Crown 2 by Terry Harknett

Author:Terry Harknett [Harknett, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: action adventure, crime story, Crown, Hong Kong, Police procedural, Terry Harknett
Publisher: Piccadilly
Published: 2022-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

‘HAVE YOU GOT a birthmark on your backside, sweetheart?’ Crown asked suddenly, swinging around in the seat to look into the frightened face of Jenny Lau.

‘I do not understand,’ she said, although Crown thought she did. The question, at least. He was prepared to allow that it was the motive for asking it which intrigued her.

‘A purple coloured mark on your skin at the small of your back,’ Chang said in Cantonese.

‘Who said this?’ she wanted to know.

‘She’s the one,’ Chang said.

‘I know,’ Crown replied, and fixed the whore with his penetrating gaze. ‘A Dutch seaman who’s spent a night in the pokey because you decided to become an accessory to murder instead of a co-operative material witness.’

Jenny covered her mouth with a hand and it muffled her words. Her eyes were very large above the hand. ‘Please, I no want any trouble.’ She hung her head and dropped the hand. Then she began to toy nervously with the hem of the cheongsam where it was slit at her thigh.

‘You said that once,’ Crown reminded as Chang tooled the VW down Peak Road towards Magazine Gap. ‘But you’ve got it already, sweetheart. Accidentally or otherwise, it came to you. It was no accident that took you up to Tiroa’s house.’

‘If I tell you-’

‘No ifs!’ Crown snapped. ‘You tried to sell yourself into this mess. I may let you buy yourself out of it. The currency is words.’

She brought up her head, found nothing encouraging in the hard lines of Crown’s expression and started to work on the hem again. One handed, while the other moved to rescue her still-burning cigarette from the ashtray. ‘I’m just a girl at the Stardust Hotel,’ she said on a cloud of smoke that was directed downwards and burst against her legs like an inverted mushroom. ‘I work there a long time.’

They were running through Magazine Gap now, between Mounts Gough and Cameron.

‘Where are we going?’ Chang asked.

‘I have bag in locker at Star Ferry,’ Jenny said tentatively.

‘Head that way, Po,’ Crown said. ‘If she tells any lies she’ll need a change of underwear.’

Jenny sucked more smoke from her cigarette. Crown looked at the dandruff in her dark hair. ‘It’s a bad place to work. Not clean and getting nice customers like some others I been at. Men not pay much and woman who run the place take big share of the money.’ She ground out the cigarette in the ashtray with a vicious gesture: as though everything she hated about her life was under the glowing tobacco embers.

‘Does that bring us up to last night, or before?’ Crown asked impatiently.

‘Last night same as any other night,9 Jenny responded. ‘Then drunken sailor come in and get sick. That happen before, also. I hear him come back down from bathroom. But he go into wrong room. The one next to mine. I go to get him back, but two men come out of room next door. They have guns.’

‘Did you know them?’

‘No.’

‘Did they see you?’

‘No!’ Fearfully.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.