Free Darwin's Blade by Dan Simmons

hundred-some feet farther up the road.
    When the door-side air bag had deployed, the gunman had fallen forward onto the driver, whose own shoulder harness kept him from falling against the steering wheel, but who was having little luck steering. The new Mercedes E 340 barreled straight ahead through the apex of the left hairpin, hitting the first row of the parked Harleys. Both of the E 340’s front air bags deployed while its driver, still pinned by his partner and now blinded by the air bag explosion and unable to reach the steering wheel, the shooter unable to move because of the air bag deployed into his own seat area, did all he could—standing on the brakes while driving straight ahead, knocking more Harleys left and right and causing a dozen bikers to leap for their lives as the heavy car drove straight onto the rickety patio, smashed tables to splinters, skidded across the rotted boards, tore through the creaky handrail, and used the patio as a ramp to launch itself off the mountain.
    Dar caught a last glimpse of the gray Mercedes, its front windows down and both men’s faces quite visible, mouths opened wide, air bags deflating even as the two-ton car seemed to pause a moment in midair à la Wile E. Coyote—barely missing the bubble nose of the Channel 5 KTLA chopper that had its gyro-stabilized cameras zoomed in on the screaming faces and hurtling car—and then the vehicle went nosedown and dropped out of sight on its way to the valley floor seven hundred feet straight down.
    The NSX’s frame had been bent, the driver’s door wouldn’t open, and Dar’s passenger door was lodged against a boulder, so he clambered out of the window just in time to become the focus of the skidding CHP Mustang and the overheated sheriff’s Monte Carlo. Doors flew open. Guns were drawn and aimed. Commands were shouted.
    Dar leaned against the NSX, spread his legs as directed, linked his fingers behind his head as suggested by the officers’ screams, and tried to breathe slowly so as not to be sick. The adrenaline surge of anger was receding like some mad tide, leaving just flotsam and jetsam of emotions behind.
    The CHP officers, young, with high badge serial numbers Dar noticed in his one glance over his shoulder, were not men he’d worked with before. He understood from their shouts and barks that they would blow him fucking away if he made a single fucking move. Dar did not move. One of the state troopers and the sheriff held guns on him, and the third—the older of the two CHP men, a grizzled veteran who looked to be about twenty-three years old—approached and frisked him quickly, jerked his arms down and back, and slapped cuffs on him.
    A couple of the bikers wandered over with beers in their hands. The one with the longer beard was showing yellow teeth in a wide grin. “Hey, man, that was the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Almost took out fucking Channel Five, man. Definitely awesome.”
    The sheriff’s deputy told the bikers to get back inside The Lookout Restaurant; several other bikers wandered over to explain that they’d never been in the fucking restaurant—that they’d been on the patio—and it was a fucking free country, man. Like, where else but America could you see a new Mercedes drive off a seven-hundred-foot drop and almost take a fucking news chopper with it, man?
    â€œSnotty Eddie’s gonna have to rename his fucking bar, man,” said a biker with a shaved head and a tattoo of a skull on his bare chest. “Change it from the fucking Lookout to the fucking Launchpad, man.”
    Dar was glad when the two highway patrolmen dragged and pushed him to the CHP Mustang.
    â€œHe’s gotta go to Riverside, you know,” the sheriff was saying. He still had a long-barreled Colt in his hand.
    â€œWe know, we know,” said the older of the two young state troopers. “Why don’t you or your deputy get on