“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 Adelita was moored below.
“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: “ Oiga, esqueletero! Aqui le tengo unos huesos!” Hey, skeleton man, I have some bones for you!
He jumped up. “They’ve found some bones.”
“ More bones?” John said, getting up too. “What is it about you, Doc? Do you bring this on yourself?”
“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 him!” Phil exclaimed the moment he saw it, gazing placidly back up at him from empty eye sockets, through twelve inches of brownish water. “The nail-gun guy.”
“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 look at this thing! It’s perfectly clean… okay, a little crud clinging to the inside of the brain case and the nasal aperture, and in the orbits, and so on – back of the palate, auditory meatuses, hard-to-reach places – but no muscles, no ligaments, and just a few shreds of tendon. In the lab, it’d take a colony of Dermestid beetles weeks to get it this clean.”
“Piranhas?” said John.
“ Si, piranhas,” the three crewmen agreed in sober unison.
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.”