Darwin's Blade

3 “C is for Careering”

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.

No wheels visible. He heard the roar of the Mercedes accelerating and he crawled on his elbows to the front right wheel of the NSX, catching a glimpse of the gray vehicle rocketing away.

Dar stood up shakily, feeling the adrenaline surging, suppressing the urge to vomit, and only then wondered if he had been hit. He touched his left ear and his fingers came away bloody, but he realized in an instant that it was only a small glass cut. With the exception of a few other slices from the broken safety glass, he had not been touched. A Honda Civic drove by below the speed limit, the round-faced male at the wheel staring wide-eyed at Dar and his car.

Dar inspected the NSX. They had shot high and they had used a lot of ammunition. The left and right windows were gone, the A-pillar had a bullet hole in it—the aluminum bright around the jagged indentation—and there were three holes in the driver’s-side door. One bullet would have hit Dar dead center in the ass if the steel side-impact strut had not deflected it, and two others had struck on the B-pillar part of the door where the handle was.

The front of the car had also taken half a dozen hits as the NSX had decelerated, but a quick inspection showed that all of the bullets had missed the wheels—running scars across the low, sloping hood or entering between the wheel and the passenger compartment or between the wheel and the front bumper. If the Acura NSX had been a front-engined vehicle, the damage would have been quite dramatic, but the engine in the sports car was set amidships, just behind the driver, and it was still idling with its usual ready purr. This—and the fact that the wheels were untouched and there didn’t appear to be any suspension or structural damage—decided Dar.

He ripped off his shirt, used it to brush the broken glass off the driver’s seat, got in, slammed the NSX into gear, and accelerated down the shoulder. The gray Mercedes had just disappeared over a dip in the interstate perhaps two miles ahead. The vehicle had been moving fast—Dar had estimated that it was passing the few other cars on the interstate at twenty-five to thirty miles per hour above the limit of seventy.

Dar was doing a hundred in third gear when he swung off the shoulder back onto the right lane of the interstate, blowing past the Civic whose round-faced driver was still staring.

This is crazy, he thought, and slammed the NSX into fourth gear, hearing the roar of the normally aspirated six-cylinder performance engine just behind his seat as he let all of the snakes out of their cage, bringing the sports car close to the 7,800-rpm red line.

But he was angry. He was very angry. Dar could not remember being this angry in a long, long time. He shifted into fifth and floored it.

He passed two cars and a semitrailer on their left, the sound of the passed vehicles actually Doppler-shifting down in tone because of his speed. As he came over the rise, he caught sight of the gray Mercedes about three miles ahead on the next long hill climb of the interstate. It was in the far left lane and still doing about a hundred. He reached for his shirt pocket to grab his cell phone—realized that he’d taken off the shirt and thrown it as a crumpled ball onto the passenger seat after cleaning out the glass. He patted the shirt, but there was nothing in the pocket. He had dropped the phone somewhere during his ducking, slithering, sliding out, crouching, elbow crawling, or glass dusting. Shit. He told himself that it didn’t matter—that the howling wind noise coming through the two shattered side windows would have drowned out any call to the police. At least the windshield was intact except for one two-inch stress fracture at the upper left where a slug had hit the top of the A-pillar.

Eyes on the road and on the tail of the Mercedes, he glanced down for the briefest second at his speedometer: 158. He accelerated, leaning over as he did so to grab his camera bag from the floor of the passenger side. Please, God—whoever’s in charge of all this—just don’t have let any of the slugs hit my cameras. Through a combination of quick pats and even quicker glances Dar ascertained that the bag was unhurt, unsnapped the top, and unceremoniously dumped the contents onto the passenger seat. He didn’t want the digital camera; he wanted the Nikon and the long lens.

Dar set the Nikon between his legs, fumbled for the telephoto, and began changing lenses as he accelerated up and over the next hill at 165 miles per hour. Changing lenses was usually a two-handed job—one had to depress a button to release the lens before screwing the new one on—but he had done it one-handed before. Just never at this speed.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a CHP patrol car coming the other way on the westernmost northbound lane, and glanced at his mirror in time to see the black-and-white CHP vehicle slewing through the median, its lights beginning to swirl and flash as it reversed direction to give chase. If the siren had come on, Dar couldn’t hear it above the wind noise in the tiny cockpit.

It was just his luck that this CHP car was one of their pursuit Mustangs—a ’94 model from the look of it—decked out with one of their usual 302 V-8 engines. Dar’s quick glimpse of the driver and his partner had told him that they were both young, and the speed of their pursuit showed him that they were both gung ho. Just my luck, thought Dar, focusing on the Mercedes ahead of him.

