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only a few yards away when she heard the sound of the gas tank exploding below. Cavanaugh and the trucker jerked their heads back at the concussion and then Fletcher was alongside both men, looking down through the trees. A hundred and fifty feet below, Fletcher saw the smashed-up remains of the blue Mustang they’d been pursuing lying amongst the foliage. A moment later the wreckage was completely obscured by flames and smoke.
    Fletcher searched for a way down, but there were no handholds and the drop was too steep. Impossible without proper equipment. And that wasn’t likely to arrive any time soon. Fletcher pulled the two-way from her belt as a second explosion shook the air. The truck driver lost his balance and fell back to the ground.
    As she put a call in to Jean at Dispatch, she saw Cavanaugh look back at her briefly and shake his head. They both knew it was hopeless. But she still requested an ambulance ASAP, and told Jean to notify the fire department three towns away. Then she turned back to see the young driver looking up at both of them as though only just noticing he wasn’t alone.
    He raised the visor of his baseball cap and said, ‘He was just
there
, officers. I mean, deputies. He just came out of nowhere, going
way
too fast. Then he must have seen me and just lost . . .’ The guy shook his head and looked at the ground. ‘Oh, Jesus. He was going too fast. There was nothing I could do. He just . . . Oh, man.’
    ‘You see anybody get out?’ Cavanaugh asked, looking down at him.
    The driver kept shaking his head as he slowly got to his feet. ‘I didn’t see nobody, man. He just swerved and went right over. Jesus, he was just going too fast and I pressed down on the brakes. What else could I do?’
    Fletcher shook her head as she watched the smoke rising into the air. ‘Nothing, sir. Nothing at all.’

SIX
    ‘How long before we can leave?’ Sonja whispered from the passenger seat.
    Bishop removed the wig that had been annoying him for hours and dropped it on the dash. Brushing a palm back and forth over his buzz cut, he sat back and let out a deep breath as the adrenalin left his system. ‘Not too long. Once they take our driver’s witness statement, they’ll let him go. An accident scene like this, they’ll want to get this rig moving before it starts blocking traffic.’
    ‘God, I hope so,’ she said, still shaking. ‘Just knowing the police are a few feet away scares me half to death.’
    ‘Try and relax. They’re seeing exactly what we want them to see.’
    ‘So am I finally safe from
him
?’
    ‘Well, you’re officially dead. Or you will be in a few days. I figure you can’t get much safer than that.’
    Sonja looked at him without smiling. ‘I thought we really
were
dead a couple of times back there. My car never handled that good before.’
    ‘That’s because your car’s currently at the bottom of that ravine where we planted it earlier. We’ve been preparing this one for weeks to make it as identical as possible to yours, then swapped them last night while you were asleep.’
    She leaned over and checked the speedometer. ‘The mileage is all wrong and I never even noticed,’ she said. ‘Not even when I was driving into town this morning.’
    ‘You had other things on your mind, I guess,’ Bishop said, turning to watch the large shape of Luke Shelton at the rear of the trailer.
    He was carefully arranging the crates of soft toys back there until they reached all the way to the roof. After all this hard work and effort, Bishop thought it would be pretty sloppy to get caught out by a routine inspection. God, after all, was in the details. Luke worked fast, just like he had when he’d guided the Mustang inside. The truck hadn’t actually been moving towards them, of course, although it had seemed that way at first glance. Hence, Sonja’s scream. It had merely been idling. Waiting for Bishop. As soon as he’d come out of the hairpin turn, he’d steered the car