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Authors: Dan Simmons

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BOOK: Darwin's Blade
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Dar rubbed his ear. “I figure that after the first fifteen seconds or so, our guy was just a passive bystander, no longer a participant.”

“What do you mean?”

Dar touched the screen again. “I mean that even at the lowest boost rates I can plot to get him from here to there, he was pulling about eighteen g's when he left the asphalt. A two-hundred-pound guy would have…”

“Had the equivalent of three thousand four hundred extra pounds sitting on his face and chest,” said Cameron. “Ouch.”

The sergeant's radio squawked. “Sorry,” he said. “Gotta take this.” He stepped away to listen to the rasping and squawking while Dar turned off his computer and stored it in the cabin of the NSX. The car was idling again to keep the air-conditioning going.

Cameron stepped closer. His expression was a queer mixture of a grin and a grimace. “Forensics boys just excavated the steering wheel of the El Camino from the crater,” he said softly.

Dar waited.

“Finger bones were embedded in the plastic,” finished Cameron. “Deeply embedded.”

Dar shrugged. His phone chirped. He flipped it open, saying to the CHP sergeant, “This is what I love about California, Paul. Never out of a cell. Never out of touch.” He listened for a minute, said, “I'll be there in twenty minutes,” and flipped the phone shut.

“Time to go to work for real?” said Cameron, grinning now, obviously phrasing the telling and retelling of this for future days.

Dar nodded. “That was Lawrence Stewart, my boss. He's got something for me that sounds weirder than this shit.”

“Semper Fi,”
said Cameron, to no one in particular.

“O seclum insipiens et inficetum,”
said Dar, to the same audience.

I
t took Dar less than fifteen minutes to drive to the crossroads truck stop–cum–Indian casino to which his boss, Lawrence Stewart, had asked him to hurry at all possible speed. In the NSX, with radar detector pinging fore and aft and sideways, all possible speed meant 162 miles per hour.

The truck stop was west of Palm Springs, but was not one of the major Indian casinos that rose up out of the desert like giant adobe fake-pueblo-style vacuum cleaners set there to suck the last dime out of the last Anglo sucker's pocket. This was a run-down, seedy little truck stop that looked as if it had hit its heyday about the same time Route 66 was booming (even though this one was nowhere near Route 66), and the “casino” was little more than a back room with six slot machines and a one-eyed Native American dealing blackjack on what seemed to be a twenty-four-hour shift.

Dar spotted Lawrence right away. His boss was hard to miss—six two, about 250 pounds, with a friendly, mustached face that at the moment seemed quite flushed. Lawrence's '86 Isuzu Trooper was parked away from the pumps and the open garage doors, on a heat-rippled strip of concrete just catty-corner from the truck-stop diner.

Dar looked for some shade to park the NSX in, found none, and pulled it into the shadow of Lawrence's sport utility vehicle. One glance showed him that something was odd. Lawrence had taken out the Isuzu's left “sealed beam unit” or SBU—car-guy talk for headlight assembly—and carefully laid the bulb and other pieces on a clean work cloth on the Isuzu's high hood. At the moment Lawrence's right hand was deep in the empty headlight socket, his left hand was fussing with his right wrist as if the truck had grabbed him, and he was on his cell phone—his ear pressed heavily to his shoulder so that the phone wouldn't drop. He was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved safari jacket that he had sweated through in the chest area, under the arms, and down the back. Dar looked again and realized that Lawrence's round face not only looked flushed, it looked red to the point of impending coronary.

“Hey, Larry,” said Dar, slamming the NSX door behind him.

“Goddammit, don't call me Larry,” rumbled the bigger man.

Everyone called Lawrence Larry. Dar had once met Lawrence's older brother, a writer named Dale Stewart, and Dale had said that Lawrence-Don't-Call-Me-Larry had been fighting that losing battle over his name since he was seven years old.

“OK, Larry,” agreed Dar amiably, walking over to lean on the right fender of the Isuzu, careful to keep his elbow on the work cloth and not the burning-hot metal. “What's up?”

Lawrence stood upright and looked around. Sweat was running down his cheeks and brow and dripping onto his safari shirt. He nodded slightly toward the plate-glass window of the diner. “See that guy on the third stool in there—No, don't turn your head to look, damn it.”

Dar kept his face turned toward Lawrence while he glanced at the long window of the diner. “Little guy with the Hawaiian shirt? Just about finished with…what?…scrambled eggs?”

“That's him,” said Lawrence. “Bromley.”

“Ahh,” said Dar. Lawrence and Trudy had been working on a stolen-car-ring case for four months. Someone had been stealing only new rental cars from one of their corporate clients—Avis in this case—and then repainting the vehicles, shipping them across state lines, and reselling them. Charles “Chuckie” Bromley had been under surveillance for weeks as the ring's number-one car thief. Dar had had nothing to do with the case until now.

“That purple Ford Expedition over there with the rental plates is his,” said Lawrence, still holding the phone to his shoulder by force of jowl. Dar heard squeaks coming from the cell phone and Lawrence said, “Just a minute, honey, Dar's here.”

“Trudy?” said Dar.

Lawrence rolled his eyes. “Who else would I call
honey?

