Джеймс Паттерсон - Liar Liar

He had been telling me that he was a soul that would never fit, an outcast doomed to wander on the edges of the world, finding pleasure wherever he could. That he’d been born and had grown without feeling love, not even for his parents. That something inside him not only rejected people but sometimes enjoyed hurting them.

That he wasn’t good, but empty inside.

And so was I.

We were the same.

I hadn’t come all the way here to kill him. I’d come because I was curious to see if I had finally found someone just like me.

Without realising it, I’d turned the gun away from Regan. It was still in my hand.

But now it was pointed at my head.

Chapter

107

REGAN SMILED. HE wasn’t desperate for me to drop the gun from my head, worried and sickened by my aim. He was curious. Excited. It was all a game to him. No expression crossed Tox’s features. He didn’t ask what I was doing. Tox Barnes, my loyal friend, seemed to know from my face what I was thinking. Yet he put his hands in the pockets of his filthy jeans and watched me. His calm only tightened the muscles pulsing in my jaw, drove my heartbeat faster and faster. When I tried to speak my voice shook with the tremors running through my body.

‘Is he right?’ I asked. Tox shrugged. I needed him to be shocked, appalled, to try to stop me. Anything but the expectation I could see in his face, the resigned look of someone who had known, all along, that I would eventually burn myself out. The tiger born in captivity, trained to walk on a lead, and yet unable to deny that natural instinct always whispering in the pit of its mind. Once I realised what I was, I would have to destroy myself. Regan’s smile was rigid with pain, but he held it, knowing that I was finally seeing through his eyes.

‘You tell me right now.’ I kept my eyes on Tox. ‘Tell me the truth. Is he right about me? He is, isn’t he?!’

‘Harry,’ Tox began.

‘I’m a killer.’ My voice was trembling on the edge of sobs. ‘I’m a punisher. I tell myself I only hurt bad people, but isn’t that just bullshit? Isn’t that just a cover-up for something really bad inside?’

‘You’re not going to shoot yourself,’ Tox said.

‘I can’t live if I’m like him. I can’t. What if this is the beginning of me ending up like that? What if he’s opened the door to something, Tox? Something I can’t control. People aren’t safe from me. They haven’t been safe from me for a long time.’

‘You’re going to put the gun down, Harry,’ Tox said. ‘That’s a fact.’

But I was on a road now that had no exits. Faster and faster the realisation was coming over me. My words came in a furious stream. ‘My own mother didn’t want me. I was a mistake. My whole life’s a joke. It’s not real , Tox. Nothing I’ve ever done can cover up what’s really in here.’ I tapped my chest furiously. ‘I’m bad in here !’

‘I don’t think so,’ Tox said, clicking his tongue, dismissive. ‘He’s just got into your head. It’s what he does. You may be a freak but you’re not all bad inside, Harry, and you don’t deserve to die.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because he isn’t all bad, either.’ Tox gestured to Regan.

I looked at the killer kneeling before us, a man who had wrought unimaginable pain on the world since he was a child.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Tox said. ‘He’s a miserable, vicious shitbag who deserves to be drowned in a vat of acid. But he came here looking for you. He spent all this time trying to convince you that he knows the real you. That you’re the same. That you belong together. He tried it out the first time with your brother. And now he wants you. It’s because he’s lonely.’

Regan was watching Tox as the shaggy-haired man gestured to him.

‘If he’s as evil and empty as he says he is, why is he so afraid of being alone?’

I looked at Regan. The blood from his belly had soaked his legs, the earthen floor. The breath in my chest was coming easier. Tox watched me. He was unafraid. He knew I wasn’t going to shoot myself. As he approached me, I thought about his words.

Regan had been right about so much. I had few friends, yes. I was selfish, violent, messed up. I’d been a problem to the world from the moment I was born, and I grew up honing my skills to be a bigger, more offensive problem. There was a lot of bad in me, and stripping away any goodness I’d managed to cover it up with had been easy. I was like Regan in so many terrifying ways.

Inside me, there wasn’t a great ball of warm, glowing, righteous goodness.

But there was a tiny spark. And there was a tiny spark in the man on the ground before me. As vile and merciless and depraved as he was, he was human. He felt loneliness. He wanted to find comfort with someone as unredeemable, as profoundly worthless, as he saw himself. He’d tried to show me that we were as bad as each other, deep down inside, and I’d come here to find out if that was true.

It was not.

Chapter

108

I DROPPED MY aim.

Blood was seeping from between Regan’s fingers. He steadied himself against the ground with one hand, his expression unreadable. It would have been too easy to take his life then. I was exhausted. My resolve was gone. All I wanted was for Regan to be gone from my life, taking all the pain he had brought with him.

But it wasn’t going to happen like this.

‘I can’t do this,’ I said. ‘I can’t kill a wounded, unarmed man on his knees in a fucking barn.’

‘I can,’ Tox suggested, taking the gun from me.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said. ‘Help me tie hi–’

A crash split the air, so sudden and loud it made all three of us jump. Vada’s head was turned towards me, the bullet hole in her cheek running blood over the side of her face, a grotesque half-mask of red. Her hand was still on the leg of the fold-out table that she had yanked backwards, causing the table to fold in on itself and crash to the floor.

As we watched, Vada’s unfocused eyes fell closed.

In her last act, she had caused a desperate distraction. The shock of the noise was enough to draw my and Tox’s attention away from Regan for just a second.

That was all the time he needed to escape.

Chapter

109

A FIERCE WIND had risen outside the barn, whipping the long grass, dragging smeary clouds across the moon. At first, I saw no sign of him, my night vision ruined by the light inside the barn. But then I caught a flicker of movement through the forest. I had to take a chance.

Tox ran beside me, grabbed my wrist and pulled as he noticed Regan turn in the darkness ahead. I was worried that with my wounded leg my friend would get ahead of me, that I’d be leaving Tox to capture Regan by himself.

But Tox wasn’t running on full strength either. Now and then a hand braced against his abdomen, his breath coming too hard as he sprinted through the bush.

A desperate thought pulsed with the rhythm of my feet on the forest floor.

You let him go. Now he’ll kill again. You’ll never exonerate Sam. Regan will continue his sick game until he wins .

Tox stumbled on a tree branch and gave a growl of pain.

‘Are you OK?’ I yelled against the wind. He didn’t answer.I stopped with him in the blackness, both of us panting heavily. We held each other. Not a hug, but the fierce grip of two allies glad to be within arm’s reach of each other.

‘We can’t lose him,’ Tox said, his eyes searching the forest around us. Suddenly there was a gust of wind, carrying the thump of a chopper. I could feel its beat in my chest. A white light swept the forest, looking for Regan, for us. In its wake, I spotted a figure moving through the trees.