Lethal Profit Read Online Free PDF Page A

run – she hadn’t been since she arrived in Paris and she could feel her body aching for the release – but March had made her wary of adventuring through streets she didn’t know in the darkness. She looked around the dingy hotel room for another excuse not to go outside and when she could find none, cursed her choice of a hotel without room service. It was raining as Eva stepped down from the chipped double stairs at the entrance to her hotel and into the street. She flipped up an umbrella and felt the cheap device bend as a gust of wind almost turned it inside out. She stood still for several seconds in the light of the hotel reception and looked around. The street was still; cars gleamed in the moonlight and there was a smell of wood smoke in the air. Nothing moved. She realised her heart was hammering in her chest. The rain drove into the fabric of her jeans.

    She started out at a slow pace, turning left at the end of the road and walking in the direction of a restaurant she knew was four streets away. She felt uncharacteristically nervous, but that was unsurprising after the events of the last 48 hours. Although she had dismissed March’s attack on her as a random event by a sick individual, when stacked up with the mugging, finding Shaun earlier that day and two strange phone calls, it left her feeling pretty unsettled. To say the least.

    Bad things always come in threes, I’ve had my quota, she told herself moving quickly along the quiet, wet streets, a lithe figure almost disappearing into the shadows between each pool of street lamp. As she walked she tried to talk herself back to her usual state of calm. March was unlikely to try the same thing twice, people like that were sick opportunists and he had too much to lose to track her down just for revenge. The mugging could simply be a case of the wrong place at the wrong time. The only event she really couldn’t dismiss was finding Shaun’s body and the police turning up whilst she was there – that was troubling. Either she was having the worst luck of her life and it really was another random event, or someone had set that up. Someone who had potentially sought him out for the same reason she had – because he had spent Jackson’s last five minutes with him and could possibly offer some kind of insight into what had really happened next. If that was the case, presumably Shaun had known something that someone out there wanted to hide; something so serious that it justified permanently silencing him.
    Eva was aware that she didn’t really know what had happened to Shaun, or what kind of person he was. There was a chance that his death was completely unconnected to his contact with Jackson – maybe he’d got himself into trouble with a local gang, or been the victim of a random burglar…
    Who took nothing and apparently killed Shaun with some kind of poison… It wasn’t outside the realms of possibility for that to have happened, but it seemed unlikely. Eva had no idea where to look for answers next – Shaun had been her only lead.

    As she reached the door of the restaurant, she snapped her umbrella shut and shook it before walking inside. There were a few customers enjoying a late night meal and no one really took any notice of her. Inside, the restaurant was dated, the waiters decked out like penguins and the tables covered with white tablecloths that had seen better days. Eva let the waiter guide her to a seat in the corner, dropped her umbrella on the floor and shrugged off her leather jacket. She looked down at the menu and decided to order a prix fixe meal of carrot salad and a tomato omelette. The waiter brought her a Diet Coke in a shapely bottle with a straw, which she finished in five minutes before ordering a large glass of thick, warming red wine. She looked across the room at the steamed-up restaurant window. Opposite her, an extra place setting and an empty chair stared back at