Free Darwin's Blade by Dan Simmons Page A

your radio and get some backup here—and tell them we need a forensics team—before there’s a fucking riot. OK?”
    The sheriff looked at the milling bikers now as they began assessing the damage to their hogs and cursing more imaginatively, nodded, put away his big pistol, and walked back to the Monte Carlo.
    Only the sheriff’s deputy had walked out onto the flimsy, damage-strewn, shaky patio to stand nervously at the edge, peer through the wide gap in the railing, and stare down toward Lake Elsinore where the Mercedes had disappeared. From somewhere far below came the buzz of the news helicopter. Part of Dar’s mind was calculating the time it had taken the Mercedes to free-fall the distance even as the state troopers shoved him into the backseat of the Mustang. It would be one hell of a news video.
    The last thing Dar heard before being driven away was the deputy on the patio edge softly repeating, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” as if it were his private mantra.

4
“D Is for Dickweed”
    T he car chase and Dar’s arrest were on Tuesday afternoon. Freed on bail that evening, he attended a meeting on Wednesday morning in the deputy district attorney’s office in downtown San Diego.
    When he was booked on Tuesday, Dar had been shirtless, wearing only his sneakers and the now soiled and bloody jeans that he had pulled on at 4:00 A.M. With the scratches from flying glass, no shirt, wildly mussed hair, two days’ stubble, and what his fellow grunts in Vietnam had long ago called a “postcombat thousand-yard stare,” his mug shot looked classically and fiercely felonious. He could picture it hanging in his study, right next to an old color photo of him receiving his robe and scroll symbolizing his Ph.D. in physics.
    At 9:00 A.M. Wednesday morning, sitting at the long table with more than a dozen other people who had yet to be introduced, Dar was shaved, showered, and dressed in a crisp white shirt, striped rep tie, blue linen blazer, tropical-weight gray pants, and polished Bally black shoes that were as soft as dance slippers. He wasn’t quite sure if he was a guest at this meeting or still a prisoner of the state, but he wanted to look decent in either case.
    The deputy district attorney’s assistant’s assistant, a nervous little man who seemed to embody every gay stereotype in the culture—from his hand-wringing and nervous giggles to his overwrought wrists—was busy offering donuts and coffee to everyone. Set on the table opposite Dar was a line of Smokey hats and badged caps behind which sat at least eight police captains and sheriffs; on the same side of the table but at the far end, substituting briefcases on the tabletop for hats, were two plainclothes officers, one with the haircut of an FBI special agent. All of them except the FBI man accepted at least one donut from the deputy DA’s assistant’s assistant.
    On Dar’s side of the table, besides Lawrence and Trudy and their lawyer, W.D.D. Du Bois, was a motley assortment of bureaucrats and attorneys, most of them wrinkled, rumpled, jowled, and slouched, all in sad contrast to the starched, silent, stern-jawed crispness of the cops on the other side. Most of the attorneys and bureaucrats just accepted coffee.
    Dar took his Styrofoam cup with thanks, received an “Oh, you’re welcome, you’re welcome” and a pat on the back from the deputy DA’s assistant’s assistant, and sat back to wait for whatever came next.
    A black man dressed in a bailiff’s uniform stepped into the room and announced, “We’re almost ready to start. Dick-weed’s on his way and Sid’s just leaving the ladies’ room.”
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    The previous afternoon, still handcuffed, Dar had been driven to the county jail in downtown Riverside. In the car, the older of the state troopers had literally read him his rights from a frayed three-by-five card. Dar had