Free The Taste of Fear by Jeremy Bates Page B

license.”
    “Knowing he was a criminal?”
    “He has criminal connections, sure. But you check his Rolodex. You’ll also find the private numbers for the Clintons, Thatcher, half the world leaders. The world’s not so black and white at the top. You know that.”
    She shook her head. They were getting distracted. How Sal knew Don Xi wasn’t what was important. “Why would he want to kill you?”
    “The man was impossible to work with. We clashed over everything. From the number of VIP suites to who was supplying us with the fucking steel. Being in Dubai finishing up the hotel, I couldn’t oversee every decision. But I was to be informed of the major ones. I wasn’t. Xi had started calling all the shots. I finally had enough. I had a talk with the directors and we got Xi to walk—and we kept his license.”
    “How’d you manage that?”
    “Our lawyers were better than his.” Sal shrugged. “Anyway, it seems old Don didn’t take it all very well.”
    Scarlett felt numb. It was a lot of information to take in. Sal knew who had set the blaze at the Prince. Okay. That was good news. That was fantastic news. Better someone he knew than someone who could disappear, maybe to come back and pick up where he left off another day. However, the fact this guy was some sort of Asian crime lord meant he had a lot of cash and a lot of connections, which meant he could do pretty much anything he wanted.
    Like try another hit.
    “Have you told the police?” she asked.
    “Not yet,” he said.
    “Why not?”
    “Danny doesn’t have enough proof.”
    “So what? Let the police get the proof themselves.”
    “We tip the police off now, Don Xi gets tipped off. By the time the police mount any sort of investigation, Don will be so clean his balls will squeak.”
    “At least if he knows you know, and others know, he won’t try anything else.”
    “He won’t try anything else, regardless.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “I know what I’m doing, cara mia. Let me handle this.”
    She started to protest, but Sal held up his hand. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
    “Listen to me, Sal,” she said, gripping his forearm. “Danny isn’t MacGyver. This isn’t a game. Don Xi tried to kill you. He might try again. You have to go to the police.”
    “You heard what I said.” He turned away from her and looked out the window.
    Scarlett clenched her jaw tight. He was impossible sometimes. Maddeningly impossible. If they’d been in LA or Dubai or Paris—or anywhere that had a goddamn infrastructure in place—this would be the time she’d hop out of the car and do some shopping to cool off.
    A faint thrumming had started behind her left eye, matching the beat of her pulse, and she knew another migraine was coming on.

Chapter 9
     
    Wednesday, December 25, 7:03 a.m.
Macau, China
    As Xi Dong stood in the doorway of his son’s bedroom, watching the boy sleep, he smiled to himself. His life had turned out well. He was a very lucky man. But his good fortunes had not come easy. It had taken perseverance and hard work and passion to transform his thirty-five-thousand-dollar inheritance into the multibillion-dollar empire he helmed today.
    The inheritance had come after his parents had died in a plane crash somewhere over the Rocky Mountains in August of 1955. He had been twenty-three. Instead of blowing the money, however, he invested the entire lot in a logging company after he learned the provincial government of British Columbia granted logging companies large concessions on land at discount prices. With his considerable profits, he built a chopstick factory and exported the chopsticks to Japan and China, eventually expanding throughout Southeast Asia. In 1960 he moved his head office from Canada to his ancestral country of Hong Kong, to a large building on Nathan Road, which was still referred to as the Golden Mile in those days. Three years later he joined a group of wealthy businessmen who won the bid for all