“Nope,” Hooker said, putting the car in gear, heading for Starbucks. “I don’t have any of those ideas.”

Ten minutes later I was leaving Starbucks with two large cups of coffee 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 lobby.”

“Here goes me, too,” Felicia said, unbuttoning her lavender-flowered shirt.

The desk clerk clapped his hands over his eyes. “I can’t look. I’m not looking.”

“Unless you want to see Felicia’s granny panties hit the floor, you’d better give me the key,” I said.

He shoved a card at me. “Take it. Take it and go! Get out of my lobby. Room 315.”

Felicia, Rosa, and I flounced off to the elevator and rode to the third floor. I let us into the room, and we went through everything.

“This guy has no imagination,” Felicia said. “Look at his boxers. They’re all the same color. No pictures or anything.”

I turned on his laptop. Nothing on its desktop. Nothing interesting in his hard drive. I went into his mail program. Wiped clean. Nothing on his calendar.

“There isn’t anything here,” I said. “He must export everything onto a memory stick.” I looked around for a memory stick but came up empty.

“There’s a little safe in the closet,” Rosa said. “Probably he got the good stuff in there because it’s locked. Nothing in his jacket pockets.”

Felicia’s cell phone rang. “It’s my niece,” Felicia said, handing the phone to me. “Hooker is there with three men, and he wants to talk to you.”

“Hey,” I said to Hooker. “How’s it going?”

“It could be better. I’m here with three gentlemen who are interested in the computer chip. Turns out it’s not behind the picture of Jesus anymore.”

“I had Felicia take it. I thought I might need it to ransom you.”

“Oh man, that’s a relief. So you have the chip with you?”

I looked over at Felicia. “You have that little chip from the back of the Jesus picture, right?”

“Yes and no,” Felicia said. “I got it, and then when I was looking for the guns, I put the chip on the table, and Beans ate it.”

“What?”

“How was I to know? I left the room for three seconds and when I come back, Mr. Sneaky Dog had his tongue on the table and the chip was gone.”

I was speechless.

“It could be worse,” Felicia said. “At least we know where it is. You just have to wait for him to poopie.”

“Hello,” Hooker said. “Are you still there?”

“The chip is temporarily unavailable,” I told him. “Let me talk to Miranda.”

There was some fumbling and Miranda came on the phone.

“Listen,” I said, “there’s a small problem here, and the chip is temporarily unavailable, but we know exactly where it is, and we’re going to get it to you as soon as possible. Now here’s the thing, if one hair is out of place on Sam Hooker’s head you’ll never see the chip.”

“Now here’s my thing. Get me the chip or you’re going to have a dead boyfriend.”

“Technically, he isn’t my boyfriend.”

“You’ve got twenty-four hours,” Miranda said. He gave me his cell phone number and disconnected.

“We have twenty-four hours to swap the chip for Hooker,” I said to Rosa and Felicia.

“Maybe we feed doggie some prunes and it make things go faster,” Felicia said. “Works for me.”

“Maybe we wait for the bad guys to return and we kick their ass,” Rosa said.

I thought they both sounded like okay ideas. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “One of you can do surveillance on the hotel, and the other can come with me to buy prunes.”

“I don’t want to do surveillance,” Rosa said. “It’s just sitting and waiting.”