Pizza Pie Puzzler: Felicia's Food Truck One Hour Cozies, #3

By Celia Kinsey

When Antonio's mobile pizza kitchen starts poaching Felicia's customers, she's less than pleased. But then a rash of vandalism culminates in the rival food truck going up with a bang, and her cook, Arnie, has some explaining to do. It's up to Felicia to find the real perpetrator before Arnie is charged with the crime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Cat Cozies
• Release date: Jun 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201295936

Book preview

Chapter One

It wasn’t until Antonio’s Pizza Truck had been parked a block from Whispering Palms Senior Living Complex for nearly a week that I discovered who’d been poaching our customers.

Usually, by the time the middle of the afternoon rolls around, there are at least four hundred dollars in the till. For the previous week, we’d been getting the normal tourist crowd, but our usual glut of senior diners had slowed to a trickle.

I finally asked Prue, a sweet but loopy inhabitant of Whispering Palms, why all her fellow residents had suddenly lost interest in our hamburgers, fries, and chili dogs.

Antonio gives out a senior discount plus a handful of free bottle rockets with every pizza, Prue said.

Bottle rockets? Do you mean a free bottle of pop, by chance?

Nope, I mean bottle rockets, Prue insisted. You know shooooeeeeeeeee bang!!!

You haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed a birdlike woman of mature years wearing enormous white sneakers and a blue rinse recreate the sound a bottle rocket makes.

I was still wiping tears of laughter from my eyes when Prue said, Does your cheeseburger come with cheese, or is that extra?

I assured Prue that cheeseburgers, by nature, came with cheese; it was right there in the name. Then I asked who Antonio was.

Antonio of Antonio’s Pizza Kitchen, Prue said.

Did a new restaurant open in Bray Bay?

Antonio’s Mobile Pizza Kitchen, I should have said. It’s just a dinky little truck. Antonio parked it in the vacant lot right next to the complex.

He sells pizza out of his truck? How does he bake it?

Antonio has this little trailer with a pizza oven on it, Prue explained. I don’t care for pizza myself, but the other residents all rave about it.

My cook, Arnie, half turned from the grill where he’d started on the patty. Prue hadn’t yet settled on the cheeseburger, but based on previous experience, there was a 98% chance she’d change her mind three or four times before returning to her original selection. Just how much of a senior discount is this Antonio giving out? I asked.

Prue didn’t know.

I thought Arnie looked more on edge than was warranted from a little competition, but at the time, I chalked up his scowl to worry. Our food truck wasn’t doing particularly well, not that it ever raked in the dough. Arnie blamed our constant cashflow problems on my propensity to give away food, but the truth is, it’s hard to turn a profit in food service, even considering the smaller overhead that comes along with working out of a truck in a vacant parking lot next to a car wash.

I think I’ll wander over there and see just how wonderful this Antonio’s pizza is, I told Arnie.

Arnie did not protest, so I left him finishing off Prue’s cheeseburger and walked the three blocks over to Whispering Palms.

Antonio’s Mobile Pizza Kitchen was certainly ideally situated to cater to the senior residents of the retirement complex.

According to several of our regulars from Whispering Palms, the on-site dining room typically served up gray meat, soggy green beans, gluey mashed potatoes, and tasteless low-sodium gravy followed by tiny portions of sugar-free gelatin intended to pass as dessert.

Despite the promotional literature