Belladonna, page 6
Malone felt Bella curl her fingers into his coat and hold on. He glanced first at her, then at Tock, then decided “what the hell” and lunged for the man.
Tock didn’t hesitate. He whipped the rifle sight to his eye and squeezed the trigger.
Malone didn’t stop, not even when he heard the shot. If Tock’s bullet had hit him, he couldn’t feel it, and it hadn’t hit Bella because she was behind him.
For an instant, parking lot, cars and trees became a blur. He launched himself at Tock—or rather at what he thought was Tock. He certainly slammed full force into someone, landing hard on his stomach in the process.
He rolled over, checking for blood before anything else, then almost had a heart attack when Bella’s hands gripped his arm. He jerked his head around. “Get back,” he snapped with a blend of fury and disbelief.
“Get back yourself,” grunted a muffled voice beneath him.
He’d recognize that accent anywhere. Frowning, Malone looked down. “Ronnie? What are you doing here? Where’s Tock?”
“Out cold in front of you.” Bella sank to her knees on the grass. “Are you two all right?”
“I will be when this big lug of a cousin gets off my back.”
“Cousin!” She stared. “You’re related?”
“Unfortunately.” Malone stood and dusted himself off. “We like to… Damn!” he swore. “He’s gone.”
“He can’t be!” Bella declared. “Where did he go?”
A bullet whizzed past her ear, answering that question. Malone grabbed her hand. To Ronnie, he shouted, “Get back to the hotel and deal with things. He’ll follow us. Go!” He barked the last order at Bella, but needn’t have bothered. She was already scrambling for the car.
“Maybe he’s dizzy,” she panted once they were inside. “He’s not—” A bullet blasted through the windshield.
“Hittmg his target?” Malone finished with a grimace. “Come on, start, you bas—” He had to duck midword to avoid the shot that turned the windshield into a web of cracked glass.
“Can you see the road?” Bella demanded as he shoved the car into gear.
“I can’t see bloody anything,” he retorted. “Hang on.”
“Thanks. I wouldn’t have thought of that.” Bracing her foot against the glove box and her hand on the dash, she darted a look over her shoulder.
“Have we lost him?” Malone asked tersely.
“I think so.” Two bullets penetrated the rear windshield, impacting in their headrests. She winced. “Obviously not.”
Downshifting, Malone floored the vehicle. The little rental car screamed onto the street with a squeal of tires that was audible even above the thunder.
They’d gone two city blocks before he risked a sideways glance. He could see it in her profile: she was thinking about Lona, the woman who’d raised her and who now lay dead in the lounge of the Excelsior Hotel.
“Ronnie’ll handle it,” he promised, his compassion uncharacteristic and somewhat unnerving. Beautiful or not, appealing or not, she shouldn’t be getting to him emotionally. She shouldn’t, but she was, he thought with a heavy, inward sigh. Damn, life was complicated.
Bella stared into the rain, which had started to fall in large drops. “Tock killed her in cold blood.”
“Yes, well, one of them did,” Malone agreed.
“Was Rudge there, too?”
She didn’t seemed surprised. But, dammit, he was. And disappointed. In Rudge, and in himself for misjudging the man so badly.
He located a spot on the shattered windshield through which he could see. More gently than was his custom, he said, “She was dying anyway, Bella. She told me.”
“I know.”
He frowned. “You did?”
“She never said anything, but I knew. I just wanted more time with her. I don’t care if she was my grandmother or not. I loved her, and… well, thank you for saving this package for me.”
For some reason her fist clutching the tissue-wrapped parcel caused Malone’s stomach to tighten. A knot of resistance, he wondered? Or desire? Possibly both, he thought glumly. Oh, God, he was in deep, deep trouble.
She stared dry-eyed at the package. He heard tissue crinkling. “What is it?” he asked.
