“I scared them half to death by showing up, apparently out of nowhere,” Phil said, “but I got them to open up with my celebrated friendly, open, and unthreatening manner.”
“And Inca Kolas spiked with rum,” Gideon said. “Am I permitted to ask a question yet?”
Phil responded with a gracious wave. “Speak.”
“Did you happen to inquire as to what happened to the body?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” Phil said. “They said he staggered away, fell over the edge into the river, and disappeared.”
“No, that part never happened. When your brain is blown apart, you don’t do any staggering. You drop where you are.”
“Yeah, you already told us that. So my guess is they just picked him up and dumped him in the river themselves. Either way—”
“—he’s in the river,” said John.
Any further thoughts were interrupted by an excited clamor from the crew members on their break down below at the riverfront. They were jabbering in pidgin Spanish, pointing down into the water, and calling, apparently, to Gideon. He was able to understand a few words:
He jumped up. “They’ve found some bones.”
“
“That’s what Julie thinks,” Gideon said, laughing, as they made
their way down the bank. “And remember your weird friend Hedwig, in Hawaii? She thinks it’s because of my aura.”
The three Indians were on a narrow, muddy, log-littered beach, and one of them, in the act of tossing a cigarillo into the water, had spotted what he was sure was a human skull, caught by an eddy and lodged in a pool formed by a tangle of downed tree branches.
“It’s
“Looks like it,” Gideon said. It was a human skull, all right. There was the expected round hole in the forehead, just right of center—no radiating or spiral cracks, just a clean hole—and a jagged-edged empty space where the back of the head should have been. No mandible was visible. “Should be easy enough to confirm, though.”
He leaned down, and grasping a branch for support, dipped into the water with his other hand and brought up the broken skull. The Indians, whom he half expected to quietly back away and leave, sat down and watched avidly. The perforated disk of bone from the warehouse door was still in his fanny pack. He took it out, wrinkling his nose a little—the fanny pack would have to go; it was getting nasty in there, what with the heat and humidity making the still-fresh bone fragment reek—and fitted it to the circular hole in the skull, which had to be done from the inside because the beveling of both the hole and the disk made it impossible to do from the front. This was no problem, however, what with the fist-sized hole in the back of the skull. He adjusted the disk until he had its irregularities matched to those of the hole and gently pressed it in. It slipped in with a solid little click, and held. A perfect fit.
“Consider it confirmed,” he said. For a while he held the skull up to his face, turning it this way and that. “Amazing,” he murmured.
“What is?” John asked, after it became clear that further elucidation wasn’t on its way.
“Well, look at it,” Gideon said. “This guy was killed yesterday afternoon, not even twenty-four hours ago, and
“Piranhas?” said John.
Gideon nodded. “I really didn’t believe they were as fast as this, though. And all these tiny scratches over every square millimeter of it ...as if it’s been... well, scoured with a pad of heavy-duty steel wool.” He shook his head. “Amazing,” he said again. “If you look closely, you can see that most of the scratches are really nicks, kind of triangular in cross section.”
“Little...tiny...teeth,” John said.
“Little tiny
“Gideon, did I just hear you say you used beetles to clean your skeletons?” Phil asked.
“Uh-huh,” he said abstractedly. “Dermestids. You get them from biological supply houses. There’s nothing like them for corpses. They love to eat dead flesh.”
“Big deal, so do I,” John said.
“Mmm,” said Gideon. He had sat down on a log with the skull and was slowly turning it in his hands again, studying it from various
