Read Body Work for Free Online Page B

corsage of feathers that brushed the swell of her breasts.
    “That table’s reserved, Warshawski. I don’t have a free seat in the house. You’ll have to stand.”
    “Not a problem, Olympia.”
    I got up and moved to the railing that created a kind of foyer between the audience space and the club entrance. I wasn’t going to give her an excuse to throw me out by losing my temper.
    “And there’s a twenty-dollar cover on the night the Body Artist appears. All drinks are six dollars, more for name brands.”
    I stuck a hand inside my sweater and pretended to be fumbling with my bra. “Want the money now?”
    She frowned. “A private eye is bad for business, Warshawski. If you interrupt the show or harass the Artist, I’ll see that you’re thrown out.”
    “I’ll tell you what’s bad for business, Ms. Koilada: you dealing drugs, or laundering money, or whatever you and Rodney are up to. I want you to know that my cousin Petra’s safety is very important to me.”
    She flicked her eyes across the room again. “Petra is safe here. No one will hurt her. She’s popular with my customers and with the staff. She has the kind of good-natured high spirits that make a server popular. Some of our customers may get overenthusiastic in their reaction to her, but she seems levelheaded. I’d be surprised to know she was blowing up something trivial into something major.”
    “Me, too. That’s why I took her reaction seriously. Olympia, even if I’m not a good-natured, high-spirited kind of gal, you could do worse than trust me with your problems. If this guy Rodney is posing a threat—”
    “Maybe being a detective makes you think you can pry into people’s affairs, whether they want it or not, but my club is my business, not yours.”
    “Who is Rodney?” I asked. “Is he a cop?”
    “Are you deaf? I told you to mind your own business.”
    She turned on her heel. The club needed too much supervising on a packed night like tonight for her to waste more time arguing with me.
    I didn’t see her stop to talk to Rodney, but she must have because he got up from his table and came over to me.
    “Girlie, you put one foot wrong here, and I’ll personally stuff your body in a snowbank.”
    “‘Girlie’? You sound like a bad movie script, Rodney.”
    His lips curved into something like a sneer. “Maybe, but you could look like part of a bad movie yourself if you try to mess with me. Got it?”
    I leaned against the railing and yawned. “Go put on a sheet and dance around a cross if you want to scare people. That how you got Olympia so rattled?”
    He pulled his hand back as if he were going to hit me but thought better of it in the nick of time.
    “No one messes with me, girlie. Not you, and not that smart-mouthed cousin of yours, either.”
    “People who mess with me or my cousin tend to spend a lot of years in Stateville, Rodney, when they aren’t picking themselves out of gutters—or snowbanks. Ask around, anyone will tell you the same. Now, go back to your chair. The band is packing up, the Artist will be onstage soon, and the rest of the audience will be peevish if you block their view.”
    His face scrunched together in ugly lines like a thwarted toddler’s. He flipped his coat open so I could see the outsize gun in his shoulder holster, but I pretended to be looking at the stage.
    He finally hissed, “Just watch yourself, girlie,” and swaggered back to his seat a few seconds before the houselights went down.
    I made a face in the dark. Maybe I hadn’t changed so much from those days of trailing around South Chicago with Boom-Boom, looking for fights.
    The lights came back up, and the routine followed its usual course, with the Artist appearing magically on her stool. The audience reacted in their usual way, gasping with amazement at the intricacy of the work on the plasma screens, shifting nervously with sexual excitement at the more graphic imagery.
    Rodney, at his central table, was staring moodily