Джеймс Паттерсон - Liar Liar

‘There!’ I dragged Tox along, then let go of him and sprinted up the incline. Tox overtook me. Regan appeared from behind a tree and smashed a branch into Tox’s face.

Tox went down hard, Regan sprinting way from him. The chopper light darted again through the forest, and I caught a flash of my partner’s face. He was out cold. As the light disappeared, I fumbled on the ground around him, looking for the gun he had dropped, feeling only rocks and branches, his warm jacket and hard chest.

I was unarmed. It was dark, I was on my own now, and the tactical team would be heading towards me, most likely with orders to shoot me on sight. The smartest thing to do would be to wait with my injured friend and surrender when the police eventually found us.

Instead, I ran after Regan.

Chapter

110

I CAME TO the clearing suddenly, a small patch of treeless sandstone reaching out over a shallow valley. Regan had stopped just short of the cliff edge, taking a moment to glance over its rim before he noticed me standing there. His lower half was soaked in blood from the bullet in his guts, and yet he carried on, a machine built for violence.

He didn’t wait. Regan strode to the edge of the forest and grabbed my throat, slamming me into the rocks in one swift motion. My brain was still tangled up in the idea of finding him, and was unprepared for what I would do now that I had.

I reached up and punched him hard in the head, twice, three times, but his strength was inhuman. A frantic thought pushed through the madness, that perhaps our fight in the barn had just been play. He was serious now. I had turned away from him. I had betrayed him. I had failed to be that perfect other he’d been searching for, to surrender to the lessons he’d been trying to teach me. He had been lonely, just as Tox said. And now he was enraged.

Regan straddled me, pinning my legs with his, and wrapped both hands around my throat.

I scratched and clawed at his hands, grabbed at his ears and face. The cartilage in my throat was creaking and crunching, and my eyes flooding with tears. I was only seconds without air, too early for hallucinations. But I was sure that what I was seeing was not real when Edward Whittacker’s face appeared behind Regan’s shoulder.

The knife in Whitt’s fist came down hard, the blade sinking into Regan’s shoulder. Whitt tried to yank the blade back but it snapped at the hilt.

Regan rolled, staggered to his feet, holding the wound. Whitt and I moved together, a silent agreement made. We ran at the big man at the cliff edge.

Our hands met at the centre of his chest, a hard shove, both our bodies almost rocketing over the cliff with him.

Regan fell into the darkness.

Chapter

111

WHITT AND I collapsed at the edge of the cliff, still struggling for breath. He held my arm as though to stop me from falling as we peered into the blackness below. The drop was long, at least a hundred feet. I could see a pale, twisted shape below on the rocks, but couldn’t tell if it was Regan or the fallen trunk of a young ghost gum. I slid back from the edge and knelt, and Whitt folded his arms around me.

I was taken back to the moment, seemingly years ago but really only weeks earlier, when this man had held me in the airport after telling me my brother had been killed. As I clung to Whitt, my fingers gripping at his sweat-damp shirt, I remembered thinking that my brother’s death had been the loss of all that I had in the world. I’d been wrong. I squeezed Whitt and he squeezed me back, a strangled laugh coming from his chest.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said, catching his laughter. ‘What are you doing here ?’

‘All my friends were in the same place.’ He shrugged. ‘I thought I’d join the party.’

We walked back through the darkened forest, Whitt’s arm around my shoulder. He reeked of Scotch. Whitt had been driven back to his addiction. I realised, as we moved through the forest, just how much of the man I had known was gone. He pulled me close, surprised perhaps by how long I’d let him touch me. The few attempts he’d ever made at hugging me were always a risk. Maybe I was changing, now that I’d discovered that the real me Regan had spent so long unravelling wasn’t empty, or completely bad.

We reached the place where I was sure Tox had been hit and knocked out, but there was no sign of him. I stopped and pulled away from Whitt, scanning the dark for any sign of the man.

I thought I saw him coming out from behind a tree, but as the forest exploded with light, I knew I was wrong.

Chapter

112

THERE WERE TEN of them. Fifteen, maybe. The bush around me was suddenly alive with people, too many to count behind the torchlight, the screaming voices. I heard the ominous sound of a dozen rifles engaging. I threw my hands up, my shout of terror inaudible among the voices all around me.

‘Don’t move! Don’t move!’

They had authority to fire, and every reason to do it. I was a rogue. A dangerous woman. I’d shown myself to be willing to kill, and was covered in my own blood and the blood of my enemy. I probably looked like a fiend in the torchlight. There was a pause, and I could almost see the decision to end my life rushing quickly through the crowd around me. Flickering through scared, hardened faces.

I braced for a shot. But none came.

Someone shoved me onto the ground. I lay still and silent as I was cuffed.

Chapter

113

THE NEXT FEW hours came to me in fragments, a film now and then blurring or skipping as I lost focus. I remember nothing of Whitt and me being led out of the woods in handcuffs. But I distinctly remember a plump, freckle-faced paramedic trying to untie my boots as I sat on a gurney in the back of a parked ambulance. The laces hadn’t been untied in days, and the boots were caked in mud and blood.

‘Girl,’ she said, shaking her head in dismay, taking a scalpel to the laces. ‘You’re one hell of a mess.’

I waited in the ambulance to be taken away, but it seemed they wanted to keep me on site until they had determined what had happened to Regan. Officers I didn’t recognise came and barked questions at me, took my answers without acknowledgement and left. I caught a glimpse through the ambulance doors of Tox and Whitt – who was now uncuffed – the two of them walking shoulder to shoulder. Tox was holding a hand to his broken nose.

‘Just get one of the paramedics to look at it,’ Whitt was pleading.

‘You nag like an old woman,’ Tox growled.

I didn’t realise I was falling asleep until the man I recognised as Deputy Commissioner Woods appeared at the bottom of my gurney, flanked by two tactical officers with rifles. While I’d drifted, my body responding to the softness of the pillow under my head and the relative safety provided by the crowd beyond the ambulance doors, the paramedic had inserted an IV drip in my vein. My handcuffs had been removed and my good ankle secured to the gurney frame. I looked at the chain connecting me to the chrome rail and supposed the sight was something I would have to get used to.

‘Regan’s body has been found,’ Woods said. ‘He’s dead.’

I smiled and let my head fall back onto the pillow.

Woods turned to the officer beside him. ‘Note for the record that upon hearing of Banks’s death, Detective Blue reacted positively.’

‘Positively?’ I laughed. ‘That’s the understatement of the year. I’m fucking elated. I want a picture with the body so I can get it framed. Can someone save his head in a jar for me? I’m gonna put it on my coffee table.’

‘Detective Blue,’ Woods said. ‘They told me you were an expert on digging holes for yourself. Let me assure you, there’s no need to make this one any deeper. You set out, with fore-sight and premeditation, to murder Regan Banks, and you’ve done just that. It doesn’t matter to me what kind of danger he was to society. You were a police officer, and when you went vigilante you broke the law.’