Licking his lips like a lascivious Lothario leering at a luscious lady-in-waiting, Percival approached the roast beef with a casual grace usually found only in ballet dancers or semi-professional fencing instructors—only to be stopped by a surly, slightly saucy sous-chef with an unruly mane of sassy strawberry blonde hair, who told him in no uncertain terms that dinner would not be served for another eighteen minutes—and that he should sit back down and put his goddamn personalized platinum fork away or risk its imminent emplacement in his nether regions.
From the corner of the cavernous, cacophonous creme-de-menthe-colored canopy under which the Hammernickie-Bluntschultz wedding reception was being held, Melanie eyed the exchange knowingly—having encountered Percival at a previous society soiree, she knew all too well his ponderous propensity for helping himself to roast beef…or mutton, or venison, or meat of most any kind—aside from pork, which Percival always declined “on behalf of my good friend Wilbur.”
Wilbur was seated at Table Fourteen, well away from Percival and his coterie of cross-dressing hangers-on, yet close enough to hear the titters and bon-mots thrown Percival’s way when he returned to Table Eight without any roast beef, having sheathed his platinum fork in a discreet shoulder holster-type apparatus that had been a gift from Holland’s Queen Beatrix herself, on the occasion of his ninth public comeuppance.
Wilbur stood up and took a lingering look around the gathering, his wandering eyes eventually landing on what they were seeking—Melanie, lurking in the corner, sipping a virgin Old Fashioned while scoping the assembled herd for a likely mark, a dupe, a patsy…a guy just like Wilbur was on the day they first met—when Melanie framed him for an arson she’d committed at a local pig farm, a tidy little trick that cost Wilbur eight years of his life in a federal prison in upstate New York.
Tossing his creme-de-menthe-colored chair aside with a manly flourish, Wilbur strode toward Melanie purposefully, his right hand reaching into his tastefully tailored jacket and grasping the recently-purchased pistol within—when he was jostled almost off his feet by Percival, who’d stumbled backwards hilariously in drunken mock-embarrassment under the barrage of his entourage’s roast beef jibes and japery.
“Oh, it’s you,” they both said simultaneously, albeit with totally different inflections and tones, since one of them was on his way to avenge eight wasted years on the grifter who had put him behind bars, while the other was simply careening aimlessly around the reception in search of an entree that would satisfy his burgeoning appetite—then the two old friends collapsed in laughter and back-slapping hugs, their previous goals forgotten in the haze of fellowship and the healthy doses of opium that had been slipped into every glass of champagne.
Everyone agreed it was a nice wedding.
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