Liar Liar Page 16

  You’re going to kill me.

  He couldn’t say the words. He swigged the bourbon.

  “This isn’t you,” Whitt said. “You’ve made a mistake. Surely they told you this when you signed on to counsel convicted killers. Surely they told you how manipulative they can be, how seductive.”

  He stumbled, fell on his hands. The bottle sloshed into the mud. She nudged him with her boot.

  “Get up.”

  Whitt looked around. There was nowhere to run, and he was too drunk to attempt it. If he sprinted away now, he’d fall helplessly, bash into trees, stagger unarmed until she found him and ended him. His only chance was to keep talking. It was so cold. His jacket was back at the crime scene. He gripped the bourbon bottle so hard, his knuckles ached. They walked in silence.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Whitt pressed on eventually. “He’s a dangerous animal. He’s clever. Cunning. Bad. But you understand him. Only you. And that makes you special. Of course it does. You understand the real Regan. That’s why you do what you do. Because you refuse to give up on them. The worst of the worst. Maybe…maybe someone refused to give up on you, and now…”

  “Stop walking,” she said. “Get on your knees.”

  “He’s not what you think he is.”

  “I said kneel down!”

  “There’s a part of you that’s not sure about this,” Whitt said. “You shot at Harry. Regan would never have allowed you to do that. Maybe you thought you could kill her, end Regan’s game. End it for him and you. Vada, there’s still a chance to—”

  “It’s over, Whitt,” she said. “Please kneel.”

  She clicked the hammer back on the pistol and pointed it at his face.

  He knelt.

  Whitt’s mind raced, new frantic arguments forming, but before he could voice them, the strange automatic impulse that he’d felt when he punched the officer on the bridge overtook him. He lunged at her legs.

  The gun’s blast lit up the forest.

  Chapter 77

  THEY FELL TOGETHER, and Whitt heard the gun clatter to the dirt. He didn’t know where the shot had gone, but he knew he wasn’t hit. Whitt rolled in the dirt, managed to get on top of Vada, his hands gripping hers over the gun. He was on autopilot, watching a man who was not him grapple for the weapon, trying to force all his weight down on her. He could not focus on her face. He knew seeing her desperate eyes would confuse him, remind him of the Vada he thought he knew, distract him from what he needed to do. He let go with one hand and punched downward, a half-strength blow that glanced off her jaw. Just enough to stop her, not enough to really hurt her. She rolled, and he lost his balance, and the gun’s deadly eye swung around at him again.

  Another shot. This one seemed to be louder.

  Whitt cowered, his hands on his head, unable to take his eyes off Vada.

  She was just as surprised by the shot. The blast had not come from her gun. She swung her weapon in the direction that it had come, but through the darkness came another muzzle flash, the shot this time whizzing over both their heads.

  She got up and ran. Whitt watched the space between the trees into which she’d vanished, his hands still gripping his skull. When he turned back toward where the gunshots had come from, he saw it.

  It emerged, bent-backed, the shoulders slightly slanted and the head lowered, two black eyes visible through slivers of icy blond hair. A ghoul or ghost, a twisted, hellish skull mask, the cheeks hollow and the eyes sunken. As he walked, unsteady, into the moonlight, Whitt recognized the ominous line of a battered leather jacket, one dirty steel-capped boot swinging, landing, with the deadly confidence of an executioner.

  Tox extended the gun in both hands as he came toward Whitt. He motioned as he passed, palm out, telling Whitt silently to stay where he was.

  Then Tox disappeared.

  Like a specter, his movements were smooth and soundless, leaving enormous prints behind in the mud. Whitt wasn’t sure what was real now and what was a dream, brought on either by the drugs, the booze, or the threat of his own death.

  He waited in the dark, standing alone, until Tox returned, the gun hanging by his side.

  “She got away,” Tox growled. “Worst shooting of my life. I should have thrown the fucking gun at her.”

  Chapter 78

  WHITT WRAPPED HIS arms around the other man.

