The sunlight streamed through the giant sliding door originally made for observation balloons. The heat of the day pooled on the thick concrete slab, the large one-eared orange tabby sprawled in the center, absorbing the heat. The clanging of metal on metal and the two men talking didn’t even cause the ear to twitch.
The two men looked at each other like a couple of goofy kids about to launch their first water balloon in the season’s premier catapult. The two were intoxicated from working for thirty-eight hours straight. The glassy eyes and rum-punched grins were infectious.
“Hey!” The sharp voice cut through the open air as only a librarian’s voice could.
The two men jerked like small boys caught about to do something they shouldn’t. They wavered and turned. The cat’s ear then twitched.
The thin woman in a grease-stained undershirt and bib overalls stood in the door to the house. “Not… before breakfast.”
The man in the torn jeans and sweaty grease-stained T-shirt swiveled around to look at the man in the pink square-dancing dress and engineer boots. Willie wavered, blinked, and nodded as he shrugged his shoulders. “What the hell. She’s probably right.” Falling forward to gain momentum, they headed toward the doorway where Maddie had disappeared.
Chet scratched at the scars on his chest where the nerves were still knitting back together. He surged and stumbled after the man in the dress. He didn’t have the energy to think of doing anything other than following the leader. Or, in this case, do what the librarian told them to do.
Twenty minutes later, the coffee, scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon had done nothing for their lack of sleep. They sat around the small table, looking at each other through glazed eyes.
Chet finally broke the silence that had been the conversation of the meal. “Dibs on the couch.”
Willie and Maddie barely made it to the nearest bedroom. They lay face down where they fell. They would worry about the grease stains on the sheets later.
The phone rang shortly after dusk.
Willie fumbled the phone off the base in the bedroom. “Hunoo?”
“I’m just giving you a heads up if you still need to hide the new engine you kids have been playing with.”
Willie was instantly wide awake. “Thanks, Dolly.” He hung up the now buzzing phone. He rolled over and sat up. He decided to let Maddie keep sleeping, and then remembered what her front had looked like most of the previous day and through the night. Maddie never had a chance at being a girl. She had three older brothers and a father who knew nothing about rearing anything but grease monkeys and moonshine cooks.
She had never been shy about the oil, grease, and hot fast steel or iron of the family business, but she had the brains. She had turned into the one who called the shots. Two or four wheels, she drove the fastest and had probably accumulated the most speed records as well as the most broken bones.
He prodded her butt. “Hooker is on his way.”
He went out to the general living area to find Chet was already sitting up and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Come on, Chet. We need to shove Hooker’s engine back behind the Speed Wagon.”
The two men had just wrangled the half-ton of cast iron and steel to its hiding place and covered it with a dusty old tarp when they heard Hooker pull up in the DeSoto out front. They fell into the grease-stained webbed lounge chairs. As Hooker walked in the giant door, Willie stood and carrying two bright plastic picnic tumblers, headed for the half-open door leading into the house.
“Hey, Hooker,” he called out nonchalantly. “Maddie is just whipping up another batch of Hornet Slappers. You care to join us, or are you planning to drive back to Manny’s tonight?”
“I’ll take a sip of yours, Willie, but basically, I’m off the moonshine for a while.”
Hooker saw Chet and veered off to talk to the California Highway Patrol Captain, who was recovering from the same ‘dime rash’ as his and the Squirt’s. All three had looked into the canyon of death, courtesy of the same killer. None of the three had made out any better than the other two, just different wounds.
Hooker shook with his left and stronger hand. “How are the chest wounds?”
“Chest is fine. It’s the ringing in the ears and the headaches; they still have me on stand-down. Until I go a month with no headaches, I’m on the shoulder.”
“So I see you guys decided to get some time in on the MG.”
Willie and Maddie returned with tumblers of mint juleps made with her family’s moonshine. Hooker noted she was in clean clothes that looked like they belonged to Willie’s boyfriend, Hank. The cuffs were rolled up a good seven inches.
“I’m surprised, Maddie. The boys are out here puking grease and iron, and you stayed clean.”
She looked down at her clean clothes. “Oh, I was working at the library. I just stopped by with... um...” She raised a tumbler and smiled. “I just brought some dinner by.”
Hooker had laid his hand on the long cold hood of her car, so he knew she had been there for several hours at least. Something was up, and he wasn’t going to push it... much.
“So what did you two guys decide on the MG?” He gave Willie a hard look.
The older man in the florid dress and now exposed knobby knees sipped his drink and smiled broadly. “Oh, the Ford piece of shit two-eighty-nine has got to go. We can find a slush box anywhere, and I think it’s time to let go of the three-eighteen.” Hooker knew Willie was bluffing. He would never let go of any Hemi engine—especially one he had built up as a street racer engine.
Hooker raised his eyebrows and drew down his closed mouth in a wise nod. He bobbed his head and finally landed on Chet again. Chet hid his face in his tumbler.
Bingo. Hooker smiled inside. He had found the weak link, the sellout. “Did you care to raise the stack any higher in this horseshit piling contest, Chet?”
Chet flopped back in the chair. “Aw, damn it all, Hooker. Don’t hang me on the meat hook.” He quickly looked over at Willie and the large scar on his throat and up the side of his face. Willie’s hand was up. No offense was taken.
