THE REAL GYRO (Food Truck Mysteries Book 4)

by Chloe Kendrick

  “We’re taking on some different tacks.” He turned to look at me. “Do you still want that food truck?”

  I gasped. Land looked at me like a kid at Christmas. Even Carter had stopped cleaning. He knew that his long-term career here was based on getting a second food truck.

  “I guess so,” I replied, trying to sound cool. I was glad that I wasn’t the one at the hospital, because my heart rate had just shot to the sky.

  “Here’s the deal. The forensics team finished a second walk through of the crime scene. They found nothing to help them there. As a result, we want to use the food truck as a possible drop point for more intelligence on the situation that we spoke about earlier. Land can do it without problems. He knows the ropes. The truck would be yours for now, but obviously, if anything goes down at that truck, it would become evidence again. We’d have to confiscate it.”

  I nodded. I didn’t like the sound of that. I needed to think about the cost of retaining the truck if we were not being able to use it for months as we waited on a trial. That could be a big drain on the business. I knew I’d have to steer the investigation away from the food truck if possible.

  Land spoke up. “That won’t happen. I personally guarantee that the truck won’t be materially involved in this sting operation.”

  I felt calmed by his words, but I highly doubted that they were true. If these people were dropping off the papers to Land, then storing them at the food truck would seem to be the natural thing to do. All of that could easily lead to the new food truck being confiscated.

  I nodded. “We’ll do it and worry about that later.” I tried to channel some of my business school professors as I spoke, hoping that they would have made the same decision to expand the business.

  Danvers held out a hand for me to shake. I looked at him for a second. We’d gone from kissing to yelling to sleeping over—albeit chastely—and now he wanted to shake hands? What was his problem?

  After making him wait a few long seconds, I finally grabbed his hand and shook. “The higher ups at CCPD will be happy to hear this. They’ve been on my case to break this wide open, and I can’t. I don’t have any leads.”

  Land spoke. “So before we go too much further, what are the terms of the deal? If I’m expected to work for you as well as work for the truck, then there should be some consideration of this in the deal.”

  Danvers and I said at the same time. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Well, we know what the truck sold for a few months ago. That should be the starting price for negotiations. However, since I’m the one who is going to be in the most danger, I thought that my work could be compensated by the police paying a small part of the truck’s asking price as payment for my services. In that way, I’d be a part owner of the truck. Maeve could put up the rest, and then we could get started on finding out who is behind this.”

  Apparently someone had been thinking about this for a while. I was concerned about the transaction. As it stood, I was the boss. If I took this deal, then we would be partners and with two partners, a draw could easily occur. We were two people with strong opinions about most everything.

  Finally, I spoke. “What type of a percentage are you thinking?” I knew I should get my facts straight before I unilaterally nixed the idea.

  “One quarter. You’d still be the boss, which is what you were indirectly asking,” Land replied. I didn’t like it when he knew me that well, but he was right.

  “I can live with that,” I said. If, for any reason, I was knocked on the head, it would be nice to have a minority stakeholder in the business to keep it running. I knew that Land and my parents would do their best. However, Land would not have any authority to sign checks and such.

  Danvers looked at us. “So it’s a deal? Everybody’s happy and warm and fuzzy? I can tell my bosses that you’re good to go.”

  I nodded. Just for that last crack, I reached out and patted a patch of hair that was standing up. “You really should do something about this. You must not have slept well last night.”

  I left him blushing while I grabbed my cellphone from my bag and dialed my banker.

  Chapter 11

  The process for getting the second truck up and running was far smoother than it had been the first time around. Granted, I was purchasing a food truck and not inheriting it from a relative. So that was different.

  However, the banks were willing to offer me a loan at a better than average rate. Within a week, I had the loan and within two weeks I had the truck. My work on the truck was much better than any work I’d done on the investigation.

  During that time, I had spent a lot of time talking to the Nolans. On occasion, I would call and ask for something else from Janelle’s truck or estate just to keep the lines of communication open. It shocked me that they agreed to all of the conditions I set. I probably could have gotten the drapes from her bedroom if I’d tried, but I felt that was pushing it a bit.

  I had several opportunities to talk to the family about the funds for buying the food truck. However, both Mr. and Mrs. Nolan professed no knowledge of where the money had come from. Likewise, they were surprised to learn that Janelle had been paying $400 a month to an unknown entity. The only person I didn’t talk to was Janelle’s brother, who was conspicuously absent from the home whenever I was there. I did learn that he’d taken his own apartment, but without an address, I would be hard-pressed to talk to him about any knowledge he had of Janelle’s business. I wanted to find out more about the rest of the family, but that was turning out to be difficult. They were very reserved, unlike my own chatty, no boundaries family.

  “You’re accusing her of bad things,” Mrs. Nolan had told me during one interview. She hadn’t liked my questions about the mysterious funds.

  I tried to glaze over it with a lie. “Not at all. I’m just trying to make sure that I have all the bills covered. If this is something that I need to pay, I don’t want to overlook it in my budget, or worse yet, default on something.”

