A plot no doubt dreamed up by some overweight screenwriter sitting by his swimming pool with a pina colada by one hand and a fresh supply of Pentel pens and an Edgar Wallace plot-wheel by the other. And even that fellow had needed a small army to fulfill his idea. I was only one man.

It wouldn’t work. It was just a momentary false gleam, like the others I’d had over the years – the idea that maybe I could put some sort of poison gas in Dolan’s air-conditioning system, or plant a bomb in his Los Angeles house, or perhaps obtain some really deadly weapon – a bazooka, let us say – and turn his damned silver Cadillac into a fireball as it raced east toward Vegas or west toward LA along 71.

Best to dismiss it.

But it wouldn’t go.

Cut him out, the voice inside that spoke for Elizabeth kept whispering. Cut him out the way an experienced sheep-dog cuts a ewe out of the flock when his master points. Detour him out into the emptiness and kill him. Kill them all.

Wouldn’t work. If I allowed no other truth, I would at least have to allow that a man who had stayed alive as long as Dolan must have a carefully honed sense of survival – honed to the point of paranoia, perhaps. He and his men would see through the detour trick in a minute.

They turned down this one today, the voice that spoke for Elizabeth responded. They never even hesitated. They went just like Mary’s little lamb.

But I knew – yes, somehow I did! – that men like Dolan, men who are really more like wolves than men, develop a sort of sixth sense when it comes to danger. I could steal genuine detour signs from some road department shed and set them up in all the right places; I could even add fluorescent orange road cones and a few of those smudge-pots. I could do all that and Dolan would still smell the nervous sweat of my hands on the stage dressing. Right through his bullet-proof windows he would smell it. He would close his eyes and hear Elizabeth’s name far back in the snake-pit that passed for his mind.