Sharp Shooter (34 page)

‘Really?’

‘No.’

I sighed, feeling mellow and happy, and contemplated how close this foot rub was to heaven.

My phone rang. I pulled it from my jeans pocket.

‘Tara speaking?’

‘Ms Sharp?’

I recognised the voice right away. ‘Mr Honey?’ I sat up a little straighter. ‘Is everything alright?’

‘Wonderful, Ms Sharp. Was the information useful?’

‘Thank you, yes. How is your fiancée?’

‘We’ve set a date.’

I relaxed again and smiled into the phone. ‘I’m glad.’

‘The reason for my call is that I have a friend who’d like to hire you. I’ve explained the nature of your . . . expertise and they’re willing to double your rate if you’ll take the job.’

I got a funny feeling in my stomach – but that could have been the olives mixing with the chocolate cake. ‘What’s the job?’

‘It’s a little delicate, you see. That’s why I’ve rung you first. To . . . sound you out. My friend runs . . . a very superior escort agency. They want you to coach their . . . employees on the art of reading body language. To enhance their clients’ experience.’

‘A brothel, Mr Honey?’

Edouardo’s head jerked up from his task of pulling gently on my toes, his eyes widening.

Mr Honey cleared his throat. ‘Ahem . . . yes . . . if you like.’

Maybe it was the alcohol, or the foot rub, or the whole craziness that had become my recent life, but I didn’t even hesitate. I wiggled my toes at Edouardo for more and smiled. ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Bring it on.’

Acknowledgements

Many thanks go to: my publisher, Louise Thurtell, for her golden enthusiasm and insightful comments (and for naming Mona). She has made this book possible.

To Tara Wynne, my lovely agent, who was happy for me to try something different. May Lily and Poppy grow up to be like Smitty, not Tara Sharp. To Margo Lanagan, my simile consultant.

And to my early and invaluable readers, Rowena Lindquist and Tansy Rayner Roberts.

Sharp Turn

Also by Marianne Delacourt

Tara Sharp is back in fun, kick-arse form in an adventure
that Janet Evanovich fans will love!

After all the excitement of
Sharp Shooter
,
Sharp Turn
sees Tara Sharp’s unorthodox investigative business starting to attract customers – though not necessarily of the right kind . . . Teaching upmarket prostitutes how to ‘read’ their clients isn’t exactly what Tara envisaged or wanted. And what would her mother say if she found out! So it’s a relief when the man of Tara’s dreams, Nick Tozzi, lines her up with a real job. Something is rotten in the local motorbike racing industry and an associate of Nick’s has asked him to see if Tara is willing to try and sniff out the bad egg. Tara’s new assignment guarantees she’s tangled in all kinds of trouble!

ISBN 978 1 74237 003 3

Chapter 1

M
Y MOTHER IS AN
expert guilt-maker. Joanna Sharp, the Rani of Reproach, the Shazadi of Shame. When she turned her talent on me, it was usually about the fact that I didn’t date the right sort of guy. Unfortunately, my mother’s idea of a suitable male was someone like Phillip Dewar: privileged and pasty (and permanently plastered). But, since I’d moved back home, due to loss of employment and a spot of pennilessness, Joanna had broadened her guilt trip to include my latest career venture.

‘Why can’t you just get a good job in the government, darling? Or let your father help you find work?’ she asked me regularly.

My reaction was consistently emphatic: ‘I can look after myself, Mum!’

Of course that meant that I had to come good on my statement, which meant earning money, which explained why I was currently on my way to a meeting with a brothel madam.

‘It’s all good. It’s ALL good!’ I chanted as my 1980s’ Holden Monaro – aka Mona – took the sharp left-hander onto Stirling Highway with only the faintest squeal of her wheels.

I’ve always been a great believer in affirmations. I CAN eat less chocolate. I CAN do more exercise. I CAN meet a perfect man. No, scrap that last one. I don’t believe in perfect men.

