Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

Vargas blinked. “Ah… no?”

“No. You are going to throw it overboard. Into the river.”

“Into the-? But, sir, as I told you, I do not know which bags it’s in.”

“That doesn’t matter because you are going to throw all the coffee bags into the river. My Indian friends will take you back and will watch you do it. And my sincere advice is not to try and trick them. And never, never let me hear of you in this province again. Do you understand?”

“I understand, Guapo, but all the coffee? I have no insurance, I will have to pay for it myself-”

“Are you arguing with me? Negotiating with me, goddamn you? You should be thanking me for not burning your lousy boat and you with it,” Guapo said, looking as if it was still a distinct possibility.

“No, no, Guapo, of course not, Guapo,” Vargas mumbled. “Whatever you say. Thank you for your understanding. I can promise you-”

“And in case you’re wondering whether the Arimaguas have a number for ‘forty-eight’ (which was exactly what Gideon was wondering), I should tell you that they will have a bag with forty-eight pebbles in it. Each time a coffee sack goes in the river, a pebble is removed from the bag. When you have finished, you’d better hope that there are no pebbles left in the bag.”

“Of course, Guapo,” Vargas said glumly.

“And you,” Guapo said, turning to Gideon. “Now what are we to do with you?”

“I have some good ideas,” said a grinning Fox-face. The burning cigarette stuck to his lower lip couldn’t have been more than a half inch long.

“No, no, an American professor,” Guapo said, “I don’t think we want that kind of trouble. I’ll tell you what, Professor. You give me those pretty American dollars you have in that wallet of yours – you can keep the lousy soles – and I will send you back to the ship with your good friend the captain to go on with your life. You’ll have a good story to tell. What do you say?”

Gideon looked at Guapo, at the big knife, at the leering Fox-face, at the other armed men, and sighed.

“Sounds fair to me,” he said.

Showered, changed, his cuts and bug bites attended to, Gideon felt like a human being again. The hike back to the ship hadn’t been as bad as the one from it (the fire-ant mound was given plenty of room this time), and a glorious pint of carambola juice – looking like orange juice but tasting like cool, thinned-down papaya juice – that he had poured down his throat had brought him back to life. They had been gone a mere three hours, he was shocked to learn. It had seemed like ten.

He had told his story to a fascinated, half-incredulous John and Phil and answered their hundred questions. Now they were lounging at the grassy edge of the thirty-foot bank overlooking the Adelita, having just watched a gray-faced Vargas, who looked like death on two legs, supervise the dumping of four-dozen sixty-kilo sacks of coffee – and presumably a fortune in coca-paste balls – into the Javaro River. The other passengers had watched from the deck, subdued, shocked – and no doubt thrilled – with the knowledge that Arden Scofield had been up to his eyeballs in drug-trafficking. The Arimaguas had disappeared back into the jungle, leaving their forty-eight pebbles behind in six neat rows, and the three-man crew that had dumped the sacks – Chato, Porge, and the cook, Meneo – were sitting on some logs along the muddy riverside a few yards downstream, taking a cigarillo break.

“I knew that Scofield was a blowhard,” John was saying, “but a drug-trafficker?” He shook his head. “What a piece of crap. What did I tell you, Doc? Did I say it was all about drugs, or didn’t I?”

“That you did,” Gideon said. “You were right, and I was wrong.”

John’s hands flew up. “Phil, did he just say what I think he said? Write it down, nobody’s gonna believe it!”

They sat companionably for a little longer and then Phil said: “Oh, there were some developments while you and Vargas were on your little junket.”

“Oh?”

“The guy that was shot with the nail gun? We found out who he was.”

Gideon sat up. “You did? Who?”

“Well, not exactly who,” said John. “We know what he was doing here, and why he got shot. And who shot him.” A ghost of a smile. “‘Nailed him,’ I guess we should say.”

Phil took up the narrative from there. Two Indians, who said they were members of a peaceable, fairly well-assimilated Yagua settlement a day’s canoe journey upstream, had appeared at the warehouse site not long before to collect what they said were their belongings – hammocks, cups and utensils, a few articles of clothing – from the platform house near the warehouse. Phil had gone to chat with them. They were frightened and shy and in a hurry to leave again, but Phil had wormed a surprising amount of information out of them with the aid of a couple of bottles of Inca Kola, a little rum, and two cigars. They had been the property’s caretakers and had been engaged for the past week in the construction work necessary to strengthen and enlarge the warehouse.

“Who were they working for?” Gideon asked. “Who was paying them?”

“I didn’t think to ask,” Phil said, and then after a moment, with some irritation: “Why would I ask that? Jeez. Anyway, they told me they’d been fishing for dorado from the bank about five o’clock yesterday afternoon when they smelled smoke. And when they climbed back up to the warehouse, they found this guy in the doorway, right in the act of setting a match to a pile of newspapers and scrap wood. A couple of other piles were already burning inside, on the wooden floor.”

“Ah, that would have been Guapo’s man,” Gideon said. “One of the Arimaguas, I bet. He was an Indian, right?”

“I have no idea.”

“You didn’t ask what he looked like?”

“No.”

“You’re kidding me. You don’t know if he had a bone in his nose, or was wearing a loincloth, or had shoes, or, or-”

Phil sighed and looked at John. “What do you think, does he really want to hear the rest of this or not?”

“Sorry,” Gideon said. “I’ll be quiet.”

They had yelled at the man, who had turned, screamed something unintelligible back at them, and begun to fling burning pieces of wood at them. One of them – they wouldn’t say which – had threatened him with the nail gun, meaning to scare him off, but when a flaming chunk of plywood hit him in the shoulder the gun had gone off, and the man had been shot through the head and very, very obviously killed. Terrified, they had fled into the jungle. Today, they had come back for their things, unaware that the Adelita was moored below.

“I scared them half to death by showing up, apparently out of nowhere,” Phil said, “but I got them to open up with my celebrated friendly, open, and unthreatening manner.”

“And Inca Kolas spiked with rum,” Gideon said. “Am I permitted to ask a question yet?”

Phil responded with a gracious wave. “Speak.”

“Did you happen to inquire as to what happened to the body?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Phil said. “They said he staggered away, fell over the edge into the river, and disappeared.”

“No, that part never happened. When your brain is blown apart, you don’t do any staggering. You drop where you are.”

“Yeah, you already told us that. So my guess is they just picked him up and dumped him in the river themselves. Either way-”

“-he’s in the river,” said John.

Any further thoughts were interrupted by an excited clamor from the crew members on their break down below at the riverfront. They were jabbering in pidgin Spanish, pointing down into the water, and calling, apparently, to Gideon. He was able to understand a few words: “ Oiga, esqueletero! Aqui le tengo unos huesos!” Hey, skeleton man, I have some bones for you!