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 out-handle 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 stra
ight 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.
CHAPTER FOUR
“D IS FOR DICKWEED”
THE CAR CHASE and Dar’s arrest were on Tuesday afternoon. Freed on bail that evening, he attended a meeting on Wednesday morning in the deputy district attorney’s office in downtown San Diego.
When he was booked on Tuesday, Dar had been shirtless, wearing only his sneakers and the now soiled and bloody jeans that he had pulled on at 4:00 A.M. With the scratches from flying glass, no shirt, wildly mussed hair, two days’ stubble, and what his fellow grunts in Vietnam had long ago called a “postcombat thousand-yard stare,” his mug shot looked classically and fiercely felonious. He could picture it hanging in his study, right next to an old color photo of him receiving his robe and scroll symbolizing his Ph.D. in physics.
At 9:00 A.M. Wednesday morning, sitting at the long table with more than a dozen other people who had yet to be introduced, Dar was shaved, showered, and dressed in a crisp white shirt, striped rep tie, blue linen blazer, tropical-weight gray pants, and polished Bally black shoes that were as soft as dance slippers. He wasn’t quite sure if he was a guest at this meeting or still a prisoner of the state, but he wanted to look decent in either case.
The deputy district attorney’s assistant’s assistant, a nervous little man who seemed to embody every gay stereotype in the culture—from his hand-wringing and nervous giggles to his overwrought wrists—was busy offering donuts and coffee to everyone. Set on the table opposite Dar was a line of Smokey hats and badged caps behind which sat at least eight police captains and sheriffs; on the same side of the table but at the far end, substituting briefcases on the tabletop for hats, were two plainclothes officers, one with the haircut of an FBI special agent. All of them except the FBI man accepted at least one donut from the deputy DA’s assistant’s assistant.
On Dar’s side of the table, besides Lawrence and Trudy and their lawyer, W.D.D. Du Bois, was a motley assortment of bureaucrats and attorneys, most of them wrinkled, rumpled, jowled, and slouched, all in sad contrast to the starched, silent, stern-jawed crispness of the cops on the other side. Most of the attorneys and bureaucrats just accepted coffee.
Dar took his Styrofoam cup with thanks, received an “Oh, you’re welcome, you’re welcome” and a pat on the back from the deputy DA’s assistant’s assistant, and sat back to wait for whatever came next.
A black man dressed in a bailiff’s uniform stepped into the room and announced, “We’re almost ready to start. Dickweed’s on his way and Sid’s just leaving the ladies’ room.”
The previous afternoon, still handcuffed, Dar had been driven to the county jail in downtown Riverside. In the car, the older of the state troopers had literally read him his rights from a frayed three-by-five card. Dar had the right to remain silent, anything he said could and would be used against him in a court of law, he had the right to an attorney, if he could not afford an attorney, one would be appointed for him. Did he understand?
“You’re reading it?” Dar asked. “You must repeat it ten thousand times a year.”
“Shut the fuck up,” explained the trooper.
Dar nodded and remained silent. He had been Mirandized. And a perfectly good adjective had been made into a verb.
At the Riverside County jail, a low, ugly structure right next to the tall, ugly Riverside city hall complex, the young CHP officers reclaimed their cuffs and officially handed him over to the Riverside sheriff, who gave him to a young deputy to book. Dar had never been arrested before. Still, all of the procedures—emptying the pockets of personal possessions, fingerprinting, and mug shot—were familiar from TV and the movies, of course, and it all combined to give him a strange sense of disembodied déjà vu that added to the unreal quality of the last hour or so.
He was put in a holding cell, alone but for the company of a few sullen cockroaches. About fifteen minutes later, the deputy returned and said, “You got a call coming. Want to call your lawyer?”
“I don’t have a lawyer,” Dar said truthfully. “Can I call my therapist?”
The deputy was not amused.
Dar called Trudy, who had dealt with so many legal issues that she could have passed the bar exam with half h
er brain tied behind her back. Instead of handling legal issues herself, however, she and Lawrence kept one of the best lawyers in California on retainer. It was necessary given that Stewart Investigations occasionally got dragged into one of the broad lawsuit nets cast out by hopeful litigants plying the fraudulent-insurance-claim waters as diligently and daily and doggedly as New England fishermen.
“Trudy, I—” began Dar when she picked up the phone.
“Yes, I know,” she interrupted. “I didn’t catch it live, but Linda taped it for me. The commentators are going on about road rage.”
“Road rage!” shouted Dar. “Those bastards tried to kill me and then I—”
“You’re at Riverside, right?” interrupted Trudy again.
“Right.”
“I’ve got one of W.D.D’s associates on the way. You’ll give a deposition there at Riverside with the associate present and he’ll have you out in an hour.”
Dar stood and blinked at the phone. “Trudy, bail’s going to be about a billion dollars. Two men are dead. Dead live on Channel Five. Riverside County’s not going to let me out of here without—”
“There’s more to this than meets the Insta-Cam,” said Trudy. “I’ve been on the phone. I know who the two guys were and why the CHP and county mounties aren’t releasing your name to the media. And why W.D.D. will be able to—”
“Who were they?” said Dar, realizing that he was shouting again. “Did they say on TV?”
“No, it wasn’t on TV and we’re all going to be further enlightened tomorrow morning at the San Diego deputy district attorney’s office,” said Trudy. “Nine A.M. You’ll be out on bail…the San Diego County DA already has a writ from one of his judges asking the Riverside County judge to be lenient. Don’t worry about media following you home… Your name isn’t going to be leaked until at least tomorrow.”