Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Brutal Anal, Brutal Blowjobs, Humiliated
Whores, Sadistic Slut Fucking, Gang-raped Sluts
, and a

---

series called 
Hurt the Bitch
, volumes 1–18, each featuring
photos of women writhing in pain while leering, laughing
men inserted objects into them.
I turned away.
‘Oh, now he’s embarrassed.’ Gilpin grinned.
But I didn’t respond because I saw Go being helped
into the back of a police car.
We met an hour later at the police station. Tanner advised
against it – I insisted. I appealed to his iconoclast,
millionaire rodeo-cowboy ego. We were going to tell the
cops the truth. It was time.
I could handle them fucking with me – but not my sister.
‘I’m agreeing to this because I think your arrest is
inevitable, Nick, no matter what we do,’ he said. ‘If we let
them know we’re up for talking, we may get some more
information on the case they’ve got against you. Without a
body, they’ll really want a confession. So they’ll try to
overwhelm you with the evidence. And they may give us
enough to really jumpstart our defense.’
‘And we give them everything, right?’ I said. ‘We give
them the clues and the marionettes and Amy.’ I was
panicked, aching to go – I could picture the cops right now
sweating my sister under a bare lightbulb.
‘As long as you let me talk,’ Tanner said. ‘If it’s me
talking about the frame-up, they can’t use it against us at
trial … if we go with a different defense.’
It concerned me that my lawyer found the truth to be so
completely unbelievable.
Gilpin met us at the steps of the station, a Coke in his hand,

---

late dinner. When he turned around to lead us in, I saw a
sweat-soaked back. The sun had long set, but the humidity
remained. He flapped his arms once, and the shirt fluttered
and stuck right back to his skin.
‘Still hot,’ he said. ‘Supposed to get hotter overnight.’
Boney was waiting for us in the conference room, the
one from the first night. The Night Of. She’d French-braided
her limp hair and clipped it to the back of her head in a
rather poignant updo, and she wore lipstick. I wondered if
she had a date. A 
meet you after midnight
situation.
‘You have kids?’ I asked her, pulling out a chair.
She looked startled and held up a finger. ‘One.’ She
didn’t say a name or an age or anything else. Boney was in
business mode. She tried to wait us out.
‘You first,’ Tanner said. ‘Tell us what you got.’
‘Sure,’ Boney said. ‘Okay.’ She turned on the tape
recorder, dispensed with the preliminaries. ‘It is your
contention, Nick, that you never bought or touched the items
in the woodshed on your sister’s property.’
‘That is correct,’ Tanner replied for me.
‘Nick, your fingerprints are all over almost every item in
the shed.’
‘That’s a lie! I touched 
nothing
, not a thing in there!
Except for my anniversary present, which 
Amy left inside
.’
Tanner touched my arm: 
shut the fuck up
.
‘Which we have brought here today,’ Tanner said.
‘Nick, your fingerprints are on the porn, on the golf
clubs, on the watch cases, and even on the TV.’
And then I saw it, how much Amy would have enjoyed
this: my deep, self-satisfied sleep (which I lorded over her,
my belief that if she were only more laid-back, more like

---

me, her insomnia would vanish) turned against me. I could
see it: Amy down on her knees, my snores heating her
cheeks, as she pressed a fingertip here and there over the
course of months. She could have slipped me a mickey for
all I knew. I remember her peering at me one morning as I
woke up, sleep-wax gumming my lips, and she said, ‘You
sleep the sleep of the damned, you know. Or the drugged.’ I
was both and didn’t know it.
‘Do you want to explain about the fingerprints?’ Gilpin
said.
‘Tell us the rest,’ Tanner said.
Boney set a biblically thick leather-covered binder on
the table between us, charred all along the edges.
‘Recognize this?’
I shrugged, shook my head.
‘It’s your wife’s diary.’
‘Um, no. Amy didn’t do diaries.’
‘Actually, Nick, she did. She did about seven years’
worth of diaries,’ Boney said.
‘Okay.’
Something bad was about to happen. My wife was
being clever again.

---