Liar Liar Page 19

  Chapter 92

  POPS COULD HEAR the voices but had lost all sense of where they were coming from. It seemed to him that Harry was in the mobile-command center with them, but through the hazy red light he couldn’t see her. Woods had instructed two of his officers to escort Pops to the farthest end of the truck, where they sat him on a fold-up chair and cuffed his wrists behind his back. The pain across his chest, the one he had been experiencing for days, was not receding the way it usually did. If anything, it was becoming more specific, a sensation like a belt tightening endlessly around his chest, pulling inward at his sides. It felt to Pops as though his rib cage wanted to collapse in on itself.

  Pops could just make out the broad figure of Woods at the other end of the truck, Nigel Spader standing restlessly beside him, watching the screens on the desk.

  “He’s not coming,” Woods grunted. “The bastard’s not coming tonight.”

  Nigel didn’t answer.

  “Any minute now, we’re going to get our first press van up at the roadblock,” Woods complained. “These country hicks are smarter than you think. Some local yokel will see through the road-crew charade. Half the population out here works on road crews. Before you know it, our failure to trap Banks will be on the national news.”

  “None of the press spotted the Bristol Gardens sting,” Nigel reasoned.

  “If this whole thing comes to nothing, Spader, I’m pinning it on you,” Woods snapped.

  Pops listened to the argument, trying to keep his breathing even. One of the officers guarding him bent and looked closely at his face, and when Pops tried to return the gaze, he saw the man’s features were clouded with green-and-yellow bursts of light.

  “Deputy Commissioner Woods, sir,” the man said, “Chief Morris ain’t lookin’ so good over here.”

  “He’s fine,” a voice said from the other end of the narrow red room.

  “Should we at least loosen the cuffs, sir?” the officer persisted.

  “I said he’s fine.”

  Pops panted as the two young men sat again on either side of him, their rifles leaning between their uniformed knees.

  “If ole mate here drops dead on us,” Pops heard one of them murmur, “I know who’s getting the blame. Take the cuffs off.”

  “You reckon?” the other whispered.

  “I reckon. He’s not gonna cause any trouble. Chief Morris? We’re gonna take the cuffs off. But you just sit there and take it easy, all right?”

  “Yeah,” the other officer whispered in Pops’s ear as he leaned back in his chair, discreetly pulling the old man’s wrists toward him. “And don’t go croaking on us, boss.”

  Chapter 93

  THEY WAITED IN the dark, lying on their bellies, each with an eye pressed to the infrared scope of their rifle. Stephen was glad that when the order had come through from command for the tactical officers to team up, it had been Shona who had made her way through the dark toward him. He knew from their academy training that she had the ears of a rabbit, and she could take the bullseye out of a paper target at a kilometer’s distance.

  He’d never admit it, but Stephen was a little nervous. He’d been on special operations before, but the danger had always been clear and present. Once, he’d laid sniper cover for a hostage situation for three hours outside a bank in the CBD, the back of his neck searing in the sun as he watched the negotiator pacing behind a truck at the front of the glass building, trying to talk the man down. Stephen had known exactly where his target was, had eighteen other sets of eyes anticipating his every move and reporting it through the radio. Target is heading north, approaching doors. Target is retreating from doors, heading south.

  He ached for the same kind of certainty, any certainty at all, in fact. Their stationary position, waiting for the approach of the killer, meant the animals and birds in the blackness around them had relaxed in their presence, and every twitch of a branch gave him the shivers. Stephen knew from talk within the crew that target Blue was just a psycho bitch running loose, trying to stick her nose into a manhunt where it wasn’t appreciated. His only fear was that she might punch him out, as she was apparently wont to do. That wouldn’t go down well with the boys. It was Banks that Stephen was really scared of. No one really knew what the guy looked like. Some of the boys had sent around photos from the crime scenes on their phones, and it looked to Stephen like the work of an animal. There were reports Banks was working with a woman.

