Felicia's Food Truck

by Celia Kinsey

  Hamburger Heist

  Pizza Pie Puzzler

  Hot Dog Horrors

  Hamburger Heist

  A Felicia’s Food Truck One Hour Mystery

  Book Two

  By Celia Kinsey

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

  Hamburger Heist: A Felicia’s Food Truck One Hour Mystery (Book Two)©2019 Celia Kinsey. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter One

  I was at the supermarket bakery counter trying to order a birthday cake for my cook and best-friend-in-the-world, Arnie, when I got the call.

  The woman on the other end was hysterical. Something bad had happened at the food truck, but I wasn’t at all clear on what it was, other than a gun had been involved at some point.

  “Who is this again?” I had to ask.

  “It’s Emmaline,” the hysterical voice on the other end informed me. “Felicia, something terrible has happened.”

  Emmaline was one of our regulars. She always came with her dog, Buddy. Buddy was a cocker spaniel who thought he was human, or at least that he was entitled to eat like one. This did not go down well with Arnie’s dachshund Frank, who spent most of his days dozing in the shade under the food truck. Frank’s idea of gourmet was roadkill that had been run over at regular intervals for a minimum of forty-eight hours.

  “Start again from the beginning, Emmaline,” I said, as I stepped into a quiet corner next to the donut display. “Speak slowly. Is anyone hurt?”

  “No,” she said. “Nobody’s hurt, but it was soooo scary.”

  “What’s all this about a gun?” I asked.

  “He pointed a gun at Arnie’s head and made him give up all the money in the register. Then he asked for three hamburgers. Done rare.”

  “Arnie asked for hamburgers?”

  “No, the robber did. He stood there waiting for Arnie to cook the hamburgers. Then he took a bite out of one of them and made Arnie do them all over again.”

  “Why?”

  “The robber said the patties were too ‘well done.’”

  “But nobody’s hurt?” I asked again, just to be sure. It gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach to think about anything happening to Arnie. I may look like I have it all together, but I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to function without him. Not even for a week.

  “No, nobody’s hurt,” Emmaline repeated. “Arnie’s talking to the police.”

  “I’ll be right over,” I told her.

  I hung up and turned back to Franny, the woman who was working behind the bakery counter. Franny and I used to waitress together at Burt’s Coffee Shop, long before I branched out on my own with the food truck.

  Franny has always been chatty. I hoped she hadn’t heard my end of the phone conversation or no telling what kind of story would be flying around the town of Bray Bay by the time the evening rolled around.

  “When did you say this Jax person would be back?” I asked Franny.

  “Early tomorrow morning,” she said. “He got off not half an hour ago; you barely missed him.”

  “Are you sure I can’t just leave him a note or something? It’s not like I want anything elaborate.”

  “No,” Franny insisted. “Jax is a terrific baker, but very particular, especially when it comes to cakes. He likes to speak to the customers in person. He’ll be in tomorrow morning.” Then she mumbled something under her breath.

  “What did you say?” I almost didn’t ask, because all I could think about was that someone had just pulled a gun on Arnie, but Franny’s furtive manner intrigued me.

  “It’s nothing,” Franny insisted.

  “It was something.”

  “I just said Jax would be in tomorrow unless he stays up all night again and oversleeps his alarm.”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, insomnia can be a challenge.”

  “Jax stays up on purpose,” Franny said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “He has a gambling problem.”

  We don’t have a casino within driving distance, so that couldn’t be it.

  “You mean online gambling?”

  Franny nodded and then skittered off as the store manager walked up.

  It was only a couple of blocks from the supermarket to the food truck. I keep the truck parked in a vacant lot next to Hank’s car wash. The graveled lot isn’t very big. There are parking spaces for only five cars plus the little tables we keep out in front in case somebody wants to eat their burgers on the spot.

  When I drove up, the parking lot was jammed. Emmaline was still there. Two police cars—parked so crooked they were taking up two spaces each—occupied the remaining slots. I could see Officer Finch and another policeman I didn’t know talking to Arnie. I pulled into Hank’s Car Wash and parked my old pickup around the back. Hank wouldn’t mind.

  “You’re sure you have no idea who it was?” Officer Finch was asking Arnie when I walked up.

  Scott Finch was my boyfriend back in high school, which was a very long time ago, but he still seems to think we’re going to get back together any day now.

  “All I can tell you is that it was definitely a man,” Arnie told Scott. “He was around six feet, maybe a little shorter, very thin. He was wearing faded blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. The shirt was mostly yellow with blue and green checks.”

  “I know you say you couldn’t see his face because of the mask,” Officer Finch said, “but what about his hands? Surely they must have given you some idea of his age.”

  “He was wearing gloves,” Arnie told Scott. “He wasn’t elderly, but he could have been anywhere from sixteen to a youthful sixty-six.”

  “He was wearing a mask?” I said.

