Nine Dragons - A Beatrix Rose Thriller: Hong Kong Stories Volume 1 (Beatrix Rose's Hong Kong Stories Book 2) Read Online Free Page B

diverted to a late night drinking den that she had visited a few times before. It was off the beaten track and did not welcome tourists. Beatrix nodded to the man behind the rickety bar. They had transacted business before, and he nodded for her to follow him to the small room at the back. It was a storeroom, with stacked bottles of Maotai and Guijing Tribute and Tsingtao, a metal desk with a roller chair, a dirty sofa and a wooden cabinet. The barman was a triad, and the bar had been affiliated with Donnie Qi’s organisation. There were two other triads in the room, one of them sitting on the sofa and the other smoking a joint as he leaned back against the wall. The three men all sported variations on the same basic uniform: tracksuit tops, trainers, lots of bling. Beatrix had found the place by asking around. She had not been concerned that she might be recognised. Only Donnie had seen her face, and he was dead.
    “What you want?” the barman asked in harsh, rough English.
    “The same as before.”
    The barman went to the cabinet and pulled out a drawer. It was full of small plastic bags, each of which was stuffed with a green-brown material. He opened one of the bags, ripped out a handful of buds and wrapped them in a piece of newspaper.
    He held up a finger. Beatrix nodded that she understood, took out a hundred dollar bill and gave it to him.
    “Want something else?” He looked to his two colleagues, gave a stagey wink, and pulled out another drawer. He took out more bags, but these contained different substances. Beatrix saw fibrous brown opium, white meth crystals, and small tablets of ecstasy.
    “I’m good,” Beatrix said. “Thanks.”
    She turned to go, but the man clicked his fingers twice and told her to wait. “You like the hashish, yes? It good? You ever try opium?”
    Beatrix turned back. The barman had picked up the bag with the stalky brown contents and was holding it out to her. His accomplices were watching avidly.
    “No.”
    “I give you. As gift.”
    She knew that she should leave, that staying here was a bad idea with bad consequences, but she looked down at the opium and found that her reaction to it was more ambivalent than she had expected. Her experience of drugs was limited. She had smoked weed ever since her teenage years. It had been almost medicinal during her service with the Group, easing the pain of the numerous injuries that she had suffered. She had smoked a little more of it these last six months. She had more to forget, more pains to salve, and, when she was high, her troubles receded just a little. But weed was weed, nice but limited, and she wondered whether she might appreciate something more. Something that offered a deeper retreat.
    “Come on,” the man urged. “Free sample.”
    Beatrix extended her hand and the man dropped the bag into her palm. “Thank you.”
    “You like, you want more, you come here, okay?”
    “Okay,” she said.
    She put both baggies into her pocket and went out into the bar and then into the street beyond.
    #
    BEATRIX’S BUILDING was twenty-five storeys tall. She summoned the ancient shoebox lift. The flat was on the penultimate floor. The elevator opened onto a narrow hallway with two doorways on either side. The shaft was in the centre, with the stairs winding their way around it. She doubted if the hallway had seen a paintbrush for twenty years. The floor was cold stone and the windows were empty, with rusting decorative ironwork taking the place of a pane of glass. There was a door that led out onto a balcony and an open archway led to a large recess, into which years’ worth of trash had been stuffed.
    She paused, as was her habit, and listened. She could hear the bustle of the street below, and the grumble of a jet passing overhead, but, save that, it was quiet. There was nothing that made her anxious. She had been in Hong Kong for six months and, during all of that time, there had been nothing to make her suspect that the Group was any