  Mrs. Nolan seemed slightly mollified. “I don’t think it’s a business expense. Janelle had very specific accounts set up in Quicken for each one, and this one doesn’t have an account. So we don’t know.” I was surprised at the depth of knowledge Mrs. Nolan had about the accounts. I doubted that my mother could have told a stranger anything about my business, much less what software I used to run the business. If she knew this much about Janelle’s business, I suspected that she knew more about the suspicious funds.

  The police had not come up with anything either. The money had come from a cash deposit, made by Janelle the day of the purchase. Janelle had not made any attempts to hide a deposit of $25,000, which would have alerted some agencies to the transaction. However, nothing seemed to have been done about the transaction. I wondered if a federal law enforcement agency had allowed the transaction to see what would happen with the transmission of information between here and Morocco.

  Of course, Danvers had only shared a fraction of this information. His mood had been fairly distant since he’d woken up at my apartment without me there. Land had apparently heard more about the situation and communicated it to me.

  The account that received the money from Janelle was a Cayman Islands account with no responsibility, so while the police could find out more about the bank, they still had no idea who was behind the account. Danvers had plenty of speculation about the recipients, but nothing concrete. I had personally offered to go there and look into the matter, but Danvers just rolled his eyes at this suggestion.

  As for the murder, the police were still stuck on the point that no one could get in or out of the truck without a key. The Nolans had turned over a key to me when we closed on the food truck, but that was likely Janelle’s key, so there was nothing to be proved by that.

  Sam had also been missing over the past two weeks. I’d tried to set up another “date” to see what I could learn, now that I knew he’d dated Janelle, but he always had plans or just didn’t bother to ans
wer his phone. I felt rather jilted, even though I hadn’t wanted him for myself. He should still be anxious to go out with me.

  Land was recovered enough to be arguing about the cuisine of the food truck again. I half expected him to just do what he wanted, even without my approval.

  “The problem we have is that I have ingredients coming for the next month or so. I wouldn’t know what to do with all of this if we don’t serve at least some of the original menu,” I’d argued. Indeed, Janelle had made some standing orders for six months, which seemed overly optimistic given that many restaurants close up in the first few months. It locked me in at a particular rate, which seemed reckless, given that the price could easily decrease over the next half year.

  “I can work around that for now. I know I can.” He began rattling off a list of recipes that I’d never heard of, so the argument was somewhat lost on me. I half-suspected that he did that on purpose.

  His arguments came down to three points, which were all valid. Since we were tied into these contracts for certain food items, we had to either keep the existing menu, shift it to something that could use lamb and some of those spices, or attempt a new and unfamiliar menu that used those items. He made an obvious case against the entirely new menu. No one wanted to learn how to cook dishes at the same time you were serving them for the first time. Word of mouth about uncertain dishes would be the death of a food truck.

  So the debate came down to either keeping the original menu or moving to Basque cuisine. I argued that I wanted to change as little as possible, but he argued how well the menu had been received when he’d done a special prep of Basque food for Dogs on the Roll. I hated to admit it, but he was right. That day had netted us one of our highest volumes of all time.

  In the end, I let him try the Basque cuisine. I knew he had nothing to do with it, but Basque food was all the rage in the market these days. So mixing trendy with the wholesome fare of Dogs on the Roll seemed like a good fit. Both would serve similar coffee, which would cut into the profits somewhat, but the main fare would be different enough not to pull clients from our existing truck.

  I was pleased with the decision, though I put up a tough fight so that Land wouldn’t think I was a pushover in matters of business. He knew the cooking side far better than I did, but I wanted to ensure that I kept control of the business end of the food trucks. He would have gladly spent all the profits in order to make the dishes just so.

  We did both agree on Basque in the Sun for the name of the renovated food truck. People might groan a little over the pun, but clever wordplay was often well received in the food service industry. The truck was quickly repainted to have a giant sun on the side along with the new name.

  Finally the new food truck was ready to open. Given the truck’s rather bloody recent history, we decided to do a cold opening first. So, on Monday morning Land rolled the truck up to the place where Janelle had parked before her demise and set up shop for the day. It was odd to watch it open, knowing that I owned it.

  Even though Carter had been hired to work with me, we decided that he would be better suited to work with Land for the first two weeks. Land would need help in getting over any particular bumps in the road, whereas things at Dogs on the Roll were fairly steady. Carter could fetch things from the original truck or run to the store if need be.

  However, that meant that I had to get the truck, do the prep work as well as my own work, and both serve and take money. Over the first few days of that first week, I felt more exhausted than Danvers and Land had looked during their surveillance.

  Basque in the Sun had a different schedule than Dogs on the Roll. I was still on the early shift, bringing in the early commuters and people in need of a caffeine fix. The other food truck opened around 10 a.m. and stayed open until four. Land counted the money around the end of my shift, and the remaining cash, from late sales that day, was left in the drawer for the next day. Basque cuisine was not particularly mouth-watering at eight a.m. People can wolf down a hot dog as breakfast, but a lamb stew or fish entrée was less likely to be eaten before lunch. They stayed open long enough to catch the people leaving work that wanted something to take home with them.

