Ugly As Sin (14 page)

As he lay there gazing with a sick stomach upon the mess that had become of his once-handsome features, he squeezed the handle of the nurse’s makeup mirror so tightly it broke off in his hand.

At that moment Nick vowed never to look into a mirror again.

Mirrors were hateful inventions. They existed only to torment him. He loathed them like most folks loath speeding tickets, head lice, and waiting in really long lines.

Of course, it would have been silly to suggest that he had gone a whole year-and-a-half without glancing into a reflective surface even
once
. Naturally, he caught glimpses of himself out of the corner of his eye: in his Bronco’s cracked rearview mirror, in the lenses of a stranger’s sunglasses, in the gray square of a television screen seconds before he turned it on.

One thing he made sure of, though: he
never
did it on purpose.

But so much had changed these last few days.

Nick knew he had never been a “good person.” Since returning to his hometown, though, he felt as if a great weight had lifted off of his shoulders. He was starting to think he
could
be, one day. Something akin to a “good person.”

Nick Bullman didn’t know shit about self-analysis. But he did know he was
trying
. And that had to stand for something, didn’t it, in the grand scheme of things?

At last, he had confronted his inner fiend. He decided it was long past time that he gazed upon the grotesque
outside
of himself as well.

You wanna reveal a man’s true colors, sometimes you gotta dig deep, get to the skull beneath the skin
...

It had taken a combination of over two thousand stitches and staples to fix him up. A total of six operations over a period of eight grueling months. Numerous skin grafts from his thighs, back, and buttocks...

This
was what he had to show for it all.

Dear God, it was so much worse than he ever thought.

But he might have finally learned to live with it. Since he had found something worth living
for
.

†

“Dad? You okay in there?”

A rap at the bathroom door. Nick flinched, knocked over a bottle of liquid soap. It clattered into the sink with one of Melissa’s toothbrushes.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, putting everything back where it belonged. “I’ll be right there. Sorry.”

“I was worried you might have fallen in.” Melissa’s voice was muffled through the bathroom door.

Nick took a moment to compose himself.

“Dinner’s waiting, whenever you’re ready. Um...are you sure everything’s okay?”

He turned his back on the mirror at last, quickly opened the door. As if their roles were reversed: Melissa was the parent, he was her child, and she had caught him doing something naughty. He stepped out into the hallway, wrapped his huge arms around her.

She had been drying her hands on a dishtowel prior to his embrace. When he released her, she said, “What was that for?”

“Nothing.” He wiped a smear of pasta sauce from her cheek, licked it off his thumb. “Let’s eat.”

†

The apartment’s dining area consisted of an old cherrywood table sitting in one corner of the living room. The table’s surface was scarred with deep gouges that suggested an axe murderer might have used it for practice at some point.

Melissa apologized as she and her father sat.

“This is wonderful,” said Nick. “Don’t be sorry.”

He noticed she had set a third place at the head of the table: silverware, a salad bowl, a dish with a small helping of lasagna in the center. As if for a guest-of-honor who had not yet arrived.

She caught him looking at the empty chair. “It’s silly, I know.”

“Not at all,” he said.

“It’s something I have to do. I always make a plate for her. Even though I end up throwing it out when I’m done. But I can’t help it. I refuse to think of her in the past tense, you know? I won’t. ’Cause that would be giving up.”

“I understand.”

She sat there for a few more seconds, staring at Sophie’s plate.

Finally, she snapped out of it. She picked up her fork, nodded toward the mound of lasagna in front of him. “Dig in.”

Nick did. And after only several bites he decided that he had never eaten anything more delicious. He knew now why Sophie couldn’t get enough of her mother’s lasagna, why she had asked for it night after night. The kid had great taste.

Nick watched Melissa pick at her salad, sip at her bottle of beer. Every so often she moved her lasagna around on her plate. Mostly, though, she just drank beer.

For the next several minutes they ate in silence, save for Etta James in the background, the clinking of forks on dishware, and Nick’s satisfied crunching/smacking (he tried his best to control it, but with no lips this was a feat easier said than done).

