“Yeah, great. Well hold on ta’ somethin’ anyway.”
“Come on, Ben. What’s with the melodrama?”
“Payback’s a bitch.”
“What?”
“You kept me waitin’, I’m just returnin’ the favor.”
I shook my head and let out a heavy sigh. “I already said I’m sorry. What more do you want?”
“You gettin’ pissed at me yet?”
“I think you can safely say that I am, yeah. Why?”
“‘Cause that’s what I wanted. Like I said, payback.”
“Then I think you can consider the debt cleared,” I told him. “Now do you actually have something to tell me, or is this all just part of your grand plan?”
“Actually, I do have somethin’. Figured you mighta heard it on the news, but I guess not…”
“I haven’t seen any news since I left Saint Louis, so you guess correctly.”
“Yeah, well like I said, brace yourself. It looks like your evil sis-in-law is at it again.”
CHAPTER 2:
I was suddenly feeling very ill. Under different circumstances I would have blamed the acidic churn in my gut on the healthy dose of aspirin I’d swallowed only a few minutes before. However, the sour nausea was accompanied by hollowness in the pit of my stomach that told me this was a different kind of sick. It was the queasiness that bore its way into your intestines at right about the moment you realized you had seriously screwed up.
Whether I wanted to admit it or not, my impromptu trip here to New Orleans had been born only partly of logic and reason. The majority of the impetus was pure emotion that I had been all too willing to ascribe to gut instinct without really giving it any serious thought. What I realized now was that any of the calculating and planning I had done was probably nothing more than the inner ramblings of someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The truth is, I probably belonged in a hospital bed in the psych ward right next to my wife’s.