Felicia's Food Truck

by Celia Kinsey

  “So? Maybe he’s just a jerk and likes making people wait on him.”

  That was probably not far off the mark, but I doubted that was the only reason Antonio had insisted on keeping his hands in his pockets.

  “I think Antonio blew up his own food truck and tried to make it look like an accident.”

  “And?”

  “He burned his hands in the process, but he doesn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Why would he blow up his own truck?”

  I had my theories, but I wasn’t ready to share them.

  “Don’t you think the fact that Antonio was spotted right after the explosion buying burn supplies and hasn’t been seen since is suspicious?”

  “It might be,” said Scott, “if he wasn’t down here at the station right now, giving a statement.”

  “A statement?”

  “He says he doesn’t have a clue why the truck blew up, but he seems pretty devastated about it.”

  “Crocodile tears.”

  “What?”

  “Crocodile tears. Antonio’s happy that truck blew up. I’d bet my life he did it himself. The only reason he’s filing a police report is that’s the first step in getting an insurance payout.”

  There was a skeptical silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Just get a look at his hands,” I told Scott.

  Scott hung up, and I wondered if he’d actually do it, but ten minutes later, he called back.

  “You were right,” he said. “Can’t talk right now, but you were right.”

  It was weeks before the whole mess was sorted out, and Antonio was back behind bars. Two more witnesses came forward to corroborate Trent’s story that Antonio’s injuries had been the result of a biking accident and not being beaten by a bitter ex-brother-in-law. Arnie was cleared of suspicion.

  The insurance fraud investigation took much longer. Scott told me he’d spent hours poring over security camera footage to establish that Antonio had been at the scene of the explosion. Apparently, Antonio had run a fuse from outside the truck to a large box of bottle rockets laced with the powdered contents of several much larger fireworks. I think Antonio’s original plan was to make it look like the box of bottle rockets blew up by accident, but he determined that just a box of bottle rockets wouldn’t total the truck, so he upgraded his firepower with the contents of the much larger fireworks stolen from the parks department.

  Apparently, Antonio had trouble keeping the paper and black powder fuse he’d fashioned to touch off the box of fireworks lit. He’d tried juicing it up with the contents of several disassembled bottle rockets. That’s how he’d burned his hands yet managed to escape getting blown to bits with the truck.

  What with the far more serious matter of false allegations of assault and battery, not to mention insurance fraud, pretty much everyone but me seemed to have forgotten about the dumped pizza toppings and the horse poo in the pizza oven, so I kept my mouth shut.

  Dr. Smith ought not to have done what he did, but nobody had gotten hurt in the process. I couldn’t really blame Sidney Smith for taking drastic—albeit slightly daft—measures to try and drive his ex-son-in-law away from Bray Bay. If I had a daughter, I sure wouldn’t want Antonio anywhere near her.

  The day we heard Antonio was back behind bars, our regulars from Whispering Palms made something of a public apology.

  I didn’t know what to think when nearly a hundred retirees showed up at the food truck. They couldn’t all be there for burgers and fries.

  They were also oddly quiet and orderly. There was none of the usual jostling and grumbling about who had cut who in line.

  “We have something to say,” Prue announced after she was ushered to the front of the pack.

  But then she didn’t say anything more. Instead, she motioned to Patsy and Flo, who unfurled an enormous banner that read, “Felicia and Arnie, Best Burgers South of the State Line, Endorsed by the Old Fogies of Whispering Palms.”

  “We all helped,” said Prue.

  The lettering was crooked, and the banner appeared to have been constructed out of an old shower curtain, but it was just about the sweetest thing I’d ever seen.

  “Fries on the house for everyone,” I said before Arnie could stop me.

  “Absolutely not,” Patsy said. “Today, anyone who doesn’t pay full price for their food has to call every Baptist church senior bingo game for the next six months.”

  “Is that so bad?” I had to ask.

  “It is,” said Prue under her breath.

  “Marcella Edwards has started carrying rotten produce in her purse,” Patsy added, “and she throws it at the caller when they pick any number she doesn’t have on her card.”

  “We tried to get the Baptists to ban her,” Fitz chimed in, ”but Marcella has the church board convinced the rest of us are picking on her. I got so fed up I invited the pastor to be our guest bingo caller, so I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time before Elder Pritchett gets a moldy orange to the head.”

  I felt a little sorry for Pastor Pritchett. He was no match for the Whispering Palms mob. No one was.

  I had to admit it felt good to know the senior citizens of Bray Bay were—for the moment, at least—solidly on my side. They were a force to be reckoned with.

  The End

  Hotdog Horrors

  A Felicia’s Food Truck One Hour Mystery

  Book Four

  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.

  Hotdog Horrors: A Felicia’s Food Truck One Hour Mystery (Book Four)©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.

  Cover Art: ©Freepick.com

  Want to get updates from Celia when she publishes a new title? Sign up for occasional emails from Celia here.

