Ugly As Sin (6 page)

“Lamictal. Twice a day, every day.”

Melissa started sobbing again.

Around them, the sounds of the restaurant seemed a million miles away now: silverware clinking against dishes...the gurgle of a coffeemaker...the
thwap
of a spatula slapping meat patties on the grill.

Nick sighed, rubbed at the stubble beneath his misshapen chin. His five o’clock shadow started low, halfway down his neck, as his disfigured face was completely hairless, like a plot of scorched earth where not even a single weed could survive.

“I’m assuming I’m here ’cause you want to me to try to find her,” he said. “You think there’s something I can do that the law can’t?”

“I was hoping you could talk to some people who might not give the police the time of day,” Melissa said. “If the cops don’t intimidate them...maybe you can.”

“Maybe,” said Nick.

“It’s been three weeks since Sophie disappeared. The cops are clueless. But I know she’s alive. I can feel it. She’s just waiting for us to come save her.”

“Melissa...”

“Will you try? Please? That’s all I’m asking. Will you
try
to find my baby?”

Nick took a deep breath, let it out slowly.

“Please,” she said again.

“I’ll do what I can.”

Even as the words fell from his mouth he had no idea what they meant. And he feared he might regret them.

“You need to understand, though: I’m not the police. I’m not some private dick. These days I’m just a bouncer with a bum knee and a fucked-up face. Used to be a grappler, so I had a few moves once upon a time. I doubt I’ve got those anymore. The last thing I wanna do is get your hopes up, sweetheart. Promise me you won’t get your hopes up.”

“I won’t,” she said.

“Sounds like your boyfriend was mixed up in some bad business. I might look like something out of a horror flick, but I go pushing my weight around, trying to get answers from people who don’t wanna give them, somebody else could get hurt.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Tell me how to get to Eddie’s place.”

“You remember the old train depot just outside of Midnight?”

Nick remembered it well. Once, after a fight with his father when he was twelve, he had decided to run away from home. Packing a bag lunch and his life’s savings at the time (five dollars), he had set out to ride the nation’s rails like a hobo, embarking on nomadic adventures with no parents telling him what he could and couldn’t do. He got as far as the Polk County Train Depot before he chickened out, hightailing it back home into the arms of his distraught mother.

Melissa said, “Just past the depot, you’ll see Gorman Gap Road on your right. After about a mile you’ll pass an old church. There’s a cow pasture, then Eddie’s is the first house on the left. His name’s on the mailbox: Whiteside. You can’t miss it. There’s still police tape everywhere.”

“Got it.”

Nick slid out of the booth. He could feel everyone in the restaurant staring at him as he stood. Once again, he ignored them.

“You’re going out there right now?” Melissa asked him.

“Can’t think of a better place to start.”

†

Since the night Sophie disappeared, Melissa had been renting an apartment on the edge of town. She insisted Nick come stay with her, but he didn’t feel comfortable with the thought of moving in even temporarily with his adult daughter, the fact that they were practically strangers notwithstanding. After leaving Annie’s Country Diner, he drove to the Sunrise Motor Lodge off North Main, where he rented a room for a week. It wasn’t the fanciest joint in the world, but it would do in a bind.

Melissa gave him her phone number, a key to the house she had shared with Eddie, and a wallet-sized photo of her daughter.

She begged him to be careful. He promised her he could take care of himself.

As they left the diner, Nick noticed the flyers up and down the block: stapled to telephone poles, taped to storefronts. He hadn’t paid them any attention on his way into town but now they were impossible to miss. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? read the caption at the top, above a black-and-white reproduction of the photo Melissa had given him. Beneath that: SOPHIE LYNN SUTTLES/AGE 14/MISSING SINCE JUNE 26, followed by a contact number for the Polk County Sheriff’s Department.

Nick and his daughter embraced as the patrons of Annie’s Country Diner watched through the restaurant’s windows. Overhead, out front of the Sheriff’s Department, the U.S. and North Carolina-state flags flapped and clanked against their pole like the voice of the town itself warning Nick that he could do no good here.

