The Big Ugly Read Online Free PDF Page B

took the paper and read it and pushed his glasses back up his oily nose.
    And that was what passed for a farewell from Mule. I turned and walked out of the restaurant.
    As I was leaving, I decided to go take in the view from the veranda. As long as I'd made the trip.
    I walked out through some opened French doors and the leafy green valley spread out as far as I could see. In another few weeks, it would turn into a quilt of reds and browns and oranges and yellows. I stood at the railing for a moment. Its vastness was scary—but the good kind of scary.
    The last time I'd been out here was with Frank Morley. Kitty had been working a double shift that weekend, so Frank and I drove out to stay at the Summit. We got one of the good rooms, with a double door terrace that gazed out on forever, and we fucked ourselves into exhaustion and then ate and drank ourselves into a stupor. I could remember lying there in his arms, staring out the open doors, staring at the stars high above the darkened valley, and wondering why I deserved to be so goddamn happy.
    Kitty had made me pay for that happiness, made me pay for it and then some.
    In Eastgate, sometimes I'd catch her watching me. I'd be in the yard, milling around or playing basketball, and I'd look up and there was Kitty. Just watching, a little smile on her lips.
    My first night there, she'd come to my dormitory. I hadn't seen her since my legal problems had started. She hadn't come to the trial. She hadn't called. She and Frank had both simply disappeared from my life, like most of the other respectable people I'd known.
    That first night in, though, I was standing by my bunk, dressed in prison gray, and she walked over and stood across the bed from me.
    All of the other broads in my section—Alexis, Effervescence Jackson and the rest of them— kept their distance. They didn't want to see or hear anything.
    Kitty stood there in her pressed gray and blue uniform, thick arms crossed over her doughy torso. As usual, her lips didn't quite close over her teeth. Her tight little bun of brown hair tilted back as she stared down her nose at me. "Is that bed big enough?"
    "It ought to do."
    "I know you're used to beds that comfortably fit two."
    I didn't know what to say. Kitty stared at me, savoring the stunned look on my face as I put it all together.
    "It was you?"
    Her huge green eyes still didn't blink. It was as if she didn't want to miss anything happening on my face.
    I said, "You put them up to it, to lie about me, to have me put in here."
    She glanced around at my new dorm, at the broads I'd have to live with and talk to and, in some cases, fight, for the next thirteen months.
    With a smile, she said, "As you were," and turned and left.

CHAPTER FIVE
     
     
    When I got back from The Summit, there was a car in Nate's parking lot that I recognized but couldn't quite place.
    I walked around back to the shop and found PO Romandetto waiting for me. He was poking around Nate's cans of thinner, smoking a cigarette.
    "You're going to blow your face off," I said.
    He turned around and plastered his lips to his teeth. "Hiya, parolee."
    "That stuff is flammable, Romandetto. You know what flammable means?"
    "Sure, means it burns." He flicked some ashes on the cans. "But, hell, we all burn sometimes." He waved a hand around the shop. "I was getting worried. I come to check on you, and you ain't here."
    "Where the fuck am I standing?"
    He stuck the butt in his mouth. "I don't appreciate the attitude, parolee, nor the coarse language neither. You can catch more flies with sugar than you can with piss. Something like that …"
    "Just saying, it's nearly five. I was out."
    "Where?"
    "Took a drive up to the mountains."
    "Why?"
    I shrugged like a damn teenager. "Just to drive."
    "Kinda long way to go, ain't it?"
    I hesitated a moment. He was the one who had fixed me up with Charles Hamill, after all. But he didn't know what the job entailed, and I didn't want to tell him that I was searching for