White Devil - A Beatrix Rose Thriller: Hong Kong Stories Volume 1 (Beatrix Rose's Hong Kong Stories) (2 page)

Beatrix sighed. She pushed her chair away from the table and stood.

“All right,” she said, in Cantonese. “Enough.”

The man in the vest turned to her, an expression of amused surprise on his cruel face.

“What did you say?” he replied, his English heavily accented and halting. The fact that he replied in English signalled his contempt for her rudimentary attempt to speak his language.

She switched to English, too. “You heard me. He’s had enough. Leave him alone.”

The man’s surprise melted away, to be replaced by scorn and disdain. “Drink your drink, lady, unless you want me to take this and make you not so pretty.” He waved the cleaver at her.

Beatrix felt the tingle of adrenaline. She looked at the cleaver, held in a steady hand, and looked up from it into his eyes. There was no pity there. They were the eyes of a man who was used to doling out pain, and unaccustomed to disobedience.

She knew that she stood at a junction, with two ways for her to proceed. She had come out tonight to get drunk. She had not come to look for trouble and, most times, she would have ignored it. She could have followed the man’s instructions, gone back to her table and the glass of sake Chau had bought for her, and tried to ignore the unpleasantness that was about to take place.

That would be the prudent course of action. The safest, most sensible thing to do. And she could have done that.

But if Chau had been irritating, then he had also been friendly. And Beatrix did not necessarily want to watch what would happen if she left him alone.

And there was this, too: the man was a bully, and Beatrix did not like bullies.

“I’m sorry,” she said, raising her hands. “My apologies.”

The man leered at her. “You watch. We speak after.”

Beatrix reached across the table for her tumbler. It had a heavy base, made from thick glass.

The man turned his back to her, faced Chau, said something else, and raised the cleaver to the same height as his head.

Beatrix picked up the glass and flung it, hard, but not so hard as to sacrifice her accuracy. It streaked across the distance between her and the man in the vest and struck him just above his ear. He took a half step forwards, braced himself against the bar, and then dropped to one knee.

There came a sudden, shocked, silence.

The remaining two men were stunned into dumbness by the incongruity of what they had just seen. They paused, mouths open, giving Beatrix enough time to take two steps closer to them. The nearest, a man with a discoloured scar down the left-hand side of his face, moved to intercept her first.

Beatrix reached out her right hand for the stool next to Chau that she, and then the man in the vest, had been sitting on. She hefted it, allowing her fingers to slip down the stool, her left hand fastening around the second of the three legs, and then swung it in a hard, powerful arc. The stool splintered against the junction of the man’s neck and shoulder, the seat breaking off and bouncing away off the wall. The man had not had the time to raise his arms to defend himself, and the blow knocked him to the ground.

The second man reached for Beatrix, his fingers brushing against her skin as she took a step away from him. She flipped the leg of the stool so that she held it at its thin end and swung it, like a baseball bat, catching the man on the temple. The end of the stool’s leg that had been wrenched away from the seat was jagged, and the sharp splinters clawed trenches in the man’s forehead and scalp. His eyes rolled back and he toppled sideways, his head bouncing off the floor.

Beatrix felt a sharp scratch down her shoulder and back. She turned. The man with the vest was on his feet again. He had a knife in his hand. It was the one that the barman had used to slice the limes for Beatrix’s gin. The edge of the blade was slicked with red. Awareness heralded the blast of pain and, as she took a half step backwards, the man stabbed the knife at her. The point of the blade sliced into the fleshy part of her torso just beneath her ribcage. The pain was no more than a sharp sting, but, as she took a second and third step backwards, she felt the blood already bubbling out.

The man grinned at her. He raised the bloody knife and came at her.

There was a sharp
pop
and the top of the man’s head burst apart. There was no time for him to register shock or surprise. One moment his head was there, whole, and the next moment it was not. He dropped to his knees and then slumped straight onto his face. He twitched once and then was still.

