Counterfeit Love (21 page)

Lucy giggled nervously, her eyes finding the portrait of Yu with his golf clubs. ‘Well that’s obviously original.’

‘You are too good, Miss Yang.’ He laughed, but his face had hardened and his eyes had gone cold. ‘So, how about the fakes?’

Lucy took a deep breath. She could feel Yu’s eyes on her. She walked towards a pair of elaborately decorated vases, running her hand over them and turning them around as if she might notice something irregular. She glanced over her shoulder at Yu, hoping his eyes might give her a hint if she was getting closer to the fakes, but they were still beady, just like a reptile’s. Even his tongue had taken on a snake-like quality, flickering from one side of his mouth to his other. Lucy shivered. Now she wasn’t just uncomfortable – she was starting to feel scared.

‘Are you going to identify the fakes? Or perhaps it is you who is the fake, Miss Yang?’

Lucy felt her heart pounding as she returned to the antiques. She was never going to come up with the right answer. She just had to bluff her way through and then get away as fast as she could. There was no reason to hang around here.

‘This is a very difficult challenge you have set for me, Mr Yu, but I believe - ’

Lucy was interrupted by a horn going off outside the front of the house. Yu’s beady eyes left Lucy’s face and flicked towards the commotion. He dashed to the far end of the room and peered through the curtains. It was hard to see clearly what was going on outside, but something was annoying Yu out there. He was breathing hard.

‘What foul wind has blown you here?’ he muttered under his breath.

Lucy felt her heart skip a beat. A snippet from the Art Bar leapt into her mind. ‘May the winds favour
you
,’ Lucy had thought the guy in the safari suit had said. But what if he had actually meant something different? ‘May the winds favour
Yu
.’ That would mean that the parcel was intended for Yu.

Before Lucy had time to think any further, Yu turned around. His face had gone bright red. ‘You need to
go
,’ he growled.

Lucy didn’t need to be asked twice. She grabbed her clutch from beside the chaise longue and turned to leave.

‘Now!’ Yu shouted.

Lucy kept her eyes on Yu as she headed out of the room. He was really agitated – struggling to breathe properly, pulling at his T-shirt and scratching his neck. As he did so, a black tattoo peeked out from underneath his shirt.

Lucy stared, her heart pounding hard. She was looking at the head of a cobra.

Lucy scuttled across the tiles towards the front door with her heart in her mouth and Yu breathing down her neck. If Yu really was the Cobra, she had to get away fast. Byron had warned her he was dangerous, but she could feel it for herself.

‘
Why are you still here
?’ he thundered at Lucy. Yu had gone from a pretentious playboy to a menacing thug.

She glanced around to see Yu peel off down a hallway, cursing in Cantonese. She watched him for a moment as he disappeared through a door.

Lucy relaxed slightly now that Yu was out of sight. She shuddered to think what might have happened if she’d been caught out on the antiques. But a garage door banging shut made her jump. She waited a moment to see if she could work out what was going on down there. She could definitely hear shouting.

Tentatively, Lucy took a few steps down the hall to see if she could make out what Yu was saying. But all she could hear was profanity. Lucy glanced back at the front door. It was her escape route. Her apartment was within walking distance, and if she took a shortcut through the park she’d be home in half an hour. Byron might even be waiting for her outside her apartment. She shivered at the thought of falling into his arms. But she didn’t have time to dwell on that; she had a decision to make.

Leaving was definitely the safe option, but Lucy could feel something burning inside her as she stared at the door at the end of the hall. Just metres away from her, something was going on. She could hear a van door clattering open, and more shouting from Yu. If he was an organised crime boss, she had to find out.

Lucy turned her back on the front door and crept down the hall. Her heart thundered as she hovered outside the door to the garage, listening. Everything had gone quiet. Then, suddenly, the door handle rattled. Lucy flung herself backward into a laundry room and dropped down behind a washing basket.

A few moments later she heard Yu thumping past, muttering more profanities. Lucy pressed herself to the floor and held her breath. She had no idea what Yu would do if he caught her sneaking around his house, but she really didn’t want to find out.

Lucy waited until the footsteps had faded into the distance before she poked her nose over the washing basket, but by then she could hear someone else in the hallway – the soft squeak of shoes on the tiles. Was it the van driver? She ducked out of sight, willing him to go away. The driver crept off down the hall after Yu. Lucy waited a few more moments and then peeked out of the laundry, just in time to see another guy walk past. He disappeared into a bathroom across the hall and banged the door shut behind him. Lucy breathed hard.
Surely that’s everyone.

Quickly and quietly she slipped into the garage. She knew she didn’t have much time before Yu and others came back. She flicked off the garage lights to make herself less visible, just in case they did, and then eased herself into the van through the open side door. She spent a moment adjusting her eyes to the darkness, then inspected a pile of boxes. The van was full of them. They could just be packets of instant noodles, for all Lucy knew, but the way Yu reacted when the van pulled up outside his house made Lucy certain that there was something unusual about this delivery.

Lucy took her phone out of her clutch and filmed the stack of boxes, along with one of the labels. She squinted in the dim light to read the words:
anti-malaria pills
. She checked another label and then another. They were all the same.

How weird – a van full of anti-malaria pills. Why would Yu completely do his nut over a van full of pills arriving on his doorstep?
Suddenly Lucy remembered what had been in the envelope she was given at the Art Bar – anti-malaria tablets. Lucy’s skin went cold. For Yu to react like he did, she assumed they were counterfeit drugs – totally illegal.

