Rick Carter's First Big Adventure (Pete's Barbecue Book 1) by Samuel Belcher

mind.  Unfortunately, it was up against some pretty stiff competition, and in the end not even the greatest stew known to man could get Mel off his mind.   The meeting with the two weird government guys was almost an after-thought now.  He knew it happened; he knew it was important and that he had agreed to do something he was very unsure of, but his mind didn’t want to dwell on that.  Instead, his mental processes were consumed with Melvin Thibadeaux, the happy go lucky disappearing jerk that left a town full of people thinking he had been dead for nearly thirty years.    Rick was trying to grasp the sheer randomness of the whole thing and how utterly pointless his twenty-six years of self-imposed survivor’s guilt had been.   How did he do it?  Why did he do it?  Where in the black hole of weird crap has he been all this time?  The more he thought about it the madder he got.   Finally the desire to hit something started to overwhelm his stomach.  He spent the rest of his time with his stew thinking about which part of Mel’s face he was going to hit first if he had a second chance.      
         In the end, he finished his stew, prepared his dinner on a wooden tray in front of the small television and watched some old episodes of a science fiction drama from the sixties.  It wasn’t until ten thirty that he remembered he had a job to do and that he had agreed to run some special fares for the two suits. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to change from a used pair of shorts and tropical shirt to another of the same.  It’s what he did every night.  But even this simple process was hampered when he discovered he had no clean clothes.  He had to search through a pile of dirty laundry to find something that he had only worn once and that he could spritz up with a bit of fabric softener and be on his way.   By eleven thirty he was out the door and for the first time in fifteen years, he was nervous, apprehensive about what this night might bring.
     
     
             The slow seething anger Rick felt as he grabbed his lunch, locked his apartment door and headed downstairs to the parking lot was only accentuated by accidently jamming his finger in the car door as he tried to close it.  Several expletives later he was pulling out of the parking lot grimacing from the pain in his finger and prepared for a bitter fight with the enemies of happiness in the night.  He wasn’t disappointed.  It didn’t take long for the battle to begin.  The first two hours of the night found him driving from bar to bar with no takers, and nothing popping up on his computer to bid on.  Business wasn’t just dead, it was cold, stiff and being embalmed.  The only thought that kept him from rolling his window down and screaming bad things to the world was the promise of a lucrative morning by the two suits from last night.  They had better not have been messing with him.  He couldn’t take that now.  He pulled into the empty parking lot of a closed business and parked.  It was 0155, and he was determined to wait out the last few minutes watching the clock tick away.  One by one the minutes went by until at last the digital clock turned 0200.   For a moment, nothing happened.  The worry began to creep into his mind.  Had he been played after all?  He sat holding his breath looking at the clock until a flicker of light caught his attention.  It was his company radio.  The back light flickered off and then back on a second later.  But, this time, the backlight had changed colors to deep green.  That was odd.   It had never done that before.  He reached down and flicked the front of the radio, but nothing happened.  He fiddled with knobs, buttons, and switches.  It seemed to be working, except now it was glowing green, a nasty, unhealthy green that looked like a cross between gamma radiation and swamp gas.  At 0205 the radio squawked to life and nearly gave him a heart attack. He jerked back