That said, my current date, the gorgeous Edouardo, came close. He was a model, a good egg and he seemed to like me – all of which made me very uneasy. The fact was, he was just too good to be true. My track record was dotted with unfaithful Lotharios and even a furniture-stealer (my last boyfriend cleaned out my flat while I was having a massage), which made it almost impossible for me to just enjoy Edouardo’s attention and not try to second-guess the whole thing.

But Second-Guess is my middle name. Tara Second-Guess Sharp.

Not just about men, about everything: a legacy from the fact that I have an unusual gift. I can see auras around people, and sometimes around objects. Occasionally, I even smell or feel things or see energy trails.

I’d been to the shrink about my gift and, instead of whacking me onto an antipsychotic, she’d sent me off to Hoshi Hara’s Paralanguage School. Betsy, my psych, was an old family friend and turned out to be more alternative than I’d ever expected for a woman who favoured Brendan O’Keefe glasses.

The end result of getting to know Mr Hara was that my gift didn’t go away, it got stronger. Now I was a fully accredited reader of paralanguage and kinesics with my own business, and I was starting to get jobs that used my skills. Like the one I was going to now.

One of my previous clients had recommended me to Madame Vine, the brothel’s owner. It seemed the madam was a forward-thinking entrepreneur who needed my skills. In return, I hoped she’d bolster my almost-bust bank account and we’d all be happy. She wasn’t exactly the kind of customer I’d expected to attract when I set up my own business, and certainly not the kind of work I’d be telling my mother about, but I wasn’t about to knock back a funds infusion because of my mother’s delicate western suburbs sensibilities.

IT’S ALL GOOD!

I cruised up a tiny side street in Leederville that was crammed with red-brick, Federation-style semi-detacheds, and pulled up outside number nine. It didn’t look like a house of ill repute. In fact, with its minimalist garden and locked letterbox, it was much tidier than its neighbours. There was no red light or gaudy lace curtains in the windows. Madame Vine ran an upper-crusty establishment that didn’t accommodate riffraff – at least that’s what my Google search had told me.

I parked Mona and reached down to my bag, sighing at the sight of the sequinned palm tree decorating its side. I’d given my favourite imitation Marc Jacobs handbag to a teenager in one of Perth’s more dubious suburbs for doing me a favour, and bartered my beloved backup Mandarina Duck in a secondhand shop. That left me with my old beach bag. Hopefully this job for Madame Vine would bring me enough cash to buy something halfway respectable.

I scrabbled down the bottom of the bag for my hairbrush and then glanced in the rear-view mirror: shoulder-length brown (at the moment) hair, broad-featured, decent-enough face and a slightly wild-eyed look that was becoming a permanent fixture. Too much adrenaline and too little sleep.

IT’S ALL GOOD.

I forced my legs out of the car and told myself I was being stupid for feeling nervous. They were normal women, just like me.

Actually, considering I hadn’t had sex in several months, probably NOT just like me (my new guy, Ed, and I hadn’t done the wild thing yet on account of me being once bitten, twice shy).

My nervousness had nothing to do with moral judgments about ladies of the night. As far as I was concerned, you did what you had to in life; I saved the kick in the nuts for the bad guys. No, my angst was more about what they would think of me, Tara Sharp, western suburbs private-school girl with the posh voice. Maybe the sequinned beach bag wasn’t such a bad look after all.

The woman who answered the door was dressed in an elegant black suit, sheer stockings and to-die-for black heels. She could have been thirty or fifty, depending on how closely you looked. I had the advantage of being able to see her aura. It was a nice sunny-day blue with the faintly fuzzy edge that older people tended to get, which inclined me to think she was closer to fifty.

‘Madame Vine? I’m Tara Sharp.’

The woman frowned, sucked in her cheeks and stepped back to let me inside, then clip-clopped off down the polished wood corridor at an impressive pace considering the height of her heels. I followed more slowly, trying not to gawk at the plush lounge area or through the open doorways into the equally opulent bedrooms. This was no tenner-a-trick joint.

