think he’d be recognizable, even from the back.”
“Well, he wasn’t,” Maggie snapped. “It was dark, he had on this long thing, he was turned the other way. Maybe I should have asked him for an ID?”
“No offense, Maggie,” Duayne said, taken aback. “I only meant—”
“Captain, where does Cisco sleep?” John asked.
“In the next to the last cabin on the port side, next to the storage rooms.”
“Tim, would you go check that room, please? Knock, and if you don’t get an answer, open the door and peek in, see if he’s there.” Gideon could see that John had assumed his cop persona. A crime had been committed, there was no responsible official there to look into it, and so John, being John, had readily jumped in as the man in charge, a state of affairs that no one seemed about to challenge.
“Why didn’t you yell for help?” he asked Maggie.
She blinked, as if it was something that hadn’t occurred to her before. “I don’t know,” she said, frowning. “You think that’s what you’d do, you know that’s what you
“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.”
“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.”
“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
“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
