MURDER TO GO (Food Truck Mysteries Book 1) (16 page)

I started going through the cleaning supplies, but most of them were spray bottles, and I didn’t want to shoot liquid on the fire that would only serve to make it burn faster or brighter. I didn’t know if it was my imagination or the reality, but I felt a little lightheaded from the heat and slowly building smoke. I knew that this had to be over soon.

After finding nothing that would be guaranteed to put out the flames, I then started looking at the food supply. I didn’t find much in the way of great ingredients to help me there either. I threw sugar on the flames but that only served to melt the sugar.
Great
, I thought,
I’ll have a crème brûlée corpse
.

Then I picked up a bag of flour, but that wasn’t a good idea. The flour began to explode as it lay on the flames. I didn’t know what chemistry class I’d missed, but that was definitely not the solution.

The smoke was getting thicker and the food ingredients in the air did not help me to breathe any better. My lungs were sucking in as much air as they could, struggling to find some oxygen, but I knew the levels had to be getting low.

I remembered enough about fire safety to bend down as the hot air rose. I was soon crawling around the food truck, looking for more supplies to throw on the fire. In the corner, I found a twenty-pound bag of individual salt packets. I thought I remembered something about salt and fires. At this point, I hoped that it had been something good and not another warning like the flour had been.

I stood up and began to choke before I could even lift the salt. The air here was thick and acrid. I tugged my shirt over my head and wrapped it around my face. I could breathe a little better now and I leaned down for the bag of salt.

With all the strength I could muster, I threw the packets at the fire. The flames burned brightly for a few seconds as the paper packets caught fire and burned. However, the fire started to die as quickly as it had flared. The flames by the outlet were nearly out, and the roll of paper towels had quickly become a smoldering mess.

Even so, I was not in a good place. The air in the food truck was thick and heavy, telling me that the oxygen was mostly depleted. I could fill my lungs and get nothing but smoke. I felt lightheaded and nauseous as I fought off sleep.

I was so close to surviving another round with Mr. Huff, but I wasn’t sure how to jump this final hurdle. Now that the fire had settled down, I lay on the floor and tried to breathe in air from the bullet holes in the door. Outside I could hear the sounds of traffic.

At first, I thought I was imagining things, but the sound of sirens was growing louder, closer. I wanted to believe that they were coming for me, but frankly, I doubted that any nighttime emergency vehicles would be out looking for food trucks that were lit up on fire.

I couldn’t see anything, but I heard the sound of voices as the sound of the sirens became nearly deafening.

I could hear people outside, and I lifted a weak arm to pound on the door. I wanted them to know to hurry so that I could breathe again. The door opened and I tumbled out into the nighttime air.

It wasn’t long after I was able to say two words without coughing like I had a death rattle, that Detective Danvers made it over to where the EMTs were checking out my vital signs for about the seventh time.

“Not making enough profit here by yourself?” Danvers asked, looking over the scene. “Decide to go for the insurance money and get caught up in the fire?”

I winced. I’d been right. My death would have been assumed to be the result of my botched attempt to burn the thing down.

“I was put here after I was knocked out, tied up, robbed and hit again. It’s been a bad night.” I had a coughing fit after that, so I missed what Danvers said in return.

Somewhere around that time, Land showed up. I kept my distance from him. I wasn’t sure of what his relationship to Mr. Huff was, or what his mysterious secret was that would keep him in the lawyer’s sway. However, I was having none of it.

Danvers sensed the tension and looked at Land. Land gave a shrug, which only made me more suspicious than ever. They appeared to have a camaraderie that seemed very odd. Basque food truck chefs and Capital City police detectives typically had very little in common.

I slowly began to explain what had happened in the past several hours. Danvers and Land both went in and checked out the storage box under the counter while the techs took photos of the truck and fire damage. When they returned, each of them had a different look on his face.

“So the jewelry from one of the heists was in the box, you said?” Danvers asked as he took out a notebook and began to scribble things down as fast as I spoke.

I coughed again and continued. “They followed me here. You can check the police logs about that. I called, and they escorted me to the street.”

Danvers nodded and wrote some more.

