Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

Lawrence nodded. “I was going to do it on the way home after photographing the desert meeting, but you’re going to have to cover for me. I may be getting stitches.” Lawrence looked at the huge, purple Expedition disappearing down the highway. “One more favor, Dar. Would you get my handkerchief out of my right back pocket?”

Dar complied.

“Stand back,” said Lawrence to everyone. He tugged hard at his hand, twice. The sharp metal ring had a firm grip in there. On the third tug he pulled hard enough to make the Isuzu rock forward on its springs.

“Aaayargh!” cried Lawrence, sounding like a black-belt karate expert preparing to break bricks. He grabbed his right forearm with his left hand and threw all 250 pounds of himself backward. A spray of blood spattered across the asphalt and almost hit the teenaged girl’s sneakers. She jumped back and stood daintily on her tiptoes.

“Arrrrrurrrr,” said the assembled crowd in unison, an orchestrated groan of disgust and admiration.

“Thanks,” Lawrence said, and took the kerchief from Dar with his left hand, wrapping it around the bleeding meat of his right hand just above the joint of thumb and wrist.

Dar put the cell phone in Lawrence’s upper left safari-shirt pocket as his boss got behind the wheel of the Trooper and started the ignition.

“Want me to go with you?” asked Dar. He could imagine Lawrence getting weaker from loss of blood just as the band of felons noticed the light glinting off his boss’s long lens documenting the stolen car scene. The chase across the desert. The shooting. Lawrence fainting. The terrible denouement.

“Naw,” said Lawrence, “just do that retirement-park interview for me and I’ll see you at our place tomorrow.”

“Okay,” said Dar, his voice dull. He would rather have had the desert chase and gun battle with stolen car thieves than to go do this damn interview. It was the kind of thing that Lawrence and Trudy usually spared him.

Lawrence roared away in the Trooper. The Expedition was just a plum-colored dot on the horizon.

The four men in mechanics’ overalls and the teenaged girl were looking at the spray pattern of blood on the white concrete.

“Jeeee-zus,” said the youngest. “That sure was a stupid thing.”

Dar dropped into the black leather of the heated NSX. “Not even in Larry’s top twenty,” he said, got the engine and the air-conditioning roaring, and pulled away, also headed west.

The mobile home park was in Riverside just off the 91, not far from the intersection with the 10 that Dar had driven west on from Banning. He found the proper surface street, pulled into the entrance of the mobile home park, and parked in the sparse shade of a cottonwood tree to read the rest of the file.

“Shit,” he whispered to himself. From Lawrence’s preliminary field report and the data from the insurer, the park had been around for a while before turning into a senior-citizen community. Now one had to be at least fifty-five to live there—although grandchildren and other youngsters were allowed to visit overnight—but the age of the average resident was probably closer to eighty. It looked from the data sheets as if many of the older residents had lived there even before the park had opened as a senior community about fifteen years earlier.

The mobile home park owner was carrying a high self-retention—which was relatively rare—carrying its own risk up to $100,000 before the insurance kicked in. Dar noted that this particular owner—a Mr. Gilley—owned several mobile home parks and maintained a high self-retention on all of them. This suggested to Dar that these parks were considered high-risk, that there had been a high volume of accidents in Mr. Gilley’s retirement mobile home parks over the years, and that the insurance companies had been unwilling to provide the usual full coverage because of the frequency of these accidents. Dar knew that this might indicate a careless attitude on the part of the owner, or just bad luck.

In this case, Gilley had been notified four days ago that there had been a serious accident in this park, and that one of his resident tenants had died—the park was called the Shady Rest, although Dar could see that most of the mature trees had died and there was little shade left. The owner had immediately contacted his business attorney, and the attorney had called Stewart Investigations to reconstruct the accident so that the attorney could evaluate the liability of his client. A fairly common case for Lawrence and Trudy’s company. Dar hated these cases—slip and falls, negligence cases, nursing home lawsuits. It was one reason why he worked under special contract for the Stewarts to reconstruct the more complicated accidents.

No one in the file’s chain of communication seemed to have any detailed facts about this accident, but the owner’s attorney had told Trudy there had been a witness—another resident by the name of Henry—and that Henry would be expecting an interviewer at the clubhouse around 11:00 A.M. Dar glanced at his watch. Ten to eleven.

Dar read through the few paragraphs of transcript from the attorney’s phone call. It seemed that one of the elderly residents, Mr. William J. Treehorn, seventy-eight, had driven his electric-powered cart over a curb outside the clubhouse, fallen from the cart, struck his head, and died instantly. The accident had occurred around 11:00 P.M., so the first thing Dar did was drive to the clubhouse—a single-story A-frame building that needed maintenance—to check the nearby lighting. He could see the security lights that would have illuminated the walkways directly in front of the clubhouse, and there were three low-pressure sodium streetlights on 35-foot poles visible around the curve of lane. Dar was a bit surprised by the low-pressure sodium lights; they were more common farther south near where he lived, near San Diego, because they were supposed to minimize light scatter for the Palomar Observatory. Still, if all the lights worked, there would have been more than adequate lighting in this accident area. A point in favor of the absentee owner.

Dar drove slowly past the front of the clubhouse. He made a note on his yellow legal pad that there was construction going on in front of the community building: part of the asphalt street had been repaved, there were delineators and cones still in place, yellow tape restricted access to several sections of sidewalk, and some repaving equipment remained parked in the roped-off part of the street. He drove around to a small parking lot at the rear of the clubhouse and walked in. There did not seem to be any air-conditioning in the building and the heat was stifling.

A group of older men was playing cards at a table near the rear window. The view out the window was of a pool and hot tub that looked as if they were rarely used—the cover to the hot tub was lashed down and mildewed, and the pool needed cleaning. Dar approached the game diffidently even though the four were watching him rather than their cards.

“Excuse me, don’t mean to interrupt the game,” said Dar, “but is one of you gentlemen named Henry?”

A man who looked to be in his late seventies sprang to his feet. He was short, perhaps five five, and could not have weighed more than 110 pounds. His skinny, white, oldman’s legs emerged from oversized shorts, but he wore an expensive polo shirt, brand-new running shoes, and a baseball cap with an emblem on it advertising a Las Vegas casino. His gold wristwatch was a Rolex.

“I’m Henry,” said the spry oldster, extending a mottled hand. “Henry Goldsmith. You the fella the insurance company sent around to hear about Bud’s accident?”

Dar introduced himself and said, “Bud was Mr. William J. Treehorn?”

One of the old men spoke without looking up from his cards. “Bud. Everybody called him Bud. Nobody never called him William or Bill. Bud.”