Ugly As Sin Read Online Free Page B

nearly unintelligible, and beneath her tears she was obviously talking more to herself than to him at first: “Don’t know what the hell I was thinking...oughta have my head examined for getting mixed up with him in the first place...”
    “Melissa, what’s going on? Did somebody hurt you?”
    “I wish you could drive out here. I wish you could come right now. It’s a lot to ask, I know, but...do you think you could?” She sounded lost, alone, more like a terrified child than a woman on the brink of turning thirty. “I didn’t know who else to call. Please , Daddy...”
    Her whole life, he’d been Missing In Action. Nick Bullman didn’t know his daughter’s favorite food, what she did for a living, or her most cherished childhood memory. They were barely more than strangers. But she was his blood.
    “Can you come? Please?” she asked him again.
    Her sobs wrenched at his heart.
    Nick took a long look around his apartment: at the bile-colored sofa with its foam guts leaking out...at the wide brown water stain on the ceiling that grew bigger every day...at the two fat bluebottle flies fucking on a dust-covered windowsill. He sighed, knew he could turn his back on all of it. His boss would probably raise hell if he asked for a few days off. Then again, Nick wasn’t entirely sure if he still had his gig at the Cherry Pit (two days ago a regular had complained to management about how he came to spend his dough on pretty girls but it was “hard to get in the mood with a bouncer standing nearby whose face looked like a plate of raw hamburger”).
    After McDougal’s lawsuit wiped him out, Nick could no longer lay claim to a hefty nest egg sitting in the bank. Nothing substantial, anyway. But he supposed he could afford to leave town for a little while. Assuming his piece-of-shit Bronco didn’t break down somewhere on the side of I-40.
    In less than a minute, his decision was made. His daughter needed him. For once, by God, he would be there for her.
    “Where are you, hon? Do you still live in Midnight?”
    “I do,” she said. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but—”
    “Where should we meet? Got a nine-hour drive ahead of me. I leave now, I can be there before dark.”
     
    †
     
    He pulled into Midnight, North Carolina around five-thirty that evening. He didn’t know how long he would be needed here, so he had packed enough clothes to last him a week. The old gym bag sat beside him on the Bronco’s passenger seat like his only friend in the world. On the truck’s CD player, Howlin’ Wolf insisted he was built for comfort, not for speed.
    Moments after Nick passed the sign welcoming him to Midnight (he noticed the subscript that once boasted BIRTHPLACE OF TV WRESTLER NICK BULLMAN! was gone now, presumably since around the time his own face was erased), he found himself overwhelmed by how much everything had changed. At the corner of First and Main, the old Midnight Drug & Sundry had been replaced by a massive bank with fancy mirrored windows. A block further down, where Hank’s Hobby Shop and Corriher Guns n’ Ammo once sat side by side, he saw a Jiffy Lube, a Domino’s Pizza, and a Chinese take-out joint. The Big Pig Grocery had become a sprawling used-car lot. Old Man Dickerson’s newsstand, where young Nick Bullman used to buy his beloved Superman comic books, was now a Radio Shack. Though it didn’t surprise him at all to see that the Lansdale Drive-In Theater was gone, he couldn’t help but feel a sharp pang of disappointment when he passed the Wal-Mart in its place.
    Nick shook his head as he took it all in, his lipless mouth pinching together into something resembling a sad smile.
    When he at last reached his destination, he took a deep breath, let it out slowly. On the phone, his daughter had asked him if he remembered where he had taken her for dinner on her thirteenth birthday (she didn’t remind him that this was the last time he had acknowledged her birthday at all, but she didn’t have