  Find out more about Celia’s other books at celiakinsey.com

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter One

  “When was the last time you cleaned out your hot dog vat?” Clarence Conroy demanded as he stood at the counter of the food truck, clutching his bottle of hand sanitizer in one hand and a baggie of ones in the other. Clarence is a relatively recent resident of Whispering Palms, the senior living complex three blocks away, but he never eats in the onsite dining room. Instead, he inflicts his business on a handful of local food service establishments.

  We get him three days a week for lunch. It could be worse. Café Tijuana downtown has him every weekday during the supper hour, and Mama’s Little Italian Kitchen has to put up with him every Saturday and Sunday evening. The rest of the time, to hear him tell it, he subsists on dry cereal and ham sandwiches.

  Clarence refuses to touch money. He claims—and it’s probably true—that the average piece of paper money carries more germs than the toilet seat in a bus station bathroom.

  Clarence is an expert on germs, just as he is an expert on efficiency and organization. He’s always making helpful little suggestions about how we could better streamline our system for preparing food and, especially, sanitizing our equipment. Before Clarence retired, he was a quality control manager for almost forty years. He worked at a chemical plant that produced cleaning compounds, so I guess a hypersensitivity to sanitation and order was an inevitable side effect.

  “We clean out the hot dog vat on a regular schedule,” I told Clarence. “I can assure you we are in full compliance with health department regulations.”

  That was not quite true. My cook, Arnie, and I try our best, but when you run a food tru
ck with one side of it open to the elements all day, it’s hard to eliminate all contact with nature. Just the previous week, we’d had a mother bird trying to build a nest up on the shelf where we kept our extra paper supplies. I hoped Clarence never found out about that.

  “What can I get for you, Clarence?” Arnie asked.

  Clarence eats at our food truck every Tuesday (2 hot dogs, no pickle relish, extra mustard with a side of potato chips), Wednesday (chili cheese fries with a side of frankfurters cut into bite-size pieces, hold the onions), and Friday (bratwurst dog, potato salad and a side of sliced tomatoes).

  Clarence invariably orders exactly the same thing, depending on what day of the week it is, but he always insists on being asked what he wants, regardless. I guess he wants to keep his options open, even though he appears completely disinclined to shake up his strict routine.

  Shortly after Clarence’s arrival in the village of Bray Bay, Prue, one of our other regulars from Whispering Palms, had informed me that Clarence was a widower, and, despite his irritating eccentricities, had made quite a splash with the ladies.

  Prue’s friend Patsy had quickly pointed out that the qualifications for making a splash with the ladies at Whispering Palms only required a man to be (a) single, (b) breathing, and (c) still able to answer the call of nature without assistance.

  Prue’s other friend Flo had then chimed in that the male to female ratio of Whispering Palms residents was of 3 women to every man. The romantically inclined woman of mature years couldn’t afford to be picky, Flo insisted.

  “Surely men aren’t dying off at 3 times the rate of women,” I’d protested.

  Flo then admitted she’d been exaggerating. The male to female ratio at Whispering Palms was closer to 2 to 1.

  To hear Prue, Patsy, and Flo tell it, the social life of seniors was fraught with the kind of drama usually only witnessed in daytime television dramas of the less realistic variety.

  While Clarence was placing his order, Prue, Patsy, and Flo arrived and stood behind him. They, at least, did not appear to be among Clarence’s admirers. They ignored Clarence and stood chattering amongst themselves like a trio of tiny sensibly sneakered sparrows dressed in stretch pants and floral overblouses.

  I’d heard that there had been a frontrunner for Clarence’s affections, or at least that’s what the woman in question had gone around telling people.

  Marcella Edwards had gone around telling anyone who would listen that she and Clarence were an item, but then Marcella went around telling people a lot of things.

  If Marcella and Clarence had ever been on, they appeared to be off now.

  Marcella sat alone at a table while she sipped a small lemonade and kept a firm grip on the enormous straw beach bag she never went anywhere without. While she sipped, she glared at the back of Clarence’s head.

  Two tables over sat Randell Romer, a small diffident man in his eighties who always carried an umbrella regardless of the weather. Randell was watching Marcella watch Clarence and absently shredding paper napkins onto his empty plate.

  It was Tuesday, so Clarence ordered his 2 hot dogs, no pickle relish, extra mustard with a side of potato chips. Then it was Prue’s turn to order. For once, she knew what she wanted.

  “I’ll have a hot dog,” Prue said. “No, I’m worn out from water aerobics this morning. I’ll have two.”

  “What do you want on your hot dogs?” Arnie asked. “Our two-dog plate comes with your choice of one side.”

  Prue hemmed and hawed until Patsy elbowed her in the ribs and told Prue to step aside and let her and Flo order.

  I didn’t catch Prue’s final decision on her preferred side because a fistfight broke out.

  Chapter Two

  Sometimes Arnie’s old dachshund, Frank, gets riled up and spoils for a fight with a couple of local dogs he’s taken a dislike to, but we don’t usually have brawls involving humans on the premises. In fact, actual acts of violence at the food truck have been limited to the one time somebody wearing a Darth Vader mask held up Arnie and made him empty the till and give up his lucky silver dollar. Even then, the gun turned out to be fake.