“Well?” Melissa said. “I’m assuming you like it?”

“
Like
it? This is fantastic, hon.”

She glanced toward the untouched plate at the head of the table again, looked like she was about to say something else, but then returned her attention to her own meal.

Outside the apartment’s single window, the day slowly died. A train passed on the tracks below.

About the time he set his silverware down, belched into one fist and rested his elbows on the tabletop, Melissa spoke again. As if she’d been thinking about this all along and decided she’d better say what was on her mind while she had the chance.

“Did you know I came to see you while you were in the hospital?”

Nick was stunned. “What?”

“I came to see you. Twice, actually. The first time was right after I heard about what those men did to you. I was at work. I saw the news on the TV above the bar. I borrowed some money from my boss that night, took the red-eye down to Amarillo.”

Nick said, “Oh, baby...”

“The second time, you were at Duke. It was after one of your surgeries.”

“I had no idea. I never knew—”

“Both times you were fast asleep. I didn’t stay long. I asked them not to tell you that I came. I don’t know why.”

Nick’s dinner sat heavy in his stomach, like a pile of soggy mulch. He hung his head, ran one hand over his prickly gray buzzcut. “I can’t believe you
cared
.”

Melissa reached across the table to touch her father’s hand. “You look like you could use another beer.”

“Or ten,” he said.

She laughed. As she headed for the kitchen, she called over her shoulder, “I’ll bring the whole case, how’s that? I might even help you finish it off.”

“You’re a big girl. I won’t try to stop you.”

On the CD player, Etta James crooned:
“Cling to me, Daddy, and I’ll be strong...we’ll get along...”

The song couldn’t have been more appropriate. Nick felt a bone-deep chill.

He wondered if Melissa felt it too.

†

His brain felt like it was slamming against the inside of his skull with every beat of his heart. At first, opening his eyes was pure agony, thanks to a beam of bright morning sunlight that stabbed through a gap in the curtains, spotlighting him square in the face.

A foul taste filled his mouth, coated the back of his throat. This conjured mental images of another intruder breaking into his room in the middle of the night...this time, however, the culprit was interested not in killing Nick Bullman, but making him the victim of a vile prank. ’Cause damned if it didn’t taste like someone had squatted over him while he slept, taken a big greasy dump down his gullet.

Nick swallowed, winced. Rubbed at his throbbing temples.

“Christ Almighty...”

The way he felt this morning, he might have been out on the road again, just ten or twelve hours after a Last Man Standing match with some stiff worker like Chris “The Cannibal” Cartman or Vesuvius.

“Idiot. Guy your age ought to know better.”

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been hungover.

After they had called it a night at Melissa’s place, he had driven back to his motel room sporting a considerable buzz. While he hadn’t been anywhere close to shitfaced, there was no doubt in Nick’s mind that he would have woken up this morning wearing an orange jumpsuit, size 4X, if Polk County’s Finest had pulled him over. This brought to mind the tragedy that had befallen a friend of his several years ago. A star-on-the-rise named William Denny—“Billy All-American” in the ring—had gone out to a bar one night after his divorce was finalized and drank himself into oblivion. On his way home, Denny’s Charger had crossed over the median and struck a minivan head-on. For the rest of his life, he had to live with the fact that he had killed a woman and her eight-year-old daughter. Nick shuddered as he remembered his friend—a grown man who could bench-press twice his own body weight—bawling like a baby from behind bars. He remembered how Billy All-American had once ranked among the most beloved “babyfaces” in the Biz...but now the marks’ red-white-and-blue-clad hero might never have existed at all. His was a name no longer mentioned by the Global Wrestling Association, lest it tarnish the brand’s reputation.

Nick forced his mind back to the present, shook his head in self-disgust. “Could’ve been you, asshole...”

As for Melissa, she’d gotten so drunk she passed out on her sofa. Nick figured it had been a long time coming, with everything on her mind these last few weeks; he couldn’t begrudge her this one night of drowning her problems with alcohol. Before he left her apartment, he had covered her with an old wool blanket draped over the back of the couch. He sat there staring at his daughter for ten or fifteen minutes before finally staggering outside to his Bronco.