Chau was standing behind him, a fog of blue smoke hanging before the barrel of the little Kel-Tec P-32 that he was holding in his hand. He moved to the man who Beatrix had hit with the stool and, point blank, shot him in the top of the head. The third man was conscious and shuffling away on his knees, his hands raised in supplication. Chau executed him, too, shooting him in the throat and then, again, square in the face.

Beatrix was confused. She put out a hand to steady herself, but a ripple of pain washed out from the puncture in her side. It amplified, spreading all the way up and down that side of her torso.

She suddenly felt faint.

“Shit,” she said.

Chau put the gun into the inside pocket of his jacket and hurried across to her. “Miss, you have been hurt.”

“I just need…to sit down,” she muttered. She reached out for a nearby stool, but miscalculated the distance between her and it. The heel of her hand slipped off the edge and she fell to her knees, knocking the stool onto its side. She tried to get to her feet, but was assailed by weakness.

Chau hurried to her side and clumsily helped her up. “We must leave. They are triads. Wo Shun Wo. If others come, they will kill you. Please. I help you. I have car outside.”

Beatrix lifted her arm so that he could loop his beneath her shoulder. He bore her weight as they stumbled, like a pair of drunken lovers, into the tumult of the main bar and then onto the crazed Kowloon street outside.

CHAU HELPED her into the street. He was slight, an inch shorter than her and of a similarly slender build, but he was wiry and stronger than he looked. He said that his car was parked in the lot around the corner. He bore her weight as they passed along the packed street, a fast-moving tributary of pedestrians that bumped and jostled them as they made their way.

The lot was a temporary arrangement, a wide square of cleared land that stretched between two buildings that were being demolished. Chau had a brand-new Mercedes CLA, shiny and red and hopelessly ostentatious. He blipped the locks, opened the rear door, and helped her inside. She dropped down onto the leather seat, removed her hand from her abdomen and looked at it. It was soaked with blood. She felt more throbbing and oozing from the gash and put her hand back, pressing down as hard as she could. She had seen wounds like this before, had inflicted them herself more than once. She knew that she was going to need some help. Unless she got treated, she was going to bleed out.

Chau got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and screeched away. Beatrix was pressed back into the seat by the sudden acceleration. He drove west on Saigon Street, forging through Kowloon’s heavy evening traffic. Beatrix glanced out at the ubiquitous red taxis, the high-end Jaguars and Rolls Royces of the garish rich, the blinged up hatchbacks and the triad-driven minibuses.

They ran up against a queue of traffic gathered at the junction with Nathan Road. He braked and turned to look back at her. “You okay?”

“Been better,” she grunted.

“I will help.”

Beatrix was tempted to tell him to stop the car and let her out. The sidewalks were thronged with people, a seething morass within which she would be able to disappear after just a few steps. But then she looked down at her side again, at the blood that was seeping between her fingers, and she felt the lethargy in her legs. She knew that her body was going into shock. She was losing too much blood. It galled her to admit it, but she needed help. The knife had left a neat and tidy wound that she wouldn’t be able to stitch up herself.

Chau looked down, too. “You need to see doctor.”

“No hospitals,” she said.

“What do you mean? Your side—”

“I don’t want to go to a hospital.”

I can’t
, she very nearly said.
I can’t go to a hospital
. If the Group was looking for her, and she knew that they
would
be looking, she couldn’t take a risk like that. She knew the reach of the intelligence service was pervasive, and the last thing that she needed was to put herself in a position where her details might be uploaded to the Internet.

She had to stay in the shadows, hidden in the depths, find out what she needed to know so that she could surface with the element of surprise on her side. It was her only chance for vengeance.

“My apartment, then. I fix you up there.”

“Where?”

“Five minutes. I take you there, yes?”

She closed her eyes. She felt faint. She knew enough medicine to know what was happening to her. It was hypoxia. Not enough blood pumping around her body meant that too little oxygen was getting to her brain.

“Do not sleep,” Chau urged.

“I’m all right,” she mumbled.

She closed her eyes.

BEATRIX WAS vaguely aware of the car door opening and Chau leaning into the cabin next to her.

“I call friend,” he said.

“No—”

“You are badly hurt. Very bad. More than I can fix. My friend is doctor. He will be able to help.”

