cosmo. “Oh yeah? Well why did you start screaming when Ray’s assistant invited you to breakfast? It was real rude of you to be there in the first place when Dickie and me were guests on the yacht. We knew what you were doing. You were trying to ruin our good time. You were jealous because you weren’t on a yacht, because losers who come in second don’t get invited on yachts.”

And this is why everyone loves Delores. I wanted to talk to Spanky alone, but Delores was never more than three inches away. It was a wonder she let him drive the race car without her.

“Oh wow,” I said to Delores. “You’ve got a big black seed right between your two front teeth. Were you eating those little crackers that are mixed in with the bar nuts?”

Delores swiped her tongue across her teeth. “Is it gone?”

“No,” I told her. “You should go to the ladies’ room and check it out. It’s huge and black.”

“Euuuw,” she said. And she took off for the ladies’ room.

“I didn’t see any seed,” Spanky said.

“I wanted to talk to you. Alone.”

“I thought you were Hooker’s girl.”

“I’m his spotter. And I didn’t like what I was seeing on Sunday.”

“You mean me winning?”

“No. I mean you cheating. There was traction control on the sixty-nine.”

“I drove the wheels off that car. And it was all legal.”

“None of it was legal. The sixty-nine had a computer chip hidden in the gear shift knob, and the chip regulated engine speed.”

“Yeah, right. And Batman is going to be my crew chief next year. Lady, you’re looney tunes. You need to stop taking those drugs.”

“You should ask Ray Huevo about it. And if you weren’t the one controlling the engine speed, you should also talk to your spotter.”

“What’s Bernie got to do with it?”

“The chip is controlled by a remote, and you and Bernie are the only ones who could effectively work the remote.”

“I’m not asking no one about it,” Spanky said. “They’d think I was nuts. And how do you know all this?”

I was pretty sure I’d accomplished my task. No way to know for certain, but I was betting Spanky didn’t know about the chip. I left the bar and crossed the street to my apartment. I put the key in the lock and the door swung open. The door hadn’t been locked. If this had happened to me a year ago, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Ten months ago, all that changed, and I got a firsthand education on breaking and entering. My brother had gotten himself into a lot of trouble, I’d gone to Florida looking for him and had stumbled onto his ransacked apartment. So finding my door unlocked when I was fairly confident I’d locked it was a little déjà vu.

I backed away and called Hooker on my cell. “This is probably stupid,” I said to him, “but I just came back from the bar, and the door to my apartment is open, and I’m almost certain I locked it.”

“Go back to the bar and wait for me.”

A half hour later Hooker showed up at the bar. Only a handful of regulars remained. Most were watching hockey on the overhead television. Hooker wasn’t big news to this group.

We went outside and looked up at my windows. No shadowy figures passing in front of the shades. We checked out the parking area. No gunner waiting with the motor running.

“Okay,” Hooker said. “Let’s do it. Let’s go upstairs and see if anyone’s home.”

“Are you sure? It seems kind of dangerous. What if someone’s actually there?”

“I’d hate that. I was counting on looking like a hero without any actual bad-guy contact.”

Hooker pulled me into the shadows and made a gesture for me to be silent. My apartment door opened wide, and Horse and Baldy came out. They walked to the parking area and got into a car. The engine caught and the car pulled out of the lot and disappeared into the night.

“I have a cramp in a really uncomfortable place,” Hooker said. “Gobbles’s idea to move to Australia is starting to have some appeal for me.”

I slipped out of the shadows, slunk to my door, and let myself in. Hooker grabbed my arm and jerked me back when I put my foot on the first step.

Hooker had his gun in his hand. “Let me go first.”

Ten months ago, when Hooker and I got involved in my brother’s disappearance we discovered some things about ourselves. One of the things we learned is that we can both be heroic if we have to…but we’d rather not. I was perfectly okay with letting Hooker go first. After all, he was big on driving the boat. And he had the gun.

I followed Hooker up the stairs, all the time holding my breath. He paused when he got to the top then looked around. He motioned for me to stay, and then he went room by room, making sure no one was there.

“Looks like it’s just you and me,” he said when he came back. “If they were searching for something, they were neat about it. Nothing seems out of place.”

I filled my travel bag plus a couple brown grocery bags with clothes and other essentials. I hadn’t had a chance to buy food, so there was very little in the refrigerator to worry about. I flipped the lights off and gave one of the bags to Hooker. “From what I could tell, they did a decent search. Things were disrupted in drawers. My bed had been taken apart.”

“They were looking for the chip,” Hooker said.

“Fortunately, I have the chip in my pocket,” I said.

“I think it’s time to get help. It was probably time to get help yesterday, but I was hoping it would all go away. I think we should go to my house tonight. We’ll be safe there. First thing in the morning, we’ll call Skippy and see if he’ll send a NASCAR lawyer or at least a PR guy with us when we talk to the police.”

Gus Skippy is vice president of a bunch of stuff. He was originally a newspaper guy, and now he was a NASCAR problem solver, shrink, babysitter, spin master, fashion icon, and the corporate communications guru who butt-kicked and bullshitted NASCAR through the millions of sticky situations that occurred during a season. He hung out with a big guy named Herbert who was known as the honorary mayor of NASCAR. They were both good old boys from Carolina, and when you put the two of them together, they were the Odd Couple of NASCAR.

We went down the stairs, locked the door behind us, and walked one block. Hooker’d taken the precaution of parking away from my building. He was driving the black Blazer, and Beans was waiting, nose pressed against the back window.

Hooker drove north to Mooresville and the collection of back roads that led to his property. He had close to fifty acres, and had placed his house squarely in the middle, behind a stand of pines. The house was only minimally visible to passing cars. He’d combined parcels of land, and three small ranch houses had gone along with the land purchase. Two of the houses were rented out to crew members. The third house sat at the edge of Hooker’s driveway and served as a gatehouse. Butchy Miller lived in the gatehouse.

The story goes that Butchy was the local high school football hero who got lost in a bottle of steroids, bulked up to skin-popping proportions, shrank his wiener into uselessness, and developed anger-management issues. He consistently lost at poker, and he scared the hell out of anyone, living or dead. Hooker considered him to be the perfect security guard, and had installed him in his gatehouse, not because he actually needed a security guard but more because he frequently needed an extra hand for poker.

Hooker stopped at the side of the road and looked at his gatehouse. “The lights are off.”

“It’s late. Butchy’s probably asleep.”

“Butchy’s afraid of the dark. He sleeps with the lights on. When he goes out, he leaves the lights on so it’s not dark when he comes home.”