  “Hey, Steve,” Shona murmured, and he took his eye from his scope to look at her. “You think if we catch Blue we still get the reward?”

  “You don’t get a police reward for doing your job,” Stephen said.

  “It’s not a police reward; it’s private.”

  “Then maybe.”

  “I see Blue and Banks out there, I know who I’m gonna run for,” she said, pushing her cap up so that the peak didn’t rest on the rifle scope. “Hundred grand? Worth a shot.”

  An animal moved in the bush near them. Both officers lifted their heads, listened. Stephen felt every muscle in his body tense. After thirty seconds, when no sound came, they went back to their rifle scopes.

  “I gotta piss,” Stephen said.

  “Real snipers piss in their pants.”

  “You’d love that, wouldn’t you?” He nudged her as he got to his feet. “Everybody thinking I pissed myself, scared of the dark out here.”

  He walked a few meters, within sight of his partner lying prone like a black log in the moonlight, and unzipped his fly.

  At first he thought he’d walked into a low-hanging branch, grabbing at the sharp, sideways tug across his throat. But when his fingers pressed to the flesh, they came away wet. Very wet.

  Stephen stopped in his tracks and clutched at the wound, just as a shadow passed before his vision, blocking his path back to Shona.

  It all happened in absolute silence. A hand gripped his hair, slashed again at the base of his throat. He didn’t even have time to grab at the knife on his belt, or the pistol tucked into the holster on his ankle.

  As he hit the ground, he heard his partner’s voice. The rustle of her clothes as she got to her feet.

  “Steve?” she asked. Her voice was small.

  Chapter 94

  THIS WASN’T RIGHT. I sat on the edge of an embankment, watching the charred house at the bottom of the valley in the moonlight, seeing nothing. I watched the moon cross the sky and guessed a couple of hours had passed since I first walked off the road toward the valley. The tension in my chest was tightening, a hard ball of pain pushing up toward my throat. Regan had said to look for a lighthouse. The only house here was a blackened pile of sticks and sandstone.

  I rubbed my eyes, trying to avoid the temptation to sleep. The helicopter on the horizon was still tracking back and forth. As it crossed the slope of the highest point of the valley wall, I felt a ripple of electricity in my body.

  There was a rock formation on the eastern side of the valley, a sharp slope of sandstone just visible beyond the trees. The rock sloped down almost at a forty-five degree angle, then jutted in and went straight down. The shape was unmistakable; the sloping roof and side wall of a house made from stone. As the chopper doubled back, it disappeared for an instant behind the rock, and then its light flashed for no more than a second as it passed across a hole in the house-shaped silhouette.

  A house. A light. A lighthouse.

  I shot to my feet and started making my way through the dark.

  Chapter 95

  AN HOUR MIGHT have passed as I crept through the bush around the rim of the valley. As I approached the jagged sandstone ledge jutting out from the hillside where the house formation stood, I drew my weapon, pausing, not wanting to confront Regan while wheezing and struggling my way up the incline. My whole body had begun to tremble lightly with terror. I walked with aching care toward the rock and swept my gun across and above it, my heart twisting as the shapes of trees and rocks and branches became the ominous figure of a broad-shouldered man. T
he lighthouse formation was narrow, punctured by ancient winds right through the middle, the rock hole forming a window through which I’d seen the helicopter’s light. In time, my pulse slowed, and I stood in the wind, waiting for what would happen next.

  Nothing happened. Another hour. I crouched in the bush, cold sweat pouring down my sides. As my mind wandered, the shape of the sandstone house wavering in my exhausted vision, I ached with regret about the young tactical guy I had subdued and probably humiliated.

  Twenty-two years old. Jesus. They were really scraping the bottom of the barrel for—

  My breath caught in my chest. I rose to my feet, the realization rocketing through me. I gripped my hair as I frantically counted off the days.

  Tomorrow was my birthday.

  I understood.