Beatrix wanted to resist, her old instincts still trying to impose themselves, but she had no strength for it and she knew that he was right.

She felt her eyelids drooping.

“Stay awake,” Chau urged her. “No sleep.”

“Yes,” she said. “No sleep.” The words felt sticky in her mouth.

Her eyes felt heavy.

Chau shook her gently. “No sleep.” He shook her more vigorously.

Chau was speaking to someone in Cantonese. The unfamiliar words came to her as if she were underwater or in a coffin that was slowly being buried.

“No sleep!” Chau said angrily. And then, when she didn’t respond, he struck her across the face.

She prised her eyes open. Chau was halfway in the car. How had that happened? He was just wearing a vest. Where was his garish shirt? She glanced down. He was pressing it against her side. The shirt was an obscene scarlet, soaked through with her blood. How could she have any more blood? She had lost so much.

“Talk to me,” he said. “Your name is Beatrix, yes?”

Her reluctance to share her personal details seemed frivolous now. What was the point? “Beatrix,” she said, wondering if she had spoken aloud. “Beatrix Rose.”

“My friend is coming, Beatrix Rose. Ten minutes.”

“No hospital, Chau.”

“I—”

“No hospital. Promise me.”

“Okay. No hospital. I promise.”

She closed her eyes again.

“You must stay awake.”

Beatrix knew that he was right, but, despite that, the promise of sleep was too attractive to ignore. She allowed her eyes to close, focusing all of her attention inwards. The darkness seemed to be layered, textured. She felt as if it had substance and the deeper she delved, the more that seemed to be true. It wrapped around her, warm and pliable and comforting, a cushion for her body and the softest of pillows for her head. She felt someone with her, a presence in the darkness, and, as she looked, she saw Isabella. Her daughter was smiling, her arms held aloft, inviting her mother’s embrace. Beatrix felt herself smile as she knelt down and wrapped her arms around the darkness.

HER DREAMS seemed to be eternal. The darkness swallowed her and held her, allowing visitations from Isabella and her husband, Lucas. He looked at her with love and forgiveness, but his affection did not excuse the neatly drilled hole in his forehead and the trail of blood that seemed to run and run. She tried to remember what had happened to him, but her memories were wispy fragments, and, as she reached out to collect them, her fingers passed through them like smoke.

BEATRIX WAS awakened by a sound she did not recognise. At first she thought it was a mosquito, buzzing around her head. She prised open eyes that were gummed together with sleep and stared up at the false ceiling. She heard it again, an urgent scurrying, and she realised that, wherever she was, it had a problem with rats.

Her repose had not been entirely natural. She noticed a scattering of small glass ampoules on the floor next to her head. She picked one up and read the English translation beneath the Cantonese: midazolam hydrochloride. A drug used for sedation and anaesthesia. She picked up another: metronidazole hydrochloride. Antibiotics.

She was lying on a futon in a tiny room, just long enough for her to stretch out and with barely a foot of space on either side. A cotton sheet was bunched around her midriff, disturbed during her sleep. She was wearing her underwear beneath a pair of mens’ pyjamas. She sat up, wincing with pain, and saw a foil container of half-finished
soba
noodles with a pair of chopsticks resting in them. Had she eaten? She didn’t remember. She was cold, too. There was an ancient air-conditioning unit on the wall, dripping water and wheezing out frigid air.

She got up, wincing with pain. The skin on the left side of her torso felt tight, unusually taut, and, as she raised her arm and looked down, she saw a neat row of stitches that held together the puckered lips of a small inch-long stab wound. There was an enormous bruise, too. It stretched from just above her hip all the way to her armpit.

She remembered: the men in the bar.

The triads.

She probed the wound. It was sore. She pressed with her fingertips and tried to assess the damage. There was no way to tell how deep the incision was, or what structures had been damaged. She remembered the blood. The knife must have caused a haemorrhage. An operation would have been necessary to fix it. Where had that happened?

Here?

She edged away from the futon, her arms spread out against the wall to help with her balance. Eventually, she felt strong enough to stand unaided.