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.
EIGHTEEN
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
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
den 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
