Ugly As Sin (11 page)

“Leon!” he called out. “You home?”

He didn’t want to spook the little weirdo. Good way to end up...
with an aquarium dropped on your head?
Nick couldn’t help chuckling as he thought of their first encounter. The look on Leon’s face when he realized he had assaulted his hero! He wouldn’t forget that any time soon.

The stench of cow manure tickled his nostrils. From somewhere on the far side of the pasture adjacent to Leon’s property, Nick heard laughter, the stop-and-go buzz of some kids on a four-wheeler. A crow cawed from the branches of a massive oak tree, before swooping down to claim the remains of some small forest creature that had crawled under Leon’s trailer to die. As its beak dipped and tore into the carrion, the bird’s obsidian eyes watched Nick suspiciously, as if the giant human might try to make off with its prize.

Nick heard music coming from inside the trailer. He climbed the milk-crate steps, knocked on the dented front door. It swung open.

“Leon?”

He ducked through the doorway. Felt the mobile home tremble beneath his weight.

From the battered stereo system by the bar came the raucous din of death metal: squealing guitars, machine-gun drumming, and a singer who sounded like Satan himself wired on PCP.

Nick instantly had a headache. He wasted no time crossing the room, turning the music off.

“Leon?”

A shout from the opposite end of the trailer. “That you, Nick?”

“It’s me.”

“Make yourself at home!”

Nick was somehow able to find an uncluttered spot on the sofa.

“Be out in a minute, dude. You caught me droppin’ some friends off at the pool.”

“What’s that?” Nick said, distracted. He swatted at a big green fly that was buzzing around his head, bouncing off the bandage on his bicep.

“Takin’ the Browns to the Super Bowl.”

“You lost me.”

“Do I gotta spell it out for you, hoss? I’m takin’ a shit!”

Nick groaned. As if the cigarettes-and-mildew stink of this place wasn’t endearing enough already.

He heard toilet paper being rolled off its spool. Enough to last a family of six for a month, from the sound of it. The toilet flushed.

Nick shifted in his seat, breathed through his nose. “You almost done in there?”

After what felt like forever, Leon came strutting down the hall, zipping up his cut-off shorts. Today his scrawny torso was covered in a loud yellow T-shirt that read: GIMME HEAD TILL I’M DEAD.

“You ever wondered why they call it
takin’
a shit? To me that implies walkin’ away with more than you had when you started. I prefer to
leave
it. Ha!”

Nick shook his head.

Leon nodded toward the silenced stereo. “What’s the matter, bro? You didn’t like my music?”

“Sorry,” said Nick. “Not my thing.”

Leon looked disappointed. “Them was the guys did your entrance theme back in the day. You remember?” He arched his back, played a few licks of furious air guitar, and sang badly,
“Gonna make your wife a widowwww, gonna send you six feet underrr!”

“I remember it,” said Nick. “Heard it every night for twenty-five years. I don’t normally listen to that kind of music, though.”

“You’re pullin’ my dick.”

“I wouldn’t think of doing that.”

“What do you listen to?”

“Blues, mostly. More my speed.”

“The blues is alright, I guess.”

“It’s the only music that’s real,” said Nick. “Where it all began.”

Leon stared off into space, as his drug-addled brain tried to work that out. “So, anyway...to what do I owe the pleasure? Somethin’ I can do for ya, brother? What happened to your arm?”

“Leon, I need your help.”

“I’d love to help you, dude. Whatever you need. Did I tell you I always was your number one fan?”

“You might have mentioned it.”

“How about a coldbeer?”

“No. Listen...”

Leon went to the fridge, got himself one. He slurped at it as he leaned against the bar and gave Nick his full attention.

“I’m gonna need you to be my second set of eyes,” said Nick.

“Okay...?”

Nick stood, joined Leon in the kitchen. “A lot has changed in Midnight since the last time I was here. It’s not as easy as it used to be for me to get out and talk to people. Plus, you know about this town’s dark side. The things that crawl beneath the surface. You can get to information that it might not be so easy for Sheriff Mackey to come by.”

“I’ll try my best,” Leon said.

“Eddie was a dealer. But he wasn’t the only link in the chain. He got his product from a supplier.”

Leon said, “Right...”

