Little Tiny Teeth

“And Captain Vargas quite naturally came up with Cisco.”

“Exactly! Naturally!”

“Okay,” John said, “I’m not convinced, but okay.” He turned to Maggie. “Maggie, you said you heard scuffling —”

“I think I heard scuffling.”

“—coming from Scofield’s cabin.”

“I think it was from Arden’s cabin.”

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“All right, fine,” John said, showing some impatience. “But I don’t remember you saying you heard a splash. Do you think you heard a splash?”

She looked blank. “A splash?”

“If he threw Arden in, there would have been a splash, wouldn’t there? Right outside his cabin. Pretty much right outside your cabin.”

Maggie frowned. “I’m not certain. Now that you’ve asked the question, it seems to me, maybe I did. But I can’t really say ...no, I’m sorry, John, I can’t say for sure that I did.”

Duayne lifted his head, sensing something in the air. “What’s happening? Are we turning around again? Why are we going back?”

“No, we’re not going back,” Vargas said. “The river here, it’s making a big loop, a big bend. That’s what the Javaro is like.”

“Tim, you got anything else to tell us?” John asked.

Tim mutely shook his head.

“Captain Vargas,” John said, “I think we need to turn this over to the police.”

“The Colombian police?”

“Well, it happened in Colombia, so obviously, yes.”

“You want to go back to the checkpoint? You want to report a murder on my ship to Colonel Malagga?” Vargas was horrified.

“Not a murder, we don’t know that yet,” John said. “A missing person for sure, a homicide, maybe—”

“And an attempted homicide—on me,” Maggie said. “Let’s not forget that delightful little incident.”

“Absolutely,” John said. “But yeah, I see your point about Malagga, Captain. What do you suggest?”

“That we continue to Leticia. It’s not much farther ahead than the border is back. We’ll be there tomorrow night or Friday morning.

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There you will find a much more professional, more competent headquarters of police. Real policemen, not scoundrels like Malagga.”

John nodded his approval. “Sounds good.”

CAPTAIN Vargas was once again in a dither, and once again the cause was Arden Scofield, who was as much a source of trepidation and self-recrimination dead as he’d been alive. For the hundredth time, Vargas cursed himself for ever getting involved with the vile man. The problem was, what the hell was he supposed to do now? He knew next to nothing about the arrangements for the contraband coffee at the San Jose de Chiquitos warehouse. The plan had been for Vargas to unload the shipment of coffee as if it was no different than usual. Scofield would take it from there. But with Scofield no longer in the picture, how would it work? Were the sacks with the coca paste in them supposed to be treated differently in some way? He supposed so, but how? Would there be people there to receive them? If so, would they be in on what was in them? Acceding to Vargas’s own wishes, Scofield had kept him out of the loop on almost everything.

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

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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—