Read Online Darwin's Blade by Dan Simmons - Free Book Online Page A

the photos would be readable.
    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