Dominican Showdown

When Danny arrived at one of the village restaurants for lunch the next day, the couple was already there. But the man leaned over and said something to the woman, after which he took money out of his wallet and they both left the restaurant even though their food was only half eaten. The Smith and Wesson was still strapped to his waist. It was there every time Danny saw the couple.

Danny’s own meal was only half eaten as well when two local policemen entered the restaurant, walked up to his table and politely but firmly requested that Danny accompany them to the local police station. There he was taken to a small interrogation room furnished with a wobbly wooden table and three chairs, one on one side of the table and two on the other. A large mirror was set in one wall, where the single chair faced. Danny was asked to sit in the single chair.

After a wait of nearly an hour sitting there all by himself, two men entered the room – an older-looking policeman and the man from the resort. They sat in the chairs opposite Danny, and the man opened a pouch he’d brought with him and had laid on the table and took Danny’s passport; hotel reservation printouts for here and the Cayman Islands, where he next was booked at a beach resort; and plane tickets out of the pouch and laid them on the table.

“You’ve been in my bungalow,” Danny said. “Those were in a locked safe.”

“Yes, Mr. Wilson,” the body-builder hunk with the gun on his hip said. “The local police are cooperating with me. It doesn’t take much in the Dominican Republic to obtain permission to search someone’s home. You have been paying a bit too much attention to me and the woman I’m with – enough to have raised questions why that was so.”

“It’s a small resort and off season,” Danny said. “I didn’t know that there were restrictions on where I could go just because you and your wife would be there too.”