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 the Mercedes in sight. It had been years since he had raced sports cars, but everything felt very, very right as he hit the apex of each decreasing radial turn exactly on the money, accelerating out of the turn with a roar, tapping the brake, setting up the next turn, shifting down, allowing just enough drift of the rear end, and coming out again at full throttle. Very few supercars in the world could outhandle the Acura NSX in this sort of situation. By the time they were nearing the top of the steep grade, the police had fallen out of sight behind them and he was within three car lengths of the E 340.

It had been two miles up the winding, twisting road above Lake Elsinore and the men in the Mercedes had obviously decided it was time to get rid of him. They slowed during a right-hand uphill hairpin, the passenger-side window came down, and a man with dark hair, a dark suit, and a dark metal Mac-10 leaned out.

Dar got off five or six photos with his Nikon, held one-handed, as the automatic weapon blazed away at him. Something banged metal near the right rear of the sports car, but the handling stayed good and Dar dropped the camera into his lap, shifted down, roared around the decreasing radial, uphill right turn and accelerated until he was almost on the Mercedes’s bumper. He noticed that it had Nevada tags and memorized the numbers.

The shooter leaned out again, but Dar was too close; he dodged into the left lane and accelerated almost even with the Mercedes. The gunman fired through his own tinted left rear window, sending bronzed glass flying, but Dar had already accelerated ahead and then dropped back next to the Mercedes. The driver’s window hummed down and Dar looked to his right directly into their faces, memorizing them, as both vehicles approached the last hairpin turn at eighty-five miles per hour.

Dar knew that beyond this point he would be in trouble. There was a long straight stretch along the ridgetop of the mountain before the curves started again. But on this last left-hand curve before the summit, directly ahead, was an old restaurant–turned–biker-bar called The Lookout. Dar had stopped there for lunch once, but the ambience—there were generally twenty to thirty “hogs” parked outside and as many guzzling and fighting inside—had not been to his liking.

The Lookout was on the right side of the road with outdoor patio seating on the south side of the restaurant. The patio consisted of little more than some rotting two-by-fours supported by wooden beams extending directly from the sheer cliff face of the hillside above Lake Elsinore. Dar could see a dozen or more bikers sprawling around a few old tables. Their hogs were parked directly in front of the patio.

Dar looked right just in time to see the passenger lean over and extend the muzzle of the Mac-10 out the driver’s window behind the driver’s head. It was aimed directly at Dar’s face.

Dar hit the brakes, the automatic weapon fired over his hood, and then he cut hard right and accelerated, catching the heavier Mercedes amidships. The Mercedes’s left-side door air bag deployed as designed, smashing the shooter’s hand into the top of the doorframe and causing the Mac-10 to fly out of the man’s hand and bounce off Dar’s hood. Dar’s NSX was a ’92 and had only a driver’s-side air bag, but after years of investigating and reconstructing air-bag accidents, he had long since disconnected his.

Now he stood on the brakes, first forcing the heavier car to its right and then falling behind the still-racing Mercedes, the tires of the NSX screeching and smoking, but the ABS working hard, the brake pedal pounding against Dar’s foot as he drove through the skid, slammed into second gear, and almost made the hard hairpin turn to the left, leaving the shoulder but missing the restaurant, scraping boulders and low brush before finally crunching and sliding to a stop a 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 á 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.