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 whatever bizarre disaster you could conjure up. There was one last crunch and the behemoth bus came to rest on top of a Hummer.

A headline flashed into my head: Bonnano Motor Coach Humps Hummer on Speedway Boulevard.

We had fifteen to twenty cars between the motor coach and us, not counting the cars directly involved in the crash, and cars were in gridlock behind us.

“I really want to run up there and take a look,” Hooker said, “but I’m afraid to get out of the car.”

“Yeah,” I said to him. “You’d probably have to sign autographs. And then the police would come and take you away and do a body-cavity search.”

I climbed out of the window and stood on the ledge to see better.

Caught in the glare of headlights and smoky road haze, a lone figure ran between wrecked cars. He had a chain and part of a handrail tethered to his ankle. Hard to tell from my vantage point if he was injured. He approached a car stopped at the intersection, yanked the driver’s door open, and wrenched the driver out of the car. He angled himself into the car and drove off with the chain caught in the door and the handrail clattering on the pavement. So far as I could see, no one stopped him or followed him. The driver of the stolen car stood in frozen shock. Sirens screamed in the distance.

I slipped back inside and took the seat next to Hooker. “Rodriguez carjacked a silver sedan and drove off into the sunset.”

“He did not.”

“Yep. He did. Still had the chain and handrail attached.”

Hooker burst out laughing. “I don’t know who’s more pathetic…him or us.”

I slouched in my seat. “I think we’d win that contest.”

Beans sat up and looked around. He gave a big Saint Bernard sigh, turned twice, and flopped down.

“This could take a while,” I said to Hooker. “They’re not going to sort this out in fifteen minutes.”

Hooker reached over and ran a fingertip along the nape of my neck. “Want to make out?”

“No!” Yes. But not here and not now. I wasn’t going to give in on a freeway. If we were going to have make-up sex, it was going to be good. It for sure wasn’t going to be in the backseat of an SUV.

“Just some kissing,” Hooker said. He put his hand over his heart. “I swear.”

“You’re not planning on doing any touching?”

“Okay, maybe some touching.”

“No.”

Hooker blew out a sigh. “Darlin’, you’re a hard woman. You’re doggone frustrating.”

“And it’s not going to do you any good to drag out your Texas drawl,” I told him.

Hooker grinned. “It got me where I wanted to go when I first met you.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not going to get you there now.”

“We’ll see,” Hooker said.

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“Come on, admit it,” Hooker said. “You want me bad.”

I smiled at him, and he smiled back, and we both knew what that meant. He held my hand, and we sat there, holding hands, staring out the windshield, watching the cleanup spectacle like it was a television show.

There were fire trucks and medical-emergency trucks from three counties and enough flashing strobes to give a healthy man a seizure. The medevac helicopter didn’t drop out of the sky, and no one seemed to be rushing around, frantically trying to save a life. So I was hoping that meant no one was critically injured. All but one of the fire trucks left the scene. And one by one the EMT trucks left, some with flashing lights. None of the EMT trucks sped away with sirens blaring. Another good sign.

Tow trucks and police were working on the outer perimeter of the crash, moving cars. The road was still blocked, but the problem was shrinking. A tow truck inched into the heart of the wreck.