Relentless

companion.
    Rapt by this spectacle, I almost made a lethal error. Switching my attention back and forth between the road ahead and the mirrors, I braked gently and reduced my speed to compensate for the distraction.
    Blockhead pulled his steering wheel too hard to the right again but also seemed to tramp on the accelerator when he wanted the brake. The heroic Explorer could endure no more, and it leaned disastrously toward port, went over, and completed a wonderfully destructive 360-degree roll.
    Because we were on a downhill run and because gravity will always have its way, the Explorer didn’t lose speed in its tumble but came on as fast as ever as it rolled again—directly toward me.
    I might have squealed, I’m not sure, but I swung the sedan to the right, onto the shoulder, but found room to get only half the car off the pavement.
    Half proved enough, and the Explorer tumbled past as it came out of its second roll and with great exuberance executed a third.
    I braked to a full stop and sat transfixed by the sight of the SUV rolling again and again, and yet again, down the hill, scattering pieces of itself in its wake. Finally the vehicle tumbled off the farther side of the road, ricocheted off a tree, caromed off another tree, and knocked this way and that into the woods, as if Mother Nature had decided to have a game of pinball.
    By the time the Explorer came to a stop, both occupants were most likely dead, but for sure neither of them would be dancing by Christmas.
    I suppose a good Samaritan would have hurried to the crash site and provided tender care to the survivors, if any.
    After I considered what these people had done to the Landulf and Clitherow families—and what they hoped to do to mine—I found myself driving past the scene with a clear conscience. And if I spent 705 years in Purgatory instead of 704—well, I would just have to cope.
    I drove on for perhaps half a mile in a daze.
    Only then did I realize that Lassie no longer occupied the back of the sedan. At some point during the death plunge of the SUV, she must have clambered into the front. She perched now in the passenger seat, riding shotgun, gazing at the highway ahead with keen interest.

   Less than five minutes after Blockhead and his nameless sidekick arrived at the pearly gates with résumés that made Saint Peter call for the celestial security guards, I topped another rise and looked down another slope at a roadblock formed by two sheriffs-department cars parked nose to nose.
    Although frightened, I was not a fraction as terrified as when we were playing let’s-shoot-each-other-in-the-head at the Landulf house. I had been through so much in the past seventy-two hours that I earned my good-scout medal for nerves of steel and was working on my titanium certification.
    In fact, I have to admit that I got a cheap thrill from the fact that this police roadblock was in my honor. All my life, I had been a good boy, living by the rules: making my bed each morning, flossing my teeth twice a day, eating my vegetables dutifully…. When I was a lad and then a single young man, all those girls who liked bad boys— which, strangely enough, seemed to be most of them—thought of meas a boring nerd, or thought of me not at all. If they could see me now—head shaved, carrying an unregistered concealed weapon, driving a vehicle stolen from a federal agent—they would swoon, become giddy with desire, and perhaps even throw their panties at me as if I were a rock star.
    In truth, of course, I remained a good boy, trying my best to do the right thing. In this inverted world of the twenty-first century, the authorities were the unprincipled thugs, and the armed fugitive in the stolen car was a churchgoing family man who had a dog named Lassie.
    As we approached the roadblock, I worried that having a dog beside me would blow my cover, but I didn’t want the sheriff’s deputies to see me stop and put her in the trunk. Then I decided that a psychopathic agent for a psychopathic federal agency might well have a service dog to assist him in chasing down and savaging the innocent.
    That scenario would have been more plausible if Lassie were a Doberman or a German shepherd, weighed a hundred pounds more than she did, and were foaming at the mouth with rabies. But she was what she was, and I came slowly to a stop at the barricade with every intention of claiming that beside me sat a canine as highly trained as a circus bear and a thousand times