“Then I went to Mr. Huff’s office and that’s when all hell broke loose.” I coughed again and knew that Danvers would want to know more about my actions, but I was hoping that it could wait until I could take a proper breath.

“Why there?” he asked.

“He was my aunt’s lawyer. This had been my aunt’s property. I wanted advice. I didn’t
want
to be knocked on the head and nearly burned alive.”

Danvers asked a few more questions as Land looked on. The EMTs motioned for me to come back and take in some more oxygen. I was glad to do so.

A crime scene tech came out of the food truck with the device that had been used to start the fire. He pointed at me and then pointed at the device. I wasn’t sure if I was in trouble or not. Danvers strode over to me. “This was the fire-starter. The tech just told me that it’s fairly well-known in the prison system, but that he doubted a recent college grad with little work or life experience could have come up with it on her own.”

I resented the word choices, but I was too tired to complain. I would argue vigorously later.

“So we’re looking for your Mr. Huff and someone who has done serious time. Interesting combination, don’t you think?” Danvers looked at me as if I was lying. I was too tired to care.

“Looking for him?” I managed to squeak out finally.

Danvers looked at me. “He’s not at the office or his house. His wife claims that she doesn’t know where he is. He’s 72. It’s not like he can get far.”

I told Danvers the name of his last mistress, the one who had received the bracelet and had later hocked it for cash. “Try there. Supposedly people didn’t know about them.”

“Supposedly?” Danvers asked with an eyebrow up.

“Men are never as clever as they like to think they are,” I replied. Then I leaned back on the gurney and closed my eyes.

They found Mr. Huff at the former girlfriend’s apartment, hiding there and waiting for the police. Apparently, the paramour had requested a rather large part of the loot that Huff had recovered from my car after they’d tied me up in the food truck. The police had found bracelets and Rolexes in her drawers and hope chest.

Once confronted with the evidence, Huff broke down and confessed to everything. He named his co-conspirator as Tony Samples, the son of the first headless corpse—and Land’s new employer.

Fred had let his son into the business after Tony had been released from prison. The small food truck business hadn’t pleased Tony, and he’d fallen in with Mr. Huff, who had been his lawyer, to get the jewelry out of my truck and into their hands.

Mr. Huff had been no part of the murder of Fred Samples. He’d been appalled by the brutality of the crime. He’d wanted no part of Fred Samples’ death, but Tony Samples had wanted more and felt that the influx of cash, combined with total control of the company, was the best way to get what he wanted.

That’s how I got the Meat Treats spot again near the government building on Elm Street. Land had come back and started working for me again. His stint at the new Meat Treats truck had lasted a full three days before the axels had given out on that dream.

He seemed more resigned than angry this time around. He did the work with little conversation though, which was a pity because I was dying to learn what Mr. Huff had known about Land that would have kept him in line for any sort of dirty deeds. The opportunity to ask never came up, and it wasn’t the sort of thing you could just toss out in the middle of a conversation about trying a new type of pickle for the relish.

That was only one of the loose ends from the murders and the robberies. The most disturbing unresolved issue was that no one was taking claim for the beheading of the health inspector. The police had assumed that Tony Samples had murdered the health inspector for some reason given that the murder method, which was rather unusual, matched the one used on his father. However, Tony denied the whole thing, and Mr. Huff, who had thought that decapitation was beneath him, had denied it as well.

Detective Danvers didn’t seem to mind as much. He shared that the district attorney would be filing charges against Tony Samples for his father’s murder, which he’d confessed to, and that no charges would be filed in regards to the health inspector, though the case would unofficially be marked closed since it was so closely related to the first murder.

Danvers still stops by in the morning. He talks for a few minutes and then gets a coffee and leaves. We haven’t moved past the stage of smiling, though Land is always mimicking his semi-flirtations. I pointed out that since he and the detective go back, he should broach the subject, but Land just snorts and goes back to cutting up the vegetables.

~ END of Book 1 ~

NEXT TRUCK MYSTERY BOOKS:

MURDER IN THE SPOTLIGHTS

LEFTOVERS

Thanks for reading!