FIVE WILL GET YOU TWENTY (Food Truck Mysteries Book 9) by Chloe Kendrick

as much as he could tell me.
    “Some of his distributors were not on the up and up. We had to go to out-of-the-way places and pick up ingredients. It seemed more like a drug deal at times than a restaurant business. We picked up sprouts once on a pier by the river.” Thomas made a face as if to tell me he wasn’t in favor of such tactics.
    That story gave me some leads that I might be able to use. For starters, the more I learned, the more I suspected that the crime was just one of these money-grabbing schemes that Pohler had developed. I thought about it for a minute, and the man thought I was done with him. He made a move for the door, but I backed up so that my body was pressed against the doorway. He wasn’t going anywhere until I was ready.
    “So, tell me about your qualifications to work on a food truck?” I asked. I had developed an idea that would likely earn me the ire of Land and Detective Danvers.
    “You’re really putting me through a job interview? I passed bad twenties at your truck. Let’s get real. You’re not hiring me.” He crossed him arms as if to say that we were done.
    I smirked at Thomas. “I don’t think that you’re giving yourself enough credit. You can sell yourself better than this.”
    He rolled his eyes at me. “I’m not sure what game you’re playing here, but I don’t really like it.”
    I cleared my throat. “I’m going to be honest with you here. I’m in a bind. My future sister-in-law was helping with Dogs on the Roll, but she has gone AWOL. So I’m running the truck by myself while trying to manage two other trucks. I need help.”
    He furrowed his brows, almost as if he were struggling to hear my words. “But I don’t understand. I’m not —”
    “You have experience with food trucks. You can cook. You also seem to know things about Ryan Pohler that I want to find out. I don’t understand why he took such a dislike to me that he would slash the tire on the truck and pass bad money at the truck, which had the police checking our cash.” I stopped only to catch my breath. “So tell me about your work experience.”
    He nodded and took a deep breath. “I’ve been on my own for a few years. I had a family issue, and we didn’t talk for a long time. So I needed to make a living. I started out waiting tables, but that wasn’t for me. People are crazy. So I moved back to the kitchen and started cooking.”
    “Why did you leave that job?” I asked, liking what I was hearing.
    “The kitchen was about ten feet square. It was hard being in that confined space all day. The food trucks aren’t bigger, but you get to see the customers. You get to see daylight. Sometimes you even get to go to festivals.”
    I asked him about the festival where we’d debuted the new truck.
    “I was there too,” he said, with a smile. “But I didn’t get out much that day. The lines were ridiculously long.”
    “You have all of the required skills, so why not work here? It wouldn’t be the first time in history that employees have been poached from other businesses. Besides, you don’t know what’s even going to happen with the food trucks now. The family might just sell them.”
    Thomas shook his head. “No way. Pohler’s wife already sent us an email saying that we weren’t even going to miss a day of business. The trucks will run as they always have.”
    I was a bit surprised. Usually families take a little time to decide what they are going to do with the family business. I wondered if the Pohler family was living on the edge and needed all the money they could get. It certainly had a whiff of desperation about it, and it made me wonder if Ryan was in dire financial trouble. He certainly shouldn’t have been, but I wondered if he’d expanded the business too fast and too soon. There wouldn’t even be a proper mourning period for the man.
    I hoped that if I were to die, then people would wait a few days to move along with the food trucks.
    “Would you need to give two