Liar Liar

by James Patterson

  Regan watched, confused by my purpose. I tugged the cable tie tighter, the final few clicks of hard plastic pulling taut, so tight my eyes were watering, then attempted the move again.

  With an audible snap, the plastic tie broke on the corner of the beam, and my hands were free.

  Regan smiled. He set his feet, ready for me to come at him.

  I took a moment to shake the blood flow back into my fingers.

  “Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this,” I said.

  Chapter 104

  HE’D SPENT FIFTEEN YEARS in prison learning to fight. That much was clear from the beginning, when he failed to approach me, letting me come to him, putting me at a disadvantage.

  I faked and he pretended to fall for it, then ducked when I swung at him, twisted and brought his elbow up and into my face. I felt my teeth crunch together. The blood was immediate, warm as it fell down my chin and dripped onto my exposed chest. I stepped back, zipped my jacket up, and wiped my mouth on the collar.

  He waited for me to come again, but I refused. As he came charging toward me, I bent and ducked out of the way, gave him a hard, short jab in the ribs as he passed.

  The anger was all-consuming, urged on by my exhaustion, the pain in my bleeding wrists and wounded leg. I needed to breathe, think of him as just any other opponent, and not the man who had destroyed my brother. Not the man who would unleash all of my worst nightmares on me if I let him subdue me again. I needed to ignore the horrific plan Regan had laid out for me, the one I saw in his eyes as he bent toward my mouth. His Harriet, finally captured. His to draw along on a string, just like Vada, his to break down and experiment with as his sick desires dictated.

  Regan grabbed at my shoulder, tried to land a punch in my midsection.

  There was no time. I swung wildly at his face, not even a punch but a furious scratch. It was a lucky shot, right across the eyes. While he was blinded, I landed two hard, heavy punches to the side of his head.

  As he went down, he grabbed my calf in his enormous hand and pulled. We fell together, his arms around me suddenly, thick and hard as tree branches. His giant hand pinned my head against the ground. The other grabbed my wrist as I tried to swipe at him again, squeezing so hard, I could feel the bones bend. There was a neat line of teeth marks between his bottom lip and chin.

  “No one’s coming for you, Harry,” he said. “It’s you and me. You have to face what you are now. You have to see. Sam didn’t get that chance.”

  I roared at the sound of my brother’s name, scraped the side of my boot hard down his shin. He tried to steady his position on top of me, but I used his weight to keep him rolling, then jabbed an elbow into his stomach. I got up and staggered away from him. He rose, fists clenched. I’d made a mistake, rolling him right into the pallets where he had been sitting when I arrived. His gun clattered to the floor, and he swept it up and pointed it at me.

  I scoffed absurdly, the outrage coming hard like a slap. He didn’t drop the weapon. I couldn’t believe what he was doing, gesturing toward the ground with the barrel.

  “Coward,” I spat, shaking my head. “Fucking coward. You can’t pin me with your own hands? Are you that pathetic?”

  “Get on your knees,” he ordered, gesturing with the gun. “We’re gonna see who’s weak. Get on your knees and take the jacket off.”

  My mind rushed, a flurry of bad ideas. Throw yourself at him again. Try to knock the gun away. Scream for help. Try to dive, roll, run for the door.

  And then I started laughing. A heavy, wet, bloody laugh that rippled from the back of my throat. Regan wasn’t expecting the sound. His brow creased.

  “What…” he began, trailing off.

  He followed my gaze over his shoulder. And took in the sight of Tox Barnes edging up behind him, a pistol gripped in both hands.

  “Remember me, arsehole?” Tox smiled.

  He shot Regan in the stomach.

  Chapter 105

  REGAN COLLAPSED ONTO his knees, the gun falling from his hands.

  Tox kicked the gun away and leaned over Regan as the big man held his stomach, writhing in pain.

  “Yeah, that fucking hurts, doesn’t it?” Tox tapped the barrel of his gun against Regan’s forehead. He reached into the killer’s back pocket and took the knife, threw it across the room as he came to me.

  I hadn’t seen Tox in a long time. Since before I learned of my brother’s death. He looked terrible, smelled worse, and wore a mask of determined brutality as he came to my side. He was exactly the man I remembered.

  “You’ll have to make it quick,” Tox said, glancing toward the open door of the barn, the dark field beyond, and the distant black mountain. “The tactics guys over in the next valley would have heard that shot. Do what you’ve gotta do and let’s get outta here, Harry, okay?”

