Gone Girl

way. Consider it done.’ I turned around, started my dramatic exit, got twenty feet, and suddenly, there was Stucks again, his entire face still slack with sleep.
    ‘Heard the cops searched the mall yesterday,’ he said, scratching his jaw. In his other hand he held a glazed donut, unbitten. A bagel-shaped bulge sat in the front pocket of his cargo pants. I almost made a joke: Is that a baked good in your pocket or are you …
    ‘Yeah. Nothing.’
    ‘Yester day . They went yester day , the jackasses.’ He ducked, looked around, as if he worried they’d overheard him. He leaned closer to me. ‘You go at night, that’s when they’re there. Daytime, they’re down by the river, or out flying a flag.’
    ‘Flying a flag?’
    ‘You know, sitting by the exits on the highway with those signs: Laid Off, Please Help, Need Beer Money , whatever,’ he said, scanning the room. ‘Flying a flag, man.’
    ‘Okay.’
    ‘At night they’re at the mall,’ he said.
    ‘Then let’s go tonight,’ I said. ‘You and me and whoever.’
    ‘Joe and Mikey Hillsam,’ Stucks said. ‘They’d be up for it.’ The Hillsams were three, four years older than me, town badasses. The kind of guys who were born without the fear gene, impervious to pain. Jock kids who sped through the summers on short, muscled legs, playing baseball, drinking beer, taking strange dares: skateboarding into drainage ditches, climbing water towers naked. The kind of guys who would peel up, wild-eyed, on a boring Saturday night and you knew something would happen, maybe nothing good, but something. Of course the Hillsams would be up for it.
    ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Tonight we go.’
    My phone rang in my pocket. The thing didn’t turn off right. It rang again.
    ‘You gonna get that?’ Stucks asked.
    ‘Nah.’
    ‘You should answer every call, man. You really should.’
    There was nothing to do for the rest of the day. No searches planned, no more flyers needed, the phones fully manned. Marybeth started sending volunteers home; they were just standing around, eating, bored. I suspected Stucks of leaving with half the breakfast table in his pockets.
    ‘Anyone hear from the detectives?’ Rand asked.
    ‘Nothing,’ Marybeth and I both answered.
    ‘That may be good, right?’ Rand asked, hopeful eyes, and Marybeth and I both indulged him. Yes, sure.
    ‘When are you leaving for Memphis?’ she asked me.
    ‘Tomorrow. Tonight my friends and I are doing another search of the mall. We don’t think it was done right yesterday.’
    ‘Excellent,’ Marybeth said. ‘That’s the kind of action we need. We suspect it wasn’t done right the first time, we do it ourselves. Because I just – I’m just not that impressed with what’s been done so far.’
    Rand put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, a signal this refrain had been expressed and received many times.
    ‘I’d like to come with you, Nick,’ he said. ‘Tonight. I’d like tocome.’ Rand was wearing a powder-blue golf shirt and olive slacks, his hair a gleaming dark helmet. I pictured him trying to hail-fellow the Hillsam brothers, doing his slightly desperate one-of-the-guys routine – hey, I love a good beer too, and how about that sports team of yours? – and felt a flush of impending awkwardness.
    ‘Of course, Rand. Of course.’
    I had a good ten unscheduled hours to work with. My car was being released back to me – having been processed and vacuumed and printed, I assume – so I hitched a ride to the police station with an elderly volunteer, one of those bustling grandmotherly types who seemed slightly nervous to be alone with me.
    ‘I’m just driving Mr Dunne to the police station, but I will be back in less than half an hour,’ she said to one of her friends. ‘No more than half an hour.’
    Gilpin had not taken Amy’s second note into evidence; he’d been too thrilled with the underwear to bother. I got in my car, flung the door open, and sat as the heat drooled out, reread my wife’s second clue:
    Picture me: I’m crazy about you
    My future is anything but hazy with you
    You took me here so I could hear you chat
    About your boyhood adventures: crummy jeans and visor hat
    Screw everyone else, for us they’re all ditched
    And let’s sneak a kiss … pretend we just got hitched .
    It was Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark Twain, where I’d worked summers growing up, where I’d wandered the town dressed as Huck Finn, in an old straw hat and faux-ragged pants,