“His boss. Any idea who that might have been?”

“No idea, man. When I needed a bump, I always went through Eddie.”

Nick abandoned that topic for now. He thought hard for a minute, and then he proceeded to fill Leon in on the events from the night before. The wound on his arm itched as he told his story.

“Somebody put a hit on you?” Leon exclaimed.

“Looks that way. And it didn’t take long for them to find me. Leon, I need to know if you told
anybody
where I was staying.”

“I ain’t talked to nobody, dude. Don’t plan on it, either.”

“Maybe you bragged to a few of your buddies about hanging with the Widowmaker? You meant no harm, I’m sure.”

“I ain’t got no friends. Since Vonda left me, I ain’t got nobody, man.”

“Leon, do you know anyone who goes by the nickname ‘Daddy?’ ”

“Can’t say as I do.”

“It was worth a shot.” Nick reached into his jacket then. “I almost forgot. I’ve got something to give you.”

“What’s this?”

“It’s a Trac-Fone. Picked one up for myself too. They’re cheap pay-as-you-go deals, nothing fancy like the kids are using these days, but they’ll work for our purposes. I thought it’d be a good idea for Melissa to be able to contact me any time she needs to. Figured it wouldn’t hurt for the two of us to stay in touch as well.”

“You bought me a
cellar
phone?” Leon said.

“Throw it out when I leave town, for all I care. But while I’m here, I need you to call me right away if you hear anything around town about Sophie, or if you see anybody snooping around Eddie’s place.”

“Dude, I don’t have a clue how to use one of these contraptions.”

“I spent all morning translating the user’s manual, already got it programmed for you. All you have to do is answer it if it rings. It’ll say ‘WIDOWMAKER’ on the little screen when I call.”

That earned a grin from Leon. He held the phone up to his ear, inspected its shiny silver buttons. When he sat it down on the bar, though, he kept one eye on the phone, as if it were something that might jump up and latch onto his carotid artery if he dropped his guard for a second.

“Somebody tried to off you, man. I can’t believe that shit!”

“It’s true,” said Nick.

“Say the dude had a silencer and everything? It’s like somethin’ outta one of them old private-eye flicks!”

“I guess.” Nick’s tone was sardonic, yet at the same time somber. “But real life isn’t black-and-white. I’m no Philip Marlowe. And I’m surrounded by rejects from
Deliverance
instead of double-crossing dames with perfect gams and tits out to here.”

Leon beamed at the mention of tits. He gave his hero two thumbs up, oblivious to the fact that he had been insulted.

†

Dinnertime found Nick and his daughter again sitting in a corner booth at Annie’s Country Diner. But they didn’t stay for long, after he told her what the man who tried to kill him had said about Sophie (“Oh, God,” she cried, “I knew it! Some pervert’s got her locked up like he
owns
her!”). Nick tossed a few dollars onto the table to pay for their untouched sodas, helped her stagger outside as the diner’s patrons looked on.

All morning, a bruise-colored sky had hinted of a storm on the way. Seconds after they climbed into Nick’s Bronco, the threat was realized. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed as if all the angels in Heaven were throwing down in some celestial brawl.

One minute the air was still, the next Nick could barely see the world outside through the sheets of pouring rain.

In the passenger seat beside him, Melissa stared out her window. Her shoulders trembled, but her sobs were muted beneath the rhythm of the Bronco’s wipers thumping back and forth like long, skinny arms warding off the blows of a bully. Wormy rivulets of rainwater trickled down the glass in front of her face.

“Where are we going?” Nick started up the vehicle. “You wanna sit here and talk, or should we—”

“Just drive,” she said. “Anywhere. I don’t care.”

He nodded, pulled away from the curb. Before they headed down Main Street, Nick saw where his daughter had been staring: on a telephone pole a few feet from the Bronco, a soggy flyer with Sophie’s face on it had been all but destroyed by the storm. The fourteen-year-old’s features appeared to be melting in the rain.

Nick felt a chill.

“Mind if I smoke?” Melissa asked him.

“Be my guest.”

She lit up. Her cigarette quivered in her grip. She rolled down her window a half-inch or so, tapped ashes through the gap.

