Gone Bitch

by Steve Lookner

  So now I have this gun, and I have no idea what to do with it. And it turns out it won’t even help convince people that I was afraid of Nick, because practically everyone in Missouri has a gun. So now I have to step it up a level and look into military-grade armaments. On the bright side, I finally have an excuse to use that $100 gift certificate for bazookas.com.

  NICK DUNNE: Six Days Gone

  The night after my living room interview with Boney and Gilpin, there was a candlelight vigil for Amy in the town square. Go signed me up to speak there because she thought it’d be a good opportunity to rehabilitate my image. My image definitely needed some rehabilitation, because the media was continuing to batter me. Their newest thing was turning up purported “items of concern,” like the utterly irrelevant fact that in high school I was voted Most Likely to Kill His Wife.

  There was a good side to all the media coverage, however: business at the cat cafe was booming. We’d hired three more baristas and 23 more cats. (Unfortunately these weren’t great cafe cats — they kept shedding on the biscotti.) Also, the cafe was now being sponsored by Fancy Feast. You’d think they might not want to sponsor a business co-owned by an alleged murderer, but I guess when it comes to cat food marketing there are only so many opportunities.

  The town square was packed for the vigil, and there were TV vans everywhere. When it was my turn to speak I walked up to the microphone and looked out at the crowd, and I was a bit thrown by seeing Amy’s face everywhere on people’s T-shirts. Most of the shirts said COME BACK AMY and WE MISS YOU, but one of them said I WENT TO SEARCH FOR AMY DUNNE AND ALL I FOUND WAS THIS STUPID T-SHIRT.

  I took out my prepared speech (unlike previous speeches, I’d actually written something in advance this time) and began to speak.

  “Hi everyone. Thank you so, so much for coming out, I really appreciate it. As you know, my wife Amy is missing. Amy is my partner in every way, and I am incomplete without her. I miss her every second of every minute of every day, and I just want her to come home. Pause look left look right don’t smile especially don’t convey you’re happy Amy’s gone and that you pray every night she won’t come back and that you’d like to give her murderer a medal…”

  Oops. That was supposed to be stage direction.

  There was a loud chorus of boos. Go gave me the “cut it short” sign, chopping at her throat. But before I could finish, our neighbor Noelle Hawthorne had come out of the crowd and approached the stage.

  “Hey, Nick!” she yelled. “I got a question for you!”

  “Then you should raise your hand and wait and see if I call on you,” I said.

  “Where’s your wife, Nick?” she yelled. “Where’s your pregnant wife?”

  There was a collective gasp from the crowd.

  I chuckled. “Pregnant? That’s impossible. I never came inside her. I only came on her face and on her tits. Oh also in her butt when she wasn’t being a bitch and was letting us have anal like normal people.”

  I could feel the hostility of the crowd as they surged forward in anger. Go grabbed me and dragged me off the stage. As she did so, I could hear the questions shouted from the reporters:

  “Nick, did you know Amy was pregnant?”

  “Nick, had you chosen a name for the baby?”

  “Nick, when you came on her face did she flinch or did she take it like a pro?”

  I was about to complain about Amy’s constant flinching when Go shoved me into her car and drove away.

  AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE: September 2, 2011

  Next up on Amy’s Murder-Framing To Do List? Fake a pregnancy!

  Why should I be satisfied with the public hating Nick for murdering his beautiful, innocent wife, when they could really hate him for murdering his beautiful, innocent, pregnant wife? It seemed like a no-brainer.

  Faking my own pregnancy should not have been that hard. My plan was pretty simple: since my neighbor Noelle is pregnant, just get some of her pee, and use it as my own pee on a pregnancy test. No problem, right?

  So I invited Noelle over one day for some lemonade. I’d turned off the toilet, so that when she inevitably had to pee, she wouldn’t be able to flush, and voila, I’d have my pregnant pee!