She hesitated, obviously puzzled. “It’s a—a picture case. And a note. It says ‘Bella, the pictures in this case are of you and Amanda. I don’t believe they will help you in your quest, but I do feel the time has come for you to have them. Amanda wrote me a letter, but foolishly I burned it. Please forgive my deceit. I have only ever wanted the best for you. I love you, my dear, as I feel certain Amanda must have done. None of us can change the past, Bella. I only hope and pray that you will learn of yours and benefit from that knowledge in the end. Love always.’” Bella’s voice broke on a stifled sob. “’Lona.’”
“MIRROR, MIRROR, on the wall,
Who’s the prettiest of us all?
And if you think that I’m so vain,
You’ve never met our dear Charmaine.”
Smiling in what she knew to be a dangerous fashion, the woman turned from one of the many mirrors that hung in her Chinatown office and faced the man she call Tic-Tac. Idiot man, she thought. His brain must be the size of a pea.
“I told you to watch the old woman,” she said in a deceptively pleasant voice. “Watch, Tic-Tac, not kill. I’m also positive I made no mention of you shooting at dear Bella Conlan and that British ninny who’s helping her.”
“No, ma’am,” Tock said, then ruined it by letting a smile creep across his mouth as he glanced at Hobson Crowe in the corner.
She pulled a slender pink weapon from her sleeve. “No, ma’am, what?” she demanded, advancing on him.
The smile vanished. “No, ma’am, you didn’t tell me to do those things.”
She leaned over him where he sat, a hint of intimidation in her stance, the weapon touching his nose. “Then why, pray tell, did you do that?”
“Because I told him to. Hello, Hobby. Getting drunk, are you?” A tall, slender woman in the shady area between forty and fifty strolled into the room. She wore a sleek, black silk pantsuit with Oriental symbols around the cuffs and collar, and held a cigarette in a silver-and-ebony holder between her long, carefully manicured fingers. Her dark hair fell straight and shiny to her shoulders. Her eyes beneath a thick fringe of bangs were hazel and currently gleamed with satisfaction.
Charmaine Parret, cool, elegant and aggravatingly composed, had the irritating ability to set her counterpart’s teeth on edge.
“You interfered?” the woman asked levelly. She didn’t clench her fists, because Tic-Tac was watching. However, had he been anywhere else, she surely would have slapped Charmaine’s face. Hobby’s, too, because he’d probably known what she was up to from the start.
He knew everything, the worm, yet he never did a damned thing with that knowledge. Heaven save her from ever becoming so utterly apathetic. He sipped his sherry calmly, because he was always calm, and watched as Charmaine sauntered across the floor.
“I have every right to ‘interfere,’ as you so crudely put it,” Charmaine replied with a serene smile.
The woman despised serenity—and poise and polish and beauty as well. Charmaine possessed all those qualities in abundance, but not naturally. No, she hadn’t been born with them. “You,” the woman noted disdainfully, “are a bitch.”
Only Charmaine’s eyes moved. They slid to her face and held her challenging gaze. “I,” she countered with no trace of rancor, “am not subject to your will.”
“I run the business, Charmaine.”
“Yes, but I am more familiar with this particular aspect of the business.”
The woman’s voice rose. “Hobby?”
He merely lifted a placid brow. “No comment.”
“Wimp,” she muttered.
“If you say so.” He raised his glass. “Why did you order the old woman killed, Charmaine?”
She drew delicately on her cigarette. “I thought she might know something.”
“Hah!” The woman turned back to the mirror. “If she did, she’d have spilled it long ago.”
“Possibly. Or perhaps she was waiting for just such a moment as was presented to her when the girl escaped from us.”
“You mean when Bella escaped from me, don’t you?” the woman challenged.
Charmaine arched her eyebrows. “Well, it does put us in a rather awkward situation. Oh, Mr. Rudge is willing to recapture her, but we’ll have to pay for his services all over again. By the way, although I’m sure Mr. Tock hasn’t mentioned it, your friend the bounty hunter was also at the Excelsior Hotel today. The interfering fool showed up just as my friend Mr. Tock was about to put an end to our witness problems.”
“Good. I told Rudge and I’m telling you again, I want her alive.”
“So you can kill her yourself?”
The woman’s head came up stiffly. “Have you got a problem with that?”
