The water violently rippled as the tow line slowly emerged, a vehicle attached. Despondency filled the crisp, ocean air, as all those present looked on with horror.
"Don't… turn around, son…" was all Doc could utter. Mater blissfully complied, a dumb buck-toothed smile hanging on his face. He would have said something along the lines of "you betcha, Doc sir!" but he was hoarse from screaming at his wife the night before, so all that escaped was a quiet "hyeuh hchech ough hr".
"Talk to us, Doc. How'd ya know we'd find him here?"
Doc Hudson looked the sheriff of Coolant Coast square in the windshield and furrowed his sun visors. He was unsure of what he should and shouldn't say to Sheriff Mugabe (no relation to former prime minister of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, although everyone always asks him). He settled with the bald-faced lie, "when you're as old as me, you get an intuition for these sorts of things."
Mugabe was the stupidest sheriff to ever take charge of Coolant Coast, and he took it at face value. "Let's get him to the morgu-arage."
"What the hell did you just say to me?" Doc asked.
"It's a portmanteau of 'morgue' and 'garage' that the boys at marketing came up with. I paid too much money for the R&D to just not use it."
Mater followed as Doc and Mugabe led the way down the freeway. Behind Mater were several police escorts, all completely horrified by the cargo Mater was barreling down the road behind him. Most of all they regretted that their exhausts disallowed some form of retching.
"You don't use those turn signals of yours, do you Mūg?" (Doc and Mugabe went to the police academy together [they also committed treason together] so they were close enough to use nicknames.)
"No. And no one can arrest me for it."
Rolling into the city, Mater felt a swift change in the quality of the road, which did his tires well after the long hours spent hauling his cargo behind him. It was back-breaking work, but Mater had fallen on hard times, and he couldn't turn down a job if he wanted to support his family. Especially not a job from the feds.
Mater attempted to croak "this here road feels smoother than a fresh wax job," but all he could mutter was a violent, blood-infused cough, a result of the tuberculosis that he couldn't afford to have treated.
Doc braked and turned around, "You're paid for your ability, Mater, not for your disability. Pipe down."
The police department had no outer-identification, and appeared to have been built atop what once was a McTire's. As the entourage entered, the receptionist was sliding quarters in and out of a cash register; she was deep in thought, depressed over the fact that she could easily steal a bit of money every day from the police department, and that no one would notice or miss it, especially since the chief of police was notorious for embezzlement– and that's besides the fact that the department had been granted an excess of funds, all of which were misappropriately used, and none of which were used to raise the salaries of the large percentage of workers in the force who were underpaid, and constantly struggling to get by. If she would get over her own misguided moral compass and take the money that she needed to survive– no, the money that she deserved, she could get her tires realigned, windshield wipers replaced, and finally start living the life that she dreamed of.
"Looking hot today, Elizabeth," Mugabe wolf-whistled as he passed by the front desk. Other misogynistic, borderline sexual harassment comments followed by the rest of the local force as they passed by her.
Mater was led outside the freezer room, where Doc and Mugabe told him to wait. The two entered the room to privately discuss the situation. There was generally no sound-proofing throughout the entire building, so Mater could've heard everything, but he was busy theorycrafting for a JRPG he was renting over the weekend. The game leaned much more towards its character interactions and story than its combat, both in the development process and playtime, but every combat scenario was incredibly hard, and if a teammate died, they were dead forever. Due to this, Mater had been spending copious amounts of money buying loot boxes, hoping to give his team more powerful gear. He was struggling balance loot box funds and his bill payments, as well as hindering his wife from catching on– and he was far too entrenched in the story to let go of all the money he had sunk into the game.
Doc and Mugabe opened the doors and ushered Mater into the room, and across a metal plate, where the autopsies took place (the 'auto' in 'autopsies' refers to cars). "Slide him up there, Mater," Doc and Mugabe awkwardly said at the same time, causing them both to blush deeply and look away from one another. Mater acquiesced, unhooking the cargo on the platform and wheeling himself around as it raised up.
"Get the car-oner in here!" Mugabe shouted out the door.
Before Doc could open his mouth, Mugabe explained that it was a combination of "car" and "coroner," and that this too was a result of hiring a Marketing and Social Media division for the police department. The car-oner entered the room and revved his engine in exasperation, shouting, "OH, DAMN, IS THAT LIGHTNING MCQUEEN?!"