  This is about me and you, Harry. About my gift to you.

  Regan wanted to strip me down, show me myself, facilitate my sick rebirth into what he’d hoped I was always going to be, my potential fulfilled. In the weeks since my brother’s death, I’d forgotten all about my birthday. It wasn’t something I celebrated even when I remembered it. My childhood had been full of forgotten birthdays. He would have known that from my files. The story about my mother showing up high on my fourteenth birthday—he’d relived that terrible incident with me over the phone.

  Regan wasn’t going to turn up tonight. He was going to turn up on my birthday. But did that mean midnight, when the date rolled over? Or the following evening, under the cover of darkness? I had no way of telling the time without lighting the screen on my phone and potentially giving away my position. I stared up at the moon, followed its pale blue glow into the woods.

  And then I saw it. Another flicker of light. Not in the valley in which the charred house stood, but to the east, where the land dipped away again, thick forest receding to flat moonlit fields. A wider valley, right next to the one Regan had been leading me to. In a clearing below me, someone was walking, shining a red torch to light their way through the tall grass.

  I headed down the other side of the ridge.

  Chapter 96

  ON THE VALLEY FLOOR, approaching through the blackness with my gun drawn, I realized the torch carrier was another tactical team member, probably assigned to the valley adjacent to the one where the trap had been set. I looked up the incline behind me toward the stone house, wondering if I should return there so that I could see the activity in both valleys at the same time. But the radio the figure was carrying would likely have access to the tactical channel, and hearing what the police team was up to would be advantageous to me.

  The figure had the shape and movement of a woman. I thought I could see a bun poking out from the back of her ball cap. She had walked to an ancient sandstone structure in the middle of the field and now sat heavily on the stones, wiping her brow and setting her rifle on the surface beside her. As I crept forward, low enough that my silhouette wouldn’t be visible across the top of the grass, I saw that the structure she was resting on was the remnants of an old well.

  She was peeling off her black gloves as I emerged from the grass.

  “Freeze,” I said.

  She gave a little yelp of surprise and threw her hands up, one palm gloved, the other bare.

  “Oh, shit!”

  “Turn around and put your hands on the well. Reach for the gun and I’ll slug you.”

  “Oh, fuck.” Her voice was tinged with the same shame I’d heard from the young officer I’d put down in the other valley. “I can’t believe this.”

  She acquiesced with my commands reluctantly, slumping forward with her hands on the well. I took the cuffs off her belt and tucked my pistol into the back of my jeans.

  “Don’t feel too bad—” I began. But before I could continue, she’d twisted back around, and I could feel the press of a sharp point in the soft flesh of my throat.

  “Oh.” Vada smiled in the dark. “I don’t feel bad at all.”

  Chapter 97

  BREATHE, I TOLD MYSELF. Just keep breathing. Don’t panic. This isn’t over yet.

  The mental pep talk didn’t work. I was so surprised by Vada’s presence, so shocked at my sudden loss of the upper hand, that I stumbled, my weak leg giving out, almost pitching me forward into the well. She had both my guns and my knife before I could even comprehend how she had taken them. I dropped the cuffs, and they were lost in the shadows, too risky for Vada to crouch down and try to find. She shoved me down onto the sandstone, ratcheting my hand behind my back.

  So stupid. So thoughtless. I’d been so caught up in my realization about Regan’s plan that I’d completely forgotten his partner.

  This is about me. But it is also about you.

  It was also about Vada. At least for now.

  The knife that she put on the stones beside my face was bloodied. This woman had already killed tonight, and she was handling me so roughly that her fingernails dug into my wrists as she bound my hands with cable ties. She yanked me upward. Unnecessary force. This was personal for her. I could feel the hate coming off her in toxic waves.

  I let her shove me into a walk through the grass toward the edge of the forest. My leg hurt, but now I limped badly, wanting her to believe I was less mobile than I really was. Make your opponent think you’re weak. Make them underestimate you until you can form a plan. I feigned a stumble over some rocks, and her fingers bit harder into my arm.