  Arnie looked a little shaken. I wanted to give him a hug, but hugging wasn’t something Arnie and I did.

  “The perpetrator was wearing one of those Darth Vader voice-changing masks,” Scott informed me as if it was his story to tell. “Arnold can’t even tell me what the assailant’s voice sounded like.”

  He managed to make it sound like a personal failure on Arnie’s part.

  “Emmaline said something about a gun,” I said.

  Emmaline was hanging around in the background, trying to keep Buddy and Frank from getting into a fight while she waited to have her statement taken down.

  As soon as I’d shown up, the second officer had disappeared around the back of the food truck. I supposed he was looking for evidence.

  “Well, Mr. Robbins,” the second officer said to Arnie as he emerged from around the back, “you’ll be relieved to know that your life was never in danger.”

  Chapter Two

  The officer held up a clear plastic evidence bag with a handgun inside.

  “I found it in the ally back behind the truck. It’s not functional,” the officer explained, “just a realistic-looking toy.”

  If it had been Scott who’d discovered the fake gun, he’d have managed to make it sound like it was Arnie’s fault for not knowing the difference, but this other officer was a professional.

  “That’s a relief,“ I said.

  “How much money did he take?” Scott asked Arnie.

 
“I can’t be sure since we don’t count it out until the end of the day,” Arnie told him.

  “We start the day with two hundred in the register,” I told Officer Finch. “And we take in around three hundred at lunchtime, give or take, so on an average day there would have been between five hundred and six hundred in the register.”

  “Two hundred and one,” Arnie corrected me. “We always start out with two hundred and one.”

  Officer Finch looked confused, but I knew what Arnie meant. My cook was referring to the Morgan silver dollar he kept in the register. Arnie’s grandpa gave it to him when he was a kid, and Arnie always kept it with him for good luck. At some point, Arnie’s younger brother had gotten ahold of the silver dollar and used the tip of his pocket knife to carve Lady Liberty a nice bushy mustache on her upper lip. It’s not a collector’s item anymore, but it’s still precious to Arnie.

  “Don’t tell me the robber took your silver dollar too,” I said to Arnie.

  “He did.”

  The police officers lingered for another ten minutes, taking down Emmaline’s witness statement and poking around the perimeter of the food truck.

  As soon as they left, Hank wandered over to see what was going on. He runs a small tool rental business out of the tiny office at the back of the car wash, but lately, I’d noticed he wasn’t open very often.

  “Not been feeling well, Hank?” I asked him.

  “Physically, I’m fine,” Hank said. “It’s just that grandson of mine who’s driving me crazy.”

  I was vaguely aware that Hank had grandchildren, but I couldn’t recall that he ever talked about them.

  “I didn’t know you had family in town,” I said.

  “I don’t. My son moved to Montana several years back,” said Hank. “But my namesake, Hank Jr. Jr., has been causing trouble again, and my daughter-in-law got this bright idea that they’d pawn him off on me for a while. They were under the delusion that I’d be able to set that boy straight.”

  “What kind of trouble has Hank Jr. Jr. gotten himself into?”

  “Oh, nothing that serious. He hasn’t gotten arrested or anything, it’s just that the kid has no ambition.”

  “So you haven’t succeeded in whipping him into shape yet, metaphorically speaking?”

  Hank snorted and kicked at the tire of the food truck.

  “That boy stays up half the night playing video games. He’s eighteen years old, but he refuses to sign up for any classes at the community college over at Eagle’s Rest. I told him, ‘Fine, you don’t have to go to school. You can work instead,’ but he won’t get a job.”

  “Surely you must like something about living with him,” I said. “He must be company for you.”

  “I hate that expression,” Hank said. He scowled at me.

  Come to think of it, I hate that expression too; I don’t know why I used it on Hank. I deserved to be scowled at.

  “He’s thin as a rail, but I can’t get him to eat any decent food,” Hank groused. “All he wants is potato chips, donuts, and pizza. He drinks about three gallons of soda a day. He likes your hamburgers, though. I take a few home for him when I’m not too dad-gummed aggravated with him.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “If you’re so keen on having company,” Hank suggested, still scowling, “perhaps you’d like to take Hank Jr. Jr. off my hands for a while?”

  I pictured a surly half man/half child permanently installed on my sofa, surrounded by empty soda cans and pizza boxes.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m happy with my solitude.”

  “I’d have sent him back home already,” Hank said, “if I hadn’t been so foolish as to insist that he had to buy his own bus ticket back to Montana. I should have just bought him the blamed ticket when he asked for it, but now I’ve backed myself into a corner. I’ll probably be still stuck with him when he’s forty.”

  “There must be something you enjoy doing together?” I persisted.

  “Well, Hank Jr. Jr. does like Star Wars,” Hank said grudgingly. “We’re rewatching the original trilogy together, so I guess the boy can’t be all bad.”

  Hank Sr. is a big Star Wars fan. He has tons of Star Wars memorabilia decorating his rental office next door.

