Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,49

been a good witness, strong and practical. She’d come to the interview with a notepad, scribbled with notes of everything she could remember about her attacker. Now here she was, aiding and abetting a dangerous vigilante, packing my bag for me like a mother sending her kid off to camp.

“I’ve gotta go,” I said when she broke away from me.

“One more thing,” she said, handing me her phone. “This has been running all morning.” Another press conference, this one with a very familiar face sitting wedged between a decidedly smug-looking Detective Nigel Spader and Deputy Commissioner Joe Woods. My mother had dolled herself up for the interview, but she was dressed inappropriately as always in a denim miniskirt and low-cut singlet top that showed off her upper-chest tattoos.

“I’m asking you, Harriet, to please make contact with the police,” Julia was saying. She was reading from a prepared statement, her finger moving slowly across the page. “I am concerned about your welfare, as are your…coll…”

Woods leaned in and whispered in her ear.

“Colleagues,” Julia said.

As the press conference ended, Julia picked up an orange-and-white coffee cup that had been sitting by her microphone and held it at chest height. Nigel and Woods boxed her in as the cameras flashed around them, talking over her shoulder. She was captured on the screen for a good five or six seconds, simply standing there holding the coffee cup. I recognized the distinct orange-and-white pattern from the Bristol Gardens hotel chain, the big letter “B” on the side of the cup confirming it as the trio eventually moved off the screen. The old honeypot ruse. Woods and Nigel would have put Julia up at the Bristol Gardens Hotel in the CBD and jammed the place up with undercover police, hoping Regan would see the press conference, take the bait, and make an appearance. It wasn’t a bad move, but my faith in the plan was slight.

“Do you think your mother’s in danger?” Melina asked.

“No.” I handed back the phone. “He knows me better than that. Regan hates my mother, and he expects me to as well. He’ll go after people who mean something to me.”

“That’s why you thought he’d come here,” Melina said. “Because of us. My case.”

I struggled to find the words. “Melina, being there for you…for people like you in my job…It’s the only thing I’ve ever really been proud of. I’m a cop. That’s all I am. There’s nothing else to me. I don’t have a life outside this, I…”

This was pathetic. I straightened, took my cap from the counter beside me, where it had been sitting, freshly washed and dried. I tried to move away, but Melina had my arm.

“You know that’s bullshit, right?” Melina said. “Harry, you should be proud of so many things in your life. You’re a good woman. I can tell.”

I didn’t look at Melina as she spoke. She didn’t know what was inside me. She didn’t know the furious hatred that burned there, the vengeful fantasies, the dark memories of what I had endured in my childhood.

She couldn’t be so sure of what I was.

Even I didn’t know.

As I retrieved the bike from the bushes behind the house, the boy I’d almost killed appeared, head down, hands in his pockets, making like he’d been freed from the house and just happened to have decided to go the back way only seconds after I’d left Melina and her daughter. I swung my leg over the bike and waited for him to tell me whatever he wanted to tell me, but he just stood there admiring the Harley, nodding appreciatively.

“I really, um…” the boy said, staring off at the suburban horizon, his chest filled with air but his teenage brain empty of words. I sighed, dragged my pistol out of my back pocket, ejected the clip and the chamber round, and handed it to him.

“Oh, man,” he whispered, weighing the gun in his hand. He pointed it at a nearby tree, looked down the sight, pulled the trigger a couple of times, listening to its impotent click. “Oh, this is fucking sweet.”

“You’re fucking sweet.” I laughed, taking the weapon back.

I tightened the straps of my bag and prepared to go. I glanced at my phone as it buzzed.

A single word. Bombala. A town an hour and a half south.

Chapter 61

POPS EXITED THE elevators on the third floor of the command building, jangling his car keys in his hand as he moved between the desks. It was uncharacteristically quiet on