  The problem is, I didn’t factor in that Noelle would come over right after eating a giant lunch. And that as soon as she walked in she’d have to take a giant shit.

  So of course, as soon as Noelle walks in she says she needs to use the bathroom, and I tell her “the toilet isn’t working so don’t flush,” and then she shits and doesn’t pee, and so now we have to sit there making chit-chat and drinking lemonade while the entire house smells like shit.

  What’s worse, I hadn’t factored in that Noelle has an enormous bladder from constantly drinking so much beer. So it takes forever for her to have to pee.

  And finally, to top it all off, when Noelle finally does pee, I have to collect the pee from a bowl of shit.

  Note to self: next time you fake a pregnancy, make allowance for shit.

  NICK DUNNE: Seven Days Gone

  It was time.

  Somehow, through no fault of my own, I had become the prime suspect in my wife’s disappearance. So I needed to get a lawyer. Today. And that lawyer was going to have to be the best of the best, the man I wished I didn’t need but knew I had to have.

  Tanner Bolt.

  I knew of Tanner Bolt—heck, everybody knew of Tanner Bolt—from his high profile cases on TV. He’d defended some of the most famous celebrities accused of doing some of the most heinous things. And he always came out on top. Which is why last night after the candlelight vigil I’d jumped on a red eye to New York, and I was now sitting in the waiting room of Tanner Bolt’s office on the top floor of a skyscraper on 57th Street.

  Tanner was so famous that he wouldn’t even take a meeting until you’d already paid his $100,000 fee and hired him. I’d wired everything in my bank account, which didn’t quite cover it, so Tanner Bolt LLP was now the proud owner of a 50% stake in a cat cafe. But if it kept me out of jail it was worth it.

  When I’d first walked into Tanner’s office the pretty black receptionist had given me an odd look. I initially thought she was judging me for killing Amy. But then I noticed a pattern: every new person I saw working at the office was black, and every one of them gave me the same odd look.

  I didn’t realize what was going on until I went to the bathroom, which was at the end of a long hall. The walls of the hall were covered with photos of Tanner’s famous cases. As I was walking down the hall looking at the photos one after the other, it finally hit me: all of Tanner’s clients were black. And all of his defenses of his clients were built on the fact that they were black, and were victims of racial discrimination, or institutional prejudice, or whatever.

  I was about to ask the receptionist what their refund policy was when a door opened and another attractive black person appeared. “Nick Dunne?” she said.

  “Yep, that’s me,” I said.

  After the requisite odd look, she led me into Tanner’s office and sat me at a chair across from a desk, where Tanner was reading through some files. “Tanner, Nick Dunne is here.”

  Tanner looked up from his files and just froze for a good 15 seconds. Then he smiled and reached out to shake my hand like everything was perfectly normal.

  “Tanner Bolt,” he said.

  “Nick Dunne, nice to meet you,” I said.

  “Nick, look: I win. I win unwinnable cases.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “For black people.”

  “So…you’re not going to represent me?” I asked.

  “And give back $100,000? Fuck no. I’m just warning you, it’s gonna be tough.”

  “Right, because of all the circumstantial evidence against me.” I said.

  “No, because you’re not black. We don’t have the race card to play here. That’s like playing poker without any aces. Or kings. Or queens or jacks or tens or nines or eights and only like two of the sevens.”

  �
��So what do we do?”

  “Well first, you’ve got to be completely open with me, and tell me absolutely everything,” he said. “We need to assume everything will get leaked, and there can’t be any surprises.”

  Everything? I thought. I had a vision of people finding out I often masturbated while watching women’s golf.

  “Also, we’ve got to keep the support of Amy’s parents,” he said. “How are things between you and them?”

  “I haven’t spoken to them since a few days after Amy hopefully was murdered.”

  “No, Nick. You need to say Amy wasn’t murdered, especially not hopefully.”

  “Not hopefully murdered, gotcha,” I said.

