Little Tiny Teeth by Aaron Elkins Read Free Book Online

grade-school teaching. (“Have you ever tried spending all day with eight-year-olds?”)
    With just about nothing else to descend to, he had hooked up as a tour guide with On the Cheap, a new company that promoted and arranged economy travel. With his scruffy appearance and no-frills approach to life, his natural optimism, his readiness to see the good in everyone, and his love of travel, it was the job he’d been born for. Now a partner in the firm, he still led about twenty foreign tours a year, and there was always space for the Laus or the Olivers. And if they were willing to lend a hand when and if needed, they were welcome to come along at no charge, or rather at cost.
    It was a very good deal, and Gideon and Julie had taken him up on it twice now, once on a trip to Costa Rica, and once on a tour of Italy’s Lake Maggiore region.
    Phil answered on the third ring and immediately came up with a proposition.
    “How does Peru sound? Six days, starting in three weeks, November twenty-sixth.”
    “Peru!” Gideon exclaimed, thrilled. “Fantastic! I’ve wanted to go for years; I’ve just never gotten it together to go. That’d be great, Phil, wonderful! Machu Picchu, Sipan-”
    “Well, don’t get too-”
    “-the Moche tombs, Cuzco, Huaca Rajada-”
    “Hey, hold your horses, will you? Forget archaeology. That’s not exactly what we’ll be doing.”
    “-the ruins at – it’s not?”
    “Not exactly, no.” He cleared his throat.
     
    “It better be someplace warm,” John said as Gideon returned to the table. “That’s my one and only condition.” John, who’d grown up in Hawaii, loved hot weather. He considered it a cruel trick of fate that he’d been assigned to cold, gloomy Seattle. He claimed to have a standing request into the bureau for a transfer to Mexicali if they ever opened a regional office there.
    “Well, then,” Gideon said, “you’ll be happy. How does eight days on the Amazon sound?”
    John’s eyes popped wide open. “Seriously?”
    “ On the Amazon?” Julie asked. “You mean on a boat?”
    “Yup, an Amazon cruise.”
    “That sounds fabulous,” Marti said. “Hey, maybe we should go. I love cruises. Talk about pampering.”
    “Yes, but this is Phil we’re talking about,” Julie said. “On the Cheap. Somehow, I don’t think pampering will be on the agenda.”
    “Don’t they have anacondas on the Amazon?” John asked. “Headhunters? Poisonous frogs? Giant spiders?”
    “I’m pretty sure headhunting died out thirty years ago or so,” Gideon said. “About the others, I don’t know.”
    “And what about mosquitoes?”
    “I believe there are a few down there.”
    “And malaria? How many damn shots would we have to get?”
    “There aren’t any shots for malaria, there are pills you take. Other than that, there may be a couple of other shots, just to be on the safe side.”
    “Great, I love shots,” John said under his breath, but Gideon could see he was just going through the motions. He was intrigued with the idea, and who wouldn’t be? “So where would we pick up the ship?”
    “In Peru. A town called Iquitos,” Gideon said, “way upstream, near the headwaters of the Amazon.” He returned to his salad of smoked salmon, Dungeness crab, and avocado, picking it over to see if he’d missed any slivers of crab. “It’s not Phil’s usual thing, though. That is, it’s not an official On the Cheap tour, it’s a kind of… I guess you’d say, an evaluation visit, and he wouldn’t mind having us along to help him evaluate.”
    There was a cargo boat operator in Iquitos, he explained, who had been trying for some time to convert his rebuilt ship, the Adelita, to the tourist trade. The operator/captain, Alfredo Vargas, had earlier contacted Phil about Phil’s writing up his would-be cruise enterprise in the next edition of South America On the Cheap. Phil had agreed to come down and check out the Adelita if and when Vargas got an actual boatload of paying