A Hand with the Dishes
I phoned him a week ago and we exchanged pleasantries. "All well. Except, I'm in the dogbox of late."
In Stranveld Private Investigators Monty, one of the two protagonists, likes coming to Pearly Beach in his old Beemer to do doughnuts in the carpark.
They turned off Charlie van Breda onto the track down to the sea.
“Yippee, yippee, yip!” Monty sang out on sighting the deserted parking area overlooking Silversands. “Gravel! Glorious gravel! Every last parking area in Gansbaai is now under tar. Boring old lifeless tar. This is God’s own gift to a doughnut specialist. Yippee, yippee, yip!”
He stopped dead in the middle of God’s own expanse of gravel, wrenched the steering wheel as far over to the right as it would go, engaged second gear, got the Beemer’s six cylinders screaming for blood, and let the clutch loose. They did three revolutions, and he reined the clutch in. It was time to yank the wheel all the way left, get the revs up, and then spin the car in the other direction. When they came to a halt facing the sea again, Monty cut the engine and sighed with satisfaction. “Ah, that’s better!” he said, as if he was buckling his belt on emerging from a brothel, or a toilet. “I really needed to do that.”
Unfortunately for Monty, the Municipality is busy destroying every last expanse of gravel in Pearly Beach by covering it in a layer of tar.


Stranveld Private Investigators is available from Smashwords.

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