Eye for an Eye

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Published by
Bev Robitai on Smashwords

Copyright Bev
Robitaille March 2011

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DEDICATION – to
Eric and Jackie in Canada, the best in-laws ever. Love you!

PROLOGUE

Like a fizzing
fuse heading for a bomb, a young blonde woman ran at full speed
along the pontoon dock, her pounding feet sending waves surging
between the gleaming launches moored on each side. She tossed
sweat-soaked hair out of her eyes and kept on running, muttering a
stream of curses punctuated by the thumps of her feet on the
dock.

‘I’ll get you,
you miserable bastard.’ Thud thud. ‘This is where you pay...’ Thud
thud. ‘I’m going to pull your scrotum over your head...’ Thud thud.
‘And use your bloody testicles for boxing practice!’

She sped down
the line of cruisers glancing left and right as she went, searching
for the boat she knew she’d recognise, looking for some little
detail that would prove she was on the right track. But nothing
caught her eye as she ran on and on until the end of the dock
brought her to an abrupt halt. She stared around wildly, as if her
quarry might suddenly materialise beside her.

‘Where the hell
are you? I’m going to rip your sodding dick off when I find
you!’

The anonymous
boats tugged gently at their mooring lines, mocking her with a
chorus of squeaks and groans as rope chafed against rubber. There
was nobody in sight.

She cursed
colourfully, returned to shore and tackled the next dock, hurrying
past the rows of expensive boats until she faced the open lake
again at the far end. Still nothing.

She pulled a
crumpled photo from her pocket and held it up to the horizon,
trying to match the scene in front of her to the picture she held.
It showed rows of boats with Angel Lady, the one she was looking
for, in front of a stretch of Toronto city skyline, with the
slender spire of the CN Tower off to the right of the marina. She
squinted to line up the buildings, judging that she was too far to
the left and the picture must have been taken from further along
the lake shore. Not far though, just a couple of minutes’ walk. She
strode along with renewed purpose.

At the end of
the next dock, the boats and the city almost matched the picture,
with the CN tower lined up against a low building in the
foreground, and just a slightly different angle of view.

‘Right, you
slimy bastard,’ she muttered. ‘Just a little further and I’ll
finally have you. Say good-bye to your balls and hello to life as a
soprano.’

She hurried
along to the next dock, breaking into a run as she finally caught
sight of the boat she was looking for.

The fuse
sparked and crackled as it got closer to the bomb.

Her running
shoes thudded along the wooden slats, sending echoes booming among
the pontoons below. Closer now, she could see the shape of a man
standing at the wheel, and a puff of pale blue smoke jetting from
the engine exhaust. The Angel Lady was getting ready to leave.

‘Not yet, you
lying prick! Wait!’

She put on a
spurt to catch the launch before it left its berth, running
pell-mell along the dock as the boat’s mooring lines slipped into
the water.

‘Wait, dammit!
I’ve got to talk to you!’

She hurtled
towards the slowly moving boat, legs pumping and arms flailing in
her efforts to reach it. The figure at the helm seemed oblivious of
her approach.

Suddenly a pile
of rags at the side of the dock seemed to catch her feet and she
tripped at full speed. In a welter of windmilling limbs she
splashed into the oil-filmed waters of Lake Ontario, falling
headlong into the ever-widening space behind the sleek white stern
of the Angel Lady.

CHAPTER 1

Robyn surfaced
from beneath warm scented bath-water and heard her phone ringing
insistently in the next room. She briefly considered leaping out to
answer it, but relaxed back into the bubbles as she heard the
answering machine pick up the call. A muffled male voice left a
message and the machine beeped as they hung up.

She added more
hot water, letting it soothe away the many stresses of her day. One
of her new customers had been particularly demanding, asking for
extended photo coverage of an upcoming wedding but with no increase
in cost. And as for her noisy next-door neighbour – well, hanging
was too good for him. She’d have to sort him out before he drove
her insane with the ‘doof-doof’ music that he’d been playing all
hours of the night.

