Джеймс Паттерсон - Liar Liar

‘Woods. But Morris approved it.’

‘Right, right.’

‘Come on, let’s get going. You’ve had yourself a pretty hard day. We all have. We’ll have a few drinks, blow off some steam. You can talk about it, or not talk about it, as you like.’

‘Oh,’ Whitt said. He never had ‘a few drinks’. Not anymore. It had taken years to climb his way out of the hole drinking had sunk him into after a bad case he’d worked on back home in Perth. A little girl had died, and Whitt had not been able to bring her killers to justice. Worse yet, he’d planted evidence and all but secured their freedom.

Old tingles of desire rippled through him at just the mention of a few drinks. He said nothing about his problem. It was too awkward to bring up at the outset. His ritual was to allow himself a single standard glass of red wine at 5.30 pm. Not a drop more. Sometimes, on his worst days, he had a Scotch. Just one.

He’d have that drink with his new partner, and explain it all to her then.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, the dread almost choking off his words.

Chapter

12

I SAT AT the back of the bar in a shadowy corner, my eyes on my glass, listening to the talk of the men at the counter. The tumbling and crashing sounds of the poker machines. The cars rushing by in the wet street.

In the time I’d been on the run, I’d learned plenty of things, but the most important had been how essential the sense of hearing is to a fugitive. I kept my ears pricked for mentions of my name at all times. For sirens, or the unmistakable stern, direct talk of cops. I made eye contact with no one. I’d kept my head so low in my first week in hiding my neck had been stiff and sore at the end of each day.

On the television screens above the bar, a cricket game, a cooking show and the national evening news. I listened as the bartender howled above the general din of conversation from the men crowded at the tables nearest the bar.

‘Shut up, you guys! I wanna hear this!’

The men’s volume lowered. The sound of the news program rose. I turned my drink on the tabletop before me, watching the ice melt.

‘ … shocking scenes. Police are saying they have no reason to believe the shooting at Sydney Police Centre in Surry Hills is linked to the ongoing search for Regan Banks … ’

I dropped my head, realising I’d almost risen out of my seat, eyes glued to the screen, my cover forgotten. My thoughts were racing. A shooting at the police command centre. Did they mean inside the building? How was that possible?

I realised with sudden, shocking clarity how many people I cared about had probably been in the building that day. Pops. Whitt. I thought briefly about Nigel Spader. He was a jerk, a jerk who had been partly responsible for my brother’s incarceration. But I didn’t want him dead. There were others – old partners, people I knew from the academy. Who was dead? Who’d done the shooting?

‘ … in total lockdown, as you can see. The names of the two officers who were killed have not been released, but sources are saying a shootout inside the station records room resulted in … ’

The records room. I chanced another look at the screens from under the ball cap pulled low on my brow. The reporter was standing outside a barricaded command centre, his face demonstrating his shock at the story he was reporting. Rage flickered in me. Regan Banks. Why had the reporter mentioned Regan Banks at all? Of course, the country was in terror at the idea that Regan was running around, ready to kill again. They were horrified at the police’s apparent inability to capture him. But a shooting at the station – nothing about that brought Regan Banks and his crimes to mind. Banks was a rapist. A strangler. A stabber. A torturer of women. He was not someone who entered buildings crowded with cops and shot people.

But there was one possibility: the reporter had mentioned Regan Banks because someone had mentioned it to him . A press release from police headquarters might have specifically said the shooting was not linked to Regan Banks.

Which meant, of course, that it was.

Regan. Why would he break into the records department? Was it to kill the people working there? The records room was a dumping ground for the department’s bad kids. I’d worked there plenty of times myself. The room was a weak access point for the building, now that I thought about it. If Regan just wanted to kill a cop, any cop, the records staff were sitting ducks.

Or had the records room itself been the target, and the staff there collateral? But what in the records room could Regan possibly …

I knew, even before I’d completed the thought.

I drained my drink and rose from my seat.

Two could play at that game.

Chapter

13

BEING ON THE lam is harder than you think. It takes a lot of set-up. I’d been given the news of my brother’s death only minutes after landing at Sydney Airport, coming home from my last case. From there I’d walked out, got a cab to my apartment, which was a crime scene, taped and locked up after Tox’s showdown with Regan. I’d taken no time to survey the chaos, the smashed coffee table and the blood pool where my friend had fallen. Numb, working purely on cold, calm directions coming from somewhere deep in my subconscious, I’d packed a bag with some clothes, the cash that was lying around my home, my phone and all my IDs. I’d locked the apartment, gone straight to a bank and emptied my accounts of the few thousand dollars I had left after my brother’s trial. This I’d put straight into the backpack.

I’d copied essential numbers from my phone, switched it off, dumped it and got a taxi back to Kings Cross, where I’d spent many of my first cases in Sex Crimes taking statements from working girls abused by their pimps or clients. I found someone I knew and, on her recommendation, headed for a back-alley phone dealership where I purchased an untraceable sim card and handset. Standing in the alley under blinking LED lights strung over the battered doorway, I’d called my boss. In the small, dark storage room where I’d bought the phone, a Chinese family was sitting down to dinner surrounded by unopened boxes of phones in every shape, colour and size. The laptop that served as their television set was being pawed at by a toddler in pyjamas. My brother’s face was warped by the angle of the screen, the banner under his chin half hidden by Chinese subtitles.

Breaking news: GRK accused Samuel Jacob Blue dead after prison fight

I’d been so out of it, Pops was on the line for a long moment before I spoke. I barely remembered dialling.

‘I can’t let him get away with it,’ I’d said finally.

‘Harry? Harry, listen.’ Pops had sounded puffed, the way I’d always known him, an old man trying to control a much younger, much angrier fighter in the ring. ‘I know this hurts. But don’t do anything. I’m warning you. Don’t –’

‘I’m sorry,’ I’d said.

I’d never stopped being sorry. I was sorry for every night that I didn’t come in, for every phone call I knew Whitt and Pops were making to my original, switched-off phone, leaving messages that would never be picked up, hoping to talk me down. I was sorry that I had not gone to Sam’s funeral. That I had not called our mother. That I had not visited Tox in hospital. I regretted what I was about to do now, as I sat in the darkened car park of the Department of Family and Community Services, smoking a cigarette and watching the automatic back doors opening and closing as workers left for the night.

I’d committed plenty of crimes since I went underground. Theft. Fraud. Fare evasion. The crimes were getting worse.

Resisting arrest. Assaulting a police officer.