Willie lowered his tumbler. “Okay, I can see we didn’t fool you and you’re obviously not going to let it go…” The man nodded at the large heap under a few tarps. “The last run we made down at the drags in Visalia last fall, Maddie blew up the three-forty. She stuck the number five piston straight through the side of the block.
“When the engine seized, it transmitted straight through the power train. I can save the axle, but the pumpkin gears are toast. So, I found a nice little straight-six we can stick in, mount it up to a standard train out of one of the yards, and the old Granny Dart GT will be ready this fall for Candy to go to school.”
Maddie finished softly, with conviction. “We wanted it to be a surprise, not only her but for you as well.”
Maddie reached over and laid her hand on Hooker’s arm. “I’m almost sixty years old. I can give up a nine-second car that is always dreaming of an eight-second car—for a young girl to start her own dream.”
Hooker saw more truth in Maddie’s face than in his uncle’s story. “Are you sure?”
She closed her eyes as she nodded once. She drew her lips in a tight curl against her teeth.
Quietly, Hooker thanked her but turned the all-knowing eye on his uncle. Willie squirmed, but he also knew that what he had just said had to come to pass.
Hooker stood. “I’ll let you kids get back to whatever mischief you were up to. I just stopped in on my way up to have dinner with Candy and finish the old shop manual I found on Marmon engines.” He turned to leave and got three steps. He turned back, and the three snapped back into their chairs as if they had been reaching for the cookie jar. “Dinner Sunday—sorry, Chet, but you’re out. We don’t want to overwhelm Candy on her first family date. But Willie, Stella wants you to come early and bring Hank. Maddie, if you would grace us in order to keep Willie in line?”
Maddie smiled evilly. She held the tumbler up. “It would be my pleasure. I look forward to putting a dog collar on William and meeting this young woman.” She raised the eyebrow at Willie and then turned back to Hooker. “I think there may also be a few jars available by Sunday.”
“Oh, I think there is more than enough moonshine out at the hacienda. Just bring yourself and the boys.” He turned as he laughed all the way to the door, more maniacally with each step.
The three didn’t move until they heard the DeSoto grow silent down the hill. “You think he suspects?” Chet looked over at Willie.
“Old shop manual for a Marmon, my Aunt Betty’s behind!”
Maddie raised her eyebrow as she sipped. “Oh, he has one. If I remember right, it’s a 1960 or ’61 machining manual. So he’s probably looking at the wildcat engine the government built for the Department of Energy transports. They called it the Desert Eagle. If I remember right, it muscled up in the fourteen or sixteen-hundred horse range. If we can figure a smoother through-put on the transmission, it would have more power than you could ever use, and still run some pretty tall gears in the ass-end.” She worked some numbers in her head. She had always been good at math, even as a young girl building moonshine runners and racers with her father and brothers. “I’d say if we can get our hands on one of those new Spicer rigs, and load the back with an over-under, he could end up with a truck capable of hitting at least the better part of a hundred and fifty out on the new flat section of the 101 up near the airbase.”
The three laid back in their chairs and thought about the eleven tons of giant yellow and blue tow truck traveling at high speed. Willie rolled his head over, at the same time as Maddie, and looked at the big yellow truck hulking in the gloom. They both smiled slowly, evilly.
“What about the engine we just got?”
Maddie laughed. “That, my dear boy, is exactly the engine they started with. And I have the blueprints to do the rest.”
Willie frowned and looked at her. “Where did you get the blueprints for the Desert Eagle?”
“Umm… they floated into my hands a couple of years ago. I was just waiting to see if Hooker was grown up enough to deal with it all responsibly.” She harrumphed. “Gosh knows, you aren’t.”
Willie looked over at the Granny car under the tarp.
Maddie smiled. “The Granny? A straight-six is sitting over at the Contra Costa yard. As far as I’ve heard, it’s clean with low miles on it. Dolly could probably get it released tomorrow. They could probably fill the whole power train, too. And remember, the fan did take out a healthy chunk of the radiator, so we can get one of those sent, as well.”
The infection was striking Willie where it always did some good. He began to softly chuckle his evil and sinister laugh. Maddie knew he couldn’t control it. It was just something that happened like a cat purring or a dog’s hind leg when you scratched its belly. It was just the nature of the beast.
Maddie turned up the evil stove a notch. “We can stick it all on Friday and testbed it by Friday night. It would give us Saturday for a shakedown to Monterey for some seafood.”
Willie rolled his eyes, remembering the disaster the last time they had driven home drunk from Monterey in the Granny car. The engine was more than the car or driver could handle, and the black circles on the highway attested to the car spinning three complete circles before it hit the side berm and flipped four times. Both passenger and driver were thrown somewhere about midway through the second flip. Only one deer of the small herd had been hit.
“How about we keep it to lunch and some music at the Boots and Saddle over in La Honda? We can let Hanky do the driving.”
The three laughed and drank some more moonshine in the night. A bat flew in the large door, flitted around, and bounced in the air out the back door. A small airplane could have done the same.
The young man out on the freeway had his left elbow on the sill of the old car. Speed was not the intent. Enjoying the evening air in the convertible was everything, as well as the woman he was heading to meet.
The last of the moon hung low over the south end of the large Bay Area. It had only four more days before it would be dark.