Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,69

road and walked quietly into the bush, fitting my feet carefully between large branches and sticks, trying to be as silent as I could.

The forest stretched around me, ringing with quiet. It was so dark, I brushed against huge tree trunks I didn’t know were around me, my hands out and wandering in blackness. Tall ghost gums marked my way, smooth and cold as I passed, silent sentries watching my progress. In time, I noticed a flicker of red light to my left and froze.

Through the trees, a long army truck emerged in my vision, its square outline barely discernible in the blackness. They had draped the mobile-command center in camouflage netting and nestled it at the base of a small incline. The red flicker I had seen was the night-vision torch of a man heading toward the door of the truck. As he pushed through the black flaps on the doorway, I glimpsed the crimson-lit interior, crammed with people.

The operation was bigger than I had anticipated. The tactical vehicle was one I recognized from a tour I’d taken as a teenager, when I’d flirted with the idea of joining the army rather than the police. It was the kind that housed submachine guns and racks of rifles, night-vision gear and sniper scopes the size of baseball bats. They’d pulled out all the stops to find Regan, and it didn’t look like they were going to make his capture a priority. They were going to shoot to kill.

This was not Pops’s style. My chief was not a “blast them out of the water” type but the kind of man who favored small, smart teams and maximum safety for all officers involved. Knowing that I was out here looking for Regan, Pops would never have authorized a crew of special-ops guys running around in the dark shooting at anything that moved. It was probably Deputy Commissioner Joe Woods in charge, and he’d no doubt authorized necessary-force protocols for both Regan and me.

Okay. New tactic. I crouched in the dark and thought. The only way I was going to get to Regan and avoid capture by the specialist team was to be on an even playing field with them. I needed the same equipment they had. And there was only one way to obtain that.

By force.

Chapter 86

TOX WASN’T FEELING GOOD. Every muscle in his body had been completely inactive during his two-week coma, the carefully built tissue slowly draining away, not helped by the three weeks he had then spent lying around after he had woken. He figured he’d worked those muscles to their limit just getting to where he was now, creeping through the darkened woods. He’d probably also torn or stretched something in the pit of his guts, which had barely been given time to heal after being severed by a kitchen knife. And yet it was Whitt who was lagging behind him, stopping every fifty meters and leaning against a tree. Tox went back to his partner. The two stood in the dark until Whitt had caught his breath.

“I’m all right.” Whitt straightened. “I can go on.”

He swayed a little. Tox put a hand on the man’s shoulder, inhaled deeply.

“Why do you smell like hooch?” he asked.

He’d taken all the Dexes from Whitt and flushed them, poured the contents of the bottles in the motel minibar down the drain. Yet he could distinctly smell whiskey. A pungent odor he knew well.

Tox’s eyes widened as he remembered.

“Is that the Blue Label from the back seat of my car?”

Whitt didn’t answer. He hung his head and drew the narrow, half-empty bottle from the pocket of his coat.

“Do you know how expensive that shit is? Do you know how long I’ve been saving that?” Tox raised a hand to smack his friend in the head again but softened at the last minute.

“You really have taken up right where you left off, haven’t you?” he said.

“I’m okay.” Whitt’s eyes moved to him in the dark. “I just needed to take the edge off.”

“You’re not okay.” Tox took the gun from Whitt’s other pocket.

“I have to keep going,” Whitt said. “Harry’s probably out there. She needs all the help she can get. If I’d seen what Vada was doing, I could have—”

“If!” Tox spat. “If, if, if. You know how many miserable fucking losers have driven themselves into the ground trying to chase down ifs?”

Whitt shook his head.

“Let me tell you something, Whitt,” Tox said. “You can hunt your fantasies about what should or