This is crazy, he thought, and slammed the NSX into fourth gear, hearing the roar of the normally aspirated six-cylinder performance engine just behind his seat as he let all of the snakes out of their cage, bringing the sports car close to the 7,800-rpm red line.

But he was angry. He was very angry. Dar could not remember being this angry in a long, long time. He shifted into fifth and floored it.

He passed two cars and a semitrailer on their left, the sound of the passed vehicles actually Doppler-shifting down in tone because of his speed. As he came over the rise, he caught sight of the gray Mercedes about three miles ahead on the next long hill climb of the interstate. It was in the far left lane and still doing about a hundred. He reached for his shirt pocket to grab his cell phone—realized that he’d taken off the shirt and thrown it as a crumpled ball onto the passenger seat after cleaning out the glass. He patted the shirt, but there was nothing in the pocket. He had dropped the phone somewhere during his ducking, slithering, sliding out, crouching, elbow crawling, or glass dusting. Shit. He told himself that it didn’t matter—that the howling wind noise coming through the two shattered side windows would have drowned out any call to the police. At least the windshield was intact except for one two-inch stress fracture at the upper left where a slug had hit the top of the A-pillar.

Eyes on the road and on the tail of the Mercedes, he glanced down for the briefest second at his speedometer: 158. He accelerated, leaning over as he did so to grab his camera bag from the floor of the passenger side. Please, God—whoever’s in charge of all this—just don’t have let any of the slugs hit my cameras. Through a combination of quick pats and even quicker glances Dar ascertained that the bag was unhurt, unsnapped the top, and unceremoniously dumped the contents onto the passenger seat. He didn’t want the digital camera; he wanted the Nikon and the long lens.

Dar set the Nikon between his legs, fumbled for the telephoto, and began changing lenses as he accelerated up and over the next hill at 165 miles per hour. Changing lenses was usually a two-handed job—one had to depress a button to release the lens before screwing the new one on—but he had done it one-handed before. Just never at this speed.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a CHP patrol car coming the other way on the westernmost northbound lane, and glanced at his mirror in time to see the black-and-white CHP vehicle slewing through the median, its lights beginning to swirl and flash as it reversed direction to give chase. If the siren had come on, Dar couldn’t hear it above the wind noise in the tiny cockpit.

It was just his luck that this CHP car was one of their pursuit Mustangs—a ’94 model from the look of it—decked out with one of their usual 302 V-8 engines. Dar’s quick glimpse of the driver and his partner had told him that they were both young, and the speed of their pursuit showed him that they were both gung ho. Just my luck, thought Dar, focusing on the Mercedes ahead of him.

Somehow he had kept his Serengeti driving glasses on during all of his flopping and crawling antics, and without these keeping the worst of the wind from his eyes, Dar didn’t think he could have seen well enough in all the wind to keep up the pace. But he was. The Mercedes was only twenty car lengths ahead now. It had slowed to about eighty-five—but the driver must have just glanced in his mirror and glimpsed either the NSX or the police flashers or both, because suddenly the gray Mercedes shifted lanes and accelerated up the next long stretch of hilly interstate, passing cars on the left and right, using all five lanes, hunting for open spots and then surging ahead.

Dar followed lane to lane. He knew that the normal Mercedes E 340s were electronically governed to keep their top speed down to 130 mph, but this window-tinted, spoilered, fat-tired, modified son of a bitch was now doing at least 155 as it dodged through the thickening traffic.

Goddammit, thought Dar. He had the long two-hundred-millimeter lens on now and the Nikon in his left hand as he whipped past traffic on his left and right. But the Mercedes was still a quarter of a mile ahead, too far for a clear shot at the license tag. And Dar had no idea how he could hold the camera steady enough to read the plate even if he got closer.

He didn’t care. He dropped the Nikon back in his lap, gripped the perfectly sized steering wheel with both hands, and swerved from the far right lane to the far left to stay behind the Mercedes. His speedometer read 170 and he was above the red line. Dar desperately did not want to blow this Acura engine: it was a handcrafted work of art, assembled by one man at the Japanese factory. Somewhere on that mostly aluminum engine block was the man’s name engraved in Japanese symbols. In an age of superchargers, turbochargers, and every other prosthetic breathing aid, this was a normally aspirated V-6 that derived speed from perfection. It would be a desecration to blow such an engine. Nonetheless, Dar kept the perforated pedal to the metal—or in this case, to the luxurious black rubber mat that ran up the firewall above the luxurious black carpeting—and let the tach creep further into the red. The little six-cylinder screamed and the gap began to close.

What if they just slow down and shoot me again? asked the still sane part of Darwin’s mind. He had no weapons in the car. He had no weapons at home. He hated handguns. What if I slow down and the cops shoot me? riposted the adrenaline-driven part of Dar’s brain. Might as well catch these fuckers first.

The Mercedes shifted from the far left lane to the far right lane, cutting off two vehicles as it did so. One of them—a Ford Windstar van—braked too quickly and spun four times before coming to a halt with its nose pointed back the way it had come. Dar noticed the pallor on the man and woman’s faces in the front seats as he passed them at 168 miles per hour.

This is how it’ll end, you asshole, shouted the sane part of Dar through the adrenaline-filled Dar’s thick skull. In the movies these car chases are always excitement and close calls. In real life, it’s a dead family—innocent people killed—and you’re not even a cop. You don’t even have the right to do this.

The driving Dar theoretically agreed with the sane Dar—he glanced at his mirror and saw the flashing lights as the CHP Mustang almost showed clear air under the wheels as it came over the rise less than a mile behind him—but the part of him that was driving was angrier than he had been for many, many years. And the Mercedes was only a hundred yards ahead now, back in the far left lane again with little traffic around it. Dar held his foot to the floor and leveraged the Nikon onto the slivered sill of the NSX door, keeping the long lens inside so the wind wouldn’t catch it and pull the expensive camera out of his hand. This is going to be tricky, he thought, deciding that he should shoot through the windshield with both hands on top of the wheel to prop and steady the Nikon, helping to steer with his left knee, just snapping away at full auto and hoping that one of 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.