Motor Mouth - Janet Evanovich [22]
“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