Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

Beyond that, he was unsure of whether to unload the coffee at all. Was there supposed to be some signal sent to the drug boss in Cali to the effect that it had been deposited? Undoubtedly, yes, but the identity of the boss was another thing he had foolishly not wanted to know and therefore didn’t know. Should he simply leave the coffee and let whoever else was involved worry about it? Should he not unload it, but rather take it back to Iquitos with him? And then do what with it? Did the Colombian boss know who he was? If so, what would be his reaction when he learned the paste was not at the warehouse but still in Vargas’s possession? He wouldn’t be pleased, that was certain. Had he already paid money to Scofield? Vargas didn’t know that either, but he imagined so, since he himself had already received money from Scofield.

These were serious questions, life-and-death questions. The people in the cocaine trade were brutal in the extreme. When they were crossed, their vengeance was a terrible thing: death, certainly, but death in the most horrible ways imaginable. He himself had a cousin whose wife’s brother had been fed to ravening pigs – alive – because he had skimmed some trifling amount from the boss’s profits.

He came to a decision. Not unloading the coffee was out of the question. Somebody would come after him; there was too much money involved, and he had no wish to be fed to the pigs. He would simply unload everything, let events take care of themselves, and hope for the best.

He closed his eyes and crossed himself. God would protect him. He was not a gangster, a criminal; he was weak, that was all – the most human of failings. He had been led down the garden path by a clever, deceptive man. Only let him get out of this with his skin intact, and on his mother’s grave, he would never – never – again…

“So what do we think happened, exactly?” Phil asked. “I’m a little confused. Somebody go over the sequence for me.”

Phil, John, and Gideon were sitting in a nook at the rear of the upper deck, aft of the cabins. It was four-thirty and the first pale pink smears of the day were just beginning to show up ahead on the eastern horizon, although high in the sky, a single, torn shred of cloud was lit a flaming orange. The meeting in the dining room had broken up half an hour earlier, and the three had come up here to talk things over on their own.

“All right,” John said. “Apparently Cisco came after Scofield and-”

“When?”

“Well, it would have to have been right before Maggie came out of her cabin.”

“Where?”

“Where?”

“ Where did he come after Scofield?”

“In his cabin,” said Gideon. “Maggie heard them scuffling, remember? And Scofield’s room is right next to hers.”

Phil nodded. “Okay, so he walks in on Scofield, who is not only asleep, but pretty much gaga from that crap he drinks, and drags him out of bed, and flops him over the side, is that it?”

“Probably something like that,” John said. “Could be, he slugged him or… You know, I should take a look at the room, see if there’s any blood or anything.”

“Okay, and then what happens?” Phil asked.

“Then Maggie wakes up, goes outside, sees Cisco standing at the rail admiring his handiwork, and he turns around and sees her, and over the side she goes too, letting out a yell that Doc here hears.”

Gideon nodded.

“And then?” Phil persisted.

“And then,” said Gideon, “after I yell ‘Man overboard’ – and probably make a racket falling all over myself trying to get to the door in the dark – Cisco bids us good-bye too.”

“Uh-huh.” Phil was plainly doubtful. “And that’s it?”

“As far as we know,” John said. “What’s the problem?”

“Well, first, why would the guy just toss Maggie overboard? I mean, couldn’t he figure out she’d scream? Wouldn’t he, you know, knock her out or choke her or something?”

“Yeah, a rational person would,” John said, “but we’re talking about Cisco here. Who knows what he had in his system by that time of night?”

“Not only that,” said Gideon, “but if the guy had really just killed Scofield, Maggie’s showing up would have thrown him into a panic. And when you’re talking about panic, there’s no such thing as a rational person.”

“Okay, I can see that,” Phil allowed, “but what about the splashes?”

“What about the splashes?”

“There should have been three of them, but we only heard Maggie and Cisco hit the water. Why didn’t we hear Scofield?”

“What do you mean, ‘we?’ As far as I remember, I’m the only one who heard any of the splashes. You two were snoring away, right up to the ‘man overboard’.”

“Well, hell, we were further away,” John said. “You were right next to Maggie’s room.”

“And just one more down from Scofield’s,” Phil added. “So why didn’t you hear him go in too?”

“Phil, I was lucky to hear Maggie go in. It wasn’t the splashes that woke me up. It was that yelp when she cut her ankle. If not for that-”

John’s head came up. He sniffed once, twice. “Do I smell smoke?”

“Must be some more logging up ahead,” Phil said, as they got up to peer around the corner of the cabin block.

But there weren’t any logging projects along this stretch of the Javaro. The acrid smoke was coming from a charred, one-story wooden building built on the right bank above a rickety old pier that was under repair, with some jarringly clean new planks among the dark, rotten ones.

“Looks like a house,” Phil said. “What’s left of it, anyway.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Gideon said, looking at the blackened structure. “It’s pretty big for that, and that’s a fairly good-sized unloading pier down below. I think it’s some kind of commercial building. A warehouse or something.”

The fire had occurred not long before, sometime during the previous day, in all likelihood; there were no longer any flames to be seen, but curling gray wisps still rose occasionally from the burnt wood, and a few embers could be seen glowing here and there in the shadows. The flooring had buckled in places, but the walls still stood, and the corrugated metal roof had held. Fifty feet from the building was a simple, open-walled, thatch-roofed house on waist-high stilts, much like the ones they’d seen at the Ocaona village, untouched by the fire and deserted.

As the Adelita pulled up to the pier, a stricken Vargas stood gazing up from the deck like a man who’s just been told he has five minutes to live. “What am I supposed to do now?” he was saying to himself over and over in Spanish, sometimes with a desperate little hiccup of a laugh. “What in the name of God am I to do now?”

Gideon, standing not far from him, asked, in English, what was the matter.

“Is our warehouse. San Jose de Chiquitos. I be to unload the… the coffee beans here. Now how I do it? I don’t can!” In his extremity, his command of English had fled him again. He jerked his head to stare at Gideon. His eyes, protuberant to begin with, bulged a little more. “What I do with the coffee?”

He asked it – wailed it – as if he were really counting on Gideon to give him the answer, and Gideon didn’t know what to say. “Well, it isn’t as if it’s your fault,” he began soothingly. “Obviously, you can’t unload it here-”

“How this can happen?” Vargas muttered, barely hearing him. “Are guards, guards what live right here! How they can don’t see? And where they are now, why they don’t be here, can you tell me this?”

“Captain Vargas, however it happened, I guess you’ll just have to take it back to Iquitos. No one would expect you to-”

But Vargas, not listening at all now, was wandering dazedly away. “You don’t can understand… you don’t know…”