"The blue horse

Title: Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Blue

Author: Debby A

Category: 500-word challenge

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"The blue horse!"

Harold watched Rosie's ice cream slide unnoticed down her cone, melting in the heat of the fair's midway. Oblivious to it, she tugged at Cal's shirt again, pointing excitedly. "The blue horse!"

"You sure?" Cal played with the softball in his hand. "How about the teddy bear?"

"No, the horse!" she insisted, annoyed.

Cal shrugged and took aim at the little painted target underneath the stuffed blue horse hanging on the game booth's corkboard. He let the ball fly, hitting it dead center.

"The kid wins!" the operator yelled cheerily for everyone on the midway to hear. "A prize for the little lady!"

Rosie reached eagerly for the blue horse, blindly handing her dripping cone towards her parents. Edith took it, ice cream leaking onto her hands. Harold grabbed a wad of napkins from his shirt pocket and handed them to his wife. A business card floated to the ground out of the mess.

Cal picked it up. "'ALL TYPES OF PLUMBING SERVICE -- 3056.' What's this?"

"That's someone's idea of a joke." Harold grabbed the card, shoving it back into his pocket. "And its not funny."

But Cal thought it *was* funny. And for that matter, so had Edith, for a week now. If only for that reason, whoever had spread those business cards around would have to pay. And pay they would, now that the obvious culprits had snickered past his office once too often.

"Look, Daddy!" Proudly, Rosie thrust her new toy up at him. The garish little stuffed animal's fur and wild mane were already shedding all over Harold's pants. Great. He'd spend his weekend covered in tiny strings of cheap blue fur and the rest of the week answering an endless stream of crank phone calls.

Unless, he suddenly thought, maybe there was a way to use this to his advantage…

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Harold busied himself all Monday morning, gleefully watching the clock. The call came at 10:15. Send them up, he told the lobby as he moved to the doorway for a better view.

The bullpen door opened as a delivery boy struggled in, dragging a dolly loaded down with oversized boxes. "Um, a delivery for," he checked his clipboard, "Starsky and Hutch?"

Harold pointed at their matched pair of empty desks. "Put 'em over there."

"Uh, here, sir?" the kid squeaked. "It's… kind of a lot of boxes."

I know, Harold thought. Boy, do I know….

"That's all right, son. Over there is exactly where they belong."

So the delivery boy reluctantly did what he was told. As the whole department watched, case after case after case of blue stuffed horses came upstairs. They soon covered the desks and the chairs and spilled onto the floor until no one could walk anywhere around Starsky and Hutch's desks.

And when the kid was done, Harold walked over and perched one perfectly ridiculous fuzzy blue horse on the top box, with a rubber-stamped business card that read: "ALL TYPES OF PLUMBING SERVICE -- 3056".

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