‘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.’
‘Strip me of my badge,’ I said. ‘I don’t care.’
‘Oh, I’m going to do much more than that.’ Woods laughed humourlessly. ‘I’m going to see that every charge you racked up in this stupid, selfish mission of yours is presented fully. We’ve got four people dead tonight, and a fifth on the way. You’re gonna be sorry Regan’s gone so he can’t share some of the shit I’m about to rain down on you.’
I hardly heard Woods’s last sentence. My mind was rushing. Regan and Vada were dead. That made two. And I assumed Vada had killed the officer she’d stolen her uniform from. Her knife had already been bloody when I’d seen it on the edge of the well as she bound my wrists. I knew that the tactical teams had most likely paired up. That made four. I’d just seen Tox and Whitt walk by my ambulance, arguing like a married couple. They were fine. So who was the fifth casualty?
‘Who’s number five?’ I asked Woods.
The officers by his side looked grave, but Woods only glared at me with disgust. He nodded to the paramedic beside me. She walked in a crouch to the end of the ambulance and started to pull the doors shut.
‘Wait,’ I called, but Woods and his guys were already turning. ‘Who’s the fifth casualty?’ A desperate feeling was growing in my chest. I tried to shift upwards, and the cuff around my ankle clanged as it held me in place. I turned, wild-eyed, to the paramedic as she gave the driver the signal to go.
‘Who’s the fifth casualty?’
‘An older man.’ The paramedic hushed me, trying to push me back onto the pillows. ‘You don’t have to worry about that now.’
One week later
Chapter 114
IT WAS CLEAR to me by the second day in hospital that I was getting special treatment. With no television allowed in my room, and no visitors, I’d amused myself in any way that I could. I lay watching the people passing the door of my single room for hours, counting the breakfast, lunch and dinner trolleys going by. Breakfast seemed to be little plastic bowls of oats and wafer-thin slices of fruit, jugs of pale orange cordial. When mine came, however, it was not on a plastic tray but in a styrofoam container, and it was fried eggs and thick toast, strips of bacon and a cappuccino. I asked questions, but the nurses only smiled and shrugged, having been directed by the two thuggish police officers outside my door not to speak to me. When dinner came, there was even a slice of pecan pie for dessert, my all-time favourite. I’d stopped wondering about all the strange benefits I was getting, until I heard one nurse in the hall outside my room explain to another, ‘She’s a friend of Mr Handsome.’
I didn’t know what that meant.
Being a friend of Mr Handsome had more benefits than just the upgraded hospital cuisine. On the third night, one of the nurses caught my eye as she brought in my dinner tray, setting it on the stand beside my bed. She had a funny look on her face, like a practical joke was about to go down and she wanted me to be aware of it.
‘Ward C, Room eight,’ she whispered.
‘Huh?’ I asked. She winked and disappeared.
As I ate my dinner, I noticed that dessert tonight was one of the regular little tubs of coloured jelly that all the other patients got. That was odd. I examined the tub, noticing the surface of the jelly was uneven and cracked. I tilted it up and saw that a key had been pushed into the jelly and lay at the bottom of the tub.
A handcuff key.
At about midnight, two nurses walking by suddenly became very interested in the officers outside my door. There was a lot of smiling and laughing, and I saw one of the women put her hand on one officer’s chest, slapping him as though he’d said something cheeky. As they all moved off down the hall, I unlocked the cuff around my ankle
and slid off the bed.
Chapter 115
THE BULLET WOUND in my calf had been badly infected when I came in, but since then it had been hit with every drug known to modern medicine. Still, I limped as I made my way down the darkened hall to the elevator, past rooms full of sleeping men and women, and blinking machines. The hospital lights had been dimmed, so I walked in a soft gold glow towards Ward C, checking the room numbers as I went. The nurses on this floor hardly glanced at me. I turned towards Room 8 and pushed open the door.
