Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,89

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 favor I can, and I have favors 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-defense, defense 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 center,” 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 Center, 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 offenses, 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 realized 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 recognize 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 center’s staff would put me in segregation straightaway, rather than leaving me to be ripped apart by dogs in the yard. Surely that was something that had already been organized.

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 is 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.

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