Somehow he had kept his Serengeti driving glasses on during all of his flopping and crawling antics, and without these keeping the worst of the wind from his eyes, Dar didn’t think he could have seen well enough in all the wind to keep up the pace. But he was. The Mercedes was only twenty car lengths ahead now. It had slowed to about eighty-five—but the driver must have just glanced in his mirror and glimpsed either the NSX or the police flashers or both, because suddenly the gray Mercedes shifted lanes and accelerated up the next long stretch of hilly interstate, passing cars on the left and right, using all five lanes, hunting for open spots and then surging ahead.

Dar followed lane to lane. He knew that the normal Mercedes E 340s were electronically governed to keep their top speed down to 130 mph, but this window-tinted, spoilered, fat-tired, modified son of a bitch was now doing at least 155 as it dodged through the thickening traffic.

Goddammit, thought Dar. He had the long two-hundred-millimeter lens on now and the Nikon in his left hand as he whipped past traffic on his left and right. But the Mercedes was still a quarter of a mile ahead, too far for a clear shot at the license tag. And Dar had no idea how he could hold the camera steady enough to read the plate even if he got closer.

He didn’t care. He dropped the Nikon back in his lap, gripped the perfectly sized steering wheel with both hands, and swerved from the far right lane to the far left to stay behind the Mercedes. His speedometer read 170 and he was above the red line. Dar desperately did not want to blow this Acura engine: it was a handcrafted work of art, assembled by one man at the Japanese factory. Somewhere on that mostly aluminum engine block was the man’s name engraved in Japanese symbols. In an age of superchargers, turbochargers, and every other prosthetic breathing aid, this was a normally aspirated V-6 that derived speed from perfection. It would be a desecration to blow such an engine. Nonetheless, Dar kept the perforated pedal to the metal—or in this case, to the luxurious black rubber mat that ran up the firewall above the luxurious black carpeting—and let the tach creep further into the red. The little six-cylinder screamed and the gap began to close.

What if they just slow down and shoot me again? asked the still sane part of Darwin’s mind. He had no weapons in the car. He had no weapons at home. He hated handguns. What if I slow down and the cops shoot me? riposted the adrenaline-driven part of Dar’s brain. Might as well catch these fuckers first.

The Mercedes shifted from the far left lane to the far right lane, cutting off two vehicles as it did so. One of them—a Ford Windstar van—braked too quickly and spun four times before coming to a halt with its nose pointed back the way it had come. Dar noticed the pallor on the man and woman’s faces in the front seats as he passed them at 168 miles per hour.

This is how it’ll end, you asshole, shouted the sane part of Dar through the adrenaline-filled Dar’s thick skull. In the movies these car chases are always excitement and close calls. In real life, it’s a dead family—innocent people killed—and you’re not even a cop. You don’t even have the right to do this.

The driving Dar theoretically agreed with the sane Dar—he glanced at his mirror and saw the flashing lights as the CHP Mustang almost showed clear air under the wheels as it came over the rise less than a mile behind him—but the part of him that was driving was angrier than he had been for many, many years. And the Mercedes was only a hundred yards ahead now, back in the far left lane again with little traffic around it. Dar held his foot to the floor and leveraged the Nikon onto the slivered sill of the NSX door, keeping the long lens inside so the wind wouldn’t catch it and pull the expensive camera out of his hand. This is going to be tricky, he thought, deciding that he should shoot through the windshield with both hands on top of the wheel to prop and steady the Nikon, helping to steer with his left knee, just snapping away at full auto and hoping that one of the photos would be readable.

The Mercedes braked and changed lanes so quickly that it crossed five lanes in a long, controlled slide, barely missing a delivery van and recovering just in time to fire down an exit ramp like a bullet down a barrel.

Fuck, Dar prayed, and braked to fall behind a Greyhound bus, braking again and skidding across the last three lanes toward the exit. He made it with the NSX’s rear wheels spinning at gravel on the shoulder, two corrections, and he was accelerating down the ramp, just catching sight of the exit sign as he passed—Lake Street.