Neither of them said another word until they had traveled out of the town common, into the wooded outskirts of Midnight. When he noticed his daughter was shivering, Nick cranked up the Bronco’s heater. Mostly it just blew out cool, dusty air that smelled like someone’s basement.

Softly, he said, “Tell me about her.”

The storm howled around them. At least a minute passed before Melissa replied.

“She’s a wonderful young lady.” She continued to stare out her rain-streaked window, alternately chewing at her fingernails and taking long drags off her cigarette as she spoke. “Nothing like me when I was her age, thank God. She’s got a good head on her shoulders. Worries about her epilepsy, of course. Says she wants to be a writer when she grows up. She loves coffee ice cream, and those caramel candies with the white stuff in the middle. She spends a lot of time at the library, although it’s usually so she can get on the Internet, mess around on Facebook. She used to beg me all the time to cook her favorite dish, lasagna...”

Melissa let out a little whimper, wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her denim jacket. She shivered again as she turned to look at her father.

“She’s a great kid. You would love her.”

“I’m sure I would. I can tell she means the world to you.”

“I wish they knew how much it hurts, when they talk about why they think Sophie was the one who killed Eddie. It tears my heart in two. That’s why I didn’t tell you about Sophie’s phone call at first. I didn’t want you to think about me the way
they
do. Everybody in this frigging town, they look at me like I’m one of those piece-of-shit moms who knew what was going on but I turned a blind eye to it. I could
never
be like that. I cared a lot about Eddie, but if I thought for a second he was putting his hands on Sophie, I would have killed him myself.”

Nick said, “The good news is, Sheriff Mackey knows he was wrong now. He can start looking at this from a different angle.”

“I tried to tell him all along. Didn’t matter that they confiscated her diary, took every scrap of paper out of her bedroom—every note, every homework assignment, even the doodles in the margins of her textbooks—but they never found a shred of evidence suggesting that Sophie had been abused. It didn’t matter, ’cause they had her phone call. Ever since she called me from that payphone, Sheriff Mackey’s had his mind made up about how the whole thing went down.”

“You can’t blame him,” said Nick. “Until we knew what Leon saw that night, it’s all he had to go on.”

“I know.”

Nick eased to a stop at an intersection, looked both ways through the storm to make sure nothing was coming. Hoped for the best. He hooked a right onto Howard Street, which would soon turn into Route 30 leading out of Polk County. The road was slick beneath the Bronco’s tires.

They passed the Snake River, which bisected the town of Midnight into two near-perfect halves. The river resembled not so much a body of water as a black swath of
nothingness
beyond the trees that lined its banks. It wasn’t too far from here, Nick remembered, where his parents’ farmhouse once stood. He didn’t bother looking for it, though, as the property had been sold and his childhood home torn down many years ago.

“You know,” Melissa said, tossing her cigarette out into the rain, “after Mom died, I thought about ending it all. Not that I would ever have the guts to do something like that—I’m a wuss when it comes to pain, and can’t stand the sight of blood—but I don’t think that’s the
only
thing that kept me from doing it. Weird as it sounds, I think I knew deep down inside that I still had something important to live for. I think...I knew I was gonna come clean with Sophie. Eventually. And we’d build a life together.”

Nick didn’t say anything.

“I think part of it was
you
, too.”

At that, Nick took his eyes off of the road long enough to glance over at his daughter. “What do you mean?”

“I think I knew you would be here. One day. That you would come back for me.”

Shame devoured his soul. “I didn’t even show up for your mama’s funeral, sweetheart.”

“No. No, but you called. You sent flowers.”

That much was true. Thousands of dollars worth, he’d sent. They were delivered to the church that day by a fleet of black vans. Definitely
not
Nick’s finest moment.

She said, “That’s not my point anyway. What I’m trying to say is...I knew there would be a day when I would get to know you. I don’t know how I knew. But I can’t help thinking that I held on after the cancer took Mom ’cause
you
were still out there, somewhere. I still saw you once every few years, so I wasn’t ready to write you off completely. I had a feeling you’d come back for me, one day. Maybe we wouldn’t live happily ever after. I know that’s not the way it happens in real life. But
eventually
everything might work out like it’s supposed to. Maybe not perfect, but...better. It
had
to get better.”