Charmaine turned away. “Take my advice, go back to your mirror. Pretend you’re the fairest in the land and leave me to deal with this matter.”
“Or I could,” Hobby suggested from the low black-andred Chinese sofa.
“No,” the women said as one. “Wait outside, please,” Charmaine added to Tock.
While he obeyed, she fingered one of the colorful, lowburning lanterns that adorned the office, her mouth curving into a pleasurable little smile.
The woman’s blood boiled. The office air that normally smelled of sandalwood and Opium perfume was marred now by the smell of Charmaine’s signature scent, Poison.
Fine, so Charmaine had status in the business. She always had and always would, but she did not oversee it….
And she wasn’t all that pretty, either. No, not pretty at all. She didn’t have short burgundy hair, and even if she had, it wouldn’t have suited her complexion. Charmaine’s background was a combustible blend, unlike her own, which was a more-flattering mixture of nationalities. Charmaine’s skin was too fair, her hair these days too black, her eyes too much like a cat’s. Robert would have ditched her eventually—if he’d lived to do it, that is.
“Drifting off, are you?” Charmaine inquired in amusement.
Rousing herself from her momentary lapse, the woman glared at her via the smoky bamboo-framed mirror. It was a bold look, but then she needed to be bold where Charmaine was concerned. “I want her alive,” she repeated. Her gaze centered mainly on Charmaine. “I want to do this myself. My way. The old woman’s gone. If she was a threat, she isn’t one anymore. Rudge is good. He’ll catch Bella—and that interfering ex-bookie, Malone, to boot. You can have him, Charmaine, but I want her. I want to destroy Belladonna.”
Chapter Five
“There’s something,” Malone muttered, pacing distractedly. “There’s always something somewhere.” He shot Bella a hooded look while he paced and she studied the pictures that Lona had given her. “Are you sure you don’t remember any more about the night you were taken?”
She sat, chin cupped in her hands, and stared at the open case. “No, I’m not.” Her gaze fastened on the double pictures—two pictures of herself at seven or eight years of age, one with pigtails, one without. She was posing in both with a smiling, blond-haired woman in her mid-to-late twenties. Her mother had been blond, or so Lona had told her. Blond, pretty and full of life. Bella examined the photos more closely. “There’s something in the background,” she said. “It looks like a country building of some sort.”
“Yes, fine, a building,” Malone said testily. “The question is does it trigger any memories?”
She thought for a minute, then said, “Only the one I told you about in the hotel lounge.” She lifted her gaze to the window. “I have to go back. I have to make arrangements for… Lona.”
“No.”
“She was my grandmother, Malone, the only family I’ve ever had. She wanted to be cremated, and I’m going to see that she gets her wish.”
Malone stopped pacing to glower at her. “Later, Bella, when we don’t have hit men and bounty hunters chasing us all over hell and the city.” He knit his brows. “What are you doing?”
“Lighting a candle.” She struck a match as if to burn away her anger. Lona shouldn’t be dead. It was her fault. The bullet must have been meant for her. “We’re in Chinatown, in someone’s—and you refuse to tell me whose— cluttered apartment, with dozens of fans, bamboo screens and pieces of wicker furniture surrounding us. Candles give the place atmosphere.”
He made a disagreeable sound—his way, Bella suspected, of venting frustration. “Stay on topic, will you? Did you see or hear anything last night in the house?”
She suppressed a sigh. Sexy or not, the man was ridiculously single-minded. Her grandmother was dead. Malone should be offering solace, not treating her like a suspect in some dimestore detective novel.
Her eyes followed him as he resumed his preoccupied pacing. She felt awful and wanted to feel that way; she had the right. Malone on the other hand had absolutely no right to look so gorgeous, to be wearing faded black jeans and a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled partway up his forearms. He looked so serious and so absorbed that for a moment Bella considered marching up to him and demanding that he put those sexy arms of his around her and hold her. She wanted to be held so close that she could hear his heart beating and feel the warmth that spelled life radiating from him.
She craved an infusion of life. Love, too, but she couldn’t see getting that from the hard-nosed Malone. Comfort, possibly, providing she made the first move. But love? No, Malone took care of Malone first and foremost.
