Button Holed
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
BUTTONS 101
BOXWOOD BUTTONS
Teaser chapter
By hook or by crook?
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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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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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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.
Drawer after drawer of them, removed from the cabinets, dumped on the glass-topped display cases over on my right.
And on the two wingback chairs in front of my desk.
And on the floor.
Just like that, my fear was forgotten, and the button-collecting, order-loving, chaos-avoiding side of me kicked in. So did the memory of how much effort it had taken to get all those buttons moved from my apartment here to the shop and how many hours I’d spent getting everything organized and looking just so.
“Damn! Do you have any idea how long it took me to put those buttons away? You can’t just toss them around. Old, remember, I said they were old. Which doesn’t mean they’re worth anything,” I added, reinforcing my earlier assertion that there wasn’t anything there worth stealing. “But buttons are little pieces of art, you know. And little chunks of history. They have to be treated carefully. Bad enough I’ve got to deal with Brina all day long. The girl doesn’t know a glass button from a gumball. And now I’ve got this mess to clean up, too? And today! Today of all days! What gives you the right to—”
“Is there some part of shut up you don’t understand?” This came from Giant #2, the same guy who’d told me to keep quiet in the first place. He came up behind me so fast, I didn’t have a chance to try and get out of his way. Once his arm went around my throat, I couldn’t have moved if I wanted to. His grip was iron. He yanked me back against a body that felt as if it was made out of poured concrete.
“I said keep quiet.” The touch of his breath against my ear turned my knees to rubber—and not in the good way that kind of thing happened back in the day when Kaz whispered sweet nothin’s and I turned into a puddle of mush. This man’s breath was damp and as chilling as a touch of fog. It smelled like a food I couldn’t identify, and that, mingled with the earthy scent of his black leather jacket, sent shock waves through me.
He took advantage of my helplessness to ratchet up my fear, tightening his hold. “You put up a fight and you’re dead,” he growled, and I guess the way he was holding me, he could feel my feeble attempt at sucking in a breath to inflate my lungs, because he made sure to add, “You scream, and I’m going to snap your little body in half so fast, you won’t know what hit you.”
Oh yeah, right about this time, I was so freakin’ scared, my mind started playing tricks on me. That was the only thing that would explain why I almost thanked him for the “little body” compliment. I mean, it was only natural considering I am a middle-sized, average-looking woman of thirty-three who had been known to be called cute but is not, on anybody’s size chart, what might be termed little.
I dragged myself out of these crazy thoughts and tried to talk myself—and these two goons—down.
“Not going to scream,” I swore. “If you guys want some help carrying buttons out to the car—”
“Buttons!” The guy who had ahold of me snorted the word and said to his friend, “You take care of everything you were supposed to?”
Giant #1 shook his head, not like he was disagreeing, but more like he couldn’t believe his fellow burglar had the nerve to ask. “You wanna tell me how I’m supposed to know?” Had he been a little less civilized, I’m pretty sure he would have emphasized his point by spitting on my newly refinished hardwood floor. His hands out at his sides, he pivoted to look around the shop. “There’s so much crap here—”
“Watch it, buddy.” I squirmed, because squirming wasn’t screaming, and all I had agreed to do was not scream. I had also not agreed to stand by and listen to my life’s work disparaged by some creep who had to hide behind a ski mask. “Those are my buttons you’re talking about. And my buttons are not crap. In fact, they are—”
Apparently, listening to me was not high on the to-do list of the guy who had ahold of me. At the end of his rope, he lifted me off the floor and shook me. Not such a good thing considering that my head snapped back and forth, and the world skipped and wobbled before my eyes. But, as it turned out, all was not lost. At the exact moment my toes touched the floor, his grip on my throat eased up.
It’s the Boy Scouts who are always prepared, right? Well, I’d obviously never been a Boy Scout. Or a Girl Scout, either, for that matter. But I knew an opportunity when I saw one, and I was as prepared as I would ever be.
The second I slipped just a bit more out of his grasp and my feet hit the floor, I folded like a cheap lawn chair in the closeout aisle. I landed on my knees before Giant #2 realized he’d lost his hold on me, and before he could snatch me up again, I took off as fast as a woman can who’s crawling across a floor strewn with buttons.
I didn’t yelp or yip, not even when I brought a knee down on a metal button. I didn’t complain, either (though I prayed it wasn’t one that was too valuable), when I heard a glass button crunch beneath me. All I did was scramble as fast as I could, trusting that the dark would cover my moves and that I knew the shop better than the two burglars ever could.
While they were shuffling around, banging into each other and the display cases as they tried to catch hold of me, I scurried like a sand crab into the back storage room, jumped to my feet, and slammed the door behind me. There was a lock in the doorknob, and I fumbled for it. No easy thing considering my fingers were slick with sweat.
Even once I’d flicked the lock, I knew it was only a matter of moments—and the inconsiderable width of one door—before I was in big trouble again. I raced to the work table, where I’d imagined never doing anything more strenuous than spending endless quiet hours researching, cleaning, and packing buttons for shipment, and it’s a good thing I wasn’t the kind of little woman the burglar had hinted I was, because I got behind that table and pushed for all I was worth. Once it was against the door, I dared to take a breath and think through my next move.
Light or no lights? In a flash, I decided I’d keep them off to buy some time in case I needed to
hide once the burglars burst through the door. Besides, I’d spent plenty of hours in the back room these last weeks since I leased the shop, and I knew the place like the back of my hand. I didn’t need the lights to grab the phone.
GOONS IN SKI masks might be pretty brave when it comes to intimidating a lone woman, but apparently, they aren’t stupid. They were long gone by the time the cops arrived, and the cops were long gone by the time Brina did me the honor of showing up.
I explained what had happened as best—and as quickly—as I could. Then I laid out my plan. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go into the bit about how this was a special day and we had a special client coming in. Brina remembered it all on her own. I knew this the moment I laid eyes on her because she’d added new (and very bright) stripes of red and pink to her inky hair, and she was wearing a black tank and a black mini that—believe it or not—were far more presentable than the holey jeans and rock-band T-shirts she usually wore. The outfit showed to perfection (and oh, how I use that term lightly) the tattooed, multicolored dragon draped over her left shoulder and the blood-red Celtic warrior spike band around her right wrist.
Somehow, even in the face of that much body art, I managed to keep focused. We needed to get the shop cleaned up, I told her. And we needed to do it fast.
“You mean you don’t want me to be careful about sorting out the buttons?”
“Not today.” I said this as I was scooping up moonglow, paperweight, and Bimini buttons all into one pile. This should have been Brina’s first clue that, for once, I was willing to relax my exacting standards when it came to my collection. Moonglow, paperweight, and Bimini buttons are all made of glass, see, but they are all different. In the best of all possible worlds, they’d never get jumbled together.