Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

“Thank you!” she gasped. “I thought it was – Thank you!” He hardly recognized this wild-eyed woman as the formidable person of the last few days. Her face was bunchy with distress, and her hair, ordinarily so neatly arranged, was plastered over her face in limp, black strands that looked like seaweed. And she was weeping frenziedly, a sloppy, snuffly, child’s sobbing that convulsed her body, or at least the little of it that Gideon could see.

“You’re okay, Maggie,” he said, his hand comfortingly on her shoulder. “I’ve got you, you’re safe. Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m – I don’t think so, no.”

“What happened?” he asked. “Is there someone else in the water? I heard two splashes.”

“Yes – uck -” Choking on swallowed water, unable to speak, she turned her head away from him, coughing and spluttering.

The Adelita had swung around now and was turning to get back to them. Some of the others were out on deck in their underwear or pajamas, gesticulating and calling encouragement. Maggie, held by Gideon and supported by the life preserver, had sighed shakily a couple of times and begun to relax, when suddenly she went rigid. Her hand clamped on his forearm. “You have to get him!” she shouted, her face only inches from his. “He’s going to get away!”

“Who’s going to get away? Maggie, what happened?”

“No, you have to get him! He grabbed me! He threw me over!” She was crying again, and shoving against him.

“Catch hold now.” John’s reassuring voice came from above. “We’ll pull you up.”

The ship had come up alongside them, and the gate in the railing had been opened. John, dressed in T-shirt and boxers, as was Gideon, was kneeling in the opening, holding out a boat hook with a ten-foot-long shaft.

“You have to get him!” she said to Gideon again, even more urgently. “Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? He tried to kill me! He… he…”

“We’ll talk about it when we’re aboard,” Gideon told her firmly. “Let’s get ourselves up there first.”

“No, but…!” She stopped herself and nodded. “All right, yes.”

She caught hold of the proffered pole, and with Gideon steadying her from below and John pulling from above, she more or less climbed up the side of the boat to the deck, a distance of perhaps five feet. Gideon quickly followed. They both stood dripping on the deck while questions came at Maggie from all sides: “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

Still wracked with coughing, she shook her head at them. “Not hurt.”

“What happened? Who tried to kill you?”

In frustration, she shook her head again. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you-” She held her hand up while she went through another bout of deep, painful coughing. When it had run its course, she took in a slow, steadying breath, and let it out, cheeks inflated. Then she raised her head, feeble but very much more in control of herself.

“Cisco,” she said.

“Cisco tried to kill you?”

It seemed to Gideon that everyone there – John, Tim, Mel, and Vargas – said it at the same time, in exactly the same astonished tone. He wasn’t sure if he’d said it himself, or only thought it.

She seemed taken aback by the chorus of incredulity. “Well, I… I think it was Cisco. I mean I couldn’t see. It was dark, it was-”

She shuddered, then suddenly glanced down at herself, at the flimsy, wet summer bathrobe that was clinging to her and the men’s pajamas underneath, and then at the circle of males surrounding her. She lifted her chin and drew the robe around her with her arms. “I have to change,” she said stiffly. “Give me twenty minutes, if you please. Captain, I don’t suppose there’d be such a thing as hot chocolate on this ship?”

“Of course there is, professor. I’ll have it for you at once.”

“Thank you.” She turned to leave.

“But wait, where is he?” John asked. “Where is Cisco?”

“He jumped,” she said. “He’s gone. After he threw me in, that’s what I was trying to tell you!” An angry glare at Gideon. “But you’ll never find him now, not after all this time.” Then, with a final, penetrating, accusing glance at Gideon, she turned and swept away and up the stairway, with considerable elan.

“What did you do to her?” John asked Gideon. “I thought you just saved her life.”

Gideon shrugged. “I thought so too. I guess I took too long.”

“Dames,” Mel said, the voice of experience. “You can’t please ’em.”

She had been sound asleep, she explained. She had been roused by what she thought was scuffling that seemed to be coming from next door – not from Gideon’s cabin, of course, but from Scofield’s, on the other side. Then, still three-quarters asleep – she wasn’t sure if it was minutes later, or only seconds – she heard what seemed to her to be someone being violently sick outside her cabin. She put on her robe and went out on deck to see if she could help. Cisco – if it was Cisco – was standing there with his back to her in what looked like a nightshirt, or maybe it was just a long shirt down almost to his knees, gripping the railing with both hands, mumbling to himself, and staring fixedly down into the moving water.

She paused to sip the hot chocolate that Vargas had given her, hunched over the cup and holding it with both hands as if to warm them, although the temperature was still in the eighties. It was two-thirty in the morning, still pitch-black. Everybody but Scofield, who had been observed to have had a couple of pots of his “digestive” tea up on the roof earlier that night, was there now, gathered around her at their table in the dining room. They were all in walking shorts and polo shirts or tank tops, the established daily uniform of choice. Vargas had made “fresh” coffee by opening a new jar of Nescafe.

She continued. Something about his rigid posture, about how tightly he was clutching the rail, told her that something terrible had happened. She was frightened. She began to back quietly away, back to the safety of her room, but the movement must have caught his eye. He had her before she’d taken two steps, both of his arms around her, squeezing the breath out of her. In what seemed like a fraction of a second he’d wrestled her to the railing and heaved her over. Cisco was incredibly strong, far, far stronger than he looked. If it was Cisco.

“Maggie,” Duayne said, “Cisco’s a pretty strange-looking man. So skinny… and the way he holds his head… I’d think he’d be recognizable, even from the back.”

“Well, he wasn’t,” Maggie snapped. “It was dark, he had on this long thing, he was turned the other way. Maybe I should have asked him for an ID?”

“No offense, Maggie,” Duayne said, taken aback. “I only meant-”

“Captain, where does Cisco sleep?” John asked.

“In the next to the last cabin on the port side, next to the storage rooms.”

“Tim, would you go check that room, please? Knock, and if you don’t get an answer, open the door and peek in, see if he’s there.” Gideon could see that John had assumed his cop persona. A crime had been committed, there was no responsible official there to look into it, and so John, being John, had readily jumped in as the man in charge, a state of affairs that no one seemed about to challenge.

“Why didn’t you yell for help?” he asked Maggie.

She blinked, as if it was something that hadn’t occurred to her before. “I don’t know,” she said, frowning. “You think that’s what you’d do, you know that’s what you should do, but when it happens to you, your mind doesn’t work right. And it was so quick! The whole thing couldn’t have taken two seconds. I was flying through the air before I knew what was happening. It was as if I was paralyzed,” she mused. “I couldn’t struggle, couldn’t scream, couldn’t-” She ran out of words and shook her head.