  “Get off.” Tox shoved Whitt away. “We’ve got to get out of here before she doubles back on us.” As he pushed his friend, Tox almost toppled Whitt over. He grabbed a handful of Whitt’s sweat-damp shirt and pulled him steady.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Tox’s face was narrower than Whitt remembered, darkened by a thick brown beard. When he frowned, his features pointed, dangerously sharp. “Are you…are you drunk?”

  “Yes,” Whitt admitted. “And high.”

  Tox considered the man before him. Then he slapped him hard across the side of the head.

  “Oh, fuck!” Whitt gripped his face. “What was that for?”

  “For being drunk and high in the middle of a fucking police investigation—what do you think?” Tox shook his head, disgusted. He grabbed Whitt by the shoulder and shoved him toward the edge of the forest. “Jesus Christ, people are gunfighting around you and you’re sippin’ margaritas.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Whitt stumbled forward as Tox kept shoving him.

  “I got sick of being babysat in a hospital bed like a drooling invalid,” Tox said. “I’d have come earlier, but Chief Morris put some goon-for-hire friend of his on my room who wouldn’t let me leave. I had to take him out with a fold-up chair to the back of the head. It’ll probably strain the relationship.” He considered this for a moment, then shrugged. “Meh.”

  As the route through the forest widened, they walked side by side.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Didn’t take a genius,” Tox said. “I saw the news reports about Bombala and followed all the blue and red lights. I was walking right toward you down the road outside the crime scene when I saw some chick come up and stick a gun in your guts.”

  “I didn’t see you,” Whitt said.

  “You were distracted,” Tox reasoned.

  “I’m so glad you’re here.” Whitt drew a ragged breath. “I’m so—”

  “Hug me again and I’ll pull your spleen out.”

  Whitt nodded. He observed that Tox wasn’t walking right. The ghoulish appearance he’d had as he emerged from the dark was the result of weight and color lost during his coma. He had the strained look of a man who should rightfully have been dead but hadn’t quite returned to the land of the living yet, either. He walked slightly twisted, a hand braced against his stomach where five weeks earlier he’d been stabbed with a ten-inch kitchen knife.

  “Should you be out of bed?” Whitt asked. “You don’t look right.”

  “Heh! This from the fucking booze hound with pupils like dinner plates,” Tox said. As they emerged onto the moonlit road, he pointed. A dented black vintage Monaro was parked at an odd angle against a fence. “Get in the car. Then you can tell me all about the crazy bitch who nearly just blew your brains out.”

  Chapter 79

  THE SUNLIGHT CAME and went. In the bare, windswept farmhouse where I spent the night and most of the day sleeping, I saw no sign of it. Curled in a corner on the floor, blocked from the view of the open doorway by a table I had turned on its side, I lay and dreamed of Regan’s victims, my brother in his jail cell, and for some worrying reason, Pops in the back of an ambulance. Memories, visions, premonitions, I didn’t know. My leg was throbbing again. I unrolled the blood-soaked bandage, cleaned the wound with alcohol wipes from the small first-aid kit, and rewrapped it.

  As I emerged into the thick twilight and looked across the field toward the mountains, I called Pops on the new number Whitt had given me.

  “Jesus Christ, Harry,” he breathed. “All day I’ve been sitting waiting for them to tell me you were dead. Were you hit?”
>
  “Yes,” I answered. “Not badly. Scratch on the leg. Who shot me?”

  “Her name’s Vada Reskit,” Pops said.

  He told me about her. In her time as a prison psychologist in Long Bay’s maximum-security unit, she had gained access to some of the country’s worst serial killers and rapists, and a couple of men imprisoned for their role in terrorist plots targeting Australian cities. For six years, Vada and Regan had sat together twice a week talking about the ins and outs of his twisted mind. Evidently, she had grown close to him. Learned to love him, perhaps. Pops told me that in the past twenty-four hours, while I had slept, the news media had already begun digging into what they could about Vada, had drawn out her shocked mother and brother for interviews and started spinning write-ups on her childhood.

