Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,87
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 recognize came and barked questions at me, took my answers without acknowledgment, 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 realize I was falling asleep until the man I recognized 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 foresight 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 humorlessly. “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