Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

the hallway began swearing. Then his bleary eyes focused on Hannah. His jaw dropped and he forgot all about the beer stretching his bladder. He stared at her until she vanished out the door into the alley.
    Archer smiled rather grimly to himself as he shut the back door behind them. The man would never forget Hannah, but he wouldn’t be able to describe anything more of her than the swing and sway of a very nice ass.
    When they were out on the street, Archer smiled. “You look very nice, Mrs. South.”
    “Thank you, Mr . . . . ?”
    “South.”
    “We’re married?”
    “It says so on the passports.” He took a ring box from his pants pocket. “Here.”
    Hannah flipped open the velvet lid, stared, and looked hastily at Archer. “Are these real?”
    “Probably.” Considering that April Joy went shopping with Archer’s money, almost certainly. April would have relished spending every dime. But there was no need to tell Hannah that. She was nervous enough about the rings as it was. “Want me to get them appraised?”
    Openmouthed, she stared at the rings. The stones were set in what looked and felt like platinum—cool, heavy, hard. The wedding band was a wide circlet set with flush-mounted, square, colorless diamonds. The engagement band featured a marquise-shaped silver-blue diamond that was at least three carats, set with large, triangular, colorless diamonds on either side.
    “I can’t wear this,” she said, swallowing.
    “Wrong size?” He picked up the rings and her left hand. Easily he slid the rings into place. “Nope. Perfect. Let’s go, sweetheart. We don’t want to miss our plane.”
    She braced herself and didn’t budge. “Not until you tell me what’s going on.”
    “Simple. We’re going after the Black Trinity.”

Fourteen
    F rom the air, Hong Kong was a silent, glittering white dream sleeping between blue ocean and black land. From the ground, Hong Kong was an exhilarating nightmare. Noise. Traffic. Smells. Crowds. Urgency. The rapid rise and fall of the Chinese language ran like a seething river through the city’s high-rise canyons. There was calm to be found inside walled residences, those private oases of proportion and elegance and silence. There was no calm on the streets. The streets were for reckless commerce, sharp-edged and unapologetic.
    The change in government known as the Turnover hadn’t diminished Hong Kong’s wealth or ambition. The newspapers printed communist sentiments and exhortations daily, but the city was fueled by a breathtaking capitalism. Hong Kong was a neon-flashing city of gamblers whose sheer dedication to money made Las Vegas look like a sixty-five-watt bingo parlor run by parish priests.
    The streets boiled with pedestrians locked in unequal battle with delivery trucks, taxis, buses, motorbikes, bicycles, and private cars. Beneath the haze of vehicle exhaust, white was the most common color of the buildings. Dazzling rainbow bursts of neon signs climbed entire buildings, calling attention to commerce. Black was the usual color of clothes. Smoke blue was the color of the air in the streets where sidewalk vendors grilled snacks on braziers for the endless, restless, relentless tide of humanity.
    Archer tapped the taxi driver on the shoulder and pointed toward the sidewalk. Without looking at traffic, the driver pulled over. Hannah tried not to look, either. Despite her dislike of the rain forest’s primitive villages, she had never been comfortable in big cities. They were exciting. They were fascinating. They were exotic. But after a while, a numbing sort of overload set in. Then all she wanted was silence and space. Cities offered neither.
    “Almost there,” Archer said. He tugged down the black cowboy hat he wore. He had picked it up from one of Hong Kong’s remarkable street vendors. Wisely, he had declined the dazzling diamond “Rolex” the same vendor was ready to part with for ver’ tiny cash, sir-sir, ver’ tiny.
    “Anyone following us?” Hannah asked.
    “We lost the last one in the meat market, when those German tour buses unloaded.”
    “Did you recognize him?”
    “Them,” he corrected. “No. I just recognized the moves. But you could lose an elephant in that market. That’s why I went there.”
    Hannah swallowed and said nothing. Hong Kong’s immense open-air food market had reminded her of a jungle without trees, Genesis without pages. Every kind of creature that walked, flew, jumped, swam, or slithered waited in