Finally,
mindful of her electricity bill if not her carbon footprint, she
stopped adding hot water, hauled herself out of the tub and
towelled off. After smoothing on some kiwi-fruit and aloe
moisturiser, she padded into the study and peered at the
answer-phone. Two messages? Someone must have called while she was
out during the afternoon as well. She pressed the play button and
reached for a notepad.

‘Gidday Sis,
it’s Pete here. Look, you haven’t heard from Dad, have you? He went
into town this morning and hasn’t come back yet, and you know how
he likes to be here for afternoon milking. Did he tell you he had
any plans for today? Give us a call, OK? Bye.’

Robyn shrugged.
The machine beeped, then continued with the second message.

‘Hi Rob, Pete
again - look it’s after six and Dad still hasn’t turned up. We were
going to check out a couple of ewes in the home paddock this
evening but he hasn’t called to say why he’s not here. Have you
heard anything? Give us a call soon as, will you? Ta.’

Robyn felt a
twinge of unease at the worry in her brother’s voice. Just as she
reached for the phone to call him back it suddenly rang beneath her
hand, making her jump. She answered cautiously.

‘Hello, Robyn
Taylor here.’

‘Ah Rob, you’re
home, good. Did you get my messages?’ Pete’s voice was unusually
tense. Robyn blinked.

‘Whoa, bro -
what happened to "Hi, how are you?"’

‘This isn’t the
time, Rob, sorry. I need to know if you’ve seen Dad today.’

‘No mate, I
haven’t. So what’s all the drama?’

‘Have you heard
from him at all?’ Pete insisted. ‘A text or a phone-call?’

‘No, I haven’t.
But he’s probably just down at the pub having a few beers, isn’t
he? Why are you so stressed out, anyway? The old fella’s over 18,
what’s the big deal? Do you think he’s up to no good, or what?’

‘Don’t make
jokes Sis, I’m trying to tell you something. It’s just a feeling,
but Dad hasn’t been acting quite normal for the last couple of
weeks, and it’s got me worried. Now he hasn’t turned up when I was
expecting him, and I reckon something’s wrong. He’d have rung me if
he was going to be late or hang round at the pub. Suppose he’s had
a heart attack or something on the way home and driven off the
road? It’s the middle of winter and he’d freeze to death even if he
survived the heart attack and the accident. I’m going to head into
town and see if I can find him. Stay by the phone in case he rings
you, will you?’

‘Jeez Pete,
look on the bright side, why don’t you! Yeah, all right, I’ll man
the phone here if that’s what you want. But hang on a sec, what
exactly do you mean by “not normal”? Has he been grumpy, worried,
depressed, what? Chest pains? Headaches? You’ve got to have more to
go on than “not normal”.’

‘I dunno, he’s
been sort of preoccupied, vague - it’s hard to put my finger on.
Just not right, you know what I mean? Anyway, I’m going to head
into town and look for the station wagon... aw, hang on, there’s a
call waiting, I’ll get back to you.’

Robyn frowned
at the receiver. She started to doodle on the pad. She waited for
what seemed like an age before Pete came back on the line.

‘Yeah, Rob, hi
- sorry about that. Some joker wanting Dad about insurance, I just
had to put him off. Anyway, I’m going to go look for him -’

‘Pete!’ she cut
in, ‘I’m sure he’s fine, you’re worrying about nothing.’

‘Hey, don’t
just dismiss the whole thing from where you are, you didn’t see his
face at breakfast this morning did you? I did, and he looked pretty
grim.’

‘OK Pete, maybe
I am being dismissive, but I’m sure you’re over-reacting.’ She
rolled her eyes at her big brother’s seriousness. ‘Look, give me
half an hour to take care of something I have to do here, I’ll call
you back then, and I bet you a dozen beers that Dad’ll be home. If
he isn’t, I’ll join the hunt. Deal? We’ll sort this out, Pete,
don’t worry.’

