Джеймс Паттерсон - Liar Liar

She got up and ran. Whitt watched the space between the trees into which she’d vanished, his hands still gripping his skull. When he turned back towards where the gunshots had come from, he saw it.

It emerged, bent-backed, the shoulders slightly slanted and the head lowered, two black eyes visible through slivers of icy blond hair. A ghoul or ghost, a twisted, hellish skull-mask, the cheeks hollow and the eyes sunken. As he walked, unsteady, into the moonlight, Whitt recognised the ominous line of a battered leather jacket, one dirty steel-capped boot swinging, landing, with the deadly confidence of an executioner.

Tox extended the gun in both hands as he came towards Whitt. He motioned as he passed, palm out, telling Whitt silently to stay where he was.

Then Tox disappeared.

Like a spectre, his movements were smooth and soundless, leaving enormous prints behind in the mud. Whitt wasn’t sure what was real now and what was a dream, brought on either by the drugs, the booze or the threat of his own death.

He waited in the dark, standing alone, until Tox returned, the gun hanging by his side.

‘She got away,’ Tox growled. ‘Worst shooting of my life. I should have thrown the fucking gun at her.’

Chapter

78

WHITT WRAPPED HIS arms around the other man.

‘Get off.’ Tox shoved Whitt away. ‘We’ve got to get out of here before she doubles back on us.’ As he pushed his friend, Tox almost toppled Whitt over. He grabbed a handful of Whitt’s sweat-damp shirt and pulled him steady.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Tox’s face was narrower than Whitt remembered, darkened by a thick brown beard. When he frowned his features pointed, dangerously sharp. ‘Are you … are you drunk ?’

‘Yes,’ Whitt admitted. ‘And high.’

Tox considered the man before him. Then he slapped him hard across the side of the head.

‘Oh fuck!’ Whitt gripped his face. ‘What was that for?’

‘For being drunk and high in the middle of a fucking police investigation – what do you think?’ Tox shook his head, disgusted. He grabbed Whitt by the shoulder and shoved him towards the edge of the forest. ‘Jesus Christ, people are gun-fighting around you and you’re sippin’ margaritas.’

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Whitt stumbled forward as Tox kept shoving him.

‘I got sick of being babysat in a hospital bed like a drooling invalid,’ Tox said. ‘I’d have come earlier but Chief Morris put some goon-for-hire friend of his on my room who wouldn’t let me leave. I had to take him out with a fold-up chair to the back of the head. It’ll probably strain the relationship.’ He considered this for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Meh.’

As the route through the forest widened, they walked side by side.

‘How did you find me?’

‘Didn’t take a genius,’ Tox said. ‘I saw the news reports about Bombala and followed all the blue and red lights. I was walking right towards you down the road outside the crime scene when I saw some chick come up and stick a gun in your guts.’

‘I didn’t see you,’ Whitt said.

‘You were distracted,’ Tox reasoned.

‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ Whitt drew a ragged breath. ‘I’m so –’

‘Hug me again and I’ll pull your spleen out.’

Whitt nodded. He observed that Tox wasn’t walking right. The ghoulish appearance he’d had as he emerged from the dark was the result of weight and colour lost during his coma. He had the strained look of a man who should rightfully have been dead but hadn’t quite returned to the land of the living yet, either. He walked slightly twisted, a hand braced against his stomach where five weeks earlier he’d been stabbed with a ten-inch kitchen knife.

‘Should you be out of bed?’ Whitt asked. ‘You don’t look right.’

‘Heh! This from the fucking booze hound with pupils like dinner plates,’ Tox said. As they emerged onto the moonlit road, he pointed. A dented black vintage Monaro was parked at an odd angle against a fence. ‘Get in the car. Then you can tell me all about the crazy bitch who nearly just blew your brains out.’

Chapter

79

THE SUNLIGHT CAME and went. In the bare, windswept farmhouse where I spent the night and most of the day sleeping, I saw no sign of it. Curled in a corner on the floor, blocked from the view of the open doorway by a table I had turned on its side, I lay and dreamed of Regan’s victims, my brother in his jail cell, and for some worrying reason, Pops in the back of an ambulance. Memories, visions, premonitions, I didn’t know. My leg was throbbing again. I unrolled the blood-soaked bandage, cleaned the wound with alcohol wipes from the small first aid kit and rewrapped it.

As I emerged into the thick twilight and looked across the field towards the mountains, I called Pops on the new number Whitt had given me.

‘Jesus Christ, Harry,’ he breathed. ‘All day I’ve been sitting waiting for them to tell me you were dead. Were you hit?’

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Not badly. Scratch on the leg. Who shot me?’

‘Her name’s Vada Reskit,’ Pops said.

He told me about her. In her time as a prison psychologist in Long Bay’s maximum security unit, she had gained access to some of the country’s worst serial killers and rapists, and a couple of men imprisoned for their role in terrorist plots targeting Australian cities. For six years, Vada and Regan had sat together twice a week talking about the ins and outs of his twisted mind. Evidently, she had grown close to him. Learned to love him, perhaps. Pops told me that in the past 24 hours, while I had slept, the news media had already begun digging into what they could about Vada, had drawn out her shocked mother and brother for interviews and started spinning write-ups on her childhood.

She’d been a strange, isolated teenager. Vada had been taken out of her high school at sixteen for having an ‘inappropriate’ relationship with her married physical education teacher. She’d been married herself at twenty-one to a poker machine mogul who was edging into his seventies, an abusive, manipulative man who dumped her for his personal assistant when they’d been wed only three weeks.

Vada was not only a mixed-up, lonely woman, she was a gifted fraud. No one had been able to confirm exactly where she’d obtained her psychology degree or what year she’d graduated, and a raid on her house that morning had uncovered a real estate agent’s blazer and badge, and dozens of folders crammed with paperwork for a mortgage company she didn’t appear to work for. Vada Reskit been known by four other names. Homicide detectives had obtained CCTV footage of her in the street one block away from the Parramatta police headquarters on the morning of the shooting in the records room, crossing the street with a bag on her hip.

I listened to Pops’s tale and remembered the woman I’d glimpsed marching into the crime scene with Whitt, totally at ease pretending to be a law enforcement official. I remembered her face above the gun, suddenly colder and devoid of life compared to the stern, determined look she’d had the first time I’d seen her. Mask on, mask off.

Vada had probably learned the art of deception from the men she drew to her. The teacher who preyed on his students. The older billionaire who burned through people like he did dollars. The dangerously attractive serial killer who, for years, bent and twisted her mind to his will. But maybe I was being too kind to Vada. Maybe she was as darkly clever as the predatory men she had partnered with over the years. Maybe all along I had been dealing not with one psychopath, but two.

Pops told me of Whitt’s near miss with Vada.

‘I haven’t spoken to Whitt,’ Pops said. ‘He won’t answer his phone. I’m getting all this information second-hand from officers in Bombala. I don’t know how he got away but he’s safe, they tell me. They’re searching for Vada now.’