Stick a Fork In It

by Robin Allen

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  ©Leigh-Ann Shrum

  About the Author

  Robin Allen lives and writes in the great state of Texas.

  Copyright Information

  Stick a Fork In It © 2012 by Robin Allen.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2012

  E-book ISBN: 9780738733203

  Cover background: iStockphoto.com/loops7 and barbed wire: iStockphoto.com/oblachko

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Cover illustration by Desmond Montague

  Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Midnight Ink does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  for the Darling of Heaven

  Acknowledgments

  My heart is full of love and gratitude for my friends and helpers, Tina Neesvig Pfeiffer, Letty Valdes Medina, Paul Allen, Nicole Allen, Jackie Kelly, Hannah Matthes, Lorie Shaw, and Melody Valadez; for the Austin WriterGrrls, especially my talented brainstorming partners Wendy Wheeler, Jennifer Evans, and Kimber Cockrill; for my yogis; and for my editor at Midnight Ink, Terri Bischoff.

  Special thanks to Detective Brian Miller with the Austin Police Department for not issuing an arrest warrant for me after answering so many detailed questions about murder; former Austin/Travis County senior health inspector Susan Speyer, RS, owner of Safe Food 4 U in Austin, Texas, for making Poppy look like a real health inspector; Jackie Kelly, MD, for medical advice; and Bosco Farr for tattoo advice. They all provided expert information when I asked for it, but I didn’t always ask and I didn’t always listen, so any errors or inconsistencies are my own.

  “There is no requirement that someone

  be physically fit to be executed.”

  —A spokesman for the Illinois Attorney General

  one

  A couple of weeks ago, an employee at my father’s restaurant tried to kill me by setting my bedroom on fire. He wanted to keep me from discovering that he had murdered a famous French chef and set up my territorial stepsister, Ursula York, to take the fall. When that didn’t work, he tried to lock me in the restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator and freeze me to death. That didn’t work either. And now he’s awaiting trial and I’m back at work, doing what I love: health inspections—in this case, a food permit inspection for a new restaurant going up on the southeast side of Austin.

  It was a muggy morning fit for orchids and alligators when I pulled up to the front gate at 7:58 am, grabbed my inspector’s backpack full of necessaries, and hopped out of my Jeep. Inside the locked gate, I saw several dusty construction workers shouldering wooden planks and pushing banged-up wheelbarrows. I caught the attention of one of them and waved him over.

  He approached me as if walking through a field of land mines toward a lynch mob. When he got within shouting distance, I held up my badge and shouted, “Is this fifty-five fifty East Slaughter Lane?”

  He shook his head. “No let you in,” he said in heavily accented English.

  “I need to speak with someone in charge.”

  He took a step back.

  I tried Spanish. “Por favor, tengo que hablar con el jefe.”

  Then he started running.

  When the rest of the workers assessed the situation—me, my badge, their fleeing coworker—they took off, too. All of them.

  A short, hefty man ran out of the building in time to see the last of the guys fly through the back gate. He barked something at the two construction workers who followed him from inside, and they went after the escapees. Then he came up to me and threw his belly against the fence, his sweat-stained blue T-shirt announcing Miles Archer Construction Company in fat yellow lettering.

  “What in the name of Davy Crockett are y’all doing?” he demanded. His white hard hat read “Boss/Jefe” in black marker.

  “Poppy Markham,” I said. “Austin/Travis County health inspector. I showed my badge and your guys ran.” Banged-up cars and trucks roared past us. “Now why do you think they did that?”

  He glanced back at the building and his manner lost some of its bluster. “Don’t know why they’d be ’fraid of a health inspector.”

  “I didn’t tell them who I was, just that I wanted to speak with el jefe.” I waited as another car sped away. “You know you can get into a fair amount of trouble for hiring undocumented workers.”

  He displayed both palms. “I have papers for ever’ single one of them, lady. If they lied, I don’t know nothing about it.”

  “Lucky for you I’m the food police, not Homeland Security. I need to inspect this place before you can get your Certificate of Occupancy.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys along with a new tone. “Oh, right, the boys said you were coming today.” He unlocked the gate and swung it open to let me pass. “Miles Archer, construction manager.”

  I shook his hand. “I know it’s a holiday, but is there a restaurant manager or owner on the premises?”

  He smiled. “Only all of ’em.” I followed him to the double door opening at the front of the building, but he stopped a few feet away and unclipped a walkie-talkie from his waistband. “Archer to eighty-eight,” he said into the mic, “health inspector’s here.”