  He handed me the gun.

  Regan was bent forward, steadying himself against the ground, a hand clasped against the wound in his stomach. He raised his head and looked at me, and I leveled the gun at his forehead.

  It was time to take my revenge.

  Chapter 106

  MY HAND WAS SHAKING, the aim of the gun wavering across Regan’s bloodied face. His eyes were steady, knowing, unafraid. These were eyes that had looked upon so many as they died. The last face so many innocent souls had seen as their lives were ripped from them. I couldn’t breathe. My free hand rose to my throat, raking my fingers through my hair, trying to find the calm I needed. I ran my finger up and down the curve of the trigger.

  “You won’t do this, Harry,” Regan said.

  “I wouldn’t be so certain.” I flicked the safety off with my thumb. “You…You killed my brother. You can’t go on. I won’t let you go on. I came here to end you, Regan. For all those girls you took. For their families.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “You really came here to do good, to make the world safe again?”

  My mind was fragmented. Reaching for traction. I felt hot all over. I tried to get a grip on the gun, but it felt slippery in my hand. I couldn’t pull the trigger. Not while my mind raced helplessly with questions. Had I really come here to kill this man?

  I had abandoned and endangered the people I loved for this. Me, the good friend. I’d thrown in my job, run and crawled and hidden from police. I’d committed a host of crimes. Me, the good cop. I’d brought pain and suffering on anyone who’d tried to help me, some of it decades after I’d wandered in and out of their lives. Me, the good kid.

  Maybe I hadn’t come here for vengeance at all.

  Maybe I’d come for answers.

  I looked at Regan. Every cell in my body was on fire. But did I hate Regan for what he had done to me? Or did I hate him because he had discovered something about me that I was only just now coming to understand?

  Maybe it was a much greater desire that had brought me all the way here. I looked at Regan, and I realized what he was saying—what he had been saying all along.

  He had been telling me that he was a soul that would never fit, an outcast doomed to wander on the edges of the world, finding pleasure wherever he could. That he’d been born and had grown without feeling love, not even for his parents. That something inside him not only rejected people but sometimes enjoyed hurting them.

  That he wasn’t good, but empty inside.

  And so was I.

  We were the same.

  I hadn’t come all the way here to kill him. I’d come because I was curious to see if I had finally found someone just like me.

  Without realizing it, I’d turned the gun away from Regan. It was still in my hand.

  But now it was pointed at my head.

  Chapter 107

  REGAN SMILED. He wasn’t desperate for me to drop the gun from my head, worried and sickened by my aim. He was curious. Excited. It was all a game to him. No expression crossed Tox’s features. He didn’t ask what I was doing. Tox Barnes, my loyal friend, seemed to know from my face what I was thinking. Yet he put his hands in the pockets of his
filthy jeans and watched me. His calm only tightened the muscles pulsing in my jaw, drove my heartbeat faster and faster. When I tried to speak, my voice shook with the tremors running through my body.

  “Is he right?” I asked. Tox shrugged. I needed him to be shocked, appalled, to try to stop me. Anything but the expectation I could see in his face, the resigned look of someone who had known, all along, that I would eventually burn myself out. The tiger born in captivity, trained to walk on a lead, and yet unable to deny that natural instinct always whispering in the pit of its mind. Once I realized what I was, I would have to destroy myself. Regan’s smile was rigid with pain, but he held it, knowing that I was finally seeing through his eyes.

  “You tell me right now.” I kept my eyes on Tox. “Tell me the truth. Is he right about me? He is, isn’t he?”

  “Harry,” Tox began.

  “I’m a killer.” My voice was trembling on the edge of sobs. “I’m a punisher. I tell myself I only hurt bad people, but isn’t that just bullshit? Isn’t that just a cover-up for something really bad inside?”

  “You’re not going to shoot yourself,” Tox said.

  “I can’t live if I’m like him. I can’t. What if this is the beginning of me ending up like that? What if he’s opened the door to something, Tox? Something I can’t control. People aren’t safe from me. They haven’t been safe from me for a long time.”

  “You’re going to put the gun down, Harry,” Tox said. “That’s a fact.”

  But I was on a road now that had no exits. Faster and faster, the realization was coming over me. My words came in a furious stream. “My own mother didn’t want me. I was a mistake. My whole life’s a joke. It’s not real, Tox. Nothing I’ve ever done can cover up what’s really in here.” I tapped my chest furiously. “I’m bad in here!”

