by Dan Simmons
“Yes, that’s right,” said Henry, his voice slower now as he pictured the end of the evening in detail. “Bud, he grunted and made some noises. The other boys didn’t understand him, but I knew he was saying that he had to get home ’cause Rose hates to go to sleep without him. So he took his winnings and him and me left the game and came outside.”
“Just the two of you?”
“Well, yeah. Wally and Herb and Don were still playing…they go way past midnight most Friday nights…and some of the other boys, the older ones, y’know, they’d gone home early. So it was just Bud and me going home at eleven.”
“But there was still the paving machine in the way,” said Dar.
“Of course there was,” said Henry, sounding impatient now at Dar’s slowness. “Think one of them construction knuckleheads had come by at ten P.M. and moved it for us? So Bud drove his Pard to the curb where we’d lifted him up, but it seemed…you know…too steep.”
“So then what did you do?” Dar could picture what happened next.
Henry rubbed his cheek and mouth. “Well, I said, ‘Let’s go down to the corner there…it’s only about thirty feet…’ because I thought the curb’s not so high there. And Bud, he agrees. So he scoots his Pard down past the useless ramp to the corner…come on, I’ll show you.”
Dar accompanied Henry to the corner beyond the handicapped access ramp. Dar noted that one of the low-pressure sodium vapor lamps was right next to the crosswalk there. There was no curb cut. Dar stood on the sidewalk while Henry stepped out into the street, his voice becoming more animated, his gnarled hands moving and gesturing as he spoke.
“Well, we get here and the curb doesn’t look that much lower. I mean, it isn’t. But it was dark, and we figured it was a little lower here, maybe. So I suggested to Bud that we take the front wheel of the Pard and drive it off the curb here ’cause it doesn’t look quite as tall as the other parts of the curb along here. Least in the dark.”
Henry paused. Dar said softly, “So did Bud drive the front wheel off the curb?”
Henry refocused his eyes, looking down at the curb now as if he had never seen it before. “Oh, yeah. No problem at all. I held on to the right handlebar of the cart and Bud drove the front wheel off the curb. Everything was hunky-dory. The cart wheel went right off and I kind of held onto it a little bit so it wouldn’t be a real hard bump. So then we had the front wheel of Bud’s little Pard off the curb and Bud looks up at me, and I remember, I said, ‘It’s all right, Bud. I’ve got the right handlebar. I’ll hold onto the handlebar.’”
Henry pantomimed holding on to the handlebar with both hands. “Bud, he hits the switch with his right hand to activate the motor, but he doesn’t give it any throttle, and I say again, ‘It’s OK, Bud, we’ll get that left rear wheel off the curb and get it down on the street and I’ll hold onto you here—both hands on the handlebar—and then you can just drive forward and the right rear tire, it’ll drive right off the curb, and then we’ll be on the street and then it’s a straight shot home.’”
Dar stood and waited, seeing Henry’s eyes cloud again as he relived the moment.
“And then the cart moved forward and I was holding on to the right end of the handlebar… Used to be real strong, Mr. Minor, worked twenty-six years loading boxes in the Chicago Merchandise Mart till we moved out here but this damned leukemia the last couple of years… Anyway, the left wheel dropped off the curb and the damned cart started to tip to its left. Bud looks at me and he can’t move his left arm or leg, and I say, ‘It’s OK, Bud, I got it with both hands,’ but the cart just kept tipping. It was heavy. Real heavy. I thought of grabbing Bud, but he was…you know…strapped into the cart the way he’s supposed to be. I did everything to hang on to that cart. I had both hands on the handlebar, but I felt it tipping farther and farther…it’s a heavy cart what with the battery and motor and all…and my hands were getting sweaty, and I thought later that I should have hollered for the fellas who were still playing pinochle, but at the time…well, I just didn’t think about it. You know how it is.”
Dar nodded and held the tape recorder.
Henry’s eyes were filling with tears now, as if the full impact of the event was striking him for the first time. “I felt the cart tipping and my fingers starting to slip and I couldn’t hold it anymore. I mean, it was just too much weight for me, and then Bud looked at me with his good eye, and I think he knew what was going to happen, but I said, ‘Bud, Bud, it’ll be all right, I’ll hang on. I’ll hang onto this. I’ve got you.’”
Henry looked at the curb for a full minute in silence. His cheeks were moist. When he spoke again, the animation was completely absent from his voice. “And then the cart tipped farther and fell over to its left and Bud couldn’t do anything because, like I said, he was paralyzed on his left side. Then there was this crash and this…sound…this sickening sound.”
Henry turned and looked Dar straight in the eye. “And then Bud died.” Henry fell silent, just standing there with his arms stretched out in the same position they must have been the instant the handlebars had slipped from his grip. “I was just trying to help him get home so he could say good-night to Rose,” whispered Henry.
Later, when Henry had left, Dar used his tape measure to calculate the fall distance from Bud’s head location while seated in a Pard cart to the pavement. Four feet six inches. But at that moment he said nothing, did nothing, just stood next to the old man whose arms were still extended, his closed fists slowly opening to splayed fingers. The hands shook.
Henry looked back at the pavement. “And then Bud died.”
Dar called it a day and drove down the 91 to the 15 and then headed south, toward his condo outside of San Diego. Fuck it, he thought. He’d started the day at 4:00 A.M. Fuck it all, he thought.
He would type up the transcript of the tape recording and hand it in to Lawrence and Trudy, but he’d be damned if he would follow up on this case. He knew the drill. The manufacturer of the electric cart would be sued, no doubt about that. The park owner would be sued—there would be no doubt about that. The construction company that had blocked the ramp would be sued by everybody, no doubt about that.
But would Rose sue Henry? Probably. Dar had very little doubt about that either. Thirty years of friendship. He was trying to get his friend Bud home in time to kiss his wife good-night. But after a few more months…perhaps a second lawyer…
Fuck it, thought Dar. He would not inquire. He’d never check the file again.
Traffic on the 15 was relatively light, which was one reason that Dar noticed the Mercedes E 340 that had been keeping pace with his left rear quarter panel. Also, the Mercedes’s windows were tinted, front and side, which was illegal in California. State and local cops had helped push that law through—none of them wanted to approach a car with opaque windows. Also, the Mercedes was new and modified for speed, with eighteen-inch wheels and a raised rear end with a tiny spoiler. Dar had a thing about people who bought luxury cars—even autobahn cruisers like the Mercedes E 340—and then hopped them up into performance cars. He thought such people were the worst kind of idiots—pretentious idiots.
So he was watching in his left mirror as the Mercedes accelerated to pass him on the left. There were five lanes along this stretch, three of them empty, but the Mercedes was whipping around the NSX as tightly as if they were on the last lap of the Daytona 500. Dar sighed. It was one of the drawbacks of owning a serious performance vehicle like his Acura NSX.
The Mercedes pulled alongside and slowed, matching speeds. Dar glanced left and could see his own face, sunglasses and all, reflected in the dark window of the big German car.
The instincts of two decades earlier took over and Dar ducked even as the black window rolled down. He glimpsed the barrel of something industrial and ugly and very full-automatic—an Uzi or a Mac-10—and then the firing began. His left window exploded glass onto his ear and hair, and bullets began tearing through the aluminum NSX.
CHAPTER THRE
E
“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.
