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.

  www.tarasharp.com

  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: info@allenandunwin.com

  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

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  MY 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.

  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?’

  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.

  As I passed the archway that opened into the front lounge area, I couldn’t resist a peek inside.

  Two men sat at the small bar. One, his sharp-looking Zegna suit not quite hiding a middle-aged paunch, was skimming a newspaper. He glanced at me then kept on with his reading.

  The other was drinking from a bottle of Coke while he pored over paperwork of some kind. And, God save me, I knew him.

  My mouth fell open. ‘Whitey?’

  His head jerked up, the bottle halfway to his mouth. ‘Sharp?’

  It was a bit hard to know where to go from there.

  I knew Greg Whitehead – Whitey – at school. After graduation he’d asked me out on a date and, to my utter disappointment, had turned out to be a horny toad. I’d avoided him ever since. But Whitey became a cop, and not so long ago he turned up to a crime scene I’d accidentally stumbled upon. Short story; long outcome. A photo of Whitey and me appeared in the local paper that made his jealous wife, June, furious.

  Now it looked like Whitey had found another way to well and truly piss her off. And, as usual, I happened to be in the right place at the wrong time to see it.

  ‘It’s only ten in the morning! Can’t you keep your fly zipped until after lunch?’ The words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them.

  Mr Zegna Suit sank further behind his newspaper.

  ‘Are you offering your services?’ Whitey fired back at me.

  ‘Not if you were the last shag on earth.’

  Ignoring Audrey’s disapproving look, I flounced out of the front door on enough indignation to float a hot air balloon.

  Chapter 2

  I PARKED MONA OUTSIDE my parents’ home on Lilac Street, Eucalyptus Grove, and stomped down the driveway to the birds’ cage, which was back in its usual spot at the front of the house. Recently, Brains and Hoo, my parents’ pink and grey galahs, had had a short holiday outside my back door when I’d been trying to protect them – and me – from a guy called Sammy Barbaro. I hadn’t done such a great job and Brains had been abducted. Fortunately, I’d found out where Barbaro lived and went right over and got her back. I also got shot at, but we’ll skip over that bit.

  Hoo barrelled straight up to me, but Brains was still a bit skittish after her bird-napping and wouldn’t come unless I had food in my hand. Scrabbling in the bottom of my beach bag, I found a bit of stale pie crust and made clicking noises with my tongue to wo
o her over. She sidled along a branch and swiped at the crust, which crumbled and fell to the floor.

  ‘Serves you right,’ I told her and went back to scratching Hoo.

  She didn’t like that either and bit Hoo on the foot. Much squawking and fluffing of feathers ensued.

  People say galahs are as smart and selfish as three year olds. Frankly, JoBob’s – my collective name for my parents – birds were smarter than a lot of adults I’d met and their selfishness made them extremely honest pets. In galah language, Brains had just said, ‘Pay attention to me, not him!’ You can’t get much more direct than that.

  I left the birds and headed down to my flat/apartment/garage where things were in their usual state of immaculate order: my entire wardrobe on the couch, laptop buried underneath somewhere, microwave door open with half a packet of popped corn inside, and a sticky fruit treat (for the birds) attracting a small army of ants on the sink. Moving back home meant my mum knew way too much about what I was doing, but at least being in a detached flat in the back garden meant I still got to be as messy as I liked.

  I plopped onto my bed and buried my face in my pillow. What would Whitey tell the cops at the Euccy Grove station? Tara Sharp’s working in a brothel. The very thought of my mother hearing about my visit to Madame Vine made me want to run to the toilet and sit there for a day.