  Yet every day when I took approximately double the amount of money to the bank, I felt refreshed. The new truck was doing well. It had exceeded my estimates for the first month—or any of the first twelve months—of being open. The food was delicious. Carter was doing well at both cooking and taking orders.

  The only issue was that we still had not come up with any information on the espionage ring or the murder of Janelle Nolan. I wasn’t allowed to just bask in the glory, pardon the pun, because Detective Danvers stopped by every day to ask where things stood. When he didn’t get the answer he wanted from me, he sauntered over to the other truck to ask them as well.

  To be honest, no one had approached Land at all regarding documents or being a courier for the Moroccan people in regards to the situation in North Africa. All was quiet on the food truck front.

  I still hadn’t learned anything else about the financials either. It frustrated me to think that the answers to these questions were just a few interviews away, if I knew whom to ask, but other than the Nolans, I had no one to query. I couldn’t even get in touch with Janelle’s brother. His number was unlisted, and I couldn’t think of a good reason to ask the Nolans for his number. All of the participants in this were in the shadows, and I didn’t have a way of learning anything about them.

  Finally on that first Friday, we had an opening celebration for the new food truck. I had promoted the new truck heavily in the newspapers and on the TV news, hoping to get more people to come and see us. I had some hope that if I ratchetted up the profile of the food truck, then someone would take notice of us.

  The day went as planned. The food truck had a line halfway down the block, and the orders were done quickly. Some of my customers even went over to the other truck and tried the cuisine. I wasn’t too worried about most of my customers defecting because they still thrived on the coffee I provided at 6 a.m. They’d have to wait until 10 for the other truck’s coffee, and most of my customers would have killed three people if they had to wait an additional four hours to get their fix.

  I closed up a bit early and left a sign suggesting that anyone could find me at the other truck. I didn’t plan on making a habit of leaving this food truck unattended. I had no desire to see my income drop back down to its previous level. We had opened the second truck so that we could double the income, and even though the work was tough, I wanted to succeed.

  Yet I was also human, and the thought of being left out of all the excitement at the other truck finally got to me. I headed over there to see what was going on.

  Land was the first to spot me in the crowd. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the other truck?” he chided. He was more concerned that I would stop working on our original truck and return to our old arrangement of me boss, him employee.

  “I told the customers to come over here. It’s just for today. I thought I deserved a day to enjoy the fact that this dream had finally come true.”

  Carter looked out the window at the line. “I think we have a success here.”

  I nodded. The line was growing as we spoke, so I hopped up into the truck and took over the customer end of the business so that both men could cook. I was almost giddy from the sales we were making. The cash register rang constantly.

  The success was all I could think about until Sam stepped up to the window. “Hey, Maeve. I didn’t expect to see you here. How have you been?”

  I was more than a little annoyed at the fact that here was the man who had been telling me he was too busy to see me, waiting in line for some Basque food at noon on a Friday. However, he was a customer, followed in line by 50 other customers, so I had to keep it pleasant. “Well, I told you I had a food truck, and we’re expanding.”

  He half-grunted a response. “Wasn’t there some guy in the interview I saw?” There was almost an imp
lication that if he’d seen me, he would have skipped this opening. I knew that he wasn’t the one for me, but even so, I wondered what I’d done to get the cold shoulder like this. I’d run through our encounters several times, but I couldn’t think of any moment that would have evoked this reaction.

  I still had to play it sweet. “That’s Land. He’s the cook and minority owner of this truck. He’ll be running it while I take care of the original truck.”

  Sam stuck his bottom lip out as if he was thinking—or pouting. “I’d heard that this was Janelle Nolan’s truck before you guys bought it.”

  Now things were getting interesting. None of the interviews had mentioned that, and I certainly hadn’t played up the dead owner angle when I sent out the print ads. I decided to play dumb and stammered, “Yeah, but how—?” I let the sentence trail off.

  Sam paused for a moment. I had apparently caught him in a story that he hadn’t prepared for. “I think someone must have told me,” he replied, hoping to get out of it.

  “The Nolans?” I asked blandly, not letting him know that I was privy to such information. “They’ve been very helpful about selling the truck.”

  He nodded. “Maybe it was the Nolans. I can’t remember.”

  The line was backing up, and Sam’s food was prepared, so I rang him up and moved on to the next customer. I did notice that he left a five dollar tip in the jar, but I wasn’t thrilled by that. I would much rather have had answers to a tip. The tip just reminded me that our relationship had gone from occasional outings to food service customer.

  The line was still going strong two hours later. The police had turned over all the frozen food to the Nolans before it thawed, so we had plenty of provisions, which was a worry considering the crowd. Land had retrieved all of them from a freezer yesterday and put them back in the food truck.

  I was surprised to see Detective Danvers and three other policemen arrive at the window. I’d been expecting a visit from them today. Danvers had been sure that the reopening of the food truck would reveal all to us by some magic. I was sorry that I was going to have to burst his bubble and tell him that I hadn’t learned a thing.