  “I don’t think so,” Tox said, clicking his tongue, dismissive. “He’s just got into your head. It’s what he does. You may be a freak, but you’re not all bad inside, Harry, and you don’t deserve to die.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he isn’t all bad, either.” Tox gestured to Regan.

  I looked at the killer kneeling before us, a man who had wrought unimaginable pain on the world since he was a child.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Tox said. “He’s a miserable, vicious shitbag who deserves to be drowned in a vat of acid. But he came here looking for you. He spent all this time trying to convince you that he knows the real you. That you’re the same. That you belong together. He tried it out the first time with your brother. And now he wants you. It’s because he’s lonely.”

  Regan was watching Tox as the shaggy-haired man gestured to him.

  “If he’s as evil and empty as he says he is, why is he so afraid of being alone?”

  I looked at Regan. The blood from his belly had soaked his legs, the earthen floor. The breath in my chest was coming easier. Tox watched me. He was unafraid. He knew I wasn’t going to shoot myself. As he approached me, I thought about his words.

  Regan had been right about so much. I had few friends, yes. I was selfish, violent, messed up. I’d been a problem to the world from the moment I was born, and I grew up honing my skills to be a bigger, more offensive problem. There was a lot of bad in me, and stripping away any goodness I’d managed to cover it up with had been easy. I was like Regan in so many terrifying ways.

  Inside me, there wasn’t a great ball of warm, glowing, righteous goodness.

  But there was a tiny spark. And there was a tiny spark in the man on the ground before me. As vile and merciless and depraved as he was, he was human. He felt loneliness. He wanted to find comfort with someone as unredeemable, as profoundly worthless, as he saw himself. He’d tried to show me that we were as bad as each other, deep down inside, and I’d come here to find out if that was true.

  It was not.

  Chapter 108

  I DROPPED MY AIM.

  Blood was seeping from between Regan’s fingers. He steadied himself against the ground with one hand, his expression unreadable. It would have been too easy to take his life then. I was exhausted. My resolve was gone. All I wanted was for Regan to be gone from my life, taking all the pain he had brought with him.

  But it wasn’t going to happen like this.

  “I can’t do this,” I said. “I can’t kill a wounded, unarmed man on his knees in a fucking barn.”

  “I can,” Tox suggested, taking the gun from me.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said. “Help me tie hi—”

  A crash split the air, so sudden and loud it made all three of us jump. Vada’s head was turned toward me, the bullet hole in her cheek running blood over the side of her face, a grotesque half-mask of red. Her hand was still on the leg of the foldout table that she had yanked backward, causing the table to fold in on itself and crash to the floor.

  As we watched, Vada’s unfocused eyes fell closed.

  In her last act, she had caused a desperate distraction. The shock of the noise was enough to draw my and Tox’s attention away from Regan for just a second.

  That was all the time he needed to escape.

  Chapter 109

  A FIERCE WIND had risen outside the barn, whipping the long grass, dragging smeary clouds across the moon. At first, I saw no sign of him, my night vision ruined by the light inside the barn. But then I caught a flicker of movement through the forest. I had to take a chance.

  Tox ran beside me, grabbed my wrist, and pulled as he noticed Regan turn in the darkness ahead. I was worried that with my wounded leg, my friend would get ahead of me, that I’d be leaving Tox to capture Regan by himself.

  But Tox wasn’t running on full strength, either. Now and then a hand braced against his abdomen, his breath coming too hard as he sprinted through the bush.

  A desperate thought pulsed with the rhythm of my feet on the forest floor.

  You let him go. Now he’ll kill again. You’ll never exonerate Sam. Regan will continue his sick game until he wins.

  Tox stumbled on a tree branch and gave a growl of pain.

  “Are you okay?” I yelled against the wind. He didn’t answer. I stopped with him in the blackness, both of us panting heavily. We held each other. Not a hug, but the fierce grip of two allies glad to be within arm’s reach of each other.

  “We can’t lose him,” Tox said, his eyes searching the forest around us. Suddenly there was a gust of wind, carrying the thump of a chopper. I could feel its beat in my chest. A white light swept the forest, looking for Regan, for us. In its wake, I spotted a figure moving through the trees.

  “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 away 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 toward 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 center 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.