Dar held up both hands. “Hey, your personal life is your own, Larry.” He smiled while he said it because he knew no other couple as committed to each other and dependent upon one another as Lawrence and Trudy. Officially, Trudy owned the company, and the couple worked sixty- to eighty-hour weeks, living, breathing, talking, and evidently thinking about little other than insurance adjusting and the ever-mounting caseload they were carrying.

“Take the phone,” said Lawrence.

Dar rescued the Flip Phone from between Lawrence's sweaty cheek and shoulder. “Hey, Trudy,” he said to the phone. To Lawrence he said, “I didn't know Avis rented purple Expeditions.”

Normally Trudy Stewart sounded pleasantly businesslike and very busy. Now she sounded very busy and very irritated as she said, “Can you get that idiot free?”

“I can try,” said Dar, beginning to understand.

“Call me back if you have to amputate,” Trudy said, and hung up.

“Damn,” muttered Lawrence, glancing over at the diner where the waitress was taking Bromley's plate away. The little man was sipping the last of his coffee. “He's going to be leaving in a minute.”

“How'd you do that?” asked Dar, nodding at where Lawrence's right hand disappeared into the headlight opening.

“I've been tailing Bromley since before sunrise and I realized that I only had one headlight working,” said Lawrence.

“Not good,” agreed Dar. People noticed one-eyed cars in their rearview mirrors at night.

“No,” snarled Lawrence, tugging at his wrist. It was firmly stuck. “I know what the problem is. These SBUs have a cheap little fuse connector that comes loose. It's behind the headlight assembly rather than under the dash. Trudy fixed it the last time the thing joggled loose.”

Dar nodded. “Trudy has smaller hands.”

Lawrence glared at his accident reconstruction specialist. “Yeah,” he said as if biting off a dozen more pertinent and violent responses. “The opening's funnel-shaped. I got my hand in there all right, even reconnected the damn fuse clip. I just can't…it just won't…”

“Let go of you?” prompted Dar, looking over at the diner. “Bromley's calling for the check.”

“Damn, damn, damn,” muttered Lawrence. “The diner was too small for me to go in without being spotted. I pumped gas as slowly as I could. I just figured that if I worked on this awhile, it would look normal enough…”

“You look like somebody with his hand trapped in a headlight socket,” said Dar.

Lawrence showed his teeth in what was definitely not a friendly smile. “The inside of the circular flange is razor-sharp,” he hissed through those teeth. “And I think my hand has swollen with the last half hour's attempt at pulling it out.”

“Couldn't you get to it from under the hood?” said Dar, ready to roll up the work cloth and pop the hood open.

Lawrence's grimace remained. “It's sealed. If I could have reached it under the hood,
I wouldn't have gone in through the headlight.

Dar knew that his boss was an amiable sort, easy to joke with and kindhearted, but he also knew that Lawrence had high blood pressure and a rare but fearsome temper. Noting his boss's beet-red face, the sweat dripping from his pug nose and mustache, and the murderous intensity of his voice, Dar guessed that this might not be a good time for further banter.

“What do you want me to do? Get some soap or grease from the mechanics in the garage?”

“I didn't want to draw a crowd…” Lawrence began, and then said, “Oh, shit.”

Four of the mechanics and a teenaged girl were walking toward them from the garage. Bromley had paid his check and was out of sight, either in the men's room or headed for the door.

Lawrence leaned closer to Dar and whispered. “Chuckie is meeting his boss and several of the others in the stolen-car ring somewhere out in the desert this morning. If I can photograph that, I've got them.” He tugged at his right hand. The Isuzu Trooper held its grip.

Dar nodded. “You want me to follow them?”

Lawrence made a face. “Don't be stupid. Across desert roads. In
that?
” He inclined his head toward the black NSX. “You've got a front clearance of about six millimeters there.”

Dar shrugged in agreement. “I wasn't planning any off-road work today. Shall I drive your truck?”

Lawrence stood upright, his hand firmly embedded. The grease monkeys and the teenaged girl had arrived and were forming a semicircle.

“How could you drive
my
truck while I'm attached like this?” hissed Lawrence.

Dar rubbed his chin. “Strap you on the hood like a deer?” he suggested.

Chuckie Bromley came out of the diner, glanced over at the small crowd around Lawrence, and climbed up awkwardly into his purple Ford Expedition.

“Hey,” said one of the teenaged mechanics, wiping his black hands on a blacker rag. “Stuck?”

Lawrence's basilisk stare made the boy take a step back.

“We got some grease,” said the second mechanic.

“Don't need grease,” said an older mechanic with missing front teeth. “Just spray some WD-40 in there…Course, you're still gonna lose some skin. Maybe a thumb.”

“I think we oughta take the grill apart,” said the third mechanic. “Remove the whole damn headlight assembly. It's the only way you're going to get your hand out of there, mister, without tearing ligaments. I have a cousin who got trapped by his Isuzu…”

Lawrence sighed heavily. Chuckie Bromley drove past them and turned west onto the highway. “Dar,” he said, “would you get that file off the passenger seat? It's the case I need you to work on today.”

Darwin went around and picked up the file, glanced at it, and said, “Oh, no, Larry. You know that I hate this sort of—”

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.

BOOK: Darwin's Blade
4.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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