This whole thing would have much more verisimilitude if a dear friend of Rick's, someone whose fate is not very important, and who has really invested an immense amount of energy in this ghoulish fantasy concerning another human being, and would be already prepped, oh, let us say catspaw, desperately hurls himself in front of the bus beforehand to protect Rick, and really dies. Then you could have the cameras linger long on that scene, no fakery needed, with a little sidelong glance at the graceful fallen hero and then back to the useless big bag of strawberry icecream on the road. A two victim accident, where the hero unbenownst to all gets away. Long afterwards, on the return tour, Rick could sing, "You Are The Wind Beneath My Wings" -- "Did you ever know that you're my hero...." Makes poetic sense to me, Sydney Carton and all that: "It is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done...." Yes, I think it is a far superior plan. An added wrinkle would be to have the bus plough into the guilty bystanders, but that might be a bit hard to pull off.
yours, Peter T.