Джеймс Паттерсон - Liar Liar

‘She’s convinced you’re going to kill me.’ Vada gave a little laugh, coming to Regan’s side.

He put an arm out, and she slipped under it, curling against him.

‘I tried to explain to her that you need me for what comes next. Your new life. Our new life. But I’m not sure she understands.’

Vada looked me up and down, and there was a flicker of pity in her eyes. But the light was soon gone, and her eyes were taking on a blankness now that was almost as complete as his. She was dehumanising me in her mind, the way he’d taught her to. Detaching herself from the idea that I didn’t deserve what I was about to get.

She sneered. ‘She said that now I’ve done my job, I’m no good to you.’

‘You have done a very good job, Vada,’ Regan said gently. He gave her a squeeze, and let her go, taking a step away from her.

Suddenly free of his embrace, she looked impossibly small. Childlike. Her features were twitching with sudden confusion. She could see in his eyes the same thing I had seen in her – detachment forming. The false warmth dissipating.

I opened my mouth to tell Vada to run, but I knew it was hopeless.

Her eyes flicked to me. We could both feel it. The change in him. The switch flipped. The mask fallen away.

She didn’t even have time to voice her surprise. Her heartache.

Regan lifted the arm that held the gun and shot her point blank in the face.

Chapter

99

I WATCHED VADA reskit jolt as though shocked with electricity, her head snapping back. She staggered once and then crumpled to the floor, her head hitting the ground hard. Regan’s gun was small and silenced. He looked at Vada’s body, her head and shoulders lying in the shadow of the rickety old work table, and then turned to me like her death had been of only passing interest.

‘She thought you loved her,’ I said. ‘What did you tell her? That you were going to run away together? Assume new iden-tities? Two broken, misunderstood souls finally united?’

‘I didn’t have to tell her much,’ Regan said, refusing to look at her. ‘Vada had plenty of experience piecing together fantasies. I just told her that if she did what I said, I’d give her everything she wanted. Isn’t that what all women want to hear?’

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘I want to hear the noise you make when I feed you into a woodchipper.’

The words were coming, but I wasn’t paying attention to them. I was focused on the cable tie around my wrist. Vada had pulled it tight, but I was sweating, so there was some lubrication. I tried to shift the thick plastic locking mechanism sideways from the back of my right hand to the gap between my wrists. The edges of the plastic were cutting, scratching my flesh.

Regan was approaching me. Moving cautiously, as though trying to corner a bird he planned to pounce on. As he came nearer, I found myself pressing against the beam, trying with all my might to shift the taut plastic.

‘Vada was very different from you,’ Regan said. ‘Some people, they need someone to save. The more damaged and unwanted, the better they feel. I’m sure you saw it a thousand times as a child, the way I did.’

‘Don’t come near me,’ I warned. The locking mechanism was between my wrists now. I gripped the loose end of the tie and started tightening the band, pulling as hard as I could. My fingers and hands were numb almost instantly. I yanked hard on the tie, cutting the plastic into my flesh.

‘You don’t need to feel sorry for Vada, Harry. I gave her what she wanted. She thought she was helping me, and that made her happy.’

‘Come any closer to me and I’ll fucking kick you,’ I snapped.

He kept approaching, and with his every step my body hardened, shook with rage and fear.

‘I will bite your fingers off, I swear to God.’

He was pressed against me suddenly, my jaw in his hard, warm hand.

We both knew I wasn’t going to kick him. I was having enough trouble standing upright. His breath was on my face. I bared my teeth, prepared to bite him if he tried to kiss me. A smile fluttered at the corners of his mouth.

‘You wouldn’t really hurt me, would you, Harry?’ he asked.

‘You wanna make a bet?’ I thought about spitting at him, but my mouth was too dry. He squeezed my face so that my cheekbones ached, seemed to want to give in to his desire to hurt me. But this wasn’t the time. He’d brought me to this place, at this time, for a reason. He would play this out slowly, so that he could enjoy it. He had been waiting a long time for this. In a dark, awful way, I had too.

‘You need to understand what happened here,’ Regan said.

Chapter

100

THEY WERE ALL fresh starts for her. Fantastic adventures. Regan saw his mother’s face change with every new house they entered, as though she was actually taking on the features of the people who lived there. Heather Banks found the house-sitting jobs in the newspapers and arrived at the city apartment or country estate or isolated cabin ready to enjoy a little escape from reality. For a weekend, a couple of weeks, a few months, she would adventure through the lives of the people who owned the homes, caring for their pets and rearranging their bookshelves, while her husband Ron worked out in the fields or walked the streets, preferring to admire the different landscapes alone. Little Regan had been to every corner of the country minding the houses of strangers he almost never met. Heather told other adults it was good for Regan to travel. He’d not fit in, the first time they’d enrolled him in school.

‘He’s very intelligent,’ she explained. ‘He gets bored.’

Regan was indeed always bored, but he was also aware that removing him from school and taking him on the road was his mother’s way of trying to make him a ‘good boy’. There were no other little boys and girls to bite and scratch and tug at here, no one to hear his screaming, squealing, convulsing tantrums that sometimes carried on for hours. They would arrive at a cheery farm and unpack their bags at the homestead, and she would turn him by the shoulders towards the fields and give him an encouraging shove, saying, ‘Now, be a good boy.’ Would this be the place that brought out the goodness in him? Or would they have to keep searching? Highway by highway and house by house they searched, Regan curled in the back seat of the car sleeping as eucalypts rolled by the windows.

Bellbird Valley was no different. Regan had wandered the bushland around the house, determined to find a way to be a good boy. And he had found nothing but miles of tangled bush and animals that were afraid of him, birds that took flight before he could line them up in his slingshot and kangaroos that bounced away at the sound of his footsteps. He assumed that goodness was something he would feel, something that would make him smile the way his father smiled at his mother sometimes. Regan would watch the two of them as his father put his arm around her waist, and he’d hear him say, ‘Gee, you’re a good woman.’

The day that it happened, Heather had taken Regan out on the porch and sat with him, as she had every morning. They would watch the sun rise through the hole in the little stone formation on the top of the valley, making for a moment the shape of a warm little dwelling with a lit window. Heather had discovered the lighthouse the first morning they’d been there, sitting on the cane lounge with a steaming coffee in her hand. ‘We should go up there,’ she’d suggested, and they had, Regan following her begrudgingly up the slope, whipping bushes with a stick. They’d stood at the rock and she’d smoothed the slope with her hand, and then sat, giggling, in the wind-worn hole like a girl on a swing.

Regan had looked at her that morning and tried to feel the goodness. Tried to think of her as a good woman, and him as a good boy. But there was nothing in him. No goodness. Just a hollow cage in his chest, a place waiting to be filled with life.