Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

To clinch her point, she gestured out the window beside their table, which overlooked Puget Sound, or as much of it as could be seen on this typical early-November day in Seattle. A dismal, freezing mist hung low over the dull gray water, totally closing out everything more than a few hundred yards offshore. As they watched, a big, green-and-white state ferry slid slowly away from Colman Dock and disappeared almost immediately into the murk, looking forlorn and bedraggled and without a single passenger out on the open, wet deck.

“Well, why doesn’t John go with you?” Julie said, then turned to address Marti’s husband directly. “You’re the one who’s always grumping about the Seattle weather, John. I would have thought you’d love a chance to be in sunny Mexico for a week.”

“Yeah, but not enough to sit still for getting scrubbed with a turnip,” John Lau said. “No, thanks, not my kind of thing.”

“Julie, I just don’t see what your problem is,” Marti said. “You already said you could get away.”

Julie nodded. She was a supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park headquarters in Port Angeles, she was overdue for some vacation time, and November was a good month to take it. “I could, yes…”

“Think of those warm, oily massages-”

“That’s just it. Actually, I’m not that crazy about massages.”

Marti stared at her. “How could anyone not be crazy about massages?”

“Julie doesn’t really enjoy being touched by other people,” said Gideon Oliver, her husband and the fourth and final member of the party. “Neither do I, for that matter.”

Marti guffawed. “That sure sounds like the recipe for a happy marriage.”

Julie smiled back at her. “Well, I make certain exceptions.”

“I’m relieved to hear it. Come on, though, will you at least think about it? It’d really be fun.”

“I am thinking about it,” Julie said, getting back to her wild-salmon-and-tarragon-mayonnaise sandwich. “Quite seriously.”

Old friends all, they were lunching at Maximilien in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where Marti had just sprung the surprise she’d so ponderously hinted at on the telephone the night before. She had bought a twenty-five-dollar raffle ticket at a charity event a month earlier, and had wound up winning the grand prize: a one-week, all-inclusive stay at Cabo San Lucas’s posh Mandalay-Pacific Spa, to be used anytime before the end of the year. For two. And she wanted company.

She poked impatiently at her cheeseless vegetarian tarte flambe. (Marti was a nutritionist at the Virginia Mason Medical Center in the city and imposed on herself – and claimed to like – the same meatless, fatless, saltless, sugarless regimen she inflicted on her captive clientele.) “So,” she pressed after all of thirty seconds, “have you thought about it?”

“Yes, and it does sound tempting. But, well…”

“I know what’s worrying you,” Marti said. “What would we do with the boys?”

“The boys?” John demanded.

“The boys?” Gideon said. “Are you by any chance referring to-”

“Well, I wouldn’t quite put it that way,” Julie said, ignoring them, “but I can’t help wondering how they’d get along for a week without us.”

In this they were engaging in the affectionate self-delusion of wives everywhere that, in the absence of their domesticating influence for even a week, their husbands would regress to the natural male status of unshaven, uncivilized, antisocial troglodytes, and they, the wives, would come home to find the beds unmade, the ashtrays littered with cigars, the floors with socks and underwear, and the kitchen sink overflowing with beer cans and old, crusted pizza boxes.

In point of fact, however, “the boys” in question were two accomplished men in their early forties, both well able to take care of themselves, and both with highly developed senses of personal hygiene. Gideon Oliver was a professor of physical anthropology at the University of Washington’s Port Angeles campus and a highly regarded forensic anthropologist known to the world’s press (to his mild dismay and the continuing amusement of his colleagues) as the Skeleton Detective. John Lau, whose relationship with Gideon went back even further than Julie’s did, was an FBI special agent with specialties in firearms, ballistics, and international racketeering. John was a powerful, muscular six-two, Gideon a somewhat more slender six-one.

“I think maybe we could manage,” Gideon said mildly. “Don’t you, John?”

“Well, as long as it’s not for more than a week,” John agreed. “I’d need a change of socks by then.”

The women paid no attention to them. “As it happens,” Marti announced, “I have a plan.”

“Why am I not surprised?” John murmured. He went back to work on the cheeseburger he had so predictably ordered. “Okay, may as well hear it,” he said resignedly.

“It’s simple,” she said. “Give Phil a call and see what he’s got going in the next few weeks. Take a trip. You both have a standing invitation, don’t you?”

“I could do that,” John said amiably. “I’ve got vacation time coming.”

“It wouldn’t work for me,” Gideon said. “It’s right in the middle of the quarter. I have classes.”

“Ask Lyle Spatz to take them for you,” Julie suggested. “He owes you, doesn’t he?”

Gideon nodded slowly. “Well, that might work, especially if it’s over Thanksgiving so we’re already skipping a few classes anyway. I’d have to figure some things out.”

“Could be fun,” John said, “depending on what Phil’s got going.” He glanced out at the bleak day. “But if it’s not somewhere south of here, forget about it.”

“At least you wouldn’t be moping around by yourselves, and you wouldn’t have to scrounge up your own meals,” Marti said.

“And it probably would be interesting,” Julie said. “Don’t you think?” And Gideon could tell that she was warming to the idea of her own week in Cabo San Lucas.

All right, then he would help make it happen. “With Phil, it’s always interesting,” he said. “Okay, let me see what he’s got on the calendar.”

He borrowed Julie’s cell phone, took it to a quiet corner near the entrance, and hit the button to speed-dial Phil Boyajian’s number in Anacortes.

Another old friend, Phil’s relationship with Gideon dated back two decades, to Gideon’s days at the University of Wisconsin, where they’d both been graduate students in the anthropology department. Since earning his Ph. D., Gideon had pursued a reasonably straightforward path up the academic ladder. Phil’s progression had not only been anything but straightforward, it had been distinctly peculiar. As he himself had described it, he’d had a career in reverse. He’d started at the top, with a tenure-track position at a major state university lined up even before he’d completed his doctorate in cultural anthropology. He’d lasted just one year. (“Can’t stand the politicking!”) From there he’d gone on to a community college in Seattle, managing to stick it out two years this time before quitting. (“How can anyone stand all those damn committees?”) Then came a stint in a high school, also not to his liking. (“I’m not a jail guard.”) This was followed – inevitably – by grade-school teaching. (“Have you ever tried spending all day with eight-year-olds?”)

With just about nothing else to descend to, he had hooked up as a tour guide with On the Cheap, a new company that promoted and arranged economy travel. With his scruffy appearance and no-frills approach to life, his natural optimism, his readiness to see the good in everyone, and his love of travel, it was the job he’d been born for. Now a partner in the firm, he still led about twenty foreign tours a year, and there was always space for the Laus or the Olivers. And if they were willing to lend a hand when and if needed, they were welcome to come along at no charge, or rather at cost.