I said the only thing I could think of. “How’d you get here from L.A. so quick?”
“I have a confession,” he said. “I lied, Doc. Sorry about that. I was already down here when you called.”
Something in my head clicked. “You came down and killed Malloy, the Fox News reporter.”
“He was damned annoying,” said Maddox. “You said so yourself.”
“You’re the one who tipped him off about the teeth.” He gave a slight, smug smile, which I took as acknowledgment, and I rattled on, my mind racing. “Anonymously — but then he tracked you down somehow. He was onto you. So you went and strangled him and staged the porn.” I was partly stalling for time, but mainly I was still working the case, finally figuring things out, and I was absurdly excited, for a man about to be shot.
It was Hickock, not Maddox, who interrupted me. “I should’ve figured you for this, Mad Dog. Somebody told me you were mixed up in that Iran-Contra mess — running drugs and guns for the CIA in Nicaragua — but I thought he was just blowing smoke up my ass. When I heard you were working for the NTSB, I thought you’d settled down. Stepped up onto the straight and narrow.”
“I had,” said Maddox. “I got scared straight for a long time. Remember that C-123 got shot down in Nicaragua in 1986? The one that could’ve brought down Ronald Reagan and George Bush, if Ollie North hadn’t taken the fall? I was supposed to be flying that plane, but I was sick. Appendicitis. I didn’t fly, so I didn’t die. I pulled some good-old-boy strings and got a job investigating crashes. Not too boring, as jobs go.”
“And you played by the rules?” asked Hickock.
“I was a good boy for fifteen years.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“Then I worked a crash about a hundred miles from here. A seaplane, bringing in a load of cocaine to the Salton Sea, up in the Imperial Valley. Bad weather, lousy pilot; the plane flipped and sank. I got a call from one of my old buddies, offering me a nice little nest egg if I could retrieve the cargo and hand it over. The rest, as they say, is history. I started doing a little moonlighting for Chapo Guzmán — two, three flights a month. Good money, and a lot more fascinating than civil service. But then somebody started sneaking snitches out of the country. Didn’t take a genius to figure out it was Saint Richard. Ever the Boy Scout.”
“So you took him out,” I said. “Damage control.”
He nodded. “Should’ve done it sooner. I let nostalgia get in the way.”
There was one more thing I still didn’t get. “Tell me,” I pressed, “why the double fake? First you staged it to look like Janus accidentally crashed, or killed himself. But then you told the reporter and the FBI he’d faked his death. How come?”
“Diversionary tactics,” he said. “Divide and conquer. I could tell the DEA was closing in. If I could make the FBI look like screwups — like they’d scared Guzmán into hiding — the DEA would be royally pissed at the Bureau. And less likely to follow the trail to me. Right, Chubby?” Hickock didn’t respond. “But if I could also make it look like Janus was actually still alive — that he’d faked the whole thing — the FBI would get pissed, too… and they’d be hell-bent on finding him instead of helping Fatso here.”
“But Prescott said that Janus had gotten an FBI agent killed,” I persisted. “What’d he mean by that?”
Maddox made a face. “Janus snuck another snitch out of Mexico back in the spring,” he said. “Swooped down and scooped up the guy right out from under the nose of one of Guzmán’s enforcers. Turns out an FBI agent was tailing the snitch, and the assassin killed the FBI agent instead of the snitch. Wasn’t Janus’s fault, but the Bureau was too dumb to know that. That, or they chose to spin it that way so they could make Janus the scapegoat.” He drew a breath, as if to clear his head, and when he exhaled, loudly and slowly through his nostrils, the rush of air had the sound of finality. “So. Boys, this has been fun, but I’ve got other fish to fry, and one of mis amigos will be here to pick me up in a few minutes. So if you two would be so kind as to get down on your knees, we can get this show on the road.”
“You’re kidding,” said Hickock. “Or you’re stupid. You’re gonna blow away a DEA agent and an FBI consultant, and you think you can just walk away scot-free?”
“I’m not stupid,” said Maddox. “And I’m not going to blow you away.” I felt a glimmer of hope, but then he added, “An assassin from the Tijuana drug cartel is.” Shifting the shotgun into his left hand, he reached behind his back and pulled a nine-millimeter pistol from his belt. “Shocking, that a veteran DEA agent walked into a trap with no backup. And tragic that his bad judgment cost the life of a respected forensic scientist, too.” He shook his head and gave an ironic tsk-tsk. “Quite a lucky break for Guzmán and the Sinaloa cartel, though.” He gave a sigh of mock sadness, then said, “On your knees. Now.”
“Fuck you,” said Hickock. “You might kill me, but I sure as hell won’t die kneeling.”
Maddox rolled his eyes. “Christ, Hickock, you’re still the same self-righteous prick you were back in Laos. Okay, have it your way.” He aimed the pistol at the agent’s chest, and I saw his finger tighten on the trigger.
In desperation — having no better ideas, and having nothing to lose — I raised my arms over my head and waved them frantically, looking up at the low ridge across the hollow. “Take the shot!” I shouted. “Take the shot! Now!”
All hell suddenly broke loose beside me. Maddox’s attention wavered from Hickock for an instant, and in that instant, Hickock yanked the revolver from its shoulder holster and swung it upward. I heard the crack of a shot — or was it two? — and then a sort of ripping sound in the air beside my right ear, and then another crack rolling in from somewhere in the distance. Maddox jerked forward, his arms flailing, and the short shotgun in his left hand thrashed and boomed. Something whacked me in the head, and I felt myself falling to the sand.
“Doc? Hey, Doc — can you hear me?” I Felt My eyelids being tugged open, and as my eyeballs leveled and came into focus, I recognized the face of Special Agent Miles Prescott. “Doc? You back with me now?”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting up abruptly and staring wildly at the scene. Sprawled on the ground ten feet away lay Maddox — or most of Maddox, from the chest down. His head — or most of his head — lay off to one side a ways, and I’d worked enough shotgun deaths to know how it had gotten there. I also noticed a large bloody wound in his chest. From the size of it, it looked like an exit wound, which would mean he’d been shot from behind, but I didn’t see how that could have happened, since he and Hickock had been face-to-face when the shooting started. Hickock, I thought in sudden panic. Where’s Hickock? I looked beside me, where he’d been standing, but he wasn’t there. I whirled, scanning in all directions, and finally saw him twenty feet behind me, sitting on the ground, leaning against the left front wheel of my car. “Hey, Hickock,” I said. “From now on, you’re Wild Bill. Nothing mild about you at all. Fastest gun in the West, man.”
I waited for his wheezy answer, but he was silent — utterly, unnaturally silent — and when I looked closer, I saw that his eyes were glassy and the sand beneath him was red, his blood mingling with the puddle of oil the Impala had hemorrhaged a quarter hour before. A lifetime before.