All Shook Up Read Online Free PDF Page B

up to had turned into something that felt a helluva lot like foreplay.
    He straightened in his seat. Jesus, man, are you out of your mind? He’d been blowing smoke when he told her he lived to get something for nothing, but that’s exactly what he’d been given—and how often did that happen to a guy like him? He planned to make this opportunity work for him. Playing I-know-I-can-make-you-want-it-as-much-as-I-do games with his new partner was not the way to go about it, and he was not screwing this up.
    God knew there was nothing left for him in Seattle. Not even Butch, who had always been the closest thing he’d had to family.
    And yet…
    Standing, J.D. dug his phone card out of his wallet and walked over to the pay phone by the rest rooms. Even if things weren’t the same between them, he should at least let Butch know where he was, and give him a number in case the cops needed to get in touch with him.
    He and Butch had gone through the foster system together when they were kids; they had even occasionally ended up in one of the group homes at the same time. But it was out on the streets, where they’d bothspent far too much time, that they’d gotten to know each other best. And just before J.D.’s sixteenth birthday, Butch had saved his ass from a headlong spill off the roof of a building they’d been messing around on.
    It didn’t matter that the game responsible for the near-accident had been instigated by Butch; it was understood that, from that day forward, J.D. owed him. Their corner of the city had rigid codes about these things, and it wasn’t uncommon for a running score to be kept of who owed what to whom. The law might be an unwritten one, but it was ironclad.
    So J.D. had appreciated all the more that Butch had never tried to collect on their old debt. It was a rare quality in their neighborhood, and it had always meant a lot to J.D. that his friend hadn’t even seemed to realize he had a marker that could be called in at any time.
    Then, last week, Butch had disabused him of the notion.
    J.D. almost hung up the phone then and there, but dogged perseverance made him punch out the remaining two numbers. It wasn’t like he hadn’t always known, somewhere in the back of his mind, that his credit could be called in at any time. But he’d still felt disillusioned when Butch actually did it. It changed the tenor of their friendship.
    Dammit, this was a mistake. J.D. started to hang up, but the phone at the other end of the line was picked up. “Yell-oh!”
    Suddenly hearing Butch’s voice raised a morass of conflicting emotions, and for a moment J.D. didn’t say anything. Butch had always been so many things that he was not. He was a fun guy to be around, for starters.Even as a kid, he’d been quick with a joke and even quicker with ideas for entertaining ways to pass the time. Grown up, he’d maintained a knack for making people laugh that J.D. envied.
    He was one of those guys to whom people just naturally gravitated. Women loved his ass, and it didn’t seem to matter that he was married to the Psycho Bitch from Hell, who’d snatch any woman bald-headed she caught throwing so much as a sideways glance his way.
    “ What? ” Butch’s impatient voice broke into his reverie. “You got something to say, spit it out. I don’t have time for this sh—”
    “Hey,” J.D. said. “It’s me.”
    “ J.D. ?”
    “Yeah.”
    There was an instant of dead silence. Then: “Where the hell are you, man? I tried to call you, but your line’s been disconnected, and when I went by your crib it looked deserted, but I couldn’t tell if that was permanent or if you were just out for the day.”
    He sounded agitated, and J.D. heard rustling and crackling over the line. He could picture Butch pouring his change from hand to hand, the way he did when he was nervous.
    A small kernel of unease unfurled in J.D.’s gut. “I gave the place up—it was time for a change.”
    “Yeah? So where are you?”
    There