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it’s bullets ora crash, your best chance is down there.’
    When she was crouched so low that all I couldsee was her shoulders and the back of her blondehead I eased the revolver out of my pocket,abruptly removed my foot from the accelerator,grabbed for the handbrake and hauled hard.
    With no tell-tale warning from the foot-operatedbraking lights, the slowing down of the Chevroletwas as unexpected as it was abrupt, and the screechof tyres and violent slewing of the pursuing policecar showed that the driver had been caught completelyoff balance. I loosed off one quick shot andas I did the windscreen in front of me shattered andstarred as a bullet went clear through the centre ofit: I fired a second time, and the police car skiddedwildly and finished up almost broadside across theroad, the nearside front wheel into the ditch onthe right-hand side of the road. It was the sort ofuncontrollable skid that might have come from afront tyre blowout.
    Certainly no harm had come to the policemeninside, within a couple of seconds of hitting theditch all three were out on the road, squeezing offshots after us as fast as they could pull the triggers:but we were already a hundred, a hundred andfifty yards away and for all the value of revolversand riot guns in distance work of this kind theymight as well have been throwing stones at us. Ina few seconds we rounded a curve and they werelost to sight.
    â€˜All right,’ I said. ‘The war’s over. You can getup, Miss Ruthven.’
    She straightened and pushed herself back onthe seat. Some dark-blonde hair had fallen forwardover her face, so she took off her bandanna,fixed her hair and pulled the bandanna on again.Women, I thought: if they fell over a cliff andthought there was company waiting at the bottom,they’d comb their hair on the way down.
    When she’d finished tying the knot under herchin she said in a subdued voice, without lookingat me: ‘Thank you for making me get down. I – Imight have been killed there.’
    â€˜You might,’ I agreed indifferently. ‘But I wasthinking about myself, lady, not you. Your continuedgood health is very closely bound up withmine. Without a real live insurance policy besideme they’d use anything from a hand grenade to a14-inch naval gun to stop me.’
    â€˜They were trying to hit us then, they weretrying to kill us.’ The tremor was back in hervoice again as she nodded at the bullet hole inthe screen. ‘I was sitting in line with that.’
    â€˜So you were. Chance in a thousand. They musthave had orders not to fire indiscriminately, butmaybe they were so mad at what happened back atthe road-block that they forgot their orders. Likelythat they were after one of our rear tyres. Hard toshoot well from a fast-moving car. Or maybe theyjust can’t shoot well anyway.’
    Approaching traffic was still light, maybe twoor three cars to the mile, but even that was toomuch for my peace of mind. Most of the cars werefilled with family groups, out-of-state vacationers,and like all vacationers they were not only curiousabout everything they saw but obviously had thetime and the inclination to indulge their curiosity.Every other car slowed down as it approached usand in my rear-view mirror I saw the stop lightsof three or four of them come on as the drivertramped on the brakes and the occupants twistedround in their seats. Hollywood and a thousandTV films had made a bullet-scarred windscreen anobject readily identifiable by millions.
    This was disturbing enough. Worse still was thenear certainty that any minute now every localradio station within a hundred miles would bebroadcasting the news of what had happened backat the Marble Springs court-house, together witha complete description of the Chevrolet, myselfand the blonde girl beside me. The chances werethat at least half of those cars approaching me hadtheir radios tuned in to one of those local stationswith their interminable record