Deadly Rich Read Online Free PDF Page A

merchandise is tagged. It can’t leave the boutique till we deactivate it.”
    “I’m sorry.” The black woman was giggling in embarrassment.
    “Will you kill that alarm!” Ms. Hansen called to Xenia Delancey.
    It was a moment before silence was restored.
    Leigh glanced toward the changing rooms. The curtain in the little doorway was swaying. “Did someone just come out of the changing rooms?”
    “I didn’t see anyone,” Tori said.
    OONA ALDRICH FELT TOO WOOZY to take the overhead route getting out of the one skirt and into the other. So she undid her own skirt and let it puddle around her feet. She lifted one bare foot out and with the other flipped it toward the bench. And missed.
    Now she opened Ms. Ingrid Hansen’s prissy little silk skirt. She held it in a hoop with both hands, lifted one leg, and tried to step into it.
    Right away she saw there was going to be a balance problem. Holding the skirt open required two hands, but keeping herself upright on one foot required at least one wall and one more hand.
    Oona looked around the changing room.
    There’s the wall, but has anyone seen a third hand ?
    She put her engineering smarts to work.
    What about sitting down on the bench …?
    She sat down on the bench. Well, she’d intended to sit. It was more of a fall but no bones were broken.
    And pulling the skirt up my legs …?
    She pulled the skirt up her legs. She stood, adjusted the hang of the pleats, fastened the belt. She looked at herself in the mirror, fore and aft.
    Not bad.
    She slid the jacket off the hanger and slipped her right arm into the sleeve.
    Something rapped on the door.
    “Just a minute!” Her left hand, halfway into the jacket, snagged the lining. She reached with her right hand and slid the door bolt back.
    “How do I look?” She faced the mirror, tried to untangle her left arm, heard cloth rip. “Shit. Now I’ll have to buy the damned thing. Well—what do you think?”
    Funny—she liked the skirt, but the jacket struck her as sort of pukey. Well, no wonder. She was wearing it halfway on and halfway off.
    “Give me a hand with this jacket, will you?”
    There was a movement in the mirror behind her. For half an instant her brain recorded the image of a man standing there, two eyes staring with lids pulled back like snarling lips. At the same moment she registered two words, only one of them English.
    “ Saludos , bitch.”
    Before she could turn, something tugged at her hair and a sudden pressure twisted her head back. The air sparkled and silver whipped past her eyes. A hot piano-wire of pain gripped her neck and fire flicked across her throat.
    She struggled to break free. The jacket held her hand like a tourniquet.
    He bent her back and, with a cracking sound, she felt her spine surrender. She was on the floor, pushing up with one arm, trying to reach the bench, when a blade danced down in front of her eyes, winking right, left, up, and down.
    She screamed and it was like a cartoon because she didn’t hear the scream, she saw it—a red scream, liquid and hot and flying in twenty directions at once. The bubbling scream flowed back into her throat, choking off her air.
    And the blade’s bloody kiss went on. And on.
    “ THIS IS INSANE ,” Leigh said. “It can’t take her twenty minutes to change into a simple dress.”
    “Take it easy,” Tori said. “Oona’s insecure, she’s a perfectionist.”
    “Not on my time she isn’t.”
    Leigh crossed the boutique to the little doorway that led to the changing rooms. She stepped past the curtain, and her glance took in a corridor with an emergency exit at the end and three doors on each side. On the right two stood half ajar.
    She moved past them and stopped at the third door.
    “Oona? Are you in there?” She rapped on the door. No answer. She leaned her ear against it and felt a sort of coiled stillness radiating through the wood panel.
    Oh my God, she thought, if Oona has passed out in the dressing room …
    Leigh tried