“Well?” He looked at her now out of intent eyes. Beautiful eyes, Bella thought. Then she collected herself.
“Rudge told me I wasn’t being held for ransom. He called me bounty. He called you a snake—or maybe I did that. He said you’d been a bookie, but now you find people for a living. He also figured you’d have welshed on your deal with him in a minute if you’d known about the stakes.” Something clicked in her brain and she sat up. “He said a name, too, but I can’t remember what it was.”
“A name?” Malone, who’d been looking somewhat vexed, frowned deeply. “Whose name?”
She concentrated. “He said that you knew him—Rudge, I mean—but that he had an in with Ro…Romaine. Isn’t that the name Lona mentioned?”
“Yes, wonderful, but who’s Romaine?” Malone came to lean his hands on the glass-and-rattan table in front of her, until his beautiful, somber face was mere inches away.
“I have no…” The sentence tapered off. That bloodstained knife glinted once again in her mind’s eye. “We have to run, Bella, get away,” a woman’s faraway voice insisted. Did she have blond hair? Yes, Bella could see it. Just the ends, but it was golden blond, like the woman in the picture case. Like her mother.
The flashback vanished, leaving her with only the mystery name, Romaine. “I don’t know.” She moved her head. “Maybe it’s familiar. I can’t tell.”
He stared at her for several long moments. She saw his eyes scanning her face, felt his breath on her cheek, then heard him make a small sound of discomfort as he drew back. “Yes, well, it’ll probably come to you eventually.” He seemed uneasy somehow. Because of her? “Uh, would you like…dinner?”
“Sure, I’d—” Inwardly pleased, Bella started to answer him, but stopped and sat up sharply. “Parret!”
“What?” He’d placed his thumb to his lower lip. Now he removed it to stare down at her.
“Parret,” she repeated, testing the name. “Tock came in and told Rudge to shut up. He said that Parret said to get out of the room. And there was a man.”
Malone crouched in front of her. He took her hand and shook it gently, as if to jostle her memory further. “A third man, Bella?”
“Yes. He sounded English, very proper.”
“Like a butler?”
“Like that, but it was a different accent, as though he’d been away from England for a long time.”
“Hobson,” Malone murmured. His head dropped forward. “God, of course. How could I have been so stupid? Hobson Crowe. And Charmaine Parret.”
Bella stared. “You know these people?”
“Not personally, but I’ve heard of them. There are three of them, or so the word on the street goes. Parret, Crowe and one other. Probably a bird name of some sort.”
“A what?”
“That’s how they’re known, Bella. Parret, Crowe and their third partner. They’re called the Birds.”
“WELL, WELL, WELL. YOU must be Lady Parret.” Larson Rudge had his feet propped up and crossed on Charmaine’s desk when she entered her hazily lit office.
“Mr. Rudge, I presume.” She sent him a cursory look as she skirted her lacquered-mahogany desk. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for answers.” The door opened and quietly closed. Without a backward glance, Rudge said, “Evening, Hobson. Were you in on this afternoon’s fun and games?”
Charmaine had no time for Rudge’s queries. Leaning her elegant body against a delicately papered wall, she said point-blank, “You have no business barging in here. If we’d wanted a face-to-face meeting, we’d have arranged one. What do you want?”
He answered just as candidly. “I like to know who I’m dealing with.”
“Then I’m afraid you’re out of luck, because you’re not dealing with either Hobby or myself anymore.”
“Which leaves either a Mr. or a Ms. X.”
“Personally, I’d leave well enough alone.”
He removed the unlit cigar from his mouth, dropping his feet heavily to the floor. His icy gray eyes flashed. “Don’t play coy with me, Lady P. I’ve figured out the truth.”
“I believe he means be’s eavesdropped,” Hobby interjected.
“Whatever. I know you’re the Birds. And you’re notorious.” He smiled smugly and sat back. “You’re also loaded.”
“We’re also murderers,” Charmaine stated coolly. “Doesn’t that worry you at all, Mr. Rudge?”
“I can take care of myself.”
