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?

“Snotty 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.

“He’s gotta go to Riverside, you know,” the sheriff was saying. He still had a long-barreled Colt in his hand.

“We know, we know,” said the older of the two young state troopers. “Why don’t you or your deputy get on 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.

The 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. Dickweed’s on his way and Sid’s just leaving the ladies’ room.”

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 the right to remain silent, anything he said could and would be used against him in a court of law, he had the right to an attorney, if he could not afford an attorney, one would be appointed for him. Did he understand?

“You’re reading it?” Dar asked. “You must repeat it ten thousand times a year.”

“Shut the fuck up,” explained the trooper.

Dar nodded and remained silent. He had been Mirandized. And a perfectly good adjective had been made into a verb.

At the Riverside County jail, a low, ugly structure right next to the tall, ugly Riverside city hall complex, the young CHP officers reclaimed their cuffs and officially handed him over to the Riverside sheriff, who gave him to a young deputy to book. Dar had never been arrested before. Still, all of the procedures—emptying the pockets of personal possessions, fingerprinting, and mug shot—were familiar from TV and the movies, of course, and it all combined to give him a strange sense of disembodied déjà vu that added to the unreal quality of the last hour or so.

He was put in a holding cell, alone but for the company of a few sullen cockroaches. About fifteen minutes later, the deputy returned and said, “You got a call coming. Want to call your lawyer?”

“I don’t have a lawyer,” Dar said truthfully. “Can I call my therapist?”

The deputy was not amused.

Dar called Trudy, who had dealt with so many legal issues that she could have passed the bar exam with half her brain tied behind her back. Instead of handling legal issues herself, however, she and Lawrence kept one of the best lawyers in California on retainer. It was necessary given that Stewart Investigations occasionally got dragged into one of the broad lawsuit nets cast out by hopeful litigants plying the fraudulent-insurance-claim waters as diligently and daily and doggedly as New England fishermen.