Thirty-Two and a Half Complications
Page 69

“What?” Samantha Jo asked. “What are you? Some kind of pervert?” She stomped toward the trailer.
I stumbled backward and turned to Neely Kate, who was staring at me with wide eyes. She’d clearly cottoned to what had happened.
Carla glanced from Neely Kate to me as Moose ran after his girlfriend. “Well, anybody with any sense in their head knows they’re gonna have sex later.” She shrugged, unconcerned. “It’s what they do.”
The buffalo wings in my stomach started a protest.
“It’s no surprise she didn’t take to your comfort. She hasn’t been herself lately,” Carla said. “She’s been meaner than a one-eyed snake.”
“Lately,” David snorted, then choked, leaning forward and coughing.
Neely Kate rolled her eyes. “And with that we’ll be goin’…”
She had started walking back to the car, dragging me with her, as Moose stormed back to his vehicle, his phone in his hand. I overheard him as he got into his car. “If I stay with this bitch much longer, I’m gonna kill her and that ain’t no lie.” He door slammed shut, muffling his voice.
When I got into Neely Kate’s car, she was clutching the steering wheel, shaking. “Did what I think just happened actually happen?” she whispered.
“If it’s that I just forced a vision of Samantha Jo and she and Moose were about to have sex, then yes, that’s exactly what happened.” Unable to contain my nausea any longer, I opened the car door, leaned out, and vomited on the dead grass.
I sat back up and shut the door. “I’m never doin’ that again.”
Neely Kate had the sense to be quiet for a moment. “So…that didn’t go exactly according to plan…”
“You think?”
“Okay, calm down. It could have been worse.”
“How could it have been worse? Did you see Moose naked?”
“But they didn’t actually have sex?”
“No, thank God, but it was really close.”
“So I can’t ask if he was any good.”
“Neely Kate!”
“Moose has really big feet, and I’ve heard guys with big feet have big—”
“Drive.”
She turned to look toward the trailer, her eyes narrowing. “She was really rude to you. I feel like going in there and snatchin’ her bald.”
“Neely Kate, go.”
“At least tell me if she was wearing one of them fake leather bustiers from Frederick’s of Hollywood.”
“Neely Kate!”
“Fine! Jeez, Louise,” she grumbled as she turned the key and started the engine. “You never tell me the good stuff.”
Neely Kate didn’t say anything else until she was heading out of the trailer park. “I think she did it.”
“You’re only saying that because she was mean to me. She didn’t do it, but she may very well have been a part of it. Moose started dating her around the time she started to work at the bank and she didn’t want to talk about the robbery.”
“Although that part may have been because she didn’t like you.”
“Well…that’s true.” I twisted my mouth to the side. “And what about her shopping trip the day the bank was robbed?”
“As much as I hate to defend her,” Neely Kate grumbled, “she may have been stress shopping.”
“True. But Moose was groveling with her to her face, then threatening to kill her out of earshot.”
“Yeah. So was Moose the guy you had the vision of? It seems logical.” She turned to me and grinned. “Too bad he wasn’t naked in the vision this morning. You know, so you could compare.”
“Shut up, Neely Kate,” I grumbled, but then I couldn’t help laughing.
Neely Kate’s hand twisted back and forth on the steering wheel. “So David took the hats from the Piggly Wiggly and Moose took some of them. Is there any chance Moose and Mick are the same person?”
I shook my head. “No. I’m certain of that, but he could have been the guy from church whose head I was in.”
“So Moose gets the caps, takes them to his buddies, they rob the bank, but what do they need the money for?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I think we need to take a think break.” She pushed out a huff. “Plus I’m hungry. Let’s get ice cream.”
I laughed. “Is that what I have to look forward to if I’m pregnant? Alternating between barfing and eating?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“I just threw up less than five minutes ago,” I protested.
She turned to me and playfully lifted an eyebrow. “So…ice cream?”
I checked my phone for any messages from Mason, and was disappointed when I saw none. While I was eager to get home, if Mason wasn’t there, I’d go stir-crazy wondering where he was. I’d rather hang out with Neely Kate. And at least we seemed to be making some progress. “Sure.”
She drove to the Burger Shack, which was in better structural shape than Big Bill’s Barbeque. The paint job was worse, if that was possible. The Sunday afternoon crowd had thinned since it was two o’clock, so we walked right up to the counter.
No one was at the register, but one of the four guys from church—Eric—stood in the opening to the kitchen, talking on the phone.
“You came here because of him,” I whispered.