Sandra Brown - Smoke Screen

A tale like that would also implicate Jay Burgess in all sorts of misdeeds, and it was clear that Raley bore a grudge toward his former best friend. In one fell swoop, he could clear himself and destroy Jay Burgess’s heroic legacy.

Was she being taken in?

If so, Raley was a great liar, because she believed everything he’d told her. She also gave credence to his story because he had withheld some of it. Based on experience, she knew that people with the most valuable information were often the ones most reluctant to impart it. He knew more about the fire, its origin, or something that he was withholding.

Sooner or later, he would have to give up everything he knew or speculated, because she had no intention of letting him sulk out there in the woods while she took on the CPD, Fordyce, and McGowan all by herself.

After she shared the story with Detectives Clark and Javier, someone would be dispatched to find Raley Gannon and bring him in for serious questioning. The fire chief would be clamoring to talk to him, too. Raley would be forced to divulge what he knew, and Britt Shelley would be on the scene to cover the story as it unfolded.

Jay had promised her a groundbreaking story, and he’d been true to his word. It troubled her, though, that the charmer she’d known and the deceiver Raley had described were the same man. If everything Raley had told her was the truth, and she believed it was, then Jay had sacrificed a girl’s life, his lifelong friendship with Raley, and even his own honor as a police officer. He’d forfeited all that to protect whatever it was that Raley had been about to discover, something so terrible that Jay felt he must confess it in order to die in peace.

Unfortunately, his killer hadn’t allowed him to unburden his conscience.

Britt was so deep in thought, she didn’t realize she was lost until her headlights shone on the city limits sign of a wide-spot-in-the-road town she’d never heard of that wasn’t in Raley’s directions. Pulling onto the shoulder, she consulted his handwritten notes.

“Double railroad tracks?” The railroad tracks where she’d taken a left turn were fifteen miles behind her. “Would have been nice if you’d emphasized that, Gannon,” she muttered as she made a U-turn. Of course he had written “double railroad tracks,” she just hadn’t read the directions carefully enough. But still…This had cost her a lot of time. Bill Alexander would be having a fit.

Her windshield was spattered with dead bugs. Twice she’d caught the glowing topaz eyes of deer in her headlights. Fortunately they’d stayed in the underbrush at the side of the road and hadn’t dashed out in front of her car. But she’d slowed down anyway.

The backtracking cost her almost half an hour. As her car bumped over the all-important double railroad tracks, she cursed Raley Gannon once again and made the correct turn.

“Go a quarter mile, then watch for a sharp right,” she read aloud from the paper she now held against the steering wheel in her line of sight to avoid making another mistake. “Okeydokey. Here we are,” she said as she found the turn.

The road was dark. The branches of trees on both sides spanned it to form a canopy. It meandered through the woods, crossing swampy areas and creeks, tributaries of the major rivers, she supposed. She really should explore this area of wild beauty. She would do that.

If she didn’t go to prison, she thought grimly.

Yes, definitely. Getting back to nature would be on her things-to-do list. But she wouldn’t venture into this low country wilderness without a guide. Not without someone who knew their way around.

Raley, maybe.

Or maybe not. He didn’t like her. He’d said so.

She jumped when an owl-or some nocturnal bird with a wide wingspan-swooped across the road directly in front of her grille. Then, feeling foolish over her jumpiness, she laughed with self-deprecation. But who wouldn’t be a little nervous driving alone at night on a dark country road?

A few minutes later, she was actually happy to notice a pair of headlights up ahead. The vehicle was on a side road, waiting for her to pass so it could pull out. She was relieved that it turned onto the road behind her. She welcomed the company.

But then the headlights loomed up in her rearview mirror.

For one irrational moment, she thought, Raley! He was coming back to Charleston with her.

But immediately reason asserted itself. He wouldn’t be coming from that direction, the headlights were too low to belong to a pickup, and Raley certainly wouldn’t zoom up behind her, practically riding her rear bumper. He wouldn’t flash his headlights onto bright and leave them on, as this driver had. Raley wouldn’t drive that dangerously close to another car, not even to get her attention and announce his presence behind her.

“Jerk,” she muttered as she gave her car some gas. The other driver did the same and stayed directly on her bumper for the next half mile. If he was impatient with her for driving the speed limit, why didn’t he just go around? There wasn’t a double yellow stripe prohibiting passing, but even if there was, anyone who didn’t have qualms against tailgating wouldn’t have qualms about breaking the no-passing law. There was no oncoming traffic to prevent him from passing her.

Raising one hand against the glare reflected in her rearview and side mirrors, she could make out two silhouettes in the other car. They appeared to be male, but she couldn’t tell with any degree of certainty, and now she was going too fast not to keep both hands on the wheel.

They were probably kids, making mischief, too foolish to realize they were playing a life-threatening game. She should do a story on it, posing the question: Should the legal driving age be raised to eighteen?

After another mile, she was frazzled. Her hands seemed grafted to the steering wheel from gripping it so tightly. Her shoulders ached with tension.

“You win.” She eased her car closer to the shoulder, which was nearly nonexistent. But the driver didn’t use the extra space to go around. Instead he pulled up so that his right front bumper was slightly overlapping her left rear one. She moved over more, until her right tires slid into soft mud. The other driver compensated, keeping their bumpers only inches apart. “What is wrong with you, you moron?”

But her irritation was steadily turning into panic. This was more sinister than teenagers playing a prank. Should she speed up, slow down, stop? All of the options posed risks, especially the last one. She was barely dressed. Her cell phone was dead. She had no weapon. She hadn’t seen another car for half an hour. Occasionally she had noticed lights from homes tucked into the woods, but not for the last few miles.

No, stopping wasn’t an option. Slowing down hadn’t discouraged him; he’d simply pulled his vehicle closer to hers. That left her only one thing to do, keep her speed up and hope that they wouldn’t crash before they reached the heavily traveled Highway 17, or that these two would tire of their game and leave her to go her way.

But instinctually she knew that wasn’t going to happen. This was menacing, not playful. The two in the other car meant to hurt her.

The driver seemed to have an uncanny knack for keeping his headlights shining directly into her mirrors. They were blinding her. Going on the offensive, she pressed her accelerator to the floorboard and at the same time jerked her wheel sharply to the left. She missed clipping his right front bumper by a hair. Now back on the hardtop surface, her car surged ahead.

But the advantage was short-lived. The other vehicle roared up behind hers, then whipped around the rear of it and overlapped bumpers again. “Dammit!” she shouted in fear. “Why are you doing this? What do you want?”