“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.”
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.”