  “None of your bullshit, Harry,” she snapped. “Try anything funny and I’ll put another bullet in you.”

  I walked, one of her hands clasping my wrists, the other pressing the knife into my shoulder blade. My brain was in full panic mode, frazzled and frantic. I saw flashes of Pops. Not surprising that the old man would come to me now, the closest thing to a parent I’d ever had. The sensation of his breath on my face as we danced around the boxing ring together, his padded hands taking furious punches until I was shivering and sick with exhaustion.

  “Come on, Blue. You’re stronger than this!” he’d growl.

  He was right. I was stronger than this.

  Wherever she had got the tactical uniform from, she had not taken the officer’s utility belt, probably thinking it would weigh her down. She’d bound my hands with cable ties from the breast pocket of the bulletproof vest. Cable ties I could work with. All was not lost, but I would have to think and act carefully.

  I couldn’t fight right now. But I could talk. Reason was my only available weapon.

  “So you’re Vada,” I said. “Regan’s next victim.”

  She gave a baffled, tense laugh.

  “What? You don’t think he’s going to kill you once you’ve fulfilled your purpose?” I asked.

  “Just walk,” she ordered.

  “I’m walking. I’m having a great time. What a beautiful night. Better enjoy this little stroll we’re taking through the moonlight, because you’re about to die, bitch,” I said.

  “You think so, huh?” She dug her nails into my wrist.

  “I know so,” I said. “This whole mission is about me, not you. If you take me to Regan, he’ll have no further use for you. You think he’ll do it quick, like that little girl and her mother, the doctor? Or will he do it slow like that helpless old couple? Which one means he loves you more, in your fucked-up brain?”

  She shoved me forward into the edge of the woods. As my eyes adjusted to the new darkness beyond the reach of the moon, I picked out the shape of a barn. There was a dim light inside the structure.

  “You killed two cops for him,” I said. “I assume there were more tonight. That’s where you got the uniform. You took out one of the tactical—”

  “Shut up, Harriet.”

  “He must have encouraged you to kill,” I said. “He probably prepared you for it mentally when you were forming your plan together. I bet he told you it would make you feel powerful. You’ve probably never felt powerful in your life. You’ve spent your whole life following men around, men who wanted to care for you. But Regan treated you like an
equal.”

  “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me, Harry,” Vada snapped. “You don’t have the training for it.”

  “I might not have your training, Vada, but I have something you don’t.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

  “Foresight.”

  “Please.” She sighed. “Spare me.”

  My stomach plunged as she pushed me forward. I dug my heels in and turned, wanting to look her in the face.

  “You can stop this now,” I said. “Or we can go in there, and I can watch him kill you.”

  “You really do think this is all about you, don’t you, Harry?” Her knife was pointed at my sternum, only an inch from the surface of my jacket. “I’m surprised someone like you, who’s started your life over so many times, can’t see what this is. You spent your whole childhood going from house to house, family to family, dozens and dozens of fresh starts.”

  “Don’t pretend you know me,” I said.

  “I don’t know you. But I know Regan. He wants to start over,” Vada said. “And he’s worthy of that. He’s a great man. He has incredible potential. But before he can start again, he has to be finished with his old life.”

  She tapped the knife against my chest.

  “He has to be finished with you.”

  Chapter 98

  HE WAS THERE in the barn, perched on the edge of a stack of dusty pallets, a gun resting on his thigh.

  Vada pushed me into the room, where the air was thick with the smell of mold and decay and the unmistakable reek of rodents. The barn was divided into two sections: a wide space with a foldout table, and a section for horses. Two of the walls dividing the stables were collapsed in and splintered. On the walls around me, I could see the outlines of tools that had once hung on angled nails. Wind whistled through the corrugated iron roof, gently swaying a single dim bulb that must have been powered by the generator I could hear humming somewhere.