Taller Toni & Fair Deal at La Cabeza

Trev Hunt

Description

These 2 tales are from "Ibiza Shorts", the great collection of 14 short stories set on the holiday island of Ibiza which became a smash hit there when first published in 2005. Now revised and re-written as an eBook for the global market, they cover romance, comedy, crime and intrigue - all by a writer who literally 'knows the island backwards'.

Informations

• Publié par: Acorn Classics House Ltd.
• Date de parution: 25 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780992684327
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Taller Toni Fair Deal at La Cabeza del Toro
Trev Hunt
A Few Comments and Kind Words on Trev Hunt's Writing.....
''Trev Hunt transports you to a world of love, comedy, drama and intrigue - brilliant!'' Guy Bellamy
''I have just read 'A Victimless Crime' from Ibiza Shorts with a glass of wine beside an open fire, and was gripped!'' Alastair Sawday
''Viva Trev Hunt - what a discovery his books are!'' John Hollands, MC - author of the 3-million best seller ''The Dead, the Dying and the Damned'' many other books
More comments are at the end of this book
Contents List of Stories
A Few Comments and Kind Words on Trev Hunt's Writing.....
Now let the fun begin.....
Taller Toni
Fair Deal at La Cabeza del Toro
About the Author
Also by Trev Hunt in eBook Format
'Tasters' - extracts from other Trev Hunt eBooks
A Virgin Bride
Love is Funny
Ibiza Shorts
A Variety of Verse
Four Play
More Comments and Kind Words on Trev Hunt's Writing
The Legal Bit.....
Now let the fun begin.....
Taller Toni

The dark-haired mechanic in his mid-forties checked the short length of pipe for perhaps the tenth time. It had to be exactly right for its job. But the craftsman's eye which he ran over it told him little, for the secret was inside, hidden from view. From the outside, a perfectly standard Jaguar hydraulic brake pipe, but accurate drilling had made it so thin that under the high pressure of hard braking, the pipe would split apart like an over-inflated balloon.
When that happened, the fluid would not continue along the hydraulic system to the slave cylinders, there to ensure that the asbestos based pads gripped the hardened steel discs and hauled the big car down from whatever speed it was doing to a standstill. The fluid would instead squirt uselessly around the engine compartment - at least for the few seconds that the driver remained alive to keep the brake pedal depressed.
His skilled fingers now busy installing the pipe in Taft's car, Toni White smiled at the perfection of his plan - he'd even cover himself by writing on the invoice that a complete overhaul of the braking system was required.....That bitch, Taft, had it coming. Six months she'd given him, just for a little cut and shut job.
He was of course genuinely sorry, but sorry at being caught, not sorry at what he'd done, which like many others who live by crime, he somehow managed to rationalise as reasonable behaviour. It had started with 'clocking' cars - winding back the speedometer to show a lower mileage than the vehicle had actually covered. Although 'Tony' White, as he was then called, was of the opinion that a car which had covered a great distance in easy motorway cruising was likely to be in better condition than one used for low mileage inner-city work, and hence unfairly penalised in its re-sale value, the magistrate had not seen it like that, and had fined him five hundred pounds - a bit excessive for a first offence. Or at least, the first at which he'd been caught.
Then switching a car's ID to another. What harm did that do? A motor that matched one written off in a crash just happened to get stolen. All he did was take the VIN plates off the wreck and substitute them on the stolen motor, grinding out and replacing any stamped into the actual chassis. So who suffered? If it was properly insured, as it should be, the one with the nicked motor took the insurance money and bought a new one. And the insurers themselves were only doing what they took the suckers' premiums for. In any case, it's a well-known fact that there's nothing like a few claims to sell policies, so in a way he was even doing the insurance company a favour.
But what had happened? Some bastard had squealed, and he'd got a hundred hours community work, together with three months suspended sentence.
And so Tony White had progressed through the seedy lower echelons of crime to grime - the grime of the cut and shut. For that can endanger lives. The cut and shut is where two wrecks are cut apart and the best bits of each welded together into one vehicle. Superficially the result often looks okay, but the integral chassis of the modern car was not designed for such drastic adaptation, which lacks structural rigidity, or what a skilled driver would call integrity.
But was it his fault that the prat who had been only too pleased to buy a low priced motor, knowing it might be a bit 'dodgy', couldn't drive, and had to show his girlfriend what his new wheels could do on a country road when it was loaded with petrol and the driver loaded with 'pop'?
Although nearly two years had since passed, and the jail sentence was behind him, White remembered the moment like he remembered no other. The magistrate, Councillor Taft, looking down like she was God Almighty, her voice strong and confident as she gave her verdict, ''The time has come to show you where your criminal exploits lead. A short, sharp shock is called for, and accordingly I sentence you to three months, to run consecutively with the three months suspended sentence already awarded to you.....''
At the memory, White's anger flowed easily and immediately into present-day violence, and he thumped the car he was working on with his fist. Again the memory - the previous suspended had been 'awarded to him', like it was a prize or something.
In jail, he had become determined to make a new start, to move to a location where his face was not associated with villainy. That was not to say he was determined to go straight, but rather not to be automatically a police suspect for any minor misdemeanour which took place.
Then one night, lying on his narrow cot in the confines of his prison cell, his mind had moved on, almost daydreamed....If he was going to move, he might as well go somewhere pleasant, away altogether from Britain with its dirt and damp and police, somewhere the sun shone, and the booze was cheap. So in jail, at the tax-payers' expense, he had started to study Spanish.
If you do just one subject even for a short time you can become fairly proficient, and by directing the energy and intellect he used in his criminal career to that one subject, by the time of his release, Tony White was indeed proficient in his new language.
On release, his first port of call had naturally been the Costa del Sol, which just a few years before had been known as the Costa del Crime. But somehow it seemed to lack identity, the long main road which connected the various communities along its path failing to offer the spirit of community he'd enjoyed back home.
So he'd motored up to the Costa Blanca, which he preferred, and which seemed less frantic in the way it conducted itself. Then on a whim he'd put his 'S' Type Jag on the ferry from Denia to Ibiza. And that was it - immediately he felt he'd found his new home, enjoying the way in which ex-pats from various parts of Europe all integrated with the local Ibicencans and Spanish to form a community that actually worked.
After he'd found and rented a vacant workshop, and used the same contact to take a short-term rental on an apartment, he'd left the Jag in Ibiza and flown home to sell up his 'grease-monkey' garage to a small-time developer. A contact he'd made in Ibiza had recommended a firm in Southampton as being something of an authority on moving to Ibiza, and the company had indeed obliged with packing his tools and workbenches and personal effects in a very professional way, which seemed to indicate they knew what they were doing.
Tony White had so far never regretted chasing the sun to Ibiza. He'd rapidly built a decent social life, and even found work more pleasurable in his garage cum workshop on a small industrial estate, situated on the northern outskirts of Ibiza, to the west of the San An road. To pull in more punters, he'd changed the spelling of his Christian name to the Spanish 'Toni' and adopted the word 'Taller', meaning workshop or garage, and pronounced by the Spanish as 'Talyer'. Thus Taller Toni was born, specialising in British cars, but able to turn its hand to anything.
Then incredibly, just over a year ago at a bar in the Plaza del Parque in Ibiza, he'd met Sheila Taft. She'd recognised him immediately, and had no hesitation in making a beeline to speak to him. She seemed surprised but pleased that, like herself, he too had emigrated, was not just on holiday, and had laughed at what she called 'the coincidence' of them both choosing the same island.