Pops was lying on his back, propped uncomfortably against the high pillows, both hands folded over his round belly like he’d fallen asleep reading a book. I stood looking at him for a while, at the machines all around him and the whiteboard above his head. When I closed the door, he woke but didn’t seemed alarmed by my presence. As I curled on the blanket beside him, he put an arm out and smiled, shifting his head to give me more room on the pillow.
‘Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky,’ the old man said.
‘I had to see you before there’s bulletproof glass between us,’ I said, patting Pops’s chest. ‘How’s the ticker?’
‘It’s still going. They’ve sent me a nice little booklet on retirement from the police force and all the benefits I’ll get. They’re subtle, the top brass.’
I’d learned from a doctor when I arrived at the hospital that Pops had suffered a heart attack. There had been a team of people around me, trying to hold me down so that I could be prepped for surgery on my leg. But I’d made a hysterical fuss about knowing Pops’s fate. The doctor had been so troubled by my screaming and kicking that he’d had an intern go down to the emergency room to check on Pops’s progress. They’d told me he was stable.
Pops had since been given a single bypass. It would be a long road to recovery, the doctors had told him. The chances of him clearing, or even being allowed to attempt, a compulsory police fitness test were practically nil.
‘They gave me a list of things I’m not allowed to eat,’ he said. ‘Since I’ve been here it’s been nothing but carrots. Carrot salad. Boiled carrots. Carrot sandwiches. I hate carrots.’
I didn’t mention my gourmet menu in Ward D.
‘I’ll try to visit again tomorrow night,’ I said. ‘I think they’re taking me on Thursday.’
‘You didn’t get bail?’
‘No,’ I said. Pops’s hand was cupped around the top of my arm. He gave the muscle a squeeze and a stressed sigh emanated from his chest.
‘You’ll do jail time,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to. Resisting arrest, the assaults. Disarming that tactics kid. The department will have to save face, but they’re not sticking a murder charge on you. No way. I’ll pull in every favour I can, and I have favours owed going back decades.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said.
We lay in the quiet together.
‘I haven’t heard anything about charges against Whitt,’ I said eventually. ‘I tried to tell them it was me alone who killed Regan, but Whitt was honest in his statement. They’re going with his version. Are they going to go after him?’
‘No.’ Pops shook his head. ‘He was off his head. Self-defence, defence of a colleague. It’s your head Woods wants on his den wall.’
‘I’m surprised he hasn’t visited me to gloat,’ I said.
‘He hasn’t visited me either.’ Pops said. ‘I thought he would have delivered the retirement pamphlets himself.’
‘Weird.’ I shifted closer to him.
‘You need to speak to Tox Barnes about the remand centre,’ Pops said. ‘Whichever one they send you to. He’ll have women in there who can look out for you. He knows those kinds of people.’
‘Pops, don’t worry about it. I’m not worried about it, so you shouldn’t be, either.’
The old man settled back against his pillow. He seemed calmer.
But we both knew I was lying.
Chapter 116
I SAT IN the police wagon and looked at the cuffs on my wrists, the rubber floor beneath my sneakers. I’d been in this type of six-prisoner transport wagon before, but I’d never sat on the steel benches here, never ridden in the back while the vehicle was in motion. I was on the dark side of the moon now, existing in a bizarre place where I was the bad guy. I couldn’t decide if it was the smell of the bleach the wagons were hosed out with, motion sickness or nerves making me nauseated. There were no windows. I supposed windows were a luxury I was done with now.
The wagon had picked me up from the Prince of Wales Hospital, and I was now on my way to Stillwater Women’s Remand Centre, on the edge of the western suburbs, where I would await legal proceedings. I’d heard that Deputy Commissioner Woods was personally going to make sure I got as much jail time as possible, but the man himself hadn’t been in contact with my lawyer. That had surprised me. I’d stolen Woods’s quarry, and that had seemed like a personal insult to him the last time I’d seen him, standing at the end of my gurney at Bellbird Valley, his lip curled in disgust. I’d have thought my eternal damnation would have been first on his To Do list.
The wagon stopped and started, working its way through the traffic on Parramatta Road. I could hear the radios of cars on either side of my enclosure, one pumping rap music, another blaring out jazz. Every sensation was painfully vivid, my mind set to record these tiny realities, knowing soon they’d all be locked away from me.