Just before he climbed into his Bronco, and she into her green Camry parked on the opposite side of the street, Nick looked back to see Melissa glaring at their audience. If she’d been packing, he was quite sure she would have opened fire on every last one of them.

“Oh, take a fucking picture,” she said.

He told her, “Hang around me long enough, hon, you’re gonna have to get used to that.”

†

Nick popped his favorite album, a collection of old blues tunes, into the Bronco’s CD player. The hairs on the nape of his neck stood up as Lightnin’ Hopkins sang of going back home:
“Well, you know this ain’t no place for me, and I don’t think po’ Lightnin’ wanna stay...”

As he drove out of Midnight’s town proper and into the countryside bordering Polk County, Nick passed a few of his old haunts, and he wondered what had become of others: places like Storch’s Rim, where he had lost his virginity at the age of fifteen...the graffiti bridge near Junction 108, beneath which he had sipped his first beer and toked on his first joint...that secret spot in the Snake River Woods where he used to throw pennies into an old well, wishing he could one day be rich and famous just like his idol, Elvis. He nearly grew dizzy beneath the memories.

He followed Melissa’s directions without consciously thinking about them. His formative years had been spent here, and in many ways it felt as if he had left Midnight only yesterday. Before long, a crooked old one-room church zipped by in his peripheral vision, then a sprawling green pasture in which eight or nine fat black cows grazed behind a barbed-wire fence.

Nick maneuvered the Bronco around a deep curve, and his destination was upon him.

He turned down the music.

The house was small, beige with brown trim. Its gravel driveway was littered with the glistening green fragments of a broken beer bottle. A propane grill leaned against one side of the house. Ribbons of yellow crime-scene tape crisscrossed the front porch (“NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF POLK COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPT”). At some point a strip of it had come loose; it dangled from the spidery branches of a dead rosebush in the middle of the yard, snapping and popping in the afternoon breeze. A thick copse of trees lined the rear of the property like a crowd of curious bystanders hoping to catch a glimpse of something gruesome.

Nick stared down at the photo of his granddaughter that Melissa had given him. Before pulling out of his parking space back at the diner, he had placed the picture on his dashboard next to the Bronco’s speedometer.

The teenager’s eyes were a radiant blue. Like his own. Her round face showed a hint of the chubby child she must have been at one time. Her dark brown hair was trimmed in a pageboy style. She wore a maroon leather jacket over a gray T-shirt, a Celtic cross necklace. The corners of her mouth were turned up in a mischievous grin, as if Sophie knew a secret that could tear this town apart.

Nick wondered what she was like. If she was safe. If he would soon be blessed with the opportunity to get to know his granddaughter, or if it was already too late.

A horn honked.

He glanced in the Bronco’s cracked rearview mirror, saw a sour-faced man in a dusty VW bug behind him.

He threw up one hand, quickly pulled over to the shoulder.

The man tooted his horn again. As the Beetle puttered on down the road, Nick noticed a faded bumper sticker on its back window: JESUS IS COMING, R U READY? He wondered if it was
that
appointment the guy had been so afraid he’d miss.

He killed the Bronco’s ignition.

Wondered why he was here.

What the hell did he plan to do now? What was he looking for, exactly? He didn’t have a clue. But he had promised Melissa he would try.

He leaned over, scrounged around in the glove compartment until he found an old pair of work gloves. They had been crammed down in there ever since he first bought the Bronco secondhand, and he had never gotten around to throwing them out. He slid them into his back pocket, just in case (he was about to go snooping around a
crime scene
, after all).

He climbed out of the Bronco. Pulled back his hood. His shaved scalp and gnarled forehead were slick with sweat.

He crossed the road and stepped onto the overgrown lawn. The high grass whispered against his shins. It had rained here recently; the air smelled of mud and, faintly, manure from the pasture down the road.

Nick took the three steps leading up to the porch in a single stride, ducking through a gap in the police tape to access the front door.

He dug into his pocket for the key Melissa had given him.

But then his breath caught in his throat.

