Big Girls Get the Blues (6 page)

But damn, I was in therapy—I didn’
t think I was qualified to be handing out psychological advice.

She was worth the trouble.  She was worth ten times this much trouble.  But If I tried to help her and just made more of a mess of her than I already had…

Maybe I should ask my psych doctor, Dr Gar
vin, what I should do?

I shook my head as I pulled into one of the many, many empty parking spaces and killed the engine. 
What the fuck am I thinking?
   

I’m coming at this all wrong.  Bev is a grown, tough, sexy as all hell woman.  She doesn’t need me trying to give her mental health help.  Whatever happened in her past really isn’t any of my goddamn business, and I better get that through my thick skull before I fuck things up even more.

What I could do for her was give her some space…maybe a couple more days worth of it.  And then I’d beg and plead for her to come back to her job, and then hopefully I’d get her to come over to my place, to visit my bed for a few nights…

I ran my hands down the sides of my face.  This was just pathetic.  What a loser.

I got out of my truck and headed toward the club.  I needed to cash out the waitresses and the dancers, and make sure everything was clean before anyone got to leave.  Shep was cooking tonight, so I didn’t really need to go in there to check things out.  He was meticulous about his kitchen…and I was afraid that if I presented myself to him, he’d decide to enforce his threat to separate me from my balls.

I was reaching for the door when I heard a scream from inside the club.  I stopped in mid stride and groaned, my head falling forward.  That wasn’t a scream of terror.  No, that was a freaking cat fight in progress.  I could only imagine the scene I was about to walk in on.

But just then a long black limousine slid out of the night and stopped oh so smoothly under the
Frisky Kitten
’s marquee.  I stood there and gawked.  Did we have a high roller coming into the club?  If so, I had to get the girls off each other and ready to dance.

Immediately the driver and passenger doors up front opened, and two tall, muscular Latin men dressed sleekly in suits worth three times my monthly income moved around to the back of the limo.  The driver opened the door facing the front of the club and another tall, muscular, extremely well dressed man emerged.

He looked around, making a quick scan, turned and looked to the man on the other side of the vehicle.  That man nodded—he’d already been scanning the parking lot.

These were professionals.  Real, honest to god body guards.  I tried to see past the man blocking line of sight of the inside of the limo, but couldn’t make out a thing.

The lead body guard finally looked at me, his dark, creased eyes moving over me slowly, and then back up to my eyes.  He smirked and then turned and offered his hand to whoever was in the back of the limousine. 

If he was holding out his hand to help the occupant out, then it couldn’t be one of the Steelers, the Penguins, or the Pirates—so I kind of felt the little excitement I’d been stoking inside me fizzle out.

That was until the woman slid out of the back of the long black limo.  She was stunning.  Taller than most, but made small by her body guard’s enormity. 
Her flesh was mocha, her eyes jet black, as was her long, shiny straight hair.  It cascaded down her shoulders, and accentuated the glorious bit of cleavage her expensive and perfectly tailored crème colored silk suit left visible.

And those legs: long and strong, and so very shapely.

This was a woman that in olden days would be worshipped as a goddess. 

So what the hell was she doing coming into a strip club in the Burg
h
?

That alone set my cop-alarms off.  Most cops won’t admit it, but if your any good at all at your job, and you’ve survived some close calls in the line of duty, you know that intuition is a real, very palpable thing.  It’s what
tells you the second before anything else could, that there’s a perp sneaking up on you, and gets you the hell out of the way before you get your brains scrambled, or a pound of led in your chest.

And the second I saw the immaculately dressed woman and her entourage, that old cop intuition went off like crazy.

I was willing, for a few seconds, to believe I was mistaken.  After all, I was in a hell of a bad mood, I was under some pressure, and damn if that woman didn’t make more than a few of my hormones groan like
they were ready to die.

But then I heard some of the conversation she was having on the razor thin iPhone she had to her ear.  She was speaking freely in Spanish, with the telltale “ch” sound substituted for the “C’s.”

So she was originally from Mexico…or at least her family was.  Not that there were a ton of Spanish speaking people from Spain running around Pittsburgh.  In America, most Spanish speaking folks were from south of the border.

And no, it wasn’t that she was speaking in a foreign language that set my alarms off either.  It was that I knew what she was saying, and she’d said, “When is the shipment being delivered?”

Forgive me for thinking the worst, but when someone mentions shipments, and they aren’t standing in a warehouse or on a loading dock, a cop thinks drugs or guns.  It’s just the way of the world.

I smiled at the gorgeous woman and pulled open the door
for her
.
  I used my friendly smile to cover my interest in her phone call.  It was one of those cop mechanisms.  Some guys had a great blank face.  Some used anger to
disguise their real thoughts.  But me, I was a friendly sort, a good old boy at heart.  And as my grandma used to tell me, you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar. 

The woman stopped in front of me and tilted her head a fraction of an inch, like a predator watching its next meal drink from the stream…right before it springs from the water and champs down on muscle and sinew and bone.
 
 

A heartbeat later the big man in charge was by her side, and one of the other suits was right in my face, staring down on me with open aggression.

I just smiled, sparing him only a glance, keeping my eyes locked with that of the woman’s. 

“I’ll call you back,” she purred in Spanish, and then cut the call off.  And then in perfect English with only the slightest trace of an accent, she said, “Would you be Quinn Thomas?”

Okay, that floored me.  Miss hot and possibly illegal knew my name.  I shook that off and shot her with my very best smile.  “That would be me.  Who may I ask are you, and how do you know me?”