‘Yeah, all
right, but after half an hour I’m going looking for him whether you
phone or not.’

‘Sure bro. See
ya later, bye.’

Robyn hung up
the phone, shaking her head at her brother’s stubbornness. He’d
always been the serious one. Of course Dad was all right – he’d
probably had a couple of beers at the pub and just needed to stay
there for a feed so he could drive home safely.

Right now, it
was time to sort out some minor domestic matters a little closer to
home. A grin spread across her face as she contemplated the ‘thing’
she was about to take care of. Some stern natural justice was
required to teach her inconsiderate noisy neighbour a lesson. Her
polite requests to turn down his loud music had been ignored, and
even the local council officers had been unable to force him to
comply with residential noise regulations, despite complaints from
several other people in the street. She was going to have to
organise her own retribution.

Dressed in
black sweatshirt and dark jeans, she crept through the hedge into
her next-door neighbour’s garden.

‘This’ll fix
you for keeping me awake with your bloody stereo,’ she said softly.
‘You made me suffer six hours of thumping music last night - I
sentence you to blocked pipes and several phone calls to a plumber,
ha! Perhaps you should move house, eh?’

She crouched by
the wall below her neighbour’s kitchen window and pulled a spray
can of expanding foam from her pocket. She inserted the nozzle into
the kitchen drain outlet and squeezed the trigger. With a
satisfying hiss, yellow foam gushed into the pipe and immediately
started to harden, oozing gently out of the end. Robyn removed the
overflow with a stick so that the cause of the blockage wouldn’t be
too obvious, then gave the same treatment to the bathroom drains.
Her neighbour’s morning shower would probably become quite
unpleasant as his drainpipes backed up.

After that, she
sprayed "Dickhead" in letters a foot high across his front lawn
with weed-killer.

With the
righteous sense of a job well done, she crept back home, washed off
the last traces of the sticky foam and put away the weed-killer.
Then she peeled the label off the spray can before putting it in
the garbage, just in case the neighbour went looking for
evidence.

It hadn’t been
half an hour yet, but she picked up the phone anyway and called
home.

‘So, Pete,
how’s Dad then?’

‘Not here, Rob,
so I couldn’t tell you.’ She raised her eyebrows at the edge in his
voice. ‘But I just called Smitty at the Blenheim cop shop and he’s
going to put the word round for the patrol cars to keep an eye out
for him. They can’t start a proper search yet ‘cause he hasn’t been
gone long enough, but he agrees that it’s out of character for him
to disappear like this so he’s going to give me a hand
unofficially. He said some of the fishing boys from Picton are
going to come along too.’

‘Jesus, Pete -
I didn’t realise it was that serious. Sorry, mate.’ She ran a hand
through her blonde hair, frowned, and sat on the edge of her desk.
‘Look, shall I drive over and start looking from the town end of
the road while you come in from the farm? If we meet in the middle
at least we’ll know he hasn’t gone off the road somewhere.’

‘Yeah, all
right, could be a plan. Call in at the cop shop on your way though
in case they’ve spotted anything - could save you a long drive out
here.’

‘Sure bro, see
you soon, OK?’

She threw a
warm jacket into the car, then went back with some misgivings to
fetch her first aid box as well.

While driving
across town to the police station, she wondered guiltily if she
should have visited home more often over the last few weeks. In
truth, she’d been enjoying the freedom from the fortnightly duty
visits that she’d made during the long months of her mother’s
illness, and had hoped that Pete and her Dad were getting on all
right by themselves. Between working every second weekend
photographing weddings, and going home to visit the family, her
social life had taken a pounding the previous year and she needed
time to repair it. Added to that, her quarter-of-a-century birthday
was looming up in September, increasing that vague social pressure
she was feeling to ‘find a nice man and settle down’.