Free White Devil - A Beatrix Rose Thriller: Hong Kong Stories Volume 1 (Beatrix Rose's Hong Kong Stories) by Mark Dawson

turned when the road reached the end, and then came back.
    She crossed the street to the entrance. There was a small lobby with an open door, obscured by a curtain of beads, to the right. There was a flight of stairs straight ahead.
    The big man pushed himself away from the wall and blocked her way inside. “What you want?” he asked.
    “Mr. Ying sent me.”
    “For?”
    “Donnie Qi.”
    “You?”
    “That’s right.” She stared him out. “Problem?”
    “He didn’t say—”
    “He didn’t say it would be a woman?”
    “A gweilo . You have no place here.”
    “You want to call Mr. Ying about it?”
    The man grunted, his hostility adapting to a kind of lazy distaste. “Upstairs,” he said.
    She climbed the stairs and reached a waiting area. A mamasan , dressed in a cheap leather miniskirt and smoking a cigarette, was negotiating with a potential customer. A girl had been brought out for him. She was Asian, and pretty, but he was not impressed.
    “White girl,” he said, in English, speaking slowly and deliberately. “Not Filipina.”
    “Russians all busy. One hour. You wait.”
    The man shook his head. He turned, saw Beatrix, and, as if suddenly embarrassed, he scurried down the stairs.
    The mamasan looked angrily at Beatrix. “You make customer go. You make him ashamed.”
    “Mr. Ying sent me.”
    She harrumphed.
    “Donnie Qi.”
    Recognition dawned, and then bled into surprise.
    “Where is he?”
    The woman assessed her, wrinkled her nose, and pointed down the corridor that led away from the waiting area. “Room with red door.”
    Beatrix nodded.
    The mamasan stepped aside.
    Beatrix took the corridor.
    #
    DONNIE QI stretched over so that he could reach the crystal meth that he had left on the stool that was next to the bed. He took the baggie and his glass pipe and rolled onto his side. It was good shit, manufactured in an underground lab in the Philippines and smuggled to Hong Kong by the triads. Donnie had bought a pound of it, and, before he handed over his money, he’d had it tested. It was ninety-nine per cent pure. Some of his more old-fashioned colleagues had a problem with selling drugs. But, he knew, with ice as good as this, pure enough to bulk out and sell for a serious profit, they would come to accept it.
    His woman, Chuntau, reclined on the bed next to him, naked, a sheet covering her from the waist down.
    “Got some for me, baby?”
    He ignored her, putting a small pile of ice into the bowl and placing his lips around the slender stem. He took his lighter, thumbed the flame, and held it underneath the bowl. The meth liquefied and then began to smoke. He moved the lighter quickly back and forth beneath the bowl, playing the flame across it, and inhaled. He removed the heat, but the meth continued to smoke. He inhaled until his lungs were full, and the meth had started to recrystallise.
    He waited for the hit, gazing with absent-minded interest at the 1980s porn that was playing on the TV. It came on him quickly, a dizzying rush that prickled his skin and sent a spasm of delicious energy around his body.
    “Donnie?”
    He handed her the bowl and his lighter. She was a fine girl. She was nineteen and had run away from a life in Shenzen where the height of her ambition would have been to work in one of the big Foxconn factories, making electrical goods that she would never have been able to afford. Her name meant spring peach and that, he thought, was about right. Big tits, nice arse. Donnie could have taken her away from here, and he had considered it many times. It wasn’t as if she had never asked him. He had declined. There was something about the nature of their relationship that gave him particular pleasure. It was no more than a commercial arrangement. He paid, she performed. There was no emotion and no attachment. That, it seemed to him, was one of the reasons why he found such enjoyment in visiting her here. He could make her do whatever he wanted, just by taking out another note