All right. He knew where he was. This road he was broadsiding onto now, following the fishtailing Mercedes, went nowhere except through the little bedroom community of Lake Elsinore along Lakeshore Drive. It used to be the old Alberhill exit, but that non-town was already behind them. Dar looked ahead to his left and saw two county sheriff’s cars—both black and white, both Chevys—one a Monte Carlo, the other an Impala—and both heading west from the town to intercept them. Both the Mercedes and the NSX blasted past the intersection before the sheriff’s cars got onto Lakeshore Drive, but Dar could actually hear the sirens as the two Chevys skidded onto the street and accelerated only a hundred yards behind him. The CHP Mustang was close behind them and trying to pass.

If I pull up to the E 340, Dar thought coolly, working it out as if it were a minor chess problem, the guys inside will shoot me. He glanced in his mirror. If I slow down, the cops probably won’t shoot me, but it’s possible that they’ll be so busy arresting me that they’ll let the Mercedes get away.

The Mercedes’s brake lights flashed on. Dar had no choice but to brake himself, the big seventeen-inch disk brakes hauling the sports car down from speed so abruptly that he was pressed forward with three g’s as the inertial reel locked and his harness held him in place.

Incredibly, the Mercedes swung out of control to the left, fishtailed to the right, then bounced across an empty corner lot—Dar could see three feet of daylight under the E 340—landed on asphalt, corrected itself perfectly, and then accelerated up a street headed west. Dar couldn’t read the street sign as he brought the NSX through a controlled slide onto the same narrow road, but he knew it from previous jobs that had brought him this way—Riverside Drive. Actually the beginning of Highway 74, it was a narrow two-lane road that crossed the mountains through the Cleveland National Forest and emerged on I-5 at San Juan Capistrano about thirty-two miles west. Dar had used the shortcut many times.

The Impala did not make the turn, and Dar caught a glimpse of it in his left mirror as it spun through a gas station entrance, just missing a Jaguar that was fueling up at the outermost pump, and then disappeared in a cloud of dust behind a line of vehicles in a used-car lot. The CHP Mustang and the other sheriff’s car both made the turn and came barreling up Riverside Drive, less than a quarter mile back now as the winding road slowed the chase.

This is where I should stop and let them handle it, thought Dar, knowing that no claim of attempting a citizen’s arrest was going to keep him out of jail. Suddenly a helicopter buzzed low over him, passed the Mercedes, and then circled around away from the hillside, preparing to make another pass.

Police helicopter, thought Dar, knowing that L.A. County had sixteen of the things while all of New York City used only six. But then he saw the markings. Wonderful. He’d be on Channel 5 KTLA in time for the six-o’clock news. Actually, he realized, he was probably on now. There were so many police automobile pursuits televised live in Southern California that there was talk of a cable channel that showed nothing else.

Dar roared up the increasingly steep and winding road, trying to keep the roof of the Mercedes in sight. It had been years since he had raced sports cars, but everything felt very, very right as he hit the apex of each decreasing radial turn exactly on the money, accelerating out of the turn with a roar, tapping the brake, setting up the next turn, shifting down, allowing just enough drift of the rear end, and coming out again at full throttle. Very few supercars in the world could outhandle the Acura NSX in this sort of situation. By the time they were nearing the top of the steep grade, the police had fallen out of sight behind them and he was within three car lengths of the E 340.

It had been two miles up the winding, twisting road above Lake Elsinore and the men in the Mercedes had obviously decided it was time to get rid of him. They slowed during a right-hand uphill hairpin, the passenger-side window came down, and a man with dark hair, a dark suit, and a dark metal Mac-10 leaned out.

Dar got off five or six photos with his Nikon, held one-handed, as the automatic weapon blazed away at him. Something banged metal near the right rear of the sports car, but the handling stayed good and Dar dropped the camera into his lap, shifted down, roared around the decreasing radial, uphill right turn and accelerated until he was almost on the Mercedes’s bumper. He noticed that it had Nevada tags and memorized the numbers.

The shooter leaned out again, but Dar was too close; he dodged into the left lane and accelerated almost even with the Mercedes. The gunman fired through his own tinted left rear window, sending bronzed glass flying, but Dar had already accelerated ahead and then dropped back next to the Mercedes. The driver’s window hummed down and Dar looked to his right directly into their faces, memorizing them, as both vehicles approached the last hairpin turn at eighty-five miles per hour.

Dar knew that beyond this point he would be in trouble. There was a long straight stretch along the ridgetop of the mountain before the curves started again. But on this last left-hand curve before the summit, directly ahead, was an old restaurant–turned–biker-bar called The Lookout. Dar had stopped there for lunch once, but the ambience—there were generally twenty to thirty “hogs” parked outside and as many guzzling and fighting inside—had not been to his liking.

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.