Authors: Kylie Logan
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Buttons, #General, #Women Sleuths
Button Holed
Table of Contents
By hook or by crook?
I pushed the door open and stopped dead in my tracks. The bag with my turkey sandwich in it slipped from my hand and hit the floor with a splat.
Too stunned to move a muscle, I stared at the chaos that reminded me of the chaos of the burglary.
The chaos I’d finally cleaned up and had under control when I left the shop not an hour earlier.
Like the hiccup of a bad dream, there were buttons spilled across my desk and all over the floor. But this dream contained another grisly component—in the center of all those buttons, there was Kate Franciscus, dressed in skinny leather pants and an emerald green jacket that would have looked spectacular with her coloring—if she wasn’t so ashen.
That silver swan-head buttonhook I’d arranged so neatly on my door-side table only a couple days earlier was sticking out of her chest, and blood curlicued down her side and puddled on the hardwood floor.
My breath gurgled on the bile that rose in my throat, and I jumped back onto the sidewalk. But I didn’t get the door closed fast enough.
That was why Mike Homolka was able to get a couple dozen photos of Kate’s body and a couple dozen more of me, staring in horror and screaming like a banshee.
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BUTTON HOLED
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / September 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Connie Laux.
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ISBN : 978-1-101-55113-4
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PRIME CRIME
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For David,
who never pictured himself
at button shows or button museums,
but who is always along for the ride!
Chapter One
HERE’S THE THING ABOUT WALKING INTO YOUR BUTTON shop at five in the morning and running smack into a hulk of a guy wearing a black ski mask: it tends to catch a girl a little off guard.
Off guard, I sucked in a breath that was half surprise, half gasp of terror; and just inside the door of the Button Box, I froze.
For exactly two seconds.
That was when my instincts kicked in. No big surprise, they told me to turn and run like hell.
I would have done it, too, if there wasn’t another guy—the twin of the giant who greeted me before I even had a chance to turn on the lights—right behind me. Even as I watched, he snapped the door closed, crossed his arms over a chest the size of Soldier Field, and braced his legs. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. The message was loud and painfully clear—no way I was going to escape in that direction.
Trapped, my heart pounded a furious rhythm, and my blood whooshed inside my head. There was no use screaming. Five in the morning, remember. And even though my shop had only been open for a week and I had yet to meet all my fellow merchants in the other converted brownstones there in Old Town, I was pretty sure nobody but me loved their jobs so much that they came into work before the sun was up.
Too bad. At least if somebody was around to find it, my body wouldn’t lie there for hours until my assistant, Brina Martingale, decided to show up. She’d be late—as usual—and I was betting that by then, I’d be stone-cold and as gray as the twinset I was wearing that day with my best pair of black pants.
Oh yeah, things looked pretty grim. I told myself panic would get me nowhere, and while I was at it, I reminded myself that if I just stayed calm, I’d find a way out of this mess. It couldn’t/wouldn’t/shouldn’t be a stretch. After all, I am notoriously levelheaded, composed, and oh-so sensible.
Levelheaded, composed, and sensible, huh?
I did my best to ignore the mocking voice inside my head. The one that sounded a whole bunch like my ex and reminded me that what were clearly assets to me added up to a big ol’
b-o-r-i-n-g
from his point of view.
And that’s when it hit.
And that’s when I groaned.
It was the first sound any of us had made, and in the deathlike silence, my groan reverberated through the shop like a voice from the grave.
So not a pretty simile considering the situation.
Rather than think about it, I looked from Giant #1 to Giant #2.
“Come on, guys,” I said, and reminding myself of the above-mentioned assets, I skirted the edges of whiny. But just barely. “I know what this is about. It’s Kaz, isn’t it? Damn the man! He owes somebody money. Again. But here’s the thing, see—we’re not married anymore. Get it? I divorced the turkey almost a year ago. Which means I’m no longer responsible for his gambling debts. So if you came here expecting me to make good on his bad luck, it’s not going to happen. And if you think you’re going to find something valuable here that you can take and pawn, you’re wasting your time.”
Oh, yes, this last bit was a big, fat lie, but then, I was counting on the fact that goons in black ski masks don’t know that much about antique and collectible buttons. Besides, desperate times, desperate measures, and all that.
“I sell buttons,” I pointed out, and I downplayed the whole antique and collectible aspect by adding, “Nothing but old buttons. There’s not one thing here that’s worth very much, and—”
“Shut up!” The guy behind me shuffled closer, and just that fast, my false bravado melted like a dollop of whipped cream floating in a hot cup of latte. My eyes were finally adjusting to the play of light and shadow, and I looked up just in time to see Giant #1 look down at me. There was nothing about this man that wasn’t sinister, from the shoulders bigger than the antique rosewood writing desk at the back of the shop to the long and jagged scar I could see just at the place where the ski mask ended and his shirt collar began. Against the black ski mask, his eyes were sunken and menacing. “Cooperate,” he growled, with a sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger accent I knew was phony. And no less terrifying because of it. “Cooperate, and nobody will get hurt.”
He didn’t need to elaborate. When he said
nobody
, he wasn’t talking about himself or his friend.
“Nobody needs to get hurt. Not ever!” Oh yeah, that was me, all right, teetering on the edge of panic and sounding like I’d stepped straight out of some can’t-we-all-get-along protest march. I darted a look around the shop. When I left there Saturday afternoon, the place was pristine. The oak floor had been swept, the display cases gleamed, and the entire place had the clean, comfy scent of lemon furniture polish. I loved my shop, all twelve hundred square feet of it, with its antique tin ceiling and the sagey-green colored walls. I loved it so much that over the last weeks before I officially opened my door to business, I’d meticulously cataloged every one of the nearly one hundred thousand buttons in my collection and tucked them away in the old library-card-catalog file cabinets along the wall to my left. Now, the trickle of light from out on the street glinted against metal buttons and glass buttons and jeweled buttons.