AS I NEARED THE TURNAROUND OF THE DEAD-END road—the spot I had come to think of as the drop zone—my small, citified, sissified car bottomed out for what felt like the dozenth time, the oil pan banging and rasping as the metal scraped across stone. When I’d rented the vehicle back at Brown Field, the Hertz agent had done a walk-around inspection with me, marking scrapes and dings on a diagram of the car. Hope he doesn’t check for dents underneath, I thought, parking in the same place where I’d parked two hours before.
The engine was ticking with heat, but something about the sound struck me as odd—as different—from the usual dry, metallic click . . . and it seemed to be coming not just from the engine but from the ground as well. Kneeling in the sand, I leaned on my elbows and peered beneath the car. Tick-splat, tick-splat, tick-splat. “Well, damn,” I muttered. “Damn damn damn.” Each damn was echoed by a fat drop of oil falling from the ripped oil pan and splatting into a fast-growing puddle beneath the engine. Still on all fours, I turned and looked behind the car. A thread of oil trailed down the rocky road, like greasy blood, from the wounded Impala.
Then, as if snuffling along the trail, another vehicle nosed up the road, a black Suburban with big tires and plenty of ground clearance. Clambering to my feet, I walked back toward the SUV. “I’m sure glad to see you,” I said to Maddox as the door opened.
But it was not Maddox who got out of the Suburban. It was a fat man with greasy red hair, a sweaty white shirt, a leather shoulder holster, and a stubby revolver. The revolver was still holstered, but the safety strap was unsnapped, and I suddenly wished I still had the pistol I’d thrown into the river a few days before. “You,” I said, my blood pressure spiking. Even though the air was bone dry, sweat began rolling from my scalp and seeping from my armpits. “What are you doing here?”
“Following you,” he wheezed. “I don’t believe we’ve formally met, Dr. Brockton. I’m Special Agent William Hickock. I’m with the DEA. The Drug Enforcement Administration.”
“I know what the DEA is,” I said. “And I know who you are. You’re the guy waging war on the worst badasses on the planet, right? Or are you?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about your pissing contest with Miles Prescott and the FBI. I heard you and Prescott arguing in the IHOP that night. The night after somebody aimed Richard Janus’s jet—his jet and his corpse and his yanked-out teeth—at that mountainside and bailed out. Were you still in cahoots with Janus at that point, or had you two had a falling-out? Had Janus gotten greedy? Or was it you that got greedy?”
“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?”