  “Roger that,” came the reply. “Send him back.”

&n
bsp; Miles pushed the button on the side of the device and brought it up to his mouth, then let it go. “We’ll let you be a surprise.” He pointed to the right. “Kitchen’s around back.”

  I didn’t want to walk around the building. It was only the last day of May, Memorial Day, and already the temperatures had climbed into the mid-eighties. I haven’t had time to get the air conditioner in my Jeep fixed, so I had already been sweating like a mail-order bride stepping off the plane. One of the treats, sometimes the only treat, of doing an inspection is that first blast of air so cold it crystallizes the sweat on your skin.

  “But these doors are open,” I said.

  “I can’t let you in the dining room without a hard hat, ma’am.” He pointed again to the right. “They’re waiting on you.”

  Ma’am. Ugh.

  x x x

  “There’s nothing wrong with that sink,” Todd Sharpe said. “It’s brand new.”

  “I can see that,” I said. “But it only has two compartments, and code requires that you have three.”

  “Nobody told us that.”

  Of all the duties of a public health inspector, a food permit inspection is one of the cushiest. Unlike surprise inspections that take up the majority of our time, performed in kitchens as pleasant as an active volcano, we perform these permit inspections in the relative comfort and quiet of an empty restaurant. No heat or sour grease traps, no rodent droppings or expired milk, no complaints or arguments.

  I loathe them.

  And this is why: rookie restaurant owners. They hurry through everything, rarely paying attention to the rules and regulations—the “boring stuff,” they like to call it—and then whine or argue when their lack of attention leaves teeth marks on their flanks.

  I had, however, looked forward to this particular permit inspection when I found out that the Sharpe brothers owned the restaurant. I wanted to see how the past twenty years had treated them. I was two years behind Todd and his identical twin, Troy, in high school. I never could tell them apart except on football game day, when Troy wore his number 8 quarterback jersey and Todd, his receiver, wore number 88, so it was more economical and practical to have a crush on both of them.

  Todd had not reacted to my name or my face, which didn’t surprise me. He and his brother had preferred haughty cheerleaders to serious loners. Physically Todd had turned out fine—still tan and overprocessed, still carrying himself like a star athlete strutting through the corridors. He wore his light brown hair military short, and the lines around his dark blue eyes made him look as intelligent as he was. But something about his manner didn’t seem right.

  Most people are nervous during an inspection, even if they aren’t trying to hide something. Todd wasn’t nervous so much as anxious. Every time I passed by the door that opened into the dining room, he went on defense, putting himself between me and it like he was afraid I would break through—which didn’t make sense because I had to go into the dining room eventually to inspect the wait station, bathrooms, and bar.

  That Todd and I were already discussing the sinks was my fault because I had broken one of my own rules. Instead of handing him my report and going over each item at the end of the inspection, I was pointing out issues to him as I found them. Not because I forgot how to do a food permit inspection, but because Todd stayed glued to my side, gnawing his thumbnail, asking me, “Did it pass?” every time I turned a knob or shot my infrared thermometer into a reach-in refrigerator.

  He wasn’t going to like what I had to say next. “You also need a separate mop sink.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked, breaking eye contact with me when he reached down to scratch his knee.

  “Because you can’t thaw chicken or cool pasta in the same sink you empty the mop bucket into.” I recognized the look on his face: how much is this going to cost, and how long will it take? He also looked ready to kill somebody. Before I lost him, I said, “You can make this one the mop sink and have your guy install a three-compartment sink. Just make sure he installs the proper backflow valve.”

  I squatted down to open one of the lowboy coolers on the cooking line. “What kind of food are you going to serve?” I asked, trying to take his mind off of whatever it had started to chew on.

  “Comfort food,” he said.

  I shut the door and stood. “That covers a lot of ground.”

  He stepped closer to me. “Did it pass?”

  “It’s cooling to the proper temperature.”

  When Todd started to follow me into the walk-in, I suddenly felt hot and sweaty. A hot flash? No. I’m only thirty-eight. My hand throbbed, and I realized it was a flashback. Before I had turned the tables on my would-be murderer and locked him in the walk-in, I had sliced the palm of my hand grappling with a bread knife. Eleven stitches.

