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the road.”
    “Roger, is he—”
    The officers leapt out of the car with their pistols drawn.
    “He’s going to bail, he’s going to bail!”
    But nobody exited the truck.
    They approached it. The back door had flown open in the crash and they could see nothing but dozens of packages and envelopes littering the floor.
    “There he is, look.”
    Pell lay stunned, facedown, on the floor of the vehicle.
    “Maybe he’s hurt.”
    “Who gives a shit?”
    The officers ran forward and cuffed and dragged him out of the space where he was wedged
    They dropped him on to his back on the ground. “Nice try, buddy, but—”
    “Fuck. It’s not him.”
    “What?” asked his partner.
    “Excuse me, does that look like a forty-three-year-old white guy?”
    The jarhead bent down to the groggy teenager, a gang teardrop tat on his cheek, and snapped “Who’re you?” in Spanish, a language that every law enforcer in and around Salinas could speak.
    The kid avoided their eyes, muttering in English, “I no saying nothing. You can go fuck youself.”
    “Oh, man.” The Latino cop glanced into the cab, where the keys were dangling from the dash. He understood: Pell had left the truck on a city street with the engine on, knowing it’d be stolen—oh, in about sixty seconds—so the police would follow it and give Pell a chance to escape in a different direction.
    Another thought. Not a good one. He turned to Jarhead. “You don’t think, when we said we had Pell and they called all availables for backup . . . I mean, you don’t think they pulled ’em off the roadblocks, do you?”
    “No, they wouldn’t do that. That’d be fucking stupid.”
    The men looked at each other.
    “Christ.” The Latino officer raced to the squad car and grabbed the microphone.

Chapter 7
    “A Honda Civic,” TJ reported, hanging up from a call with DMV. “Five years old. Red. I’ve got the tags.” They knew Pell was now in the Worldwide Express driver’s personal car, which was missing from the company’s lot in Salinas.
    TJ added, “I’ll let the roadblocks know.”
    “ When they get back on site,” Dance muttered.
    To the dismay of the agents and O’Neil, some local dispatcher had ordered the nearby roadblocks abandoned for the pursuit of the Worldwide Express truck. His placid face registering what for O’Neil was disgust—a tightening of the lips—he’d sent the cars back on site immediately.
    They were in a meeting room up the hall from Sandoval’s office. Now that Pell was clearly not near the courthouse, Dance wanted to return to CBI headquarters, but Charles Overby had told them to remain at the courthouse until he arrived.
    “Think he wants to make sure no press conferences escape either,” TJ said, to which Dance and O’Neil gave sour laughs. “Speaking of which,” came TJ’s whisper. “Incoming! . . . Hit the decks.”
    A figure strode confidently through the door. Charles Overby, a fifty-five-year-old career law enforcer.
    Without any greetings, he asked Dance, “He wasn’t in the truck?”
    “No. Local gangbanger. Pell left the truck running. He knew somebody’d snatch it, and we’d focus on that. He took off in the delivery driver’s own car.”
    “The driver?”
    “No sign.”
    “Ouch.” Brown-haired, sunburned Charles Overby was athletic in a pear-shaped way, a tennis and golf player. He was the newly appointed headof the CBI’s west-central office. The agent in charge he replaced, Stan Fishburne, had taken early retirement on a medical, much to the CBI staff’s collective dismay (because of the severe heart attack on Fishburne’s account—and because of who had succeeded him on theirs).
    O’Neil took a call and Dance updated Overby, adding the details of Pell’s new wheels and their concern that the partner was still nearby.
    “You think he’s really planted another device?”
    “Unlikely. But the accomplice staying around makes sense.”
    O’Neil hung up. “The roadblocks’re all