The Messiah Secret - James Becker [81]
Bronson registered the other car at the same instant and reacted the way he’d been trained, turning the wheel away from the impending collision and accelerating hard to get clear of the path of the other vehicle.
Angela looked more closely at the driver and registered the bandaged ear, pale skin and dark, almost black, eyes of the man behind the wheel.
‘It’s that priest!’ she shouted. ‘He’s trying to kill us.’
Bronson glanced to his right, but his concentration was on the traffic, not on the driver of the other vehicle.
His options were limited. There was a line of vehicles – cars and light vans – heading towards them, but only a couple of cars in their lane ahead of them. No side streets, or not for about a hundred yards, and all the side turnings Bronson could see were dead ends. The last thing he wanted to do was get trapped somewhere that the priest could attack them. He didn’t know if the priest was armed, and had no desire to find out.
But a car is a weapon. A ton or so of metal able to travel at high speed, and in skilled hands – perhaps even more so in unskilled hands – can be lethal. He had to keep moving, keep them ahead of the other car.
He accelerated hard down the road. The single ace he held was that his car had already been in motion, and this gave him a tiny speed advantage.
He checked the mirror on the passenger side. The priest’s car was now perhaps ten feet behind him, and dropping back slightly. Fifty yards ahead was a lumbering grey van, the rear doors wedged open to reveal a motley collection of carpets and other unidentifiable materials inside it. To the left, an almost unbroken stream of cars was heading towards them.
Angela looked behind them, then tensed, pushing back in her seat, her arms pressing against the dashboard, as Bronson changed up and mashed the accelerator pedal again.
The priest was still close behind, maybe fifteen feet back, clearly visible in Bronson’s mirror and now matching speed with him.
Ahead, the back of the van loomed ever closer. At the last second, Bronson swung the wheel to the left, heading straight towards the oncoming traffic, gambling that the drivers on the other side of the road would give way.
But they showed no signs of moving over, and at the last second before a collision was inevitable, he slammed on the brakes and swung back on to the right-hand side of the road.
There was a bang and a scream of tortured metal as the front of the priest’s car crashed into the boot of his. The priest had braked as well, but too late.
‘There goes my no-claims bonus,’ Bronson muttered.
Angela spun round to look behind them.
‘He’s still coming after us,’ she said, her voice choked with fear.
Bronson had been hoping that the air bags in the priest’s car might have deployed as a result of the collision, but there was no sign of that having happened. Behind the wheel he could see the man’s black eyes staring right at him as he wrestled with the steering wheel.
Bronson swung his car to the right, back on to the correct side of the road, then moved even further over. He took a quick glance down the right-hand side of the slow-moving van, trying to see what was in front of it, then hit the accelerator again.
‘Hang on,’ he muttered, as the right-hand wheels of his car mounted the pavement. He sounded a long blast on the horn. With the left wheels of the car on the road and the right ones bouncing over the uneven paving slabs, Bronson powered past the van, scattering pedestrians, chickens and dogs as he did so.
Just as he reached the front of the van, a pile of boxes stacked four high on the pavement loomed in front of the car.
‘Brace yourself,’ he said, and hit them squarely, his eyes closing at the moment of impact. Cardboard and debris flew in every direction but, as he drove over their remains, he could see that the boxes had contained nothing more solid than a few dozen packets of crisps.
Bronson steered his car back on to the road. It bounced hard as it left the pavement, the suspension banging in