Dar nodded. “On two conditions.”

Cameron raised his heavy eyebrows.

“Get me back down to my car and loan me your radio.”

Dar drove the NSX out of the canyon and into the desert, stopped, looked around for a while, drove farther, looked a bit longer, drove back to his first stopping point, and walked out into the desert, gathering pebbles and other small items and putting them into his pocket. He shot some images of the Joshua trees and the sand, then walked back to the car and took a few more images of the asphalt road. It was still early and the traffic was light—a few vans and pickups—so there was no backup from the single-lane closing in the canyon. But it was already eighty degrees in the desert and Dar took off his jacket and kept the air-conditioning going as he sat in the idling black Acura on a gravel turnout two miles from the entrance to the canyon.

Dar powered up his IBM ThinkPad, downloaded the stored images from the Hitachi digital camera via a flash card, and scrolled through them for a few minutes. He ran the short video segments he had shot. Then he enabled his numeric keypad and tapped in equations for several minutes, exiting once to activate map software and the GPS unit he carried in the glove box. He double-checked distances, angles, and elevations, and then finished his arithmetic, shut down the computer, stowed it away, and called Cameron on the radio he had borrowed. It had been thirty-five minutes since he’d left the ledge.

The green and white chopper buzzed by once and landed five minutes later. The pilot stayed inside his bubble while Cameron got out, adjusted his hat, and walked over to the NSX.

“Where’s young Elvis?” said Dar.

“Elroy,” said the sergeant.

“Whatever.”

“I left him behind. He’s had enough excitement this morning. Besides, he was being disrespectful of his elders.”

“Oh?”

“He called you an arrogant A-hole after you left,” said Cameron.

Dar raised one eyebrow. “A-hole?”

The fellow ex-Marine shrugged. “Sorry, Darwin. It’s the best the boy could do. He’s never been in the military. Generation Xer and all that. And he’s white. Linguistically deprived. I apologize for him.”

“A-hole?” said Dar.

“What do you have for me?” Cameron was obviously tired and edging out of his amused mode into his more habitual pissed-off attitude.

“What do I get for having anything for you?” said Dar.

“The eternal gratitude of the California Highway Patrol,” growled Cameron.

“I guess it’ll have to do.” Dar squinted at the little helicopter that seemed to shimmer as heat waves rose from the highway between it and the NSX. “As much as I hate to get in that goddamn thing again, I think it’ll be easier to show you if we go back up for a couple of minutes.”

Cameron shrugged. “Crash site?”

“Uh-uh. I’m not flying in that canyon again. Just tell your man to follow my directions and to keep it under five hundred feet.”

They hovered above the highway half a mile east of where the NSX was parked. “Did you see that scorched, rippled pattern on the asphalt here near the turnout?” said Dar through his headset microphone.

“Yeah, sure, now I do. Not when I drove this way in the dark this morning. So what? Highway’s fucked up like that in a thousand places. Shitty maintenance out here.”

“Yes,” said Dar, “but stretches of the road here look as if they’ve been melted and then resolidified.”

Cameron shrugged, “Desert, man. Going to be what today?” He turned to the pilot.

“A hundred and twelve,” said the pilot, never moving his sunglasses in their direction, his attention on the instruments and the horizon. “Fahrenheit.”

“OK,” said Dar. “Let’s head back toward the NSX.”

“That’s it?” said Cameron.

“Patience.”

They hovered three hundred feet above the highway. A station wagon rushed past headed west, kids’ heads poking out of both rear windows, goggling at the helicopter. The Acura looked like a black, wax candle that had melted in the heat.

“Notice those skid marks?” said Dar.

“When we flew down, sure,” said Cameron. “But they’re a mile and a half from the canyon. More than two miles from the crash site. You saying that somebody ran out of control, left skid marks here, and crashed almost three miles away, two hundred feet up a canyon wall? Fast motherfucker.” The sergeant was smiling, but he was not amused.

“Long skid marks,” said Dar, pointing to the parallel tracks heading off west.

“Kids burning rubber. Find tire marks every few hundred meters out here. You know that, Dar. Just lucky if we don’t find the kids in the wreckage the next morning.”

“I measured them,” said Dar. “One thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight feet of nonstriated road marks. If it was a kid doing peel-outs, he did one hell of a long wheelie and left most of his tires on the asphalt. If it’s skid marks…”

“What are you saying?” said Cameron.

“Simple matter of friction coefficient. Our El Camino tried to stop here and couldn’t. Brakes melted.” Dar fished in his pocket and handed Cameron several tiny pellets and spheres of what looked to be melted rubber.

“Brake pads?” said Cameron.

“What’s left of them,” Dar said, and handed the sergeant several more tiny droplets. These were tiny pellets of metal. “These are from the surfaces of the actual brake drums melting,” he said. “The Joshua trees along this stretch are dusted with both powdered rubber and melted steel.”

“El Caminos never had brakes worth shit,” said Cameron, shifting the pellets in his dark palm.

“No,” agreed Dar. “Especially when you’re trying to haul your speed down from somewhere around three hundred miles per hour.”

“Three hundred miles per hour!” said the CHP sergeant, his jaw dropping slightly.

“Land this thing,” said Dar. “I’ll explain outside.”

“I think he did it after dark because he didn’t want anyone seeing him attach the JATO units back at that turnout,” said Dar. “And then—”

“JATO units!” said Cameron, taking his hat off and rubbing the sweat liner with his fingers.

“Jet Assist Take Off units,” said Dar. “They’re essentially just large, strap-on, solid-fuel rockets that the Air Force once used to get heavy cargo planes off the ground when the runway was too short or the load was too—”

“I know what the fuck JATO stands for,” snapped Cameron. “I was in the Corps, man. But where would some dickweed with an ’82 El Camino get two of those?”

Dar shrugged. “Andrews Air Force Base just north of here. Twelve Palms just down the road. More military bases around here than any other comparable patch of real estate in the United States. Who the hell knows what military surplus they sell for scrap or whatever.”

“JATO units!” said Cameron, looking at the endless skid marks again. They weaved in several places, but recovered and then headed straight as a double-shafted, black arrow for the distant canyon. “Why’d he use two?”

“One wouldn’t have done him much good unless he sat on it,” said Dar. “If he lit off just one and it wasn’t positioned perfectly on the El Camino’s exact center of mass, the vehicle would’ve just spun like a Catherine wheel until the rocket dug or melted him a hole in the desert.”

“All right,” said Cameron. “He strapped or bolted or cinched on two of these Air Force surplus rocket fuckers. Then what?”

Dar rubbed his chin; he had neglected to shave in the rush to get going. “Then he waited for a break in traffic and lit them. Probably a simple battery circuit. Once they’re lit, you can’t shut them off. They’re essentially just oversized skyrockets, like miniature versions of the two strap-on boosters that the space shuttle uses. Light ’em and go. No turning back.”

“So he turned into a space shuttle,” said Cameron, his expression strange. He looked at the mountains two miles away. “Airborne all the way into that rock wall.”