Sharp Turn
Praise for
Sharp Shooter
‘At times absolutely hilarious, this book is a fantastic escapist easy read – perfect for a rainy Sunday or a long day at the beach. Really enjoyable.’
Gloss Magazine
‘Tara Sharp is a welcome addition to the pantheon of smart female protagonists. When a new job links Tara to a local mob boss, she enters a dangerous underworld. In a word: Feisty.’
Gold Coast Bulletin
‘Wonderful, fast-moving and laugh-out-loud, this is a read to get away from the real world.’
Manly Daily
‘It’s a lot of fun for a holiday read. In a word: Energetic.’
Townsville Bulletin Top Read
Marianne Delacourt
is the pseudonym of a successful Australian sci-fi fantasy author who is sold throughout the world. The first book in the Tara Sharp series is
Sharp Shooter
, which is set in Perth where the author grew up.
Sharp Turn
is the second book in the series. Marianne now lives in Brisbane with her husband and three sons.
SHARP
TURN
MARIANNE DELACOURT
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, alive or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
First published in 2010
Copyright © Marianne Delacourt 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian
Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Arena Books, an imprint of
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
Web:
www.allenandunwin.com
A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 74237 003 3
Set in 12/16 pt Fairfield Light by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Colleen
Contents
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, on the down low, 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. Ed and I were still pretty casual 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 going 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 kid from one of Perth’s more dubious suburbs for doing me a favour, and bartered my beloved backup Mandarina Duck in a second-hand 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 the 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, stepped inside, 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.