Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“Well, we get here and the curb doesn’t look that much lower. I mean, it isn’t. But it was dark, and we figured it was a little lower here, maybe. So I suggested to Bud that we take the front wheel of the Pard and drive it off the curb here ’cause it doesn’t look quite as tall as the other parts of the curb along here. Least in the dark.”

Henry paused. Dar said softly, “So did Bud drive the front wheel off the curb?”

Henry refocused his eyes, looking down at the curb now as if he had never seen it before. “Oh, yeah. No problem at all. I held on to the right handlebar of the cart and Bud drove the front wheel off the curb. Everything was hunky-dory. The cart wheel went right off and I kind of held onto it a little bit so it wouldn’t be a real hard bump. So then we had the front wheel of Bud’s little Pard off the curb and Bud looks up at me, and I remember, I said, ‘It’s all right, Bud. I’ve got the right handlebar. I’ll hold onto the handlebar.’”

Henry pantomimed holding on to the handlebar with both hands. “Bud, he hits the switch with his right hand to activate the motor, but he doesn’t give it any throttle, and I say again, ‘It’s OK, Bud, we’ll get that left rear wheel off the curb and get it down on the street and I’ll hold onto you here—both hands on the handlebar—and then you can just drive forward and the right rear tire, it’ll drive right off the curb, and then we’ll be on the street and then it’s a straight shot home.’”

Dar stood and waited, seeing Henry’s eyes cloud again as he relived the moment.

“And then the cart moved forward and I was holding on to the right end of the handlebar…Used to be real strong, Mr. Minor, worked twenty-six years loading boxes in the Chicago Merchandise Mart till we moved out here but this damned leukemia the last couple of years…Anyway, the left wheel dropped off the curb and the damned cart started to tip to its left. Bud looks at me and he can’t move his left arm or leg, and I say, ‘It’s OK, Bud, I got it with both hands,’ but the cart just kept tipping. It was heavy. Real heavy. I thought of grabbing Bud, but he was…you know…strapped into the cart the way he’s supposed to be. I did everything to hang on to that cart. I had both hands on the handlebar, but I felt it tipping farther and farther…it’s a heavy cart what with the battery and motor and all…and my hands were getting sweaty, and I thought later that I should have hollered for the fellas who were still playing pinochle, but at the time…well, I just didn’t think about it. You know how it is.”

Dar nodded and held the tape recorder.

Henry’s eyes were filling with tears now, as if the full impact of the event was striking him for the first time. “I felt the cart tipping and my fingers starting to slip and I couldn’t hold it anymore. I mean, it was just too much weight for me, and then Bud looked at me with his good eye, and I think he knew what was going to happen, but I said, ‘Bud, Bud, it’ll be all right, I’ll hang on. I’ll hang onto this. I’ve got you.’”

Henry looked at the curb for a full minute in silence. His cheeks were moist. When he spoke again, the animation was completely absent from his voice. “And then the cart tipped farther and fell over to its left and Bud couldn’t do anything because, like I said, he was paralyzed on his left side. Then there was this crash and this…sound…this sickening sound.”

Henry turned and looked Dar straight in the eye. “And then Bud died.” Henry fell silent, just standing there with his arms stretched out in the same position they must have been the instant the handlebars had slipped from his grip. “I was just trying to help him get home so he could say good-night to Rose,” whispered Henry.

Later, when Henry had left, Dar used his tape measure to calculate the fall distance from Bud’s head location while seated in a Pard cart to the pavement. Four feet six inches. But at that moment he said nothing, did nothing, just stood next to the old man whose arms were still extended, his closed fists slowly opening to splayed fingers. The hands shook.

Henry looked back at the pavement. “And then Bud died.”

Dar called it a day and drove down the 91 to the 15 and then headed south, toward his condo outside of San Diego. Fuck it, he thought. He’d started the day at 4:00 A.M. Fuck it all, he thought.

He would type up the transcript of the tape recording and hand it in to Lawrence and Trudy, but he’d be damned if he would follow up on this case. He knew the drill. The manufacturer of the electric cart would be sued, no doubt about that. The park owner would be sued—there would be no doubt about that. The construction company that had blocked the ramp would be sued by everybody, no doubt about that.

But would Rose sue Henry? Probably. Dar had very little doubt about that either. Thirty years of friendship. He was trying to get his friend Bud home in time to kiss his wife good-night. But after a few more months…perhaps a second lawyer…

Fuck it, thought Dar. He would not inquire. He’d never check the file again.

Traffic on the 15 was relatively light, which was one reason that Dar noticed the Mercedes E 340 that had been keeping pace with his left rear quarter panel. Also, the Mercedes’s windows were tinted, front and side, which was illegal in California. State and local cops had helped push that law through—none of them wanted to approach a car with opaque windows. Also, the Mercedes was new and modified for speed, with eighteen-inch wheels and a raised rear end with a tiny spoiler. Dar had a thing about people who bought luxury cars—even autobahn cruisers like the Mercedes E 340—and then hopped them up into performance cars. He thought such people were the worst kind of idiots—pretentious idiots.

So he was watching in his left mirror as the Mercedes accelerated to pass him on the left. There were five lanes along this stretch, three of them empty, but the Mercedes was whipping around the NSX as tightly as if they were on the last lap of the Daytona 500. Dar sighed. It was one of the drawbacks of owning a serious performance vehicle like his Acura NSX.

The Mercedes pulled alongside and slowed, matching speeds. Dar glanced left and could see his own face, sunglasses and all, reflected in the dark window of the big German car.

The instincts of two decades earlier took over and Dar ducked even as the black window rolled down. He glimpsed the barrel of something industrial and ugly and very full-automatic—an Uzi or a Mac-10—and then the firing began. His left window exploded glass onto his ear and hair, and bullets began tearing through the aluminum NSX.

The shooting seemed to go on interminably, but almost certainly lasted no more than five seconds. An eternity.

Dar had thrown himself flat across the low center console, burrowing his head into the black leather of the passenger seat as glass shards filled the air like parade confetti, his left hand still on the bottom curve of the steering wheel, his right heel lifting to the brake and pressing hard. There had been no one but the Mercedes in sight behind him. His left foot hit the clutch as he used his left hand, which was higher than his head, to slam the little shift lever from fifth to third. The noise of the bullets slamming into the aluminum of the door and front end of the now rapidly decelerating NSX sounded like someone riveting in a huge barrel.

The NSX slid to a stop on what Dar hoped and prayed was the highway’s shoulder—he had not lifted his head to check—and he kept his head down after the shooting stopped. He slithered across the glass-covered console and passenger seat, hearing and feeling other shards fall from his head and back, set the stick in neutral, and pulled up on the parking brake as he crawled over it and then he was out the passenger door, on his belly on the pavement and peering under the low-slung sports car, trying to see if the E 340 Mercedes had stopped alongside him. It would be bad news if it had; it was thirty yards to the fence that bordered the interstate, and no trees or other cover in sight beyond that.