Джеймс Паттерсон - Liar Liar

No one did. I swung my bag onto my back, was about to run when I spotted one of the girls from the circle. She was across the park, impossibly far away, arm in arm with a big man. A big man with a shaved head. They were just heading through the doorway of the female public toilet. I tried to run, but someone was holding the handle of my backpack.

‘He’s here!’ I cried. ‘Let go of me!’

But they yanked me down onto the ground.

‘I got her,’ the homeless man with the plaited beard said.

I didn’t have time for this. I’d seen Regan, seen him with his next victim.

I rolled, tried to kick out from underneath him, but someone else had my legs.

I looked up through the forest of legs around me and saw the young man in the food truck trying to see what was happening over heads of the crowd. I did the only thing I could think of – I screamed as pathetically as I could.

‘Help! Help! He’s got me! Please!’

The young man burst out of the side of the truck, trying to shove his way towards me. The distraction was enough. I freed my hand from where it had been trapped under me, took the gun from my pocket and fired it into the air above my head.

I was free, instantly, the crowd falling away in terror. I got up and bolted for the other side of the park, my phone still in one hand, my gun in the other. The door to the toilets seemed miles away, over pathways, behind bushes.

I ran for my life. For her life. The phone clattered from my fingers as I lifted the gun with both hands and skidded to a halt through the doorway.

‘Police!’ I roared. ‘Hands up!’

Chapter

21

THE DOOR TO the cubicle was open. His jeans were pooled around his boots, his white arse clenching as the tremors pulsed through him. The girl leaned out from her position in front of his crotch, shock in her eyes, standing and putting her hands up with a wail.

It was not him. Just some tradesman getting a blow job on his way home from work. He turned and I cringed. He too put his hands in the air.

‘I’m sorry!’ he gasped. ‘I’m sorry! Don’t shoot!’

The gunshot had brought more people into the park. In the distance I could see the homeless men pointing in my direction. Another siren. I grabbed my phone from the ground and took off at a sprint across the road towards the hospital. I’d lose them in the underground car park, come up on the other side of the building, disappear into the winding streets and alley-ways around Surry Hills. As I ran I remembered the phone. The line was still open. I put the phone to my ear and listened, my face burning with embarrassment.

‘Harry?’ Regan was saying. ‘Are you there?’

‘You’ve fucked with me for the last time,’ I promised him. Even to me, my voice sounded weak. Rattled.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t resist. I have considered following you around, watching you from afar, reporting your whereabouts back to you. It wouldn’t be hard. You’re not exactly the world’s hardest person to track.’

‘Bullshit,’ I sneered.

‘How do you think I got your number?’ he asked. ‘I followed you to that back-alley shithole in Kings Cross where you got the burner phone.’

I swallowed. ‘Did you hurt those people?’ I thought of the family sitting around the boxes, watching their laptop screen. The toddler.

‘I don’t have to hurt people all the time to get what I want,’ he said.

‘What do you want from me?’ I asked. ‘What the fuck is all this? Why Sam? I need to understand.’

‘You’ll understand one step at a time,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to follow you. You’re going to follow me . And I think that, as you do, you’ll learn to understand both me and yourself. Things are about to get very personal, Harry.’

‘I don’t want to play stupid games. Just come at me,’ I snarled. ‘I’m ready. If you have any guts at all, you slimy little coward, you’ll tell me where you are and we’ll have at it.’

‘I’ll tell you exactly where I am,’ he said. ‘When the time is right.’

Chapter

22

WHITT WALKED QUICKLY towards the front steps of the station, his coat pulled tightly around him, partly to ward off the cold, partly as a shield against curious eyes. He knew that if he looked as terrible as he felt, there would be rumours. His past relationship with the drink was public knowledge across the police department. Everything was. He’d slipped off the wagon the night before.

Not so much slipped as leapt, arms out. Swan-dived. He had no memory of how the evening had ended, but that morning as he dressed gingerly, stopping now and then to be sick, evidence of his fall was all around him. Glass smashed in the kitchen. Vomit in the sink. The fridge hanging open, beeping in protest. Disarray. Whitt didn’t do disarray. It was not him. Some other person had crept into his body after the second glass of wine and had refused to relinquish their hold.

Whitt gripped the handrail to pull himself up towards the front doors of the station.

Vada was at the doors waiting for him. He glared at her as he walked into the foyer.

‘Je-sus.’ She strained to see his face over the collar of his coat. ‘Looks like someone pulled up rough!’

‘I didn’t pull up rough ,’ Whitt said. ‘I haven’t pulled up at all. I think I’m still drunk. Last night was … well, it was completely inappropriate, is what it was.’

They came to the entrance to the conference rooms. Vada juggled her folders of case files, rummaged in her handbag. Whitt waited, then searched his own bag and found his security card.

‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’ Vada put a hand on his shoulder as they walked the immaculate halls. ‘You saw two of your colleagues killed. You deserved to let off some steam.’

There it was again. That word. Deserved . Oh, the things Whitt could justify to himself with that single word. All he had to do was think about how tired he’d become since the Regan Banks case began, how stressed and afraid he was, and he’d leap happily back off the wagon again. The temptation for another drink now just to take the edge off his sickness was overwhelming. It would probably help him work better. Ease his stomach, his nerves, stave off the full force of the hangover at least until the afternoon.

They sat at a table. Whitt held his head in his hands as Vada took her notepad and pen from her bag, setting herself up for their first briefing. Whitt liked her meticulous placement of her pen by her paper, her mobile at her elbow, a chilled water bottle directly between them. She was organised, ambitious, direct. Maybe if she said what he’d done the night before was OK, then it was. Whitt revelled in the sensation of having a partner to reassure him. He wasn’t alone. She was going to be here for him.

Whitt spread out his own papers, a map with a winding river cutting through forest and suburbia.

‘This was where we last saw him,’ Whitt said, pointing at the map. ‘After Regan was wounded in a shooting beside the Georges River, we believe he swam ashore here at Sandy Point, on the opposite side of the bank. He made his way through the national park and stole a car from a service station here, on Heathcote Road. We don’t know the extent of Regan’s injuries, but the officer who winged him thinks he got him at least twice. And I think I can confirm that. I saw him shot.’

Vada was scrawling notes.

‘Obviously the wounds were not life threatening,’ Whitt continued. ‘We lost him for a couple of days. He dumped the car in Baulkham Hills, and then five days later turned up in Lane Cove. He abducted Doctor Parish, and her daughter Isobel. He forced them to drive to her plastic surgery clinic in Mosman, where she treated his wounds. Then he killed them both.’