I silently tried to calculate what Woods could throw at me. A common assault charge against any of the people I’d fought off in my pursuit of Regan Banks carried a maximum of two years in prison, and that’s if Woods didn’t have the charges bumped up to reckless wounding or wounding with intent. He would probably be able to get me for breaking and entering, and certainly for stealing vehicles from members of the public. I might have been able to soften the onslaught of legal proceedings that was owed to me if they had been first offences, but in my teenage years I’d been in and out of police stations frequently for the same kinds of write-ups. A good lawyer, which I couldn’t afford, might have been able to get the jail terms for all those charges to run concurrently with a charge for killing Regan. But even if I convinced the court I was remorseful (which I wasn’t) or that I had good character (which I didn’t), I figured I was looking at a minimum of six years.
I didn’t notice that the wagon had stopped at a police station until three other women climbed into the back with me. I shuffled along the bench to allow for them, but they all sat together opposite me. I kept my head down, didn’t speak as the wagon lurched into motion. In time I realised one of the women was staring hard at me.
She was a young dark-skinned woman, missing her two front teeth.
‘You that cop, huh?’ she said.
‘Excuse me?’ My stomach twisted harder into knots. I told myself there was no reason to panic. My face had been all over the news for the better part of a year. Of course the women in prison were going to recognise me. Even though I’d killed Regan Banks, a killer of women, a cop in prison was still a cop. I would be universally hated by everyone there. But that didn’t mean I was going to be in danger. Surely the remand centre’s staff would put me in segregation straight away, rather than leaving me to be ripped apart by dogs in the yard. Surely that was something that had already been organised.
As I tried to convince myself of this, the woman jutted her chin at me and repeated her question.
‘You that copper woman from the news?’
‘That’s me,’ I said.
‘Oh baby.’ She laughed, and looked at her friends. The two women in chains beside her joined in. ‘This gonna be fun.’
‘What’s gonna be fun?’ I asked.
‘Watching the girls inside fight each other to be the one who kills you,’ she said.
I sneered, brushing the comment off. But by the time the wagon stopped again all my bravado was gone.
The doors opened, and I looked up at the prison walls.
PROLOGUE
SHE LOCKED THE door, double-checked the gun was in place
and took up position on the bed, drawing the laptop towards her, ready for her next customer.
She sat with her legs folded beneath her, wearing an off-white vest top and short denim skirt. Her lips were dark crimson, cheeks thick with blusher. And as she regarded herself in the tiny communication window of the laptop – dispassionately, as though it were some other twenty-four-year-old staring back at her – she remembered a time when she wouldn’t have dreamed of slathering on the make-up. Not unless it was for a student fancy-dress party. Rocky Horror theme, tarts and vicars, something like that. Uh, gross, she’d have said. How obvious.
But those days were history. She didn’t go to fancy-dress parties any more. Although she often invited men ‘to party’.
Fixed to a tripod at the foot of her bed was the camera, its impassive eye trained on her, ready to take her image to screens in hotel rooms and upstairs studies and man caves; to laptops opened furtively in back rooms or maybe in the living room if the wife and kids were out, where she’d be appraised as though she were stock options, or a good deal on beef at the supermarket, or a bargain on Amazon. Yes. No. Dunno. Maybe.
Again, it was a thought that should have disgusted her, and once upon a time it had. The thought of all those unseen eyes on her body. The mortal dread of being recognised. But not any more.
The camera light turned green, which meant that somewhere out in the world of the Internet a man was looking at her right now, assessing her, sizing her up, deciding if she was worth it.
Her laptop cursor blinked. In the office sat her supervisor, Jason. Right now he’d be peering at his own monitor through a cloud of weed smoke and wondering why she wasn’t typing, so she stitched on a smile for her audience and reached to the keyboard: Hi, I’m bored, want to play?
Liar Liar: (Harriet Blue 3) (Detective Harriet Blue Series) Page 22