  “You don’t happen to have one of those Darth Vader voice-changing masks, do you?” I couldn’t resist asking.

  “Funny you should ask about that,” Hank said. “I had one those on a shelf over my desk at the car wash, but just last week it disappeared.”

  Chapter Three

  “Did you report your Darth Vader mask as stolen?” I asked.

  “Nah,” Hank said. “Those masks are a dime a dozen. You can get those anywhere this time of year. Just last week I saw that Walmart over in Eagle’s Rest had their Halloween stuff out already and there was a whole display of ‘em.”

  After that, Hank wandered back over to the car wash. I didn’t have the heart to quiz him as to whether Hank Jr. Jr. was partial to plaid.

  I sent Arnie home early, although he insisted that he didn’t want to go. I could tell he was shaken, and, as I pointed out, it was hardly likely we’d be held up twice in the same day.

  “It was a one-off,” I’d tried to reassure him. “We could be here another twenty years and never get held up again. Bray Bay’s not exactly a hotbed of criminal activity.”

  Arnie left, taking Frank with him. Frank had slept through the whole robbery and hadn’t woken up until it was all over when Buddy had gone sniffing around under the truck in search of dropped French fries. Emmaline hates when Buddy eats stuff off the ground. She claims it gives him indigestion. I personally think Frank’s indigestion is the result of a steady diet of fried foods and wolfing down mustard packets whole when Emmaline isn’t looking.

  It was dead quiet, so I decided to give the interior of the truck a good cleaning. We do a lot of frying, and grease tends to build up. I hate dealing with grease, though, so I decided to start with something easier: the stainless steel shelf underneath the serving window on the side of the truck.

  Usually, the stainless steel shelf is covered with greasy fingerprints and globs of splashed condiments from the squeeze bottles we keep out for diners to help themselves, but today there was something I’d never seen before.

  Along the front of the shelf, directly in front of the cash register, was a haze of fine white powder. I ran my finger across it, creating a line before I thought better of it.

  I decided to consult Arnie. He answered after a single ring.

  “Everything OK?” he asked.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “I’m just curious about this white powder.”

  “What white powder?” Arnie asked.

  “There’s a film of white powder on the shelf below the register. Did the police maybe powder it to collect prints?”

  “I don’t think they took any prints off the truck,” Arnie said. “Besides, it wouldn’t do them much good. The robber was wearing gloves, and I don’t think he ever even touched the counter, although he did reach across it several times.”

  “What could all this white powder be, then?”

  “Cocaine?”

  “I seriously doubt it.”

  “Try sniffing it,” Arnie suggested.

  “What if it really is cocaine?”

  “Taste it?”

  “That’s even worse.”

  “Why don’t you call that Officer Finch up and ask him what to do? I’m sure he’d hurry right over since he seems to think you and he—”

  Arnie sounded aggravated, but it didn’t seem fair to blame me for Scott’s refusal to stay in the friend zone.

  “You know there’s nothing going on between us.”

  “Well, maybe you’d better tell Scott that.”

  I had a sinking feeling that Arnie and I were about to have a serious falling out, and I wasn’t even sure why.

  “I’m going to taste the powder,” I announced. “Stay on the line, just in case I keel over.”

&n
bsp; “Don’t do that!” Arnie said frantically on the other end of the line. “I won’t tease you about Scott anymore—”

  “Too late,” I interrupted. “I already tasted it.”

  “What is it?” Arnie demanded. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “It’s powdered sugar,” I told him.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “But we don’t keep powdered sugar in the food truck.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Then how did it get there?”

  “No idea,” I said. “But at least we can rest assured that you probably weren’t held up by a cocaine dealer.”

  As I was closing up that evening, I got a call from Scott.

  “We caught your guy,” he told me.

  “Already?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure you’ve got the right man?”

  “Well, your friend Arnold was just down here, and he gave a positive identification.”

  “How could he? He didn’t even see the robber’s face.”

  “Well,” Scott said. “Criminal types aren’t very smart. The perp didn’t even bother with changing clothes. He was still wearing the same shirt he had on when he held up your food truck.”

  “Is that all you’re going on? Couldn’t several people in Bray Bay own the same shirt?”

  “Well, he matched the physical description Arnold gave, and also that of your customer.”

  “There are lots of thin men in Bray Bay,” I insisted.

  That wasn’t true. Bray Bay is mostly over-sixties. Very few men arrive at their sixth or seventh decade still thin as a rail.

  “He also had the cash on his person,” Scott added defensively.

  “How much?”

  “Three hundred.”

  “But there can’t have been less than five hundred in the register,” I pointed out.

  “Well, he must have spent some of it already.”

  “What about Arnie’s silver dollar?”

  “Huh?”

  “Arnie’s lucky silver dollar. It’s an old Morgan silver dollar. Has a mustache carved on Lady Liberty.”