“I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he wheezed.
“Bullshit,” I snapped. “If you’ve been following me, you know I just came from Donovan State Prison. The assistant warden there told you years ago about Janus’s drug drops. Did you offer to look the other way, for a piece of the profits? Or were you two partners, fifty-fifty? You lined up the product, he flew the planes?”
He stared at me, then gave a guffaw. “Drug drops? Those weren’t drug drops.”
“Jesus, Hickock, give me a break. You’re gonna shoot me anyhow, so there’s no point in lying.”
“Shoot you?” He looked at me as if I were insane. “I’m trying to protect you, Dr. Dumb-Ass.”
Now I was the one gaping. “Protect me?”
“Hell, yeah. And you’re not making it easy.” He shook his head. “Janus wasn’t dropping drugs from that DC-3. He was dropping people.”
“People? What people? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about people who needed to get the hell out of Mexico, under the radar. People who had price tags on their heads. People who were trying to help us bring down the country’s biggest drug cartel.”
“You mean the Sinaloa cartel? You mean Guzmán?”
“I mean Guzmán.” He gave a slight, ironic smile. “And yeah, in my world, at least, he is the baddest badass on the planet.”
“You brought Richard Janus in on this? How? Why?”
“Richard and I go way back,” he said. “Went way back. Forty years. I flew with him in Southeast Asia — Laos — back in the sixties.”
“Air America? You were an Air America pilot too?”
“Nah, I wasn’t a pilot. I was his kicker.”
“Kicker?”
“Cargo kicker. Richard would take us in through the treetops, weaving and juking, dodging branches and bullets. That man had balls of solid brass. Then he’d pop up and level off for about two seconds — just long enough for me to kick the rice out the door — and dive back down to the deck.” He shook his head again. “This DEA gig? The pucker factor escalates every now and then, but kicking cargo for Richard? Fascinating, every damn day.”
I blinked. “Excuse me. Did you just call it ‘fascinating’?”
He gave a wheezy laugh. “Yeah. That’s Air America slang — coined by Richard, in fact. It’s a whistling-past-the-graveyard kinda term. It means—”
“I know what it means,” I said, as alarms started sounding somewhere in the back of my mind. “It means ‘scary as hell,’ right?”
“Right.” He grinned, then — studying my expression — he frowned. “Something wrong? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“I just heard an echo,” I said. “Somebody else used that word recently, exactly the same way — said jumping out of the Citation that night would’ve been pretty fascinating. I don’t suppose you know the NTSB crash investigator, Maddox? Any chance he was an Air America kicker too?”
“Pat Maddox? ‘Mad Dog’ Maddox?” Hickock’s expression darkened. “Hell, yeah, I know him. And hell no, he wasn’t a kicker. He was a Marine Corps pilot from ’Nam. He got scrubbed — given a fake discharge, civilian papers, a bogus contract — and sent to Laos as a so-called civilian. Mad Dog loved the black-ops stuff, the CIA dirty work. He used to call Richard ‘Boy Scout’ because he was such a straight arrow. Me, he called ‘Mild Bill.’ Maddox was a hard-ass. An asshole. But hey, it was war, and war is hell.”
“He came from the marines? You know what he flew in Vietnam?”
“Sure. He talked about it all the damn time. He flew F-4s.”
“Jets?”
“Hell, yeah. The F-4 Phantom was a supersonic attack fighter. Mad Dog loved to wave his top-gun dick in everybody’s face.”
I hated the image, but I liked the information. “So if he was flying dogfights at Mach 2 or whatever,” I said, “he’d have no trouble at the controls of a mild-mannered civilian jet, right?”
“Well, every aircraft’s different, but if he studied up on the pilot’s handbook and the panel…” He trailed off, and I could see him working to connect the dots that I had just begun to connect myself. “Let me get this straight,” he wheezed. “Are you thinking—”
I interrupted. “Maddox told me the Citation was like a Dodge Caravan,” I said excitedly. “Almost as if he’d flown one and found it kinda boring.”
Hickock held up a hand. “Slow down, slow down. Do you really, seriously—”
I cut him off again. “Fighter pilots get parachute training, too, right?”
Hickock furrowed his brow, then gave a grunt—“Huh”—and began to nod, slowly and tentatively at first, then more decisively. “Mad Dog loved the edgy stuff. Survival skills, commando training, inserting assassin teams. All that macho Rambo shit.”
“He was limping,” I went on. “The day after the crash. He was wearing a knee brace. He said he’d had surgery, but I bet he hadn’t — that’d be easy to find out. I bet he twisted his knee when he jumped out of the Citation — came down hard, or crooked, or something. Came down right over there!” I pointed toward the five burned tubes jutting from the sand. “Those are signal flares. A landing zone. A target. Somebody was waiting here. Maddox phoned just before takeoff, or maybe the guy here just listened for the sound of the jet. He lit the flares, the jet turned, and Maddox made the jump. Then — being the crash investigator assigned to this region — he was in a perfect position to cover his tracks.” Hickock rubbed his jaw, considering the scenario.
At that moment my watch began to beep, and when I looked at it and saw the time — two forty-five — I felt a wave of panic. “Oh shit,” I said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Maddox. He’s on his way.”
“On his way where?”
“His way here.”
“Here here?” I nodded. “Christ. When?”
“Now,” I said. “Actually, twenty or thirty minutes from now. That beep from my watch was reminding me to finish up at the prison and head back here to meet him.”
“But why, Doc? Why the hell’d you call him, if you think he killed Richard?”
“I didn’t think that when I called him,” I pointed out. “I called him two hours ago. Before you told me all this stuff about him and Richard. Before I put the pieces together.” He still looked confused and mad. “Look, I called to tell him I’d found the spot where Richard’s killer came down when he bailed out that night. Maddox offered to dash down from L.A. to take a look.” But as I said it, I realized that taking a look was the last thing Maddox needed, because Maddox had seen this spot already, at least three times: first, when he’d scouted it out; later, when he’d placed the flares in the sand, probably the afternoon before the crash; finally, when he’d floated down through the night sky toward the fiery marker, lit by an accomplice with a lighter, a bad nicotine addiction, and a getaway car. No, Maddox wasn’t coming to see what I’d found. Maddox was coming to kill me and scrub the site.
“We gotta get out of here,” I told Hickock. “Before he gets here.”
“Too late for that, I’m afraid,” said a voice, and Pat Maddox — Mad Dog Maddox — stepped from behind a bushy mesquite tree, a short-barreled shotgun pointed at Hickock. “Mild Bill,” he said pleasantly. “Long time, no see. How you been?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hickock’s eyes flicker toward his revolver. Maddox must have seen it, too. “Go for it,” he said, nodding at the agent’s gun. “But I’d bet my life that your head’ll be gone before you can clear leather.”