Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

Both men stopped walking and started talking at the same time. “Go ahead,” said Dar. “You tell the first part.”

Lawrence nodded. His large hands opened and gestured as he started the explanation. “Okay, basically, these two guys drank their eighteen or twenty cans of beer and tried to crash the concert. No tickets, but they knew about an old fire road and decided they could come in the back way after dark. But the back way is fenced by our client. A ten-foot-high wooden fence up there.”

Syd stared back toward the cliff and the darkness. They were lifting the smashed pickup onto a flatbed truck now.

“They accidentally drove through the fence?” she said, her voice thin.

“Uh-uh,” said Lawrence, shaking his head. “They backed the pickup right against the fence and the driver—a skinnier guy—boosted his pal over. But it was real dark up there, and when the bigger guy went over, he found that it was a thirty-foot fall. So he came crashing down through those tree branches…”

“And that killed him?” said Syd.

Lawrence shook his head again. “Naw, he hit a big branch about forty feet up. That was probably when he broke his arm. The branch had snagged him by his undershorts and part of his belt.”

“He still didn’t realize how high he was,” added Dar. “Looking down in the dark, he could see the tops of the shorter trees and probably thought they were bushes that would break his fall.”

“So he cut himself out of his shorts,” said Lawrence.

“And fell another twenty feet,” said Syd.

“Yeah,” said Lawrence.

“But that didn’t kill him,” said Sydney, speaking in a tone that suggested she now knew that she was the straight man.

“Nope,” said Lawrence. “That just scratched him up something terrible as he fell through the branches. Plus that was also when his own knife was jammed three inches into his thigh and that holly branch got rammed up his ass. Pardon my French.”

“And then what?” said Syd.

“Dar, you figured it out first,” said Lawrence. “Why don’t you tell the finale.”

Dar shrugged. “There’s not much more. The driver could hear his friend crying in agony down there. He realized what a drop it must have been. The big guy’s screams of pain must have been drowned out somewhat by the Metallica concert, but the driver knew he had to do something.”

“So he…” prompted Syd.

“So he took the length of old clothesline that was lying in the back of the pickup, threw it down to his friend, and told him to tie it securely around his waist,” said Dar. “That’s my guess. Actually, it wouldn’t have been that easy or succinct. There would have been a lot of drunken shouting and cursing and crying going on, but the bigger guy wrapped the line around his middle twice and tied it off with a granny knot, while the skinny guy tied the other end of the rope securely to the rear bumper of the F250.”

“And then…” said Syd.

Dar tilted his head as if the rest was obvious. It was. “Well, our skinny driver was very drunk and very rattled. He accidentally put the truck in reverse, gunned it, drove backwards ten feet through our client’s high fence—the tire tracks up there speak for themselves—and dropped backwards forty-some feet onto his buddy, catapulting himself eighty-five feet out through the windshield in the process.”

“E-mail me your report in the morning and I’ll write the official version and send it to our client,” said Lawrence.

“I’ll have my analysis to you by ten A.M.,” said Dar.

Sydney shook her head. “You do this for a living ?”

The first phone call came in a little after 5:00 A.M.

“Damn,” said Dar. He didn’t really consider it morning until sometime between 9:30 and 10:00 A.M., sitting over coffee and a second bagel, behind the morning paper.

The phone rang again.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Minor, this is Steve Capelli with Newsweek magazine. We’d like to talk to you about—”

Dar slammed the phone down and rolled over to catch a little more sleep.

The second call came in two minutes later.

“Dr. Minor, my name is Evelyn Summers…perhaps you’ve seen me on Channel Seven…and I was hoping that you would—”

Dar would never know what Evelyn was hoping because he hung up, turned the ringer off on the phone, and walked over to the window. Along with the San Diego Police patrol car that had been parked inconspicuously across the street all night, there were now three very conspicuous TV trucks. A fourth truck with a satellite antenna on its roof pulled up as Dar watched.

He walked back to his phone, and recorded a new message on the answering machine: “Yo, dis is Vito. Dere’s nobody home but me an’ the Dobermans. You got sometin’ to say to me…say it! Otherwise, hang the fug up.”

Dar went into the bathroom to shower and shave. Ten minutes later, dressed and holding a steaming mug of coffee in his hand, he looked out the front window again. There were five TV trucks and four vans parked across the street. Well, he thought, it had taken them forty-eight hours to get his name from the DMV based on the tag number from his poor NSX; somebody at one of the news channels must have a contact in the department. Dar doubted if the reporter had been lucky enough to get a copy of his driver’s-license photograph, but he wasn’t going to stroll out front to find out. The phone light blinked on and off. Dar started packing his duffel bag, folding shirts and trousers and humming the theme to The Godfather as he did so.

Upon arriving at the Justice Center, Dar saw that Deputy DA Weid had been his usual generous self in setting up a temporary office for the visiting state’s attorney’s chief investigator. Sydney Olson’s “office” was in the basement of the old section of the Hall of Justice, not far from the holding cells, a former interrogation room with puke-green and white-faded-to-yellow walls randomly decorated with scuff marks and smashed-mosquito abstract art going back to the 1940s, some folding tables and metal chairs, and no windows except for the bit of reflective one-way glass. But the folding tables were covered with modern machines—a Gateway top-of-the-line laptop, Dar noted, connected to printers, scanners, and other peripherals. There were also two new phones, each with at least four lines. A map of Southern California had been tacked to the filthy rear wall and had already sprouted an array of red, blue, green, and yellow pins. A male secretary, busy at a second computer, informed Dar that Investigator Olson had been called to the district attorney’s office, but she had left word that she would be back in an hour and would like to talk to Dr. Minor before he left the building.

The secretary offered Dar some coffee from the inevitable pot scorching away on the table under the one-way mirror. Cop coffee was 180 percent caffeine and the texture of road tar on a hot summer day, and he had long since decided it was the secret weapon that kept America’s law enforcement agencies going despite the long hours, miserable working conditions, lowlife clients, and terrible pay. Dar took a healthy swig, feeling tired and grumpy.

“I’ll check back later,” said Dar.

Finding an empty bench in the basement corridor, Dar fired up his ThinkPad and finished typing his report on the Metallica concert accident. He attached the modem umbilical to his digital cell phone, dialed up Stewart Investigations’s dedicated line, and E-mailed the report straight to their fax machine/printer so that they would have a hard copy waiting.

Putting the laptop back in its case, Dar pondered how he could kill another half hour. Making up his mind, he walked to the end of the corridor past holding cells full of prisoners who were howling like mutts in a kennel, and then jogged up the polished steps into the handsome old Gothic courthouse itself. Unlike the efficient and butt-ugly new addition to the Hall of Justice where Dickweed and others had their offices, the old courthouse lacked air-conditioning but made up for it with a regal bearing.