Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“I don’t want to leave it on the road where I’m hiking in,” Dar said truthfully. “I’d worry about it.”

Lawrence certainly understood that. It was a running joke between Trudy and Dar how Lawrence invariably parked in the most distant edge of any parking lot, and then with the curb and shrubs and cacti on one side if he could—anything to avoid dings. When Larry’s car got dings, Larry’s car got sold.

“Sure, I’ll drop you off,” Lawrence had said. “I wasn’t up to anything except watching a video tonight.”

“Which one?”

“Ernest Goes to Camp,” said Lawrence. “But that’s OK, I’ve seen it.”

Two hundred and thirty-six times, thought Dar. Aloud, he said, “I appreciate this, Larry.”

“Lawrence,” said Lawrence. “You want to leave your Crusher here or shall I come pick you up in town?”

“I’ll drive out to your place,” said Dar.

Now, on the way out from Escondido in Lawrence’s Trooper, the bulging rucksack loaded in the backseat, Lawrence said, “Where you headed? Borrego Desert State Park? Cleveland National Forest? Or are we going as far as Joshua Tree or someplace?”

“Mulholland Drive,” said Dar.

Lawrence almost drove off the road. “Mul…hol…land…Drive? As in L.A.?”

“Yeah,” said Dar.

Lawrence squinted at him. “For camping.”

“Yep,” said Dar. “Probably two days worth. I’ve got my cell phone, so I’ll give you a call when I need to be picked up.”

“Eight-thirty on a Saturday night, it’ll be after midnight when we get there, and you’re going camping somewhere off Mulholland Drive.”

“Right,” said Dar. “Just off Beverly Glen Boulevard, actually. You don’t have to drive on Mulholland, just through Beverly Hills and up Beverly Glen to just over the ridgeline…on the Valley side.”

Lawrence squinted at him and then slammed on the brakes, kicked up dust in a turnout, and turned the Trooper around, headed back toward his home.

“You’re not going to take me?” said Dar.

“Sure, I’ll take you,” growled his friend. “But if I’m going into goddamned Los Angeles on a Saturday night and going through goddamned Beverly Hills, and stopping on Mulholland after midnight, I’m going home to get my .38.” He glanced suspiciously at Dar. “Are you armed?”

“No,” Dar said truthfully.

“You’re nuts,” said Lawrence.

Dar asked Lawrence to stop once, on Ventura Boulevard. It had taken Dar three minutes on the Internet to track down Dallas Trace’s unlisted phone number, and now he used a pay phone to call that number. A woman’s voice answered in a Latina accent—not sultry Brazilian, but no-nonsense Central American housekeeperese.

“Mr. John Cochran calling for Mr. Trace,” he said in his softest male-secretary voice.

“Just a minute,” said the woman. A minute later, Dallas Trace’s fake West Texas drawl boomed on the line. “Johnny! What’s up, amigo?”

It was Dar’s turn to turn on a fake dialect. Speaking through his red bandana, he growled in his best East L.A. gang voice, “Chew’re what’s up, you honky motherfucker turf-jumping chickenshit bastard. If chew thing you can off Esposito that way and cut us all out—I mean, fuck your Russian fucking mafia, man—we know about Yaponchik and Zuker and we don’t give a fuck, man. Those Commie fag bastards don’t scare us, man. We comin’ for you, homme.”

Dar hung up and got back in the Trooper. Lawrence had been close enough to hear most of Dar’s monologue.

“Calling your girlfriend?” said the adjuster.

“Yeah,” said Dar.

Dar had Lawrence drop him off about two hundred yards east of the intersection of Beverly Glen Boulevard and Mulholland Drive. They waited for a car or two to pass, until the road was dark, and then Dar was out of the Trooper with his rucksack and moving quickly downhill into the tall weeds. He did not want to be arrested by Sherman Oaks police in the first five minutes of his mission. Lawrence drove off.

Dar reached into his heavy rucksack and found the carefully wrapped L. L. Bean night-vision goggles and the small box of camouflage color sticks. The ghillie suit was heavy, but most of the weight in his pack came from optical aids he had brought along and wrapped carefully in foam.

Dar was wearing black jeans, dark Mephisto boots, and a black Eddie Bauer cotton henley. Clicking on the battery-powered night-vision goggles, he saw that he had stopped just before running into a barbed-wire fence. The lights of the San Fernando Valley were so bright that it caused the goggles to flare every time Dar raised his gaze above the uninhabited ridge.

“The Counselor and his wife designed the house to take maximum advantage of the view of the city lights,” the Architectural Digest article had read, “the same view that inspired their former neighbor, Steven, to create the unforgettable alien Mother Ship.” It had taken Dar twenty minutes to figure out that the writer was talking about Steven Spielberg, who had lived in this neighborhood long ago when he was working on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Right now that Mother Ship–shaped V of bright lights visible between the darker hills was just a pain in the ass—or to be more specific, a pain in the eyes.

Dar removed the night goggles and used the camo-sticks to paint his face and hands. The idea was to use light colors on those parts of the face where shadows were formed—under the cheeks and chin and nose, in the eye sockets—and darker colors on prominent features such as his nose and cheekbones, jaw and forehead. The important thing, both with the face and hands, was to create an irregular pattern that would keep the human brain from piecing together the outline of a human face or hands at a distance.

This was a point of no return. If a Sherman Oaks PD searchlight suddenly pinned him now, he would have a hell of a time explaining the face paint. Of course, he rationalized, the night goggles and rucksack full of ghillie suit might be a problem to explain as well. Then again, so far he had not trespassed.

Dar eliminated that technicality by climbing the barbed-wire fence and heading out onto the long ridge, passing through the few trees that ran along Mulholland and into the scrub grass and shrubs. The ridges on either side—each about two hundred yards away—were developed to capacity with homes, most with outside security lights. Between that glare and the moonlight, Dar realized that it was easier to slip along with the night-vision goggles up on his forehead.

It took him about ten minutes to hike to a place on the ridgeline directly opposite Dallas Trace’s mansion. Dar knew from Architectural Digest that the huge home presented a fortress’s blank face to the street: high walls, windowless concrete, a basement garage with automatic doors, no sight of the main door. It must be, Dar knew, a serious problem for the FBI, NICB, state’s attorney’s office, or anyone else who was trying to carry out legal surveillance of the place.

But the back of Defense Attorney Trace’s home was a blaze of lights. Every room seemed to be lighted. Dar went to one knee, set the rucksack down carefully, and extracted his old Redfield Accu-Range telescopic sight. The scope was only 3–9 variable magnification, but it was easier to use than binoculars and had the advantage of showing only one set of optical lenses to the sun in the daylight.

Well, there was no doubt that this was the house. The four-foot-wide pool on its strip of coral-colored concrete that made up the backyard was brightly lit, as was the almost vertical strip of mowed grass below it. Dar could make out a security fence about twenty yards down the hill: razor wire atop an outward-slanted fence. The rear lights were bright enough to illuminate the hillside, but he could see extra motion-detector-activated lights on the wall and fence. Dar had no doubt that the fence and the lights, as well as the doors and the windows, were all hooked to state-of-the-art anti-intruder circuitry and that both the Sherman Oaks private security agency and the police would be notified if so much as an errant squirrel ended up in that yard. Mr. Dallas Trace’s home was not an easy target for a lazy or careless burglar.