Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

“Okay. And we didn’t get here till around five this morning, so it took us eleven hours to make it, and we were doing six or seven knots all the way – well, except for an hour or two when we were looking for Scofield, so say the distance had to be a minimum of fifty miles, am I right?”

“Yeah…” Oh, jeez, he thought as he finally, belatedly grasped the point that Phil and John were making. Maybe his brains had been a little scrambled. They were absolutely right; how could it be Cisco? Whatever the bones said, it was impossible. He would have had to be in two places at the same time.

“I see-” he began, but stopped himself before the words were out of his mouth. John didn’t very often get to win a Socratic argument with him, and Gideon didn’t want to deprive him of the experience.

“So,” declared John exultantly, “you want to tell me how Cisco could beat the boat here? How he could cover fifty miles in two hours? There aren’t any roads out there. What’d he do, run?”

Frowning, honestly mystified, Gideon shook his head. “You’re right, it doesn’t compute, does it? And yet I can’t make myself believe… I mean the odds against-” His face lit up. “Wait a minute. Maybe, just maybe, it does compute. Maybe he did beat the Adelita here!”

Now it was their turn to look confused. “‘Splain yourself, Lucy,’” Phil said.

“Come on back to the boat,” Gideon said. “We need to check something out.”

They carried the bones back to the Adelita on the plywood square, left them on the bed in Gideon’s cabin, and went looking for Vargas. They found him in the wheelhouse with Chato, apparently preparing to get underway again for Leticia, but before they opened the door he slipped somewhat furtively out to meet them, closing the door behind him. The trip had begun a mere five days ago, but the captain looked as if he’d aged twenty years.

“Professor, you told them” – he indicated John and Phil – “what happened?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Everything?”

“Yes.”

His face fell. “Did you… did you told anyone else?” He was still shaky, and so was his English.

All three shook their heads no.

“I got a big favor to ask.” He chewed on his lip and gazed beseechingly at them. “I never done nothing like this before. I never going to do it again, I swear! Was all Dr. Scofield. Please, don’t tell no one else.”

“Yeah, but didn’t the others already see you throwing the coffee overboard?” Phil asked.

“Yes, sure, and I explained them everything.”

Not quite everything, it turned out. He had faithfully given them the essential details of all that had happened – the “rocks” hidden in the coffee bags, the runners who were to pick it up at the warehouse, the forced meeting with Guapo, the reason the bags were being chucked in the river, and so forth. All he had omitted was the little fact that he had known anything about it before being informed by Guapo (to Vargas’s horror and amazement) that the Adelita was carrying coca paste. It had all been Scofield’s doing, accomplished without Vargas’s knowledge. Vargas was merely an innocent, victimized by a cunning criminal.

“And they believed that?” asked John.

Vargas shrugged pitifully. “I hope.” He awaited their response as if his life was in their hands, which wasn’t that much of an exaggeration. “I don’t want to go to jail!” he blurted.

“Up to you, John,” Gideon said, and Phil signaled his agreement with a nod.

Gideon was willing to believe Vargas when he said that this was his first experience with drug transporting and that he’d been scared enough by Guapo never to do it again. His inclination was to go along with him, to let the poor guy put it all behind him, and he knew that Phil, being Phil, would feel the same way, only more strongly. But John was the arbiter in such matters, and Gideon honestly didn’t know what he would do. He could be unbending when it came to breaking the law, especially concerning drug-trafficking, but he was also a genuinely nice guy with a lot of sympathy for people in trouble.

“I’ll take everything into consideration, Captain,” he said magisterially. “For the moment we’ll keep it to ourselves. In the long run, we’ll have to see.”

Vargas’s eyes closed in relief. Obviously, he took it (as did Gideon) as meaning that he was off the hook.

“But I’ll tell you this: if I ever hear your name in connection with the drug trade again – even a suspicion of connection – and I have my contacts – I will get in touch with the Peruvian authorities instantly. You understand?”

Vargas’s eyes misted. “God bless you, Juan.” He looked as if he might kiss John’s hand if given the chance. “God bless you all.”

“There was something we wanted to ask you,” Gideon said, embarrassed. “Do you have a chart of the river that we could look at?”

“A chart? You mean, a nautical chart? Of the Rio Javaro? There isn’t no such thing. All there is is a map.”

“That’ll do fine.”

“Come, is inside.”

A narrow, four-foot-long strip map that followed the snakelike river, from where it left the Amazon to where it rejoined it at Leticia, had been tacked to the back wall of the wheelhouse. It had been folded and unfolded so many times that it was coming apart at the creases despite several yellowing layers of transparent tape laid along them.

“Can you show us where it was that we stopped yesterday afternoon?”

“Mmm…” Calculating, Vargas moved his finger in little circles and brought it down on a spot. “Here.”

Gideon laid his right forefinger on it and left it there. “And the warehouse, where was that?”

A painful little wince wrinkled Vargas’s forehead at the hated word, but he pointed to another spot. “Here. San Jose de Chiquitos.”

Gideon realized he had been holding his breath. Now he exhaled with satisfaction. There. He’d been right. He laid his left forefinger down on the spot and smiled. “See?”

“Wow,” said John.

“Whoa,” said Phil.

It was so obvious that no explanation was necessary. Gideon’s fore-fingers were only an inch apart, approximately two miles. Because the Javaro was a giant series of undulating, incurving loops, it doubled back on itself in places, creating slender necks of land that were only two or three miles wide. The warehouse and the place they had stopped yesterday – the place where Cisco had last been seen – were on either side of one of these necks, directly opposite each other. Thus, while the Adelita had to negotiate a wide, fifty- or sixty-mile arc to get from one to the other, Cisco had only to cross a two-mile strip of land. Sweltering, brutal, unforgiving jungle land, to be sure, but Cisco was no stranger to that. Two hours would have given him ample time to reach the warehouse and start the fire. And get himself punctured by a nail gun in the doing.

The question was: Why? Guapo had said that “my man” had started the fire. But surely Cisco – poor crack-brained, strung-out Cisco – couldn’t have been tied in with El Guapo?

“Ah, but he could, he could!” Vargas cried. “He used to run errands for some of those people – dirty little jobs they didn’t want to do for themselves.” Now that the worst was presumably over, his easy command of English was back. “Sure, they probably paid him a few soles to set it. That’s the answer.”

A few minutes’ further discussion laid out a probable scenario: Guapo or his representative had gotten in touch with Cisco when he’d learned that Cisco would be on the Adelita – or possibly Cisco had gotten in touch with Guapo to see if there was any little paid service he could perform. And Guapo had taken him up on it. The plan, and it was a good one, seemed evident now. When they stopped for their trek the previous day – and, tellingly, it was Cisco who’d chosen the place to moor – Cisco would call off the hike to the shaman’s village and say he was going back to the boat. Instead, he would head on foot for the warehouse and set it afire. When the Adelita showed up the next morning and the passengers got off to look around, he would get back on the boat when they did. No one would be likely to notice that he hadn’t gotten off there. Why would they?