“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.