Джеймс Паттерсон - Liar Liar

Whatever had happened to Regan, it was so bad that a judge had decided it should never be known to the public, lest Regan have to suffer the humiliation of the event being revealed in his adult life. I walked and wondered what a person could possibly to do a seven-year-old that warranted that. I had some ideas, and just considering them made me sick.

I wondered if what happened to Regan had made him the monster he was deep down inside. Was he born bad, or was he taking me to the place where he had been made that way?

I had turned back towards the highway, half-formulating a plan to catch a ride to the nearest town with a car-trouble story, when I spied the stone building on the edge of the next paddock. An old house with darkened windows, a car parked, still shimmering with rain. My ride to the meeting that I knew would end a life.

Regan’s or mine.

Chapter

84

THE FIRST INDICATION that they were in the right place might have been missed by a careless onlooker. Tox hadn’t been entirely sure he was on the right track, but had set out with Whitt on a half-theory, unable to stand the motel room any longer.

Al Cerullo had been more helpful than he’d anticipated. Instead of simply giving Tox the password to Vada’s email account, Al had unlocked her whole work profile for him, giving him the woman’s login to the prison’s intranet. There wasn’t much in the email account to drive Tox’s search, but he had discovered that the prison recorded each employee’s Google search history to ensure staff didn’t get up to any unsavoury online behaviour during work hours. There, between searches for academic articles on antisocial personality disorder and the relative benefits of Clozaril as an anti-psychotic medication, he’d spotted a Google Maps search. The land was in a place called Bellbird Valley.

Now, as Tox slowed the Monaro before the row of roadworks signs, he felt his curiosity piquing at the apparently ordinary scene before him. A dusty yellow digger had been parked by the side of the highway, three men standing around it, not doing much of anything, their high-vis vests painfully bright in the light of the lamps rigged around the roadblock. Tox was behind two other cars. He eased off the brake and let the car roll as he was directed west by a large ‘detour’ sign and another man with flashing hand-held pointers.

‘This is it,’ he told Whitt.

Whitt shuffled upwards in his seat, having been resting against the window.

‘How do you know?’ he asked, squinting into the dark.

‘They’re not using that crawler excavator to pull up the road,’ Tox said as they drove away from the roadblock. ‘It’s built for muddy earth. Probably borrowed it from a local farm for show. Those three goons standing leaning on their shovels didn’t look like they’d ever done a day’s manual labour in their lives, and they’ve got bulges under their jackets which I’d hazard are too big for radios. They’ll be undercovers making sure a couple of country bumpkins on their way home from the local rodeo don’t drive through the middle of the country’s biggest manhunt.’

Tox parked the car not far from the detour and got out. He walked to the back, popped the boot. Whitt marvelled at the array of weaponry that was lit by the flickering red interior bulb. A pile of guns, haphazardly dumped in the trunk, barrels and stocks poking at odd angles, shoulder straps tangled across magazines. Tox took a hunting blade the size of his forearm from the edge of the pile and attached it to his belt. He handed Whitt a similar knife and then put a foot on the bumper, extracted a sawn-off shotgun from the collection and started fitting it with shells.

‘Is this overkill?’ Whitt asked, picking up a huge magnum revolver from the pile of guns heaped on the carpet before him.

‘The Kalashnikov would probably be overkill,’ Tox said. Whitt hadn’t even noticed the huge semiautomatic rifle lying at the bottom of the pile until he spotted its camouflaged stock. Tox took the revolver from Whitt’s hand and tossed it back into the pile, handing him a Glock instead. ‘Take this. You don’t want to be fumbling around in the dark with a cylinder.’

They shut the trunk, and Tox snapped the shotgun closed. Without so much as a glance at each other, the two men turned and started walking back towards the detour on the highway. They came within a hundred metres of the men pretending to be road workers, then turned and walked into the darkened bush.

‘Try not to shoot me,’ Tox warned his partner. ‘I’ve had enough of hospitals for one year.’

Chapter

85

THE HELICOPTER WARNED me.

I spotted the chopper tracking along the mountain range in the distance, a tiny moving star among a thousand others, drifting slowly east towards the coast. The chopper might have represented anything – the coastguard surveying the beaches for signs of trouble, a pair of pilots taking a night ride, a traffic crew scanning the general area for their evening report. But as I walked towards Bellbird Valley, having hidden my stolen car in the bush off the side of the highway, I saw the chopper stop and track back the way it had come. It was a police chopper, holding off until it was called. I stood on the side of the road and watched it pass between the tops of two trees.

They were waiting.

I pressed my palm against my forehead and groaned.

Pops. He must have been right, that Regan had decided to take me to the place where whatever had happened to him as a kid had occurred. This is about me , Regan had said. He wanted me to know what had happened to him.

My body heavy with fatigue and disappointment, I paused and tried to decide what I would do. With the state’s best specialist officers lying in wait for Regan, there was no way he would come tonight. No way I would be able to take him down on my own, even if he did. I sank onto the ground at the roadside and tried to draw some remaining strength from deep inside my body.

We were nowhere near a lighthouse. A quick scan of Bellbird Valley on the car’s GPS had told me I was miles from the sea.

I thought about walking into the forest, making myself known, letting the team pounce on me and drag me into custody. I needed medical attention, and fast. I hadn’t felt any sensation in the toes of my wounded leg for an hour. I was dehydrated, exhausted and covered in the various cuts and scrapes that come with living rough. I was hungry, dangerously on edge. Here was the perfect opportunity for me to surrender before I crossed the line I’d been steadily approaching over the past weeks, the one that would change my life.

But I didn’t.

Regan had said he thought we might have ‘company’ in the valley. He was right. But I knew there was a chance this was the night he had chosen for me, and that he wouldn’t spot the trap waiting for him. That he would come, and they would pounce, and someone I cared for, maybe Whitt, maybe Pops, might be hurt. And I also knew there was a chance I could get to him before my colleagues put cuffs on the monster in their midst and wrapped him safely in the protective arms of the justice system. I had come too far to give up all hope now.

I kept walking, using the land beneath me as a guide. I knew I was adjacent to a narrow, deep valley. I turned off the road and walked quietly into the bush, fitting my feet carefully between large branches and sticks, trying to be as silent as I could.

The forest stretched around me, ringing with quiet. It was so dark I brushed against huge tree trunks I didn’t know were around me, my hands out and wandering in blackness. Tall ghost gums marked my way, smooth and cold as I passed, silent sentries watching my progress. In time, I noticed a flicker of red light to my left and froze.

Through the trees a long army truck emerged in my vision, its square outline barely discernible in the blackness. They had draped the mobile command centre in camouflage netting, and nestled it at the base of a small incline. The red flicker I had seen was the night-vision torch of a man heading towards the door of the truck. As he pushed through the black flaps on the doorway, I glimpsed the crimson-lit interior, crammed with people.