“Tell me, Lyle,” she said in a tight voice. “Do you think about your Wyoming wife late at night, too?”
“Now, darling, let’s not be catty. We have only a few minutes to talk and I’d rather not fight this time. How is Deborah doing? Is she as lovely as always?”
Chester’s horrified expression at Lyle’s words about her mother would have been comical if Ronnie wasn’t so busy grinding her teeth down to nubs to keep from calling Lyle every name she could think of at the moment.
Mississippi gave her the motion to keep Lyle talking. She didn’t know why that mattered since they weren’t tracing the call.
“Mom is fine,” she answered, lowering the phone onto the desk.
“Is she still gracing the Rapid City society pages? I thought I heard something through my attorney that she’d divorced your father due to an extramarital affair.”
What had he been smoking in prison? Her mother had been in the society pages maybe once or twice, and that was only due to being seen at one of the hoity-toity parties Ronnie had hosted for Lyle’s so-called business partners.
“Mom is remarried now and lives elsewhere.” Deborah still had Ronnie’s childhood home in Rapid City, but she couldn’t see how her mother’s life was Lyle’s business anymore.
“Remarried already?” His laughter sounded canned. “She didn’t waste time finding another sugar daddy. What about you, darling?”
If he called her “darling” one more time, she was going to hire a prison guard to jam a riot stick up his patronizing ass. “What about me?”
“Is there someone else keeping your bed warm now?”
Why did he care if she was screwing anyone or not? He’d been too busy bonking his bimbos over the last few years of their marriage to share Ronnie’s sheets.
She took another yoga breath. “Why did you want me to call you, Lyle? And don’t waste my time trying to tell me it was to catch up, because I don’t believe for a damned minute that you give a flying fuck about me and my family.”
Mississippi crossed his arms, scowling down at her.
She flipped him off with both middle fingers.
“I need a favor,” Lyle said.
Was he freaking kidding? After he’d shredded her dignity to pieces and then thrown the remaining scraps of her self-respect to the FBI sharks for further frenzied feeding all the while hiding behind his lying lawyer, the jerk wanted a favor from her?
Mississippi shook his head, apparently able to read her thoughts about reaching through the line and castrating the cocksucking, monkey-fucking bastard with her bare hands.
This time she took two yoga breaths. “And what favor would that be, Lyle?”
* * *
“You mean you actually called that sleazeball?” Natalie asked Ronnie several hours later at The Shaft while waiting for Gary the bartender to fill their drink orders.
Crudnuggets, she’d left Jackrabbit Junction for half a day and in that short time her cousin had joined Kate’s crazy train. Why on earth would Ronnie bother returning that cheating bastard’s call when he had done nothing but screw her six ways from Sunday at every turn since she’d married him?
“Shhhhh,” Ronnie said, leaning closer. “I don’t want anyone else to know about this besides Katie and you.”
“And Chester,” Natalie added. “I can’t believe you took that gossip queen with you. He’ll have it on the front page of the Yuccaville Yodeler tomorrow morning.”
“No, he won’t. He promised me he’d keep his lips sealed about this. Besides, I needed his help getting Cherry to let us use her office.”
“Why couldn’t you talk to Lyle here in Butch’s office?”
“Because I needed Mississippi to be there with me.” Ronnie’s cheek twitched several times. “I didn’t want anyone else I know to get suspicious, and the FBI is like a big red elephant in our family.”
“Red elephant?” Natalie repeated, scratching her neck. “I don’t think that’s an actual saying.”
“Whatever. You know what I mean.” Ronnie’s hand trembled as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
Natalie shifted gears. “So, Chester is good friends with the owner of Dirty Gerties, huh?”
Ronnie tittered like Aunt Deborah, a surefire warning sign that her cousin was skidding out of control. “I think she wants to be more than friends, but Chester is too nervous to sleep with her.”
Chester Thomas was nervous about sleeping with a woman? Was the world coming to an end?
“Did you tell Grady about this phone call?”
“Of course not, and you can’t either.” She held up her closed fist. “Posse promise?”
Natalie frowned, but bumped fists anyway. The secrets were piling up down here in the desert.
“It was humiliating enough to have Chester and Mississippi listening in on that phone conversation. If Grady had been there, I would have keeled over.”
“Why? What did Lyle say?”
“He sort of brought up our sex life.”
Natalie pretended to gag. “I hope you disinfected your vagina before you started sleeping with Grady.”
Ronnie wrinkled her nose in reply. “You’re one to talk after screwing around with a Mr. Clean lookalike who was banging that tattooed titty-tassel tart behind your back.”
She couldn’t help but laugh at Ronnie’s alliterative description of the tramp who’d inspired many rants after Natalie had broken up with the cockroach they’d both been screwing. That whole mess, which had seeded the sabbatical idea in her head, seemed like another lifetime.
After Natalie stopped laughing, she told Ronnie, “You should probably give Grady the short and clean version of the call, though.”
When Grady eventually found out, and Natalie had little doubt that he would somehow being that he was the sheriff, this call might cause some friction between Ronnie and him.
“What is with you and Chester and Katie all wanting me to bow at Grady’s knees and kiss his feet?”
“Uhhh, I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Just because we’re swapping bodily fluids doesn’t make him the king of my universe.” The corner of her mouth twitched several times