She extended he hand to me, her nails manicured but only with a clear polish.  I took her hand and it was warm and satin soft. 

“My name is Concetta Rivera.  Please, call me Cetti.”

Her handshake was firm, but I let her hand go fast.  I didn’t like the vibe she was giving off.  If she knew my name, she probably knew what I used to do for a living.  I hated losing the element of surprise.

“That tells me what to call you, not who you are and what you’re doing here.”

The body guard beside me growled…fucking
growled
at me.

Her black eyes flashed to him and he fell silent. 

“I’m afraid your brother-in-law, Teddy,
forgot t
o inform you of my arrival.
  I’m the Obsidian Butterfly.”

I just stared at her.  This conversation was getting weirder by the second.

“I’m a dancer.  I’ll be doing a
three week
engagement exclusively
here
at
Teddy’s club.  It should be…” she stopped and looked around at the empty parking lot.  “It should be quite the boom for all of us.”

So Teddy had known she was coming, and he hadn’t said a word.  The man had left notes about everything, enough sticky notes to wallpaper
his office, and he’d just talked and talked and talked about what was coming up for the month.

Not a freaking word about Miss Rivera or the Obsidian Butterfly. 

I pulled the door open even further and made a gallant gesture for her to enter.  There was another screech and the sound of breaking glass.

She just stared into my eyes, an unfathomable expression on her face.  And then a light of controlled humor sparked in her black eyes.

“I think I’ll come back tomorrow…when things are…” She smiled, and damn if she didn’t light up that dang little parking lot with it.  “Settled.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling
relieved.  Possible criminal or not, I didn’t want to have her see the club for the first time this way. 

Her lips quirked and she turned around and headed back to the limo.  The driver had the door open and she slid in with grace and elegance.  The other guard followed, but the head guard glared at me, eyes dark and
flat with dislike. 

I just smiled back.  I didn’t know what skills the man had, and since I wasn’t a hundred percent sure he and his boss weren’t on the up and up, I would try to make nice.  So I smiled at the bastard and started back in away from him.  I thought it would sooth his ego if I left first, and didn’t turn my back on him. 

He grinned and turned back toward the idling limousine.  I’d amused him.

I
pulled open the front door again and forced myself to walk in.  Immediately I saw there were only a handful of customers scattered amongst the outer tables, and a couple at the bar.  A stressed looking dishwasher named Gill was standing behind the bar, the bartender’s bible laid out on the bar in front of him, his eyes scanning the pages desperately.

Music was cued up—some mangled cover of an old Brian Adams classic—but the stage was empty.

But the table directly in front of the stage had two dancers clawing at each other on it.  One was practically spread
eagle;
the other was astride the one on the bottom, her hands wrapped around her victim’s throat.

There were toppled chairs everywhere, and some broken glasses and overturned beer bottles.  And there was some simpleton in a
red flannel shirt and a bass fishing cap turned backwards on his head.  And he was clapping and calling out to the girls with encouragement.  He then picked up a half empty bottle of Bud, put his thumb over the mouth of it, and gave it a hearty shaking. 

The two dancers hissed like alley cats as the dim wit sprayed them with the rank shit.

The dancers were strangers to me.  I hadn’t seen them at all that week, but that wasn’t surprising.  The club was open fifteen hours a day, six days a week.  There had to be at least thirty dancers on the pay roll.

I walked up to the idiot with the beer bottle and snatched
it
out of his hands.  When he turned and started to mewl in retaliation, I raised my fist and took aim.  He was smarter than he looked.  He held up his hands and backed away…all the way out the front door.

Him gone, I turned my attention back to the two wrestling pole dancers.  One was lean yet obviously flexible—the one contorted in a spread eagle still.  The other had some meat on her bones, and had her skinnier opponent pinned to the table.  She might have actually killed the other dancer, but her tremendous chest was getting in the way of her getting a solid hold on her opponent’s throat.

So I reached in and took hold of the dancer on top around her waist, keeping her facing away from me if she decided to start clawing at me, and I
dragged her off the table and into the back of the club.  The other dancer started to cough and then to curse belligerently.  Her voice was getting louder instead of softer, so I guessed she was in pursuit.  Once behind the door to the kitchen, I plopped the thrashing dancer in my grip on to the stainless steel counter of the dishwasher, turned to grab the industrial length hose, and turned the water on to cold.

I waited just long enough for the following dancer to attack the other, which got them both comfortably in range of the hose in my hand.  I shot both of them mercilessly with the cold, drenching spray, and they slid in their spike high heels to the floor, holding their hands over their faces for protection.

Quite an audience of kitchen workers, cocktail waitresses and strippers in all levels of undress crowded into the kitchen, watching me hose down the two dancers in question with morbid fascination. 

I let the hose go dead and turned to face them all.

“Now listen here, people.  I know for a freaking fact you would never act this way normally, so I’m going to try to be understanding
about the
seemingly insane reasoning for your behaviors as of late.”
 

Tammy Fay snorted in derision, and Gill the dishwasher/slash hopeless bartender
smiled crazily down at the sight of the wringing wet strippers.

“But hear this,” and my voice took on the crack of a whip.  Every
one
flinched and unconsciously took a step back.  Good.  I had their attentions.  “If anyone starts another fight in this club while Teddy and Bev are gone, I’ll fire you on the spot.”

Some of them looked unconvinced.

“I’ve already ran it past Teddy, and have full authority to can anyone’s ass I see fit.  And in addition, I’ll call the police on whoever is involved in said fight, and we will be filing charges.”