  She’d been a strange, isolated teenager. Vada had been taken out of her high school at sixteen for having an “inappropriate” relationship with her married physical education teacher. She’d been married herself at twenty-one to a poker-machine mogul who was edging into his seventies, an abusive, manipulative man who dumped her for his personal assistant when they’d been wed only three weeks.

  Vada was not only a mixed-up, lonely woman, she was a gifted fraud. No one had been able to confirm exactly where she’d obtained her psychology degree or what year she’d graduated, and a raid on her house that morning had uncovered a real-estate agent’s blazer and badge and dozens of folders crammed with paperwork for a mortgage company she didn’t appear to work for. Vada Reskit been known by four other names. Homicide detectives had obtained CCTV footage of her in the street one block away from the Parramatta police headquarters on the morning of the shooting in the records room, crossing the street with a bag on her hip.

  I listened to Pops’s tale and remembered the woman I’d glimpsed marching into the crime scene with Whitt, totally at ease pretending to be a law-enforcement official. I remembered her face above the gun, suddenly colder and devoid of life compared to the stern, determined look she’d had the first time I’d seen her. Mask on, mask off.

  Vada had probably learned the art of deception from the men she drew to her. The teacher who preyed on his students. The older billionaire who burned through people like he did dollars. The dangerously attractive serial killer who, for years, bent and twisted her mind to his will. But maybe I was being too kind to Vada. Maybe she was as darkly clever as the predatory men she had partnered with over the years. Maybe all along I had been dealing with not one psychopath, but two.

  Pops told me of Whitt’s near miss with Vada.

  “I haven’t spoken to Whitt,” Pops said. “He won’t answer his phone. I’m getting all this information second-hand from officers in Bombala. I don’t know how he got away, but he’s safe, they tell me. They’re searching for Vada now.”

  “They won’t find her,” I said. “She’ll go to Regan now.”

  “Harry,” Pops said carefully, “I know you won’t listen to me. But I’m going to implore you anyway. Please come in. We know Regan’s not alone now. He’s going to lure you into a trap, and you’re going to go willingly because you think it’s your duty or something. Harry, I know why Regan went into foster care. I know more about this man than you do.”

  A chill came over me. I stood, had to steady myself in the doorway.

  “He’s a monster, Harry.”

  “Tell me what happened,” I said.

  Pops sighed.

  “If you know what happened to Regan as a child, you know where it happened,” I pressed. “Tell me.”

  “I’m not going to help you put your head in the lion’s mouth,” Pops said. “I’m not even sure he’s leading you there. The house isn’t there anymore. It was lost…” He paused. “Harry, please, you have to listen to me, vengeance for your brother is not—”

  I hung up and grabbed my bag from inside the farmhouse, gritting my teeth through the pain. Night had fallen. If Pops wasn’t going to help me, I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to convince him. Regan was out there, and now I knew he had a friend, a woman who’d spent her life lying, manipulating, searching for that dark partner in crime she’d found in Regan Banks.

  She was going down with him.

  Chapter 80

  AS I HEADED TOWARD the highway, my phone buzzed.

  “Well, well, well,” I said before Regan could speak. “Someone’s got a girlfriend. Turns out she’s a chronic fuck-up as well. Couldn’t pour water out of a boot, that one. Your squeeze had me at ten paces and she couldn’t hit me, and now she’s let Edward Whittacker slip away.”

  Regan was quiet for a moment.

  “She had you at ten paces?” he repeated.

  “Oh, she didn’t tell you she fired at me?” I laughed. “Now, that’s funny. I think your little love pet might be aware that you only have eyes for me.” The words had spilled out, but they trailed to a halt as I burned with a sudden pang of regret. I didn’t know how complicit Vada was in Regan’s plans. She might have been his victim, too, and even though she had tried to kill my friend, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be responsible for signing her death warrant with Regan just yet. I decided to lie. “You should give her a break. I fired first. She was only defending herself.”

  “Harry,” Regan said, “we can talk about Vada later. We can talk about all of it. I really wanted to do more, you know. I think that taking away that layer, helping you to realize that your strange, small circle of friends doesn’t really mean anything, might have been really powerful for you.”