  “We also need to start working on your image by getting some positive stuff out there. What nice things have you done for Amy in the last year or so?”

  “You know…ate her out, made her come, bought her a load of shit.”

  “Nick, romantic things.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Ate her out tenderly, bought her a load of expensive shit.”

  “Come on, Nick, work with me here. Think. I’m sure you’ve done something nice for her recently.”

  “No, I haven’t,” I said. “That’s why she’s still with me. She’s a hot girl, remember?”

  “Well make something up then. Ok, next thing: have you ever cheated on Amy?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well I’ll need every detail. Specifically, details about what the girls’ bodies are like and what sex stuff they like to do. If you have any nude photos that would be a big help, and if you have actual sex tapes of them that could be the thing that wins us the case. By the way, you’re not cheating now, are you? Since she disappeared?”

  I put my head down like a kid caught stealing from the cookie jar.

  “You are?”

  “I couldn’t help it. She’s a college girl, a student in one of my classes.”

  “So you actually had sex with her while your wife was missing?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tanner stared at me for a long beat.

  “I like you, Nick Dunne. I like you a lot.”

  He stood up and walked over to a mini-fridge. “Clamato?” he asked. I’d never understood Clamato. What is it, exactly? Is it like V8? Do you taste the tomato more, or the clams? Why would anyone think clams taste good with tomato anyway? Is it supposed to be healthy? I kept meaning to look it up on the web every time I saw it, but I always forgot.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Well look Nick, I know this is gonna be tough to hear, but it’s time for some hard reality: you’ve got to cut it off with the college girl.”

  “Dude, no way!”

  “I know it’s hard giving that up. But if this whole thing goes well you’ll be famous and swimming in pussy. And not just Missouri pussy. We’re talking LA and New York pussy.”

  It was strange: once Tanner explained how I’d get even better pussy after this was all over, I immediately accepted cutting things off with Andie without mourning her in the slightest.

  Tanner wrapped up our meeting by giving me some talking points to study and saying he’d be flying to Missouri tomorrow to set up shop. He also said it was of the utmost importance that I get some naked pictures of Andie in a cheerleader outfit. I assured him I would and walked out, feeling a thousand times better than when I’d walked in.

  Part Two: BOY MEETS BITCH

  AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE: The Day Of

  Tra and la! I’m dead!

  Of course technically, I’m only missing. But as far as everyone else is concerned, I’m dead. Hot girls don’t go missing for a few days then turn up without a scratch. Average-looking girls, maybe. Ugly girls, all the time. But if a hot girl goes missing for even like an hour, you might as well start making funeral arrangements.

  I’ve taken multiple precautions to make sure no one will find me. Not the least of which is my getaway vehicle: a Segway. They might go looking for a getaway car, but nobody will look for a getaway Segway. That’s because no one’s ever used a getaway Segway before.

  It was a bit shady obtaining the Segway without leaving a paper trail. I’d found an ad for one insanely cheap on Craigslist, and I ended up buying it from a guy in a Walmart parking lot late at night who had a truck loaded with Segways. To top it off, he pronounced it “Sej-way.” Hey, I’m not gonna ask, and I don’t wanna know.

  I left Carthage before sunrise and have been cruising along for several hours now. At one point I look in the rearview mirror, Carthage 43 miles behind me, my husband facing a lifetime of being raped in prison, and I just marvel at how easy it’s been. But maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit here. The reason it’s been so easy is because I prepared so well. I pull out my giant checklist and look at the unbroken series of black lines crossing off the various items, and I feel an enormous sense of pride.

  Item 18: Cut self and put blood on kitchen floor. Check.

  Item 26: Order bazooka, and remember to choose Free Super Saver Shipping at checkout. Check.

  Item 41: Make suhweeeeeeet mixtape for Segway ride: some Counting Crows, a little Train, can’t forget Mumford & Sons! Check.