She took a pen out of her bag and used it to open a flap on one of the boxes, then grabbed a packet of pills. They looked just like the real thing, but she had no doubt they were just cheap imitations – at best, they would be useless against malaria, at worst, they might poison anyone who used them. Her colleague on the sports desk was still in hospital after taking counterfeit painkillers laced with toxins.

Lucy thought back to her conversation at the Art Bar one more time.
The usual order
, Mr Safari Suit had said as he gave her the package. It seemed so obvious now – he’d been placing an order for fake anti-malaria pills. Lucy cursed herself for missing the most important details of her exchange at the Art Bar, and then discarding the most significant thing in the envelope. She’d been dwelling on a gold key when the critical piece of the story had been lying on her bedside table the whole time. She hadn’t even bothered to tell Byron about them, the detail had seemed so insignificant.

Lucy’s eyes darted around the boxes, suddenly making sense of everything. Yu was passing himself off as a cultured, respectable businessman, but he was actually dealing in counterfeit prescription drugs and who knew what else. The market for them worldwide was massive, and the profits astronomical. No wonder Yu had such an impressive collection of antiques.

Lucy was still unclear how the yacht fitted into the arrangement. It seemed likely that
Hound Dog
had been payment for a consignment of the pills. Perhaps Yu had then laundered the yacht in one of his own deals.

Then she remembered Durban talking about a boat he was buying with the commission from selling a commercial property. Was that
Hound Dog
? Lucy shook her head in dismay. Byron must have been right about Durban’s connection to the Cobra.

Lucy surveyed the scene in front of her. Something had gone wrong, for the driver to show up with a van full of counterfeit goods. But she didn’t have time to work that out. Lucy was tucking the packet of pills into her clutch when out of the corner of her eye she spotted someone. She froze.

A hooded figure was standing outside the open van door, peering inside. Lucy’s heart thumped. It looked like the driver was back. She wondered if he could see her in the darkness. As he bent over to climb into the back of the van, Lucy readied herself like a stealthy feline. Then she pounced – not at all like a cat, with breasts going one way and heels the other. She whacked the driver on the head with her studded clutch. He groaned softly, so she smashed him again.

‘Lucy,’ he whispered, ‘it’s me.’

She kneed him in the groin before she stopped to check who
me
was.

‘Nooo,’ he whimpered, pulling at her dress. ‘It’s Byron.’

‘
Byron
?’

‘We have to get outta here.’ He grabbed her hand.

‘I found something,’ she breathed into his ear.

‘Tell me later,’ he whispered urgently.

Byron punched a control panel and the garage door started to thunder open. They scrambled under the door as soon as there was space and bolted down the driveway and onto the road. They didn’t stop running until they reached Lucy’s apartment block. Lucy collapsed against a mouldy concrete wall, trying to catch her breath. ‘
Oh. My. God
.’

Byron stumbled onto a step and lay down, clutching his crotch. ‘
My balls
,’ he moaned.

Lucy turned her head to inspect the sorry figure beside her. Blood was trickling from a gash on his right eye. His left eyebrow bore the imprint of a studded clutch.

‘You’ve ended my chances of fatherhood,’ he groaned, trying to sit up.

‘You’re lucky I didn’t stick a heel through your eye,’ Lucy panted. ‘What were you doing driving Yu’s van?’

‘I wasn’t driving Yu’s van. I broke into the house when the garage door opened. I was looking for you.’

‘Are you insane?’

Byron nodded. ‘Probably.’

Lucy joined him on the step. ‘Did you see what was in the van?’

‘A lunatic with a knuckle duster.’

Lucy snorted. ‘I hit you with my clutch.’

She pulled out her phone, trying to decide who to call first – the office or the police. She had to report the fake drugs, but she also had to make sure the camera crew was outside Yu’s house when he got busted. ‘Looks like I found the Cobra,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’ Byron demanded.

‘That van’s full of rip-off prescription drugs, and Yu’s at the centre of everything.’

‘
Shit.
There’s been a massive bust down at the cargo terminal – a container load of counterfeit anti-malaria pills destined for Dubai, according to an agency guy I was talking to.’

Lucy lowered her phone and turned to Byron. ‘What?’

‘Guess one of the drivers panicked, went to Yu’s instead,’ he said.

‘How do you know all that?’

Byron blinked a drop of blood from his eyes. ‘Got a tipoff. Just as I was leaving the party.’

‘So what were you doing at Yu’s then?’

‘Looking for you.’ He paused. ‘Charlotte told me where you were.’

Lucy stared at Byron, trying to work out what was going on. ‘Wait a minute. You were looking for me at Yu’s house when the police were raiding a counterfeit drug shipment at the cargo terminal?’

Byron closed his eyes. ‘I was worried about you. I didn’t know Yu was the Cobra, but I was pretty certain he was connected somehow.’

Lucy frowned, still confused. ‘You could have been breaking an exclusive, but you decided I needed
rescuing
?’

Byron nodded slowly and put his hand over his groin. ‘Don’t kick me again. Please.’

Lucy regarded the battered guy in front of her. He was bleeding from his eyebrow and pleading for his balls, but she had never seen anyone so perfect in her life.

She put away her phone and pulled a tissue out of her bag, gently dabbing the blood from Byron’s eyebrow, then wiping the dirt from his cheek. His eyes followed her until she gently touched her lips to his.

‘What have I done to deserve you?’ she whispered.

Byron put his arms around her back and pulled her against his body. ‘Everything.’

They shared an exhausted kiss, until Lucy reluctantly pulled herself away and took his hand.

‘Come on, I have to call the office and get changed. I’ve got a counterfeit drug story to cover.’