  “You’ve only taught me how important my friends are to me,” I said. “Your plan is failing.”

  “We’ll see. For now, I’ve run out of time to carry on. We have to meet.”

  “Why now?” I asked.

  He seemed surprised. “You really don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “This is about me and you, Harry. About my gift to you. You don’t get it?”

  “The day you start making sense is going to be the greatest day of my fucking life,” I said.

  “You’ll see, in time. I have faith. I’m going to give you an address.”

  Those ominous words I had heard before, words that made my skin crawl.

  “I think we’re going to have company,” he continued. “But you’ll work out how we’re going to be alone. You’ll understand when you see the lighthouse.”

  Chapter 81

  TOX SAT ON the end of the motel bed where Whitt slept, looking at his cigarette between drags, admiring the glow of the embers in the dim light. There had been no smoking in the hospital. None of life’s necessities, really. For the first few days after waking from his coma, Tox had not smoked, drunk, or felt the press of a woman’s naked body against his. And that was a very unusual thing. He’d lain silently like a pathetic, wounded animal, watching the pretty nurses coming in and out, giving him drugs, adjusting his sheets and pillows, starved of all joy. Then he’d heard a couple of those nurses walking by his room giggling about “Mr. Handsome in number twelve.” With effort, Tox had shuffled down on the mattress, leaned forward, and grabbed his chart from where it hung near his feet. The top of the page read “Barnes, Tate John. Room 12.”

  Mr. Handsome? Huh.

  A few careful looks, some of his rusty but serviceable romantic charm, and he’d managed to get a couple of Jim Beam minis stuffed under his pillow one day. Then, about a week later, one of the young ladies had tucked herself under his arm and helped him hobble to the fire escape, stood watching him with a nervous smile as he sucked down three cigarettes in a row. Tox thought he’d pushed his luck just about as far as it would go when, one night, a darkened shape had come creeping in and flipped the lock on the door after closing it behind her. They’d both laughed as she slid back his sheet, pushing his hospital gown up his hairy legs.

  No, hospital hadn’t been so bad. But that didn’t mean that Tox was going to leave the score between him and Regan unsettled. He’d been selfish to try to take Regan down himself, keep the girl-killer for his own
plaything when really it was Harry who deserved that prize. Tox had learned of Sam Blue’s killing while in the hospital bed. He’d tried to leave then but only made it as far as the foyer before hospital security dragged him back to his room.

  Tox would help Harry kill the beast. That would make things just about even, he figured.

  Whitt stirred in his sleep and Tox glanced at him. It had been sunrise by the time he’d got his partner down from the twitching, nodding, buzzing state he’d found him in. Half of it was the Dexies, and half of it was probably having come within a whisker of his own execution. Tox had taken his emergency pack of naloxone from the Monaro, listening silently to Whitt’s ramblings about the Reskit woman and her connection to Regan Banks. He’d shot Whitt up with the Narcan, the way he had on many occasions when friends from the darker corners of his life had needed it. Then he’d leaned, smoking, in the doorway of the motel bathroom and listened to Whitt explain all that he could about Reskit. How he had been completely duped into thinking she was a cop. How he’d fallen off the wagon. How stupid he felt about it. All while Whitt knelt at the toilet, vomiting between streams of words. When Whitt looked like he was slowing down, Tox had dragged him to the bed, dumped him on the coverlet, and sat down to think.

  He’d known a few women like Reskit in his time. The cruelest and meanest pimps were the ones who had the most girls fluttering around them, trying to be the one he really loved and trusted, the one who understood him. Tox had been running an informant named Jasmine back in the 1990s who let her street daddy push her around, and she’d turned up to a meeting once with her own front tooth mounted on a big gold chain around her neck like she was proud he’d smacked it out of her. Tox had put the guy’s hand in a sandwich press and there had been no more tooth necklaces after that, but for every Jasmine he tried to look out for, there were ten he never heard about.