  There are only a couple of items left, and I’m about to take care of one of them. I pull into a gas station just off the interstate, and head into the bathroom. I make sure it’s locked, pull out my scissors, and take one last look at my usual hairdo. Time for a little trim! I start snipping at the edges but I’m feeling uninspired, so to get into the mood I put on some salon-quality house music. Boom-chick boom-chick boom-chick! Yeah, that’s more like it. I start getting into it. Really really into it. Work those scissors, girl! Snip snip snip! This hairdresser’s on fire! Finally the song ends, and I check out my handiwork in the mirror.

  I’m completely bald.

  Maybe the people I yell at in Supercuts aren’t so bad at this after all.

  NICK DUNNE: Seven Days Gone

  On the plane ride back from New York, I’d studied clue 4 for so long I’d memorized it.

  It’s time for clue 4, the one after clue 3,

  In which I reveal the location of your gift from me!

  It isn’t in the closet like chess or checkers,

  It’s where you store goodies for playing with your pecker.

  Amy had taken mercy on me and made this final clue a little easier. She was clearly talking about the woodshed behind Go’s house where I kept my extra porn. I’d accumulated so much porn that I’d run out of room in my house to store any more. Every nook and cranny was filled with it: under the sink, behind pieces of furniture, in the crisper drawer of the fridge. But Go had this rickety storehouse in the backyard she never used, so I asked if I could use it. She said I could, as long as I didn’t actually jerk off to the porn in there.

  As soon as my plane landed I headed directly to Go’s. I was filled with nervous anticipation as Go and I approached the shed and I opened the door. Would this be the day I finally got Beats headphones like the rest of the world? Would they make my favorite songs sound even better than they have before, and make me feel like I’ve never really heard the songs until now?

  When I looked inside, however, I had to lean against the wall to catch my breath.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “She’s been buying stuff with my credit card.”

  The storehouse was completely filled, all 720 cubic feet of it, with porn. And also a set of golf clubs shoved into an opening in the porn.

  “Holy shit,” said Go. “You mean she ordered all of this and secretly put it in here?”

  “Well not all of it,” I said. “Some of it’s mine.”

  “How much is yours?”

  I made a gesture which encompassed everything but the golf clubs.

  “Wait, you’re saying she bought just the golf clubs?”

  “Can you believe it?” I said. “Can you believe that my wife went on a crazy shopping spree and bought golf clubs on my credit card? This is identity theft!”

  Then in a flash, i
t all came together: Amy was framing me. The police would find the newly purchased, hidden golf clubs, and assume I’d bought the clubs to use after I murdered my wife. Just like they’d found the “signs of a struggle” in the living room that Amy left for them, and found the blood on the kitchen floor that Amy put there. “Shit, I am fucked,” I said.

  “Because the police are gonna find these golf clubs and conclude you’re the murderer?” Go asked.

  “No, because the police are gonna find this porn and confiscate it,” I said. “All my good DP scenes are in here! Hey, do you have an extra external hard drive I could burn some of this shit onto?”

  AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE: The Day Of

  Item 12 on my Murder-Framing To Do List had been to buy a bunch of leisure activity-related stuff on Nick’s credit card, so everyone would think he’d been preparing for the good life after he killed me. You know, fishing gear, a jet ski, the works. What I didn’t realize is that due to the amount of porn Nick had bought, he only had $175 left on all of his credit lines combined. So I had to settle for buying a single set of used golf clubs. And not even a whole set — I could only afford the irons.

  But some parts of the plan had gone even better than expected. I’d planned on renting some cheap little cabin in the Ozarks where no one would bother me and I could hide out for a while, but on the way there I’d noticed a 24 Hour FitClub. It was one of the ones that’s really open 24 hours, not one of the bullshit ones that closes at 9 and should be called 16 Hour FitClub. I realized that the price of a monthly membership there was way less than it would be to rent a cabin, and plus I’d have cable TV, wireless, a jacuzzi, a steam room, unlimited clean towels, and a gym membership to boot!