Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

“Maggie, that’s a pretty bad gash you’ve got on your leg,” Gideon said. He’d only noticed it a moment before. “You’d better get some antiseptic on that and cover it up. In this kind of climate you don’t want to take any chances.”

“ What?” She stared down at her leg – the wrong leg first, then the right one, then reached down to touch, very gingerly, a still-bleeding wound on the inside of her left ankle. Blood had seeped down into and spotted her white sneakers, worn without socks. “I didn’t even know I had this,” she said with wonder. “I didn’t feel a thing.” She produced a Kleenex and dabbed it against the wound.

“That’s because your system’s still in shock. Don’t worry, you’ll feel it when the vasoconstriction reverses. Any minute now.”

“I remember, I hit my leg on the railing as I was going over. That’s when it must have happened. I think I even gave a yelp, but-”

“You did,” Gideon said. “That’s what woke me up.”

“And thank heavens it did!” she said fervently, and then her face softened. “Gideon, I haven’t really said thank you to you.”

“As a matter of fact, you did. The very first thing. After you finished slugging me.”

She laughed. “I’m sorry about that. I thought you were Cisco. Oh dear, I split your lip, didn’t I?”

“It’s nothing,” said Gideon, who had been dabbing a tissue at his mouth. By now the bleeding, hardly copious to begin with, had almost entirely stopped.

“Well, when we get to Leticia, I owe you the biggest, best dinner money can buy.”

“Oh, I think a beer’ll cover it,” he said, smiling.

She returned the smile. “You’ve got it. Anyway, as soon as I landed in the water my brain started working again and I screamed for help. Then when somebody yelled ‘Man overboard’-”

“Me again,” Gideon said.

“-he just climbed over and heaved himself into the river too.”

Ah, and that was the second splash, thought Gideon. Until then he’d been uncertain whether he’d really heard two splashes, or if he’d imagined – dreamed – one of them.

“I saw him hit the water,” Maggie continued, “but it was too dark to really see anything. Then you showed up and I thought it was him coming after me. I don’t know what happened to him. I hope he drowned.”

“He probably just swam for the shore,” said John. “Probably made it without any problem too. The Javaro’s not much more than a hundred yards wide here. Maggie, do you have any idea of why he would have attacked you?”

She shook her head slowly back and forth, still cradling the mug of hot chocolate. “I don’t have a clue. I guess he was… well, you know how he was.”

“Yeah, the cheese slid off his cracker a long time ago,” Mel said.

“I want to apologize,” a visibly disturbed Vargas said. He had run off to get some antibiotic cream and a supersized Band-Aid for Maggie, and having applied them, he was hovering over her with the pot of hot chocolate, punctiliously topping off her cup every time she had a sip. “I had no way of knowing the man was… was crazy, insane. I assure you, if I had any idea-”

“Nobody’s blaming you, Captain,” John said. “All right, let’s-”

“He’s not there.” Tim had returned. He was standing at the entrance to the dining room, looking sick and shaky, making no move to approach.

“Hey, buddy, what’s the matter?” Phil asked.

“I-” He had to steady himself on the doorjamb. It seemed to take all his courage to continue. “I checked Dr. Scofield’s room too. He’s not there either. He’s… he’s dead, I’m sure of it.”

“Oh, hell, he’s probably still up on the roof,” Mel said, “sleeping it off. He lapped up a hell of a lot of ‘tea’ last night.”

Duayne nodded. “Yes, that’s probably so. Yesterday morning, I was up there early to see the sunrise, and he was still in his deck chair, sound asleep.”

Tim was shaking his head, back and forth, back and forth. “No… no…”

“Well, why would you think he’s dead?” Maggie said irritably, perhaps vexed at being yet again shoved from center stage by Scofield.

“Because-”

“No, hold it,” John said. “Before we go there, let’s just see if he is upstairs.”

“I’ll go and check,” Phil said, getting up.

But Tim continued to shake his head, looking sicker by the second. “I’m telling you. You won’t find him.”

Phil soon returned, shaking his head. “Not there.”

A search of the nonpassenger section of the ship by one of Vargas’s crew produced the same result.

Arden Scofield was no longer aboard the Adelita.

“Okay, Tim,” John said. “Let’s hear it. What’s going on here?”

Tim had joined them at the table by now, and Vargas had had the galley scare up some hot, predawn picarones and honey for them, which all but Tim were attacking as if they’d had nothing to eat for a week.

“I should have told you before,” Tim said miserably. “I almost did, really – but I never thought – I mean the idea that he would – Jesus Christ, I still can’t believe it! I mean-” And his face was in his hands.

“Goddamn it, Tim-!” John began, but Gideon stopped him with a hand on his arm. He made up a cup of heavily sugared coffee for Tim and put it in front of him. “Tim,” he said gently, “take a couple of sips. That’s right, good. Okay? Now. Take your time. Who are you talking about? Who is ‘he’?”

Tim lifted a haggard face. “Cisco. Cisco killed him.”

In the general burst of exclamations that followed this, a thought flitted briefly across Gideon’s mind: it seemed as if an awful lot was being blamed on someone who wasn’t there to speak for himself.

“He threw him overboard,” Tim continued.

“You know that?” Gideon asked.

“No, I don’t know it; how could I know it? But it’s obvious. That was the scuffling that Maggie – Dr. Gray – heard, don’t you see?”

“Well, why would Cisco-” Mel began.

With a wave of his hand John quieted him and retook command. “Captain, don’t you think you’d better run up to the wheelhouse and turn the boat around and go back and see if you can spot Professor Scofield? You might have a look for Cisco as well.”

Vargas, at his usual station overseeing the buffet table, jumped to comply. “Meneo, you come too,” he said in Spanish. “I want you and Chato up front searching for them. Take the other lamp.”

“Okay, Tim,” John said, “go ahead. Why would Cisco want to kill Dr. Scofield?”

“He hated him, that’s why. That stupid spider in his bag? That was Cisco. That thing with the spear and the shrunken head? That was Cisco too. He just wanted to, to scare him, to humiliate him.”

Gideon permitted himself a small, internal a-ha of satisfaction, and from across the table Phil doffed an imaginary hat in his direction.

“You knew about that – about the spider and the shrunken head – and you didn’t tell anyone?” John asked, seeming to swell as he grew more stern.

“I…” Tim’s expression had become more shamefaced than anything else. “I didn’t know about it at the time, no. He told me later, up on the roof that night.”

“But you kept it to yourself. You didn’t tell anyone.”

“I… no. I’ll tell you the truth, I thought it was funny – well, I did.” He paused to drink more coffee. “I thought he had it coming.”

“And did he tell you he was going to kill him too?”

A sudden twitch of his fingers jammed the cup onto its saucer, slopping coffee over the side. “ No! It’s just that it makes sense now, after what happened to Maggie and everything. He threw Dr. Scofield overboard too. How hard would it have been to dump him over the side if he was all doped up from that tea?”