Jamaican Wedding Part VI

The sun was setting and it was a damn beautiful sight although I imagined DB would have rather been watching it with his sweetheart. At that very moment though the bride to be had other more romantic visions that needed attending to. She was in the resort lobby at the cyber café Googling Jamaican beach front properties.

DB tossed his plastic cup of rum on the beach. “God damn it, what where you thinking? Telling Summer I was going to buy a beach house down here.”

I lit up a cigarillo and blew the smoke over my head. “I thought you were doing well.”

“I am but a beach house down here would cost millions. I’m not doing that well.”

“Well, then maybe you shouldn’t go around making promises you can’t keep.”

“I didn’t make any promises. You’re the one making promises!”

“Right,” I said. “I may have dug a bit of a hole for you but my heart was in the right place.”

“Oh, my God, sometimes you just don’t make any sense.”

“I’m a hard man to get to know but we can talk about that later. Timball and his men are going to come here looking for us eventually. We have to come up with a plan.”

“We have to come up with a plan? No, you have to come up with a plan. This is supposed to be my wedding trip not some cat and mouse espionage game for amateurs.”

“This isn’t espionage for amateurs. This is the real deal.”

I heard someone’s feet in the sand and turned. It was Macho Man. He was wearing some sort of weird yellow and red handkerchief thing on his head. It made him look like a pro wrestler.

“The real deal?” DB said.

“It seems I have once again inadvertently walked into mayhem. It is of course my nature. I can do things no other way,”

“Ha,” DB cried, “Inadvertently? How come these sorts of things never happen to anybody else?”

“Luck? Alignment of the stars? Hell, I don’t know. These things happen to the Captain quite a bit too. It’s something with the way we’re built I suppose.”

“Bullshit, I’m going up to my room. This is all too much. I have a wedding to prepare for.”

“You should stay out of your room. Timball will find you,” Macho Man said.

“Whatever,” DB said and marched off towards the resort lobby.

“Does this captain guy have the disk?” Macho Man asked.

“Yeah, he said he hid it in a good place.”

“Where?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“Oh, well okay, as long as it’s safe.”

It seemed as if Macho Man was acting strangely. Of course I was keenly aware that my paranoia might be the manifestation of deep rooted childhood fears and the lingering effects of the copious amounts of rum and marijuana in my system. And yet still I couldn’t quite control myself…

“Did you just laugh at me?” I asked.

Macho Man titled his head and looked into my eyes. “Laugh?”

His eyes were red around the edges and it wasn’t just from the mascara he was wearing irritating the liner of his eyes. He was as stoned as I was.

“How do I know I can trust you? Why wouldn’t you just take that disk and run? How can I trust anyone with a Macho Man tattoo?” I said.

Less than five feet away was a freshly lit tiki torch. I looked at Mach Man and he looked at me and at the same moment we dove for it. I guess we both thought it would make an excellent weapon or perhaps, for a reason only the tilted mind can comprehend, we both wanted that tiki torch, not to simply posses it but to deny the other of its fiery brilliance.

As I flew through the air time seemed to slow and I thought of the day’s events, how a wedding trip to Jamaica had turned into a surreal grind show and it hadn’t even been the Captain’s fault. An image of the Captain in his patriotic Speedos entered my head and I quickly purged it, replacing it with a hooker from the cavern. The last thing that went through my mind before our heads hit was what a shame it would be that I wouldn’t get to fully experience the good buzz I had at that moment.

* * *

I awoke to what I thought was sun’s bright light in my face. As my eyes adjusted I realized that the light in my eyes was of the artificial and overhead variety.

“I see you’re awake.”

I turned my head and there stood Timball and his goons. The Captain was tied to a chair next to him. Someone had fastened one of those hard hats with cup holders on it to his head and he was drinking Red Stripe through the straw. Macho Man was still unconscious on the floor next to me. From what I could make out we were in some sort of storage room surrounded by boxes.

“Why does he get beer?” I asked.

Timball picked at the carnation on the lapel of his white linen suit. “He’s been very cooperative.”

With all the might I could muster I tried to lunge to my feet. It was a feeble attempt and I only managed to get my head off the ground which then it slammed onto the cold hard cement. “You bastard.”

“That had to hurt,” Timball said.

I looked passed Timball to the Captain. He winked at me and I knew then that he hadn’t sold me out that he may have been a lot of things but he wasn’t a snitch. His loyalty to inebriation might have caused him to be creative and finagle the beer he was wearing on his hard hat but even in his darkest drunkest hour I knew he was still my friend. I silently scolded myself for even thinking that he might have given me up.

“I didn’t hurt half as much as I’m going to hurt you,” I said.

Timball’s goons took a step towards me but he stuck both his arms out and stopped them. With his thin arms spread out and spherical mid section he looked much like a cartoon pigeon in a suit. “You are in no position to threaten me.”

“No, but I am,” the Captain said.

For a moment Timball stood with his back to the Captain but then slowly turned towards him his face reddening. “I thought we had a deal.”

“You thought you had a deal but the rules are changing,” the Captain said. “You’ll get your disk but you’ll let my friend go.”

“I told you that he was going to die. No one steals from me. That part wasn’t negotiable,” Timball said. “I kept my part of the deal. I gave you the beer.”

The Captain slurped the last of the Red Stripe from his hard hat. “Well, I’m changing the rules. He doesn’t even know where the disk is hidden. I’m the only one that knows where it’s at.”

“How about I just kill you both?” Timball said.

“Fine and you’ll never get your disk,” the Captain said.

This didn’t sit well with Timball. His body began to quake and his face grew even redder. Without warning he turned on the heels of his shiny shoes and slugged one of his goons in the stomach. The goon barely flinched. Timball sighed. “Now, I feel better. And don’t even think that you’re both going to walk away from this little situation. One of you is going to die. I can’t let the competition think I’m getting weak.”

“Fine, my friend here walks,” the Captain said. “When I know he and my other friends are safe you’ll get your disk.”

It was obvious by the look on Timball’s face--which resembled a constipated warthog-- that he wasn’t used to negotiating that he simply brutalized and took what he wanted.

“Fine, fine fine! You’re friends walk. Untie him,” Timball ordered. “Now where is my disk?”

One of the goons untied me and I stood there for a moment. I couldn’t leave the Captain.

“What are you doing?” the Captain said. “Get out of here.”

I didn’t know what else to do so I headed towards the double doors and pushed them open. The door hit something. I looked around the open door and there was DB with his index finger over his mouth. “Shhhhhhhhhh.”

I let the door close behind me and a moment later three shots echoed inside the storage room.