Ms Clippety-Clop halted in front of an ornate door and knocked.

‘Entrée.’

‘It’s Ms Sharp, Madame Vine,’ my guide announced, in a voice plummier than Joanna Lumley’s. She ushered me in, shut the door behind us and waited. My guide, it seemed, was merely the PA.

I stared at the woman seated behind a large, decoratively carved cedar desk. Madame Vine was round-ish, with her hair cut in a bouncy blonde bob. From what I could see from this side of the desk, she was dressed in a silk caftan and a LOT of bling; fingers, neck, wrists, ears. Old style, though. No piercings. If I didn’t know better, I’d have picked her to be in real estate.

‘Ms Sharp?’ she said.

‘Madame Vine,’ I squeaked.

The two women exchanged a look, then Madame Vine smiled at me the way an animal handler might at a new, frightened zoo inmate. ‘Why don’t you sit down? Thank you, Audrey.’

Audrey nodded, and walked into an adjoining room. As she passed Madame Vine’s desk, the two women’s auras blended snugly together. There was something more than the usual work relationship going on there.

I plopped into the brown leather armchair and cleared my throat. Time to be a businesswoman. ‘Err . . . Lloyd Honey said you wished to discuss some potential work.’

‘Aaah, Lloyd. Dear man.’ Madame Vine slipped one outrageously long, diamanté-studded fingernail between her lips and sucked on it, then removed it to stroke an equally ridiculously long eyelash. ‘He claims you have a unique ability to read situations. Is that so, Ms Sharp?’

‘Tara, please. And yes,’ I said, ‘my business is reading paralanguage and kinesics. I usually lean towards investigative jobs but I do consider other things. What did you have in mind?’

Madame Vine got up from her chair and moved around to stand directly under the air-conditioning vent. She couldn’t have been much over five feet tall and her shrewd, plump face was shiny with moisture. A red aura punctuated with blue flashes fanned her ample frame. I mentally reviewed the aura colour code Mr Hara had taught me. People with red auras tended to be materialistic and pragmatic. The brilliant turquoise flashes signified energy and influence. This woman could probably move mountains if she set her mind to it.

‘I run a superior business, Tara, and I’m always looking for ways to improve the quality of the service we give. And to be honest, the global financial crisis hasn’t been kind to the more . . . expensive establishments like us.’

I nodded encouragingly and she went on.

‘I sense some . . . problems amongst my girls but haven’t been able to get to the bottom of it.’

‘What kind of problems?’ I asked.

She hesitated. ‘Someone in my employ is disgruntled. Dead animals on the doorstep, threatening text messages, that sort of thing. I wondered if you might be able to work with them for a few days, maybe a week, and see what you can learn.’

‘Work with?’
What the hell did that mean?

Madame Vine picked up a long, thin, ivory-handled envelope knife. ‘The girls get together regularly in the client lounge. I can introduce you as a new employee – that way they’ll be relaxed about your presence.’

‘Let me get this right. You’re suggesting that I pretend to be one of your . . . workers?’

She gave me a keen smile. ‘You wouldn’t need to take on any clients. Just participate in the mingling part. The remuneration would be substantial.’

I clutched my sequinned beach bag, trying to ignore the thought of my mother’s reaction if she heard about me ‘mingling’ in a brothel. My sweat snap-froze on my skin. It suddenly felt hard to breathe.

‘I-I’m not sure this is really my line of work. And frankly, Madame Vine, I’m sure your girls would see through me in a heartbeat,’ I managed to gasp out.

‘I can see my proposal has taken you by surprise. Perhaps you should think on it and we can talk again?’ she said.

I nodded and sprang up eager to be on my way.

Madame Vine pressed her intercom. ‘Audrey. Please see Ms Sharp out.’

Audrey appeared, taking care not to trip over the fringe of the silk floor rug. Her eyebrows lifted slightly and her aura surged towards Madame Vine’s. I felt a slight snap of a mild electric shock as their energies met, before she led me out into the corridor. These two definitely had it going on.