Button Holed by Kylie Logan Read Free Book Online Page B

walked away. He was watching me from in front of the blues club two doors down. The only thing I could do was go into the shop and hope that by the time Kate arrived, it wouldn’t look like my problem.
    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, which 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 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.

Chapter Four

    “GOOD THING MANKOWSKI DOWN AT THE END OF THE street remembered me. Otherwise, I never would have been able to get near this place.”
    I heard Stan’s voice just a nanosecond before a Starbucks cup appeared right under my nose. The unmistakable aroma of Caffè Misto streamed out of the little hole on the to-go lid, tickling my senses and coaxing me back to reality.
    “Drink.” The cup was in my hand before I could respond, and Stan was looking at me over it. “I put plenty of sugar in it. You know, to help with the shock.”
    Shock.
    Now that he put a name to it, what I was feeling made sense: the numbness that coiled in my stomach and made my arms and legs feel as if they were made of lead, my clammy skin, the way my breaths were so fast and so shallow that I wheezed like I had a five-pack-a-day habit.
    “Go on; take a sip.” Somehow, Stan understood that expecting me to accomplish something even that simple was akin to asking me to leap tall buildings in a single bound. He reached over, popped the lid off the coffee cup, and put a hand under mine to lift it to my mouth. “It will make you feel better, kiddo. I promise.”
    I wasn’t sure anything ever could, but I knew Stan; he wasn’t going to let me off the hook. A sip, and I felt some of the tightness in my chest uncurl. Another, and I somehow managed to draw in a long, slow breath.
    “There you go.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Keep it up and you’ll be feeling like yourself in no time.”
    “Can you promise that, too?” My voice was gravel. We were outside the shop on the park bench near the street, but the door was open, and I looked past Stan to the commotion that was once my tidy button emporium. The last hour or so was pretty much a blur. I sort of remembered jumping back out on the sidewalk, scrambling for my cell phone, and—for the second time in less than a week—dialing 911. I had a vague recollection of Brina and Dr. Levine, the optometrist who occupied the brownstone directly across from me, racing across the street at the sound of my screaming, of the cops arriving, of the questions and the confusion. I had a foggy sort of flashback that included all of us being told to wait outside and stay out of the way.
    The memory of Kate’s body on the floor of the Button Box, her blood pooling around her—that was as clear as day, and something I would never forget.
    I shivered.
    Stan draped a Cubs sweatshirt over my shoulders and gruffly explained away the kindness. “I had it in the car. I figured I might as well bring it with me.”
    “But how . . .”