Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

The Lookout was on the right side of the road with outdoor patio seating on the south side of the restaurant. The patio consisted of little more than some rotting two-by-fours supported by wooden beams extending directly from the sheer cliff face of the hillside above Lake Elsinore. Dar could see a dozen or more bikers sprawling around a few old tables. Their hogs were parked directly in front of the patio.

Dar looked right just in time to see the passenger lean over and extend the muzzle of the Mac-10 out the driver’s window behind the driver’s head. It was aimed directly at Dar’s face.

Dar hit the brakes, the automatic weapon fired over his hood, and then he cut hard right and accelerated, catching the heavier Mercedes amidships. The Mercedes’s left-side door air bag deployed as designed, smashing the shooter’s hand into the top of the doorframe and causing the Mac-10 to fly out of the man’s hand and bounce off Dar’s hood. Dar’s NSX was a ’92 and had only a driver’s-side air bag, but after years of investigating and reconstructing air-bag accidents, he had long since disconnected his.

Now he stood on the brakes, first forcing the heavier car to its right and then falling behind the still-racing Mercedes, the tires of the NSX screeching and smoking, but the ABS working hard, the brake pedal pounding against Dar’s foot as he drove through the skid, slammed into second gear, and almost made the hard hairpin turn to the left, leaving the shoulder but missing the restaurant, scraping boulders and low brush before finally crunching and sliding to a stop a hundred-some feet farther up the road.

When the door-side air bag had deployed, the gunman had fallen forward onto the driver, whose own shoulder harness kept him from falling against the steering wheel, but who was having little luck steering. The new Mercedes E 340 barreled straight ahead through the apex of the left hairpin, hitting the first row of the parked Harleys. Both of the E 340’s front air bags deployed while its driver, still pinned by his partner and now blinded by the air bag explosion and unable to reach the steering wheel, the shooter unable to move because of the air bag deployed into his own seat area, did all he could—standing on the brakes while driving straight ahead, knocking more Harleys left and right and causing a dozen bikers to leap for their lives as the heavy car drove straight onto the rickety patio, smashed tables to splinters, skidded across the rotted boards, tore through the creaky handrail, and used the patio as a ramp to launch itself off the mountain.

Dar caught a last glimpse of the gray Mercedes, its front windows down and both men’s faces quite visible, mouths opened wide, air bags deflating even as the two-ton car seemed to pause a moment in midair á la Wile E. Coyote—barely missing the bubble nose of the Channel 5 KTLA chopper that had its gyro-stabilized cameras zoomed in on the screaming faces and hurtling car—and then the vehicle went nosedown and dropped out of sight on its way to the valley floor seven hundred feet straight down.

The NSX’s frame had been bent, the driver’s door wouldn’t open, and Dar’s passenger door was lodged against a boulder, so he clambered out of the window just in time to become the focus of the skidding CHP Mustang and the overheated sheriff’s Monte Carlo. Doors flew open. Guns were drawn and aimed. Commands were shouted.

Dar leaned against the NSX, spread his legs as directed, linked his fingers behind his head as suggested by the officers’ screams, and tried to breathe slowly so as not to be sick. The adrenaline surge of anger was receding like some mad tide, leaving just flotsam and jetsam of emotions behind.

The CHP officers, young, with high badge serial numbers Dar noticed in his one glance over his shoulder, were not men he’d worked with before. He understood from their shouts and barks that they would blow him fucking away if he made a single fucking move. Dar did not move. One of the state troopers and the sheriff held guns on him, and the third—the older of the two CHP men, a grizzled veteran who looked to be about twenty-three years old—approached and frisked him quickly, jerked his arms down and back, and slapped cuffs on him.

A couple of the bikers wandered over with beers in their hands. The one with the longer beard was showing yellow teeth in a wide grin. “Hey, man, that was the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Almost took out fucking Channel Five, man. Definitely awesome.”

The sheriff’s deputy told the bikers to get back inside The Lookout Restaurant; several other bikers wandered over to explain that they’d never been in the fucking restaurant—that they’d been on the patio—and it was a fucking free country, man. Like, where else but America could you see a new Mercedes drive off a seven-hundred-foot drop and almost take a fucking news chopper with it, man?

“Snotty Eddie’s gonna have to rename his fucking bar, man,” said a biker with a shaved head and a tattoo of a skull on his bare chest. “Change it from the fucking Lookout to the fucking Launchpad, man.”

Dar was glad when the two highway patrolmen dragged and pushed him to the CHP Mustang.

“He’s gotta go to Riverside, you know,” the sheriff was saying. He still had a long-barreled Colt in his hand.

“We know, we know,” said the older of the two young state troopers. “Why don’t you or your deputy get on your radio and get some backup here—and tell them we need a forensics team—before there’s a fucking riot. OK?”

The sheriff looked at the milling bikers now as they began assessing the damage to their hogs and cursing more imaginatively, nodded, put away his big pistol, and walked back to the Monte Carlo.

Only the sheriff’s deputy had walked out onto the flimsy, damage-strewn, shaky patio to stand nervously at the edge, peer through the wide gap in the railing, and stare down toward Lake Elsinore where the Mercedes had disappeared. From somewhere far below came the buzz of the news helicopter. Part of Dar’s mind was calculating the time it had taken the Mercedes to free-fall the distance even as the state troopers shoved him into the backseat of the Mustang. It would be one hell of a news video.

The last thing Dar heard before being driven away was the deputy on the patio edge softly repeating, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” as if it were his private mantra.

The car chase and Dar’s arrest were on Tuesday afternoon. Freed on bail that evening, he attended a meeting on Wednesday morning in the deputy district attorney’s office in downtown San Diego.

When he was booked on Tuesday, Dar had been shirtless, wearing only his sneakers and the now soiled and bloody jeans that he had pulled on at 4:00 A.M. With the scratches from flying glass, no shirt, wildly mussed hair, two days’ stubble, and what his fellow grunts in Vietnam had long ago called a “postcombat thousand-yard stare,” his mug shot looked classically and fiercely felonious. He could picture it hanging in his study, right next to an old color photo of him receiving his robe and scroll symbolizing his Ph.D. in physics.

At 9:00 A.M. Wednesday morning, sitting at the long table with more than a dozen other people who had yet to be introduced, Dar was shaved, showered, and dressed in a crisp white shirt, striped rep tie, blue linen blazer, tropical-weight gray pants, and polished Bally black shoes that were as soft as dance slippers. He wasn’t quite sure if he was a guest at this meeting or still a prisoner of the state, but he wanted to look decent in either case.

The deputy district attorney’s assistant’s assistant, a nervous little man who seemed to embody every gay stereotype in the culture—from his hand-wringing and nervous giggles to his overwrought wrists—was busy offering donuts and coffee to everyone. Set on the table opposite Dar was a line of Smokey hats and badged caps behind which sat at least eight police captains and sheriffs; on the same side of the table but at the far end, substituting briefcases on the tabletop for hats, were two plainclothes officers, one with the haircut of an FBI special agent. All of them except the FBI man accepted at least one donut from the deputy DA’s assistant’s assistant.