Now he shook his head again, swung his legs over the side of the bed. He wiped crusty sleep-stuff from the corner of his right eye. Shot a glance at the clock on the nightstand: 8:48 a.m.

The phone rang.

The sound was like shards of broken glass stabbing through his eardrums, digging through the meat of his brain.

He reached over, knocked the phone off its cradle. Stifling a burp that threatened to turn into something worse, he bent to retrieve the dangling receiver.

“What is it?” he growled into the phone.

“Mr. Bullman? ’Morning.”

“Sheriff.”

“I’m calling to tell you that it looks like we might finally have a lead.”

Nick stood, too quickly. He swayed on his feet.

“Last night around one a.m.,” Mackey said, “a drugstore about nine miles from here was broken into. A small, family-owned place called Boden & Sons, in Tryon.”

Nick paced back and forth. The phone’s cord stretched tight between the receiver in his hand and its cradle on the nightstand.

“He came in through the back. Busted out a window. He knew exactly what he was looking for, never even touched the register.”

The sheriff didn’t have to tell Nick what the burglar had been after. The big man knew. Instantly. It was an act of desperation, this robbery. But it wasn’t one of those drugstore smash-and-grabs you read about in the papers—some punk looking to score a few bottles of Oxycontin or Xanax. He remembered what Melissa had told him that day at the diner, about how her daughter suffered from epilepsy, and the medication Sophie took to keep her seizures at bay...

“Lamictal.”

“Got it in one,” said the sheriff. “Son-of-a-bitch cleaned out their entire supply.”

Who
are
these people?
Nick wondered.
They obviously don’t mind
killing
to achieve their goals...so why do they appear to be taking such good
care
of Sophie? What do they want her for?

Every possible answer to those questions made Nick feel like vomiting. And not because of his hangover. He covered his mouth with a fist.

“Here’s where it gets good,” said the sheriff. “The store has a single security camera, above the register. It’s wired into a computer in an office in the back. After hours, the camera is set to record only when it detects movement.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Nick. “You got him on video.”

“I’m telling you he practically
posed
for us.”

“I’ll be damned,” Nick said again.

“There is, uh, one more thing.”

“Shoot.”

“It’s gonna sound crazy. But I saw it with my own two eyes.”

Mackey hesitated.

“Mr. Bullman...if I didn’t know better, I’d think the man on that video was the same man who tried to kill you at the Sunrise Motor Lodge. The man we both watched get
zipped up in a body bag
, and loaded into the back of that ambulance.”

†

“Holy shit! Yeah, I’ve seen him. I
have
seen that dude!”

Leon had been slouching in a chair in one corner of Nick’s room, his yellow moped helmet in his lap. But suddenly he sat up straight, as if an electric current had shot through his lanky frame. The helmet tumbled onto the floor.

“That’s him alright. Sure as I’m sittin’ here.”

Several hours after their morning chat, Sheriff Mackey had called Nick again, this time to inform him that the video footage recorded at Boden & Sons’ Pharmacy would be airing on Channel 13’s
News At 6
. Nick had dialed up Leon right away, insisting that he watch the broadcast; maybe he would recognize the man from the drugstore. Of course, Nick wasn’t surprised to learn that Leon had pawned his own TV a while back. So he told him to come to the MountainView Motel, and they would watch the news together.

“Don’t be late,” he had strongly suggested.

Leon obliged, puttering up on his moped a few minutes before six p.m. He wore acid-washed jeans and a T-shirt from a band called Your Kid’s On Fire.

As the eight-second clip was replayed, a pretty young reporter explained what had happened at Boden & Sons’ Pharmacy in Tryon the night before. While specific details regarding what was stolen had not yet been disclosed, she said, local authorities were asking citizens for help identifying this man who might be connected to the disappearance of Sophie Lynn Suttles. At this point an image of the missing teen—the same photo Nick carried in his Bronco—flashed across the screen, but Sophie’s face was there and gone so fast it was barely more than a subliminal suggestion.