At one time, more of that yellow crime-scene tape had been stretched across the threshold to warn away the curious. Now it lay in a pile at Nick’s feet, like a dead snake.

The door was ajar. The lock had been busted.

Nick gently pushed on the door, forcing it open just far enough so he could enter by turning sideways. He wondered if he should announce his presence, call out to whomever might still be in the house. No...he decided it would be best to keep the element of surprise in his favor till he knew what he was up against.

He stepped through a small living room, past a recliner, a loveseat, and a coffee table stained with old cup-rings. The house was dark. It had that stale “closed-in” odor of a place that has been empty of any human presence for a while, a smell that was not too strong but still slightly unpleasant. Against one wall stood a widescreen TV and a tall potted plant that had starved to death weeks ago.

In the hallway that connected the living room to the rear of the house, the beige carpet was matted with an ugly maroon blotch. The stain spread out approximately three feet in diameter, but did not stop at the baseboard; it climbed several inches up the wall in a starburst pattern. Dozens of black dots speckled the wall as well—damage left by the spray of shotgun pellets.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that this was the spot where Eddie had been murdered.

Nick swallowed a foul taste in his mouth, stepped over the stain.

...and he heard a loud
THUMP
toward the back of the house.

He froze.

Another
THUD
, followed by a muffled curse.

He wished he had a weapon. Thought about going back for the tire iron in his truck. Tried not to think about the possibility that he might be creeping up on a trigger-happy cop.

He took another cautious step forward.

He had never realized how difficult it was for a guy his size to
sneak
. Of course, with the exception of a crude storyline in the early days of his “feud” with Big Bubba Bad-Ass—he had “broken into” Eric’s house, and as the marks booed him on the Widowmaker “planted video cameras” throughout his enemy’s home: in a bedroom, the shower, everywhere Big Bubba shared intimate moments with his bikini-model wife—Nick Bullman had never had any
reason
to sneak around. He feared that his every step could be heard all the way back in Midnight. He imagined the customers in Annie’s Country Diner holding on to their seats, staring wide-eyed at the ripples in their coffee each time one of his Size 16 boots touched the floor.

He sucked in a deep breath, held it as he moved through the house: past a cluttered utility room...a bathroom so tiny he suspected he’d get stuck if he tried to turn around in there...and a bedroom decorated with posters of brooding, black-clad rock stars. The latter, he assumed, was where his granddaughter once slept.

Again he heard movement. It came from the master bedroom up ahead, on his right. Sounded like someone searching for something—drawers being yanked open, footsteps pacing back and forth. And, every few seconds, exasperated curses in a thick Southern accent...

“Dammit, you gotta be in here somewhere!”

Nick slid along the wall, inching closer, until he stood just three or four feet from the open doorway of the master bedroom.

A floorboard creaked beneath his boot.

The noises abruptly ceased.

Nick mouthed a breathless curse. He stood statue-still. Waiting, listening. Wishing again that he had a weapon...

After for what felt like forever, he again moved toward the bedroom.

He risked a glance through the doorway.

Clothes were tangled and strewn all over the floor. On the king-sized bed lay jagged pieces of a shattered acoustic guitar. A lamp dangled off a nightstand, its cord stretched taut. Against the wall to Nick’s right stood a large mirrored dresser; half of its drawers hung open, the other half were dumped upside-down on the floor.

Nick stepped into the bedroom.

He was alone. But how...?

At the back of the room a thin doorway opened onto another small bathroom. A rectangle of evening sunlight bled through a frosted-glass window above the toilet. He wondered if whomever had been making all that racket had escaped through that window. Impossible. It appeared to be merely decorative, and was just slightly wider than a cereal box.

Which meant that the intruder had to
still be in this room
—

A
slosh
ing noise behind him. In the mirror above the dresser: a glimpse of wild, bloodshot eyes. A
man
, moving fast. Something big and box-shaped (and filled with
water
?) hefted above his head.

Nick turned. Too late.

The CRASH was louder than anything he had ever heard. Felt like a damn
planet
dropped on top of his skull, as his senses were assaulted by an explosion of wet, stink, and pain.