Hours, maybe even days, later I sat at the hotel bar. The place was crowded, and I mean crowded. About ever damn seat was filled. Next to me on my right sat a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt. His hair had faded away to a couple of white poofs around his temples and he drank from a bent straw that stuck out of his pina colada like a periscope.

On my other side, a fat woman in an unflattering muumuu designed to make the sun itself look dim and drab.

I said the courteous hello when they each showed up, but made sure they knew that’s all they were getting from me.

I sat there and I drank. First a Malibu and coke, then a vodka cranberry. I didn’t know what the hell to drink. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing in that hotel bar. Hadn’t I been in my room?

Hadn’t I been looking at something?

“Another?” The bartender asked me. He looked like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, if Shaggy wore board shorts and an untucked polo shirt. I counted the dandruff flakes around the front of his collar as I shook my head and put my palm over the rim of my glass. No more for me, thanks.

I downed the last of the watery vodka and cranberry juice and looked behind me. I could almost make out a path through the throng of people grinding on the dance floor. I’d have to chance it.

I stood on uneasy feet. Wobbled, and caught myself on the shoulder of the fat woman.

“Sorry,” I said and looked at her forehead.

“That’s ok,” she said through a heavy giggle. “I came down tonight figuring one of these young men would end up groping me.”

She laughed then at her own drollery.

“What?” I looked into her eyes.

“I was hoping to get a little action from someone tonight,” she said and showed me her messy teeth.

“Right,” I stammered. Maybe I’d had more to drink than I thought. “Sorry again.”

I about faced and nearly ran into everyone on the dance floor on my way to the door.

In the quiet of the hotel hallway I could hear my head pounding. I looked down at my hands. A few of my knuckles were bruised and my middle finger had a black nail. I stuck my hands into my pockets, ashamed and worried someone might see the state of them, and headed off in the direction of my room. That’s when I felt something in my pocket. I pulled out what I thought at first was a folded piece of paper.

Turned out to be a photograph. It’d been folded in half twice. When I unfolded it, the picture of a man wearing a white wife-beater in a small, filthy kitchen had been divided into four quadrants. In the top left quadrant his ugly face had been caught in a snarl.

I walked down the hall and stared at the picture. Before I realized where I’d been walking, I found myself outside my room. My hand instinctively snuck into my back pocket and found the plastic card key. It took three tries, but the door eventually opened.

Inside a man lay on the floor. The man from the photograph. My new case still sat open on the bed, and all the woman’s clothing and even the other pictures were still there, where I’d set them before I stepped outside. The door to the balcony had been left open and the sea breeze came at me over the man’s body. It carried a heavy odor of fresh death. A sweet smell that complimented the sea air. I coughed trying to hold back vomit. His face looked almost the same, just as scrunched and pained. He had a button-up, silk t-shirt on over the wife-beater. I rummaged through the pockets on his jeans, found twenty-dollars in a money clip, but nothing else. I pocketed the twenty and dropped the clip on his belly. The hollow sound it made when it landed made my skin crawl. That and the fact that his eyes were still open, for Chrissakes.