  What I was witnessing now, however, definitely qualified as a brawl, or at the very least, a rumble.

  Clarence and Fitz, another Whispering Palms resident, were facing off from opposite sides of one of the flimsy plastic tables we keep for customers who want to eat on the spot.

  Fitz was clutching at his left eye with one hand and the edge of the table with the other. He looked pretty wobbly on his feet.

  Clarence was trying to stanch the flow of blood from his nose with a wad of paper napkins. When he noticed that blood was getting on his shirt, he grabbed one of the plastic gingham tablecloths off the table, scattering his paper plate and the hot dogs on it all over the ground. He then managed to tuck the tablecloth into his collar like a giant bib, all the while keeping a wary eye on Fitz.

  Frank darted out from his habitual spot between the front wheels of the food truck to snaffle down the dropped dogs, then retreated under the truck and out of harm’s way.

  “You hit me!” Clarence yelled at Fitz. At least that’s what I think he yelled; it was hard to tell what with the entire contents of a tabletop napkin dispenser shoved up against his face.

  “You hit me first,” Fitz shouted back “You hit me right in my good eye.”

  “I wouldn’t have hit you if—" Clarence said, pulling the napkins away from his nose, just long enough to speak.

  “If what?” Fitz demanded. “I’m the one who has a right to be hopping mad.”

  Arnie had come down out of the food truck and inserted himself between the two, and I joined him.

  “Sit down,” I said. “Both of you. And use your words like grownups.”

  It was a terribly patronizing thing to say, and I’m not proud of saying it, but I did a stint as a preschool teacher at Happy Hearts Preschool and Daycare, back in my early twenties, so “use your words” just sort of popped out.

  Surprisingly, Fitz and Clarence did as they were told. Apparently, I hadn’t lost my touch.

  “Now, what seems to be the problem?” I said.

  Fitz took his hand away from his injured eye and pointed at Clarence.

  “He’s trying to get me kicked out of Whispering Palms,” Fitz said

  I turned to Clarence, who was trying to readjust his tablecloth bib with one hand.

  “Is that true?” I asked.

  “Is what true?” Clarence demanded. If we were all back at Happy Hearts Preschool, somebody would be heading for the thinking chair about now, as in, “think about what you did, and we’ll try talking about it again in a few minutes when you’ve had a chance to calm down.”

  “Are you trying to get Fitz kicked out of Whispering Palms?” I asked again.

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “How would you put it?”

  Clarence was never forced to explain himself because we were interrupted by a screech of horror from Prue.

  Prue had sprung up from her table and was shrieking and dancing up and down as she gesticulated wildly at a half-eaten hot dog remaining on her plate.

  “There’s a spider inside my hot dog,” she wailed.

  I rushed over to Prue and examined the remains of her spit-up hot dog on her plate.

  What with the hitting, yelling, bloody noses and spit-up food, I might as well be back at Happy Hearts Preschool instead of running a food truck. I’d heard of people referring to old age as one’s second childhood, but this was getting ridiculous.

  Prue was not imagining things. It was most definitely a spider, although not a real one. I laid out the tiny black plastic spider (no larger than the size of a nickel) on a paper napkin and prodded it with a plastic fork, just to be sure it really was a toy.

  “You found this on your hot dog?” Arnie asked Prue as he peered over my shoulder.

  “No, it was inside the wiener.”

  “Inside?”

  Prue was adama
nt, but I was skeptical. I thought it more likely that someone had managed to slip the plastic spider inside the bun and conceal it within the condiments.

  “I thought you didn’t like mustard, Prue,” I said.

  Prue is the world’s most indecisive diner, but ironically, she holds very strong views on condiments. She loves pickle relish and ketchup, but mustard, as she colorfully puts it, makes her “want to toss her cookies.”

  “Did you put mustard on Prue’s hot dogs?” I asked Arnie.

  He shook his head.

  “Maybe you ended up with someone else’s order,” I suggested.

  Prue didn’t think so. I turned away from the table to continue questioning Fitz and Clarence, but they’d both taken off. Clarence had even absconded with our tablecloth, not that I wanted it back after he’d bled all over it.

  I picked up Clarence’s dropped plate—Frank had taken care of the contents—and put the incident out of my mind.

  The following day, Wednesday, at 11:38 sharp, I was reminded of the incident by the arrival of Clarence. Clarence had determined that 11:38 was the optimal time to arrive at the food truck if he wanted to avoid having to wait in line. Clarence has a strong aversion to waiting in line. According to him, the average American spends 5 years of their life standing in lines. He thought that was a terrible waste of human potential. I couldn’t argue with that kind of logic.

  Shortly after Clarence went up to the window to order, I was surprised to see Fitz come around the corner of the car wash. After yesterday’s incident, I’d expected that Fitz might lay low for a while. It should be easy to avoid Clarence. Everyone knew where he’d be at any given moment of the day, he was such a slave to his routine.

  Clarence was still at the window, but Fitz came right up behind him, bold as brass. When it was Fitz’s turn, he said, ”Chili cheese fries, extra onions, side of frankfurters cut in pieces.”