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

from his wallet and tossing it onto the floor with all the others.
    There was more to it, of course. It was squalid and cheap and that, he knew, was another reason. It was a ready reminder of his upbringing in the slums not too far from here, and of all the girls like her who had looked down their noses at him. He had been a runt of a child, skinny and nervous, and he knew that they had looked at him and had come to the conclusion that he would amount to nothing. They would not have looked at him that way today. He had money, more than they could imagine. He had power. He had respect. He could buy and sell them, and he did. It did him no harm to be reminded of where he came from. It whetted the edge of his ambition. It made him hungrier to succeed.
    Chuntau was quiet. He looked over at her. She was asleep, snoring loudly.
    The meth hit his brain and his eyes rolled back into his head. He slumped down into the embrace of the sweaty sheets, listening to the frantic sounds of the street outside.
    He heard the creak as the door to the room was pushed open. He blinked, trying to focus. He saw the white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, standing there. She was lit by the flickering naked bulb in the hallway, an on and off glow that alternately silhouetted her and then cast her in darkness.
    “Who are you?” he said. It was an effort to speak through the torpor of the drug.
    She said nothing.
    “Wrong room. Get out.”
    She stepped inside.
    Something was wrong, but the cloud in his brain was so thick and cloying that he couldn’t think what it was.
    She closed the door.
    What was it? His thoughts were scrambled, and he couldn’t make sense of them. A white woman. He knew there was something that he needed to remember. What was it?
    She took another step inside and unzipped the leather jacket that she was wearing.
    He smiled then, propping an elbow beneath him so he could raise his head a little. He grinned, hungry and lascivious. “Maybe not wrong room. Ying sent you?”
    “Yes,” she said, in slow and heavily accented Cantonese. “But not for what you think.”
    Yes, this was Ying’s doing. Donnie and the older man had clashed lately. Ying was too conservative, almost constitutionally unable to grasp the scope of the opportunities that the new modern world had made available to men like them. He was obsessed with staying below the surface, better to avoid the attention of the authorities on the mainland. Donnie knew that the Chinese were corrupt. He had politicked for the triad to open direct lines of communication with them. Ying and his cronies in the old guard had shouted him down, the same way they had tried to stop him from selling meth.
    Perhaps Ying had changed his mind. Perhaps this was a peace offering?
    He patted the bed. “Come over here.”
    She did.
    Donnie pressed himself into a sitting position. He caught sight of himself in the cracked mirror that was fixed to the wall. He was lithe, muscled, his skin covered in tattoos that were themselves daubed in a sheen of sweat.
    The woman drew closer so that Donnie could see her more clearly. She was very beautiful, with porcelain skin and cool eyes. He grinned at her. The ice fired his appetite. He was ready to go again. He saw her looking at the glass pipe on the stool.
    “You want?”
    “Sure,” she said.
    As he turned away from her and reached to the stool, he realised what it was that was bothering him.
    Chau.
    The bar where three of his men had been shot.
    The hotel where another three had been killed.
    The blonde white woman.
    Fuck.
    He tried to get off the bed, but the meth was thick and sticky in his brain. His legs became tangled in the damp sheet. He kicked the sheet off, but, his balance gone, he fell off the edge and landed on the bare floorboards between the edge of the bed and the wall.
    He scrambled his feet beneath him, his back pressed against the peeling paint. The woman had come around the bed. He looked down at her hand. She was holding a