  Everyone had cautioned me not to go back to work so soon afterward, but I hadn’t suffered any after-effects—certainly not emotional ones. I dealt with the incident the same way I deal with everything: I cowgirled up and moved on. It wouldn’t do for a health inspector to squall like a starlet in a slasher movie every time she encountered a walk-in. So why did I feel distressed now, when I had been the one to triumph?

  Maybe it was something else. The flu or a latent schoolgirl reaction to finally speaking to Todd “the Catch” Sharpe or simply the general feeling of unease that had been nagging at me since I pulled up to the building.

  Most restaurants make an effort to be inviting, with glass front doors, painted exteriors, and cheerful landscaping, but everything about this place shouted “Go away!” Its two stories of gray cinder block were surrounded by a moat of blacktop parking lot protected by a high chainlink fence topped with barbed wire.

  Regardless of the reason for my sudden flush, I didn’t want to work through it in front of Todd. I stopped and turned around. “How about we go see the facilities?”

  He ran a manicured hand over his salon-streaked hair. “Facilities?”

  “You put in bathrooms, didn’t you?”

  “Upstairs and down. But we’re trying to keep the concept under wraps until the grand opening.”

  A lot of restaurant owners are protective of their concept before they open, believing that it’s so unique and genius that no one on earth has done it before. But really, everything has already been done. Twice. There is nothing new under the sun, and there is certainly no idea that some restaurant owner somewhere hasn’t already considered and tried or considered and rejected.

  “I don’t need to see your menu,” I said, “but I do need to see where the entrées will eventually end up.”

  His smile eased the concerned creases on his forehead. “Yeah, okay, but I need you to sign a confidentiality agreement.”

  He went into an office near the kitchen door and returned with two hard hats and a single sheet of paper. I read standard language that made me promise not to divulge anything to anyone about what I saw, heard, or believed about the restaurant. I didn’t think a lawyer wrote it, but it got the point across.

  “You mentioned an upstairs,” I said, handing him the signed paper. “Is there a second kitchen I need to see?”

  The kitchen we stood in was quite large. Take away the ovens, stoves, and prep tables, and the Dallas Cowboys could have run drills in there. My father’s restaurant, Markham’s Cocktails & Grille, uses six cooks during the week and nine on the weekends. This place would need at least twice that to keep it going on a busy night.

  “Just this one,” Todd said.

  “What are you calling it?” I asked as we crossed through the kitchen.

  “That’s still under discussion,” Todd said.

  I figured that was something else they wanted to keep under wraps. And I was pretty sure from the bleak exterior it wouldn’t have bistro or café in the name. “It would be nice to have the name for my report,” I said.
>
  “We’ll tell you when we decide,” he said. “Put this on.”

  He handed me a pristine white hard hat with “Troy/Jefe” handwritten across the front in black marker, then put a scuffed “Todd Sharpe” one on his own head. My hat fit loose and dropped down over my eyes. Todd pushed open a floor-to-ceiling swinging silver door and indicated that I should pass through ahead of him.

  If you had asked me what I didn’t expect to see, what I saw would be the answer.

  A huge dining room—no, not a room, an expanse—of concrete floors and gray walls. Made of cinder blocks, it looked like the exterior. No artwork, beer neon, televisions, or knickknacks on the walls. No tables, chairs, booths, or benches. Not even carpet. They would need to serve comfort food to make up for the soullessness of the ambiance.

  And then I noticed something even more odd. Each of the letters A, B, C, and D were painted fifteen or twenty feet high in black on each of the four walls. It looked like Stephen King and Tim Burton had collaborated on a daycare design.

  A flash of light drew my eyes up to a sidewalk squaring the perimeter of the second floor and accessible by metal staircases on each side of the room. A catwalk? In a restaurant?

  In spite of losing about ten guys in the outdoor exodus of illegals, Miles Archer Construction Company still had several workers inside sawing, nailing, assembling, welding, and trying to outdo each other in the noise department. It sounded like a war zone.

  “Todd!” a man yelled from above. I looked up to see Todd’s twin, Troy, on the catwalk. He sat on the black railing, his legs dangling over the edge, with what looked like a noose around his neck. “I can’t take it anymore!”

  I saw another flash of light, then Troy pushing himself off the railing.

  I surged toward him screaming, “Nooooo! ”

  two

  I heard laughter. Twin laughter coming from in back and in front of me. Then surround-sound laughter as the construction workers joined in. Troy had landed on a large, black, billowy pillow, like the kind stuntmen use.