“Not all the way,” said Dar, turning on the ThinkPad and pointing to some delta-v estimates. “I can only guess at the thrust those things put out, but the rocket flare melted those patches of the highway back there and probably got him up to about two hundred and eighty-five miles per hour at just the point these skid marks begin, about twelve seconds after ignition.”

“Helluva ride,” said Cameron.

“Maybe the kid was going for a land speed record,” agreed Dar. “About this point, with the telephone poles flashing past in the dark like a picket fence—the rocket blast would’ve illuminated them—our boy had second thoughts. He slammed on the brakes.”

“Lot of good it did him,” said Cameron. The sergeant was almost whispering now.

“Brake linings melted,” agreed Dar. “Brake drums melted. Tires started coming apart. You notice that just the last hundred meters or so of road marks are intermittent.”

“Brakes going on and off?” said Cameron, his voice filling now with the future pleasure of telling and retelling this story. Cops loved roadkill.

Dar shook his head. “Nope. These are just tire-melt patches at this point. The El Camino is taking thirty and forty-foot hops before becoming completely airborne.”

“Holy shit,” said Cameron, sounding almost gleeful.

“Yes,” said Dar. “There’s a final melt point just beyond where the tire marks cease. That’s where the JATO units were burning down at a nice healthy thirty-six-degree takeoff angle. The El Camino’s climb ratio must have been impressive.”

“Fuck me.” The sergeant grinned. “So those candles burned all the way to the cliff wall?”

Dar shook his head. “My guess is that they burned out about fifteen seconds after takeoff. The rest of his ride was pure ballistics.” He pointed to the GPS map on the ThinkPad’s screen, with the simple equations to the right of the arching trajectory from desert to canyon wall.

“The road turns and starts climbing where he impacted,” said Cameron.

Dar winced slightly. He hated the verb-use of nouns such as impact. “Yeah,” he said. “He didn’t make the turn. The El Camino was probably spinning around its own horizontal axis at this point, giving it some flight stability during the descent.”

“Like a rifle bullet.”

“Precisely.”

“What do you think his…can’t think of the word…high point was?”

“Apogee?” said Dar. He looked at the computer screen. “Probably no less than two thousand and no more than twenty-eight hundred feet above the desert floor.”

“Holy shit,” whispered Cameron again. “It was a short trip, but it must have been one hell of a ride.”

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.

2

“B is for Bud”

It 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.