Джеймс Паттерсон - Liar Liar

‘They won’t find her,’ I said. ‘She’ll go to Regan now.’

‘Harry,’ Pops said carefully. ‘I know you won’t listen to me. But I’m going to implore you anyway. Please come in. We know Regan’s not alone now. He’s going to lure you into a trap, and you’re going to go willingly because you think it’s your duty or something. Harry, I know why Regan went into foster care. I know more about this man than you do.’

A chill came over me. I stood, had to steady myself in the doorway.

‘He’s a monster, Harry.’

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.

Pops sighed.

‘If you know what happened to Regan as a child, you know where it happened,’ I pressed. ‘Tell me.’

‘I’m not going to help you put your head in the lion’s mouth,’ Pops said. ‘I’m not even sure he’s leading you there. The house isn’t there anymore. It was lost …’ He paused. ‘Harry, please, you have to listen to me, vengeance for your brother is not –’

I hung up and grabbed my bag from inside the farmhouse, gritting my teeth through the pain. Night had fallen. If Pops wasn’t going to help me, I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to convince him. Regan was out there, and now I knew he had a friend, a woman who’d spent her life lying, manipulating, searching for that dark partner in crime she’d found in Regan Banks.

She was going down with him.

Chapter

80

AS I HEADED towards the highway, my phone buzzed.

‘Well, well, well,’ I said before Regan could speak. ‘Someone’s got a girlfriend . Turns out she’s a chronic fuck-up as well. Couldn’t pour water out of a boot, that one. Your squeeze had me at ten paces and she couldn’t hit me, and now she’s let Edward Whittacker slip away.’

Regan was quiet for a moment.

‘She had you at ten paces?’ he repeated.

‘Oh, she didn’t tell you she fired at me?’ I laughed. ‘Now that’s funny. I think your little love-pet might be aware that you only have eyes for me.’ The words had spilled out, but they trailed to a halt as I burned with a sudden pang of regret. I didn’t know how complicit Vada was in Regan’s plans. She might have been his victim, too, and even though she had tried to kill my friend, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be responsible for signing her death warrant with Regan just yet. I decided to lie. ‘You should give her a break. I fired first. She was only defending herself.’

‘Harry,’ Regan said. ‘We can talk about Vada later. We can talk about all of it. I really wanted to do more, you know. I think that taking away that layer, helping you to realise that your strange, small circle of friends doesn’t really mean anything, might have been really powerful for you.’

‘You’ve only taught me how important my friends are to me,’ I said. ‘Your plan is failing.’

‘We’ll see. For now, I’ve run out of time to carry on. We have to meet.’

‘Why now?’ I asked.

He seemed surprised. ‘You really don’t know?’

‘No.’

‘This is about me and you, Harry. About my gift to you. You don’t get it?’

‘The day you start making sense is going to be the greatest day of my fucking life,’ I said.

‘You’ll see, in time. I have faith. I’m going to give you an address.’

Those ominous words I had heard before, words that made my skin crawl.

‘I think we’re going to have company,’ he continued. ‘But you’ll work out how we’re going to be alone. You’ll understand when you see the lighthouse.’

Chapter

81

TOX SAT ON the end of the motel bed where Whitt slept, looking at his cigarette between drags, admiring the glow of the embers in the dim light. There had been no smoking in the hospital. None of life’s necessities, really. For the first few days after waking from his coma, Tox had not smoked, drunk, or felt the press of a woman’s naked body against his. And that was a very unusual thing. He’d lain silently like a pathetic, wounded animal, watching the pretty nurses coming in and out, giving him drugs, adjusting his sheets and pillows, starved of all joy. Then he’d heard a couple of those nurses walking by his room giggling about ‘Mr Handsome in number twelve’. With effort, Tox had shuffled down on the mattress, leaned forward and grabbed his chart from where it hung near his feet. The top of the page read ‘Barnes, Tate John. Room 12’.

Mr Handsome? Huh.

A few careful looks, some of his rusty but serviceable romantic charm and he’d managed to get a couple of Jim Beam minis stuffed under his pillow one day. Then, about a week later, one of the young ladies had tucked herself under his arm and helped him hobble to the fire escape, stood watching him with a nervous smile as he sucked down three cigarettes in a row. Tox thought he’d pushed his luck just about as far as it would go when, one night, a darkened shape had come creeping in and flipped the lock on the door after closing it behind her. They’d both laughed as she slid back his sheet, pushing his hospital gown up his hairy legs.

No, hospital hadn’t been so bad. But that didn’t mean that Tox was going to leave the score between him and Regan unsettled. He’d been selfish to try to take Regan down himself, keep the girl-killer for his own plaything when really it was Harry who deserved that prize. Tox had learned of Sam Blue’s killing while in the hospital bed. He’d tried to leave then, but only made it as far as the foyer before hospital security dragged him back to his room.

Tox would help Harry kill the beast. That would make things just about even, he figured.

Whitt stirred in his sleep and Tox glanced at him. It had been sunrise by the time he’d got his partner down from the twitching, nodding, buzzing state he’d found him in. Half of it was the Dexies, and half of it was probably having come within a whisker of his own execution. Tox had taken his emergency pack of naloxone from the Monaro, listening silently to Whitt’s ramblings about the Reskit woman and her connection to Regan Banks. He’d shot Whitt up with the Narcan, the way he had on many occasions when friends from the darker corners of his life had needed it. Then he’d leaned, smoking, in the doorway of the motel bathroom and listened to Whitt explain all that he could about Reskit. How he had been completely duped into thinking she was a cop. How he’d fallen off the wagon. How stupid he felt about it. All while Whitt knelt at the toilet, vomiting between streams of words. When Whitt looked like he was slowing down Tox had dragged him to the bed, dumped him on the coverlet and sat down to think.

He’d known a few women like Reskit in his time. The cruel-lest and meanest pimps were the ones who had the most girls fluttering around them, trying to be the one he really loved and trusted, the one who understood him. Tox had been running an informant named Jasmine back in the 1990s who let her street daddy push her around, and she’d turned up to a meeting once with her own front tooth mounted on a big gold chain around her neck like she was proud he’d smacked it out of her. Tox had put the guy’s hand in a sandwich press and there had been no more tooth necklaces after that, but for every Jasmine he tried to look out for there were ten he never heard about.

Murder trials were filled with these violence-attracted girls. Rows of pretty young things in the front row of the gallery making eyes from at the perp, trying to pass handwritten letters to the defence team. Tox didn’t get it.

Didn’t matter. He didn’t need to get it. He just needed to make it right when he saw it, catch the pigs and put them out to slaughter.

That’s what he was going to do now.

Chapter

82

TOX EXHALED CIGARETTE smoke, leaned over and picked up Whitt’s phone from beside the bed.