One Kick: A Novel

by Chelsea Cain

  “Did you see the Amber Alert?” she asked.

  Her brother was still pretending to type something on his keyboard. “Is this going to be like Adam Rice?” he asked.

  Adam Rice had disappeared three weeks ago from the yard of his mother’s apartment building in Tacoma. It’s what had set Kick off. She didn’t know why—she never did. Maybe it was because Tacoma wasn’t that far away. But from the first moment she saw Adam’s picture, she felt a connection with him.

  The pizza was cold and stale. Kick took a bite anyway. “I have it under control,” she said. She got a pack of throwing stars out of her backpack and stowed them in her sweatshirt pocket. She could relax better if she had weapons immediately handy.

  James spun his chair around to face her. His Doctor Who TARDIS T-shirt had a green crusty stain on the neck. Split pea soup, Kick hoped.

  He pushed his brown hair out of his eyes and adjusted his glasses. “So the app worked?” he asked. He had recently started trying to grow a mustache. Kick didn’t have the heart to tell him that he still looked fifteen. Most people were surprised to learn that he was two years older than she was.

  “You designed it,” Kick said. “Of course it worked.”

  “What did you do?” he asked heavily. “Drive up and down I-5 all morning, looking for white SUVs?”

  He made it sound so ineffectual.

  “It’s not healthy,” he said. “You know that.” He pointed at the pizza in her hand. “That’s five days old,” he said.

  She took another bite of the pizza and chewed it slowly right at him with her mouth open.

  “That is so unnecessary,” James said, rolling his eyes as he turned his chair back toward his desk.

  He made a show of being absorbed in something on his computer screen.

  Kick didn’t take the bait.

  Finally, James said, “Want to see what I’ve been doing?”

  He was supposed to be getting an online certification in some new programming language. Kick craned forward, noticing that her brother’s monitors weren’t filled with their usual coding gibberish. She got up off the couch and joined him at the desk. It was spread with clutter, except for the area in front of his keyboard where James kept his talisman, a little man made of twisted wire. His largest screen, the center one, was checkered with video thumbnails. Kick reached across James for his computer mouse, but he swatted her hand away. “I’ll do it,” he said, and guided the cursor to one of the thumbnails and clicked to expand it.

  The window enlarged to reveal a video feed of cars on the interstate. Kick scanned the other thumbnails. They were all similar. “What are those?” she asked.

  The corner of James’s mouth turned up into a satisfied smile. “Traffic cameras,” he said. “I have a program that takes a screen shot of any vehicle I specify. For instance, white SUVs.” His fingers grazed his keyboard and a window opened on another monitor. “Look here,” he said. At least a hundred screen shots of white SUVs filled the screen.

  Kick’s eyes hurt trying to tell one from the next. “That’s a fuckload of white SUVs,” she said.

  “I’ve crowdsourced the images,” James explained. “So I’ve got volunteers all over the world looking at all these live as they come in. If any of them spot a vehicle with a matching plate, or dealer plates, I’ll know immediately. It’s faster than whatever the police are doing.”

  Kick wrapped her arms around her brother’s neck and kissed him. His T-shirt smelled like he’d been wearing it for days. “You’re brilliant,” she said.

  James’s face reddened. She could tell he was pleased. He hadn’t exactly been Mr. Sunshine lately, so it felt like a good sign. Kick sat down on the arm of his chair and leaned against him as they both watched his monitor. All the video was in black-and-white and every car appeared to be a shade of gray. Every few moments James would minimize one video and enlarge another one. There were so many cars, and so much water on the road, that the license plates were passing blurs.

  Kick glanced away from the monitor and noticed a new poster on the window. It had a picture of a baseball and a Babe Ruth quote: Don’t let the fear of striking out hold you back.

  “That’s two stranger abductions in the last month,” Kick said.

  James didn’t say anything. He reached for the little wire man. The scars on his wrists were faint white stripes. She’d never asked about them. The wire man was an inch tall, small enough to hold in your hand. But James didn’t let Kick touch it.

  “You know what that could mean,” Kick said.

  James pushed his glasses up his nose. “You called the police again, didn’t you?”

  He knew her too well. “They said that they still don’t need my help and suggested I call my therapist,” she said.

  “You want to help?” James asked. “Use some of your settlement money to buy them a better computer system.” Then he smirked and set the talisman back in its place. “Or cuter uniforms.”

  Kick opened her mouth to say something smart-ass, but she forgot what she was going to say as her eyes fell on James’s monitor. “Motherfucker,” she said.

  “What?” James asked. She felt him tense. “Oh.”

  A local news site was streaming live on the screen below the traffic cam footage. Kick sat up and rocked forward. A female news anchor was speaking from behind a desk. She was in her mid-fifties, with coiffed black hair and a familiar pendant. A graphic took up much of the screen next to her: a photograph of Kick, hood up, just beginning to reach for the spent cartridge at the gun range. “She was a reporter,” Kick said. She hadn’t been texting; she’d been taking a photo with her phone. “She was at the range this morning,” Kick explained to James. She scowled at the screen and balled her hands into fists. “I knew I should have kicked her teeth in.”

  “Do you want me to turn it up?” James asked hesitantly.

  “No,” Kick said, eyes still glued to the silent images on the monitor. A teaser below the image read: Kit Lannigan Update! From Kidnap Victim to Ace Shot. She’d never be able to go to that gun range again.

  Kick’s photograph dissolved and another photograph appeared. Kick recognized it right away as the author photo from a book called My Story: Lessons I Learned from my Daughter’s Abduction. Her mother had written that one. It had been the last straw before Kick filed for emancipation. Tonight at five, interview with kidnap mom Paula Lannigan!

  Kick’s stomach twisted. It was a constant struggle—not strangling her mother. “Kidnap mom.” Who knew that was a career?

  Then the screen went to video footage of a thickened, bearded man in a suit trying to climb the wide concrete stairs to an office building while a reporter shouted questions at him. This was the only time Kick saw Frank: when he popped up on the news, a boom mic stuck in his ruddy face. James turned up the volume. “Any comment on Mel Riley’s health, Agent Moony?” the reporter hollered. “Are you glad he’s dying?” Frank glowered at the camera and shoved his way past the reporter.

  He’d never given an interview.

  “Turn it off,” Kick said quietly.

  James tapped a button and the video window vanished from the screen. Kick’s pulse throbbed in her ears.

  “You want to talk about it?” her brother asked with a nervous glance.

  A poster of a frog, caught mid-hop, was taped above the printer. Leap, and the net will appear.

  “No,” Kick said. She slid the pack of throwing stars out of her pocket, extracted one, pinched it between her thumb and forefinger, and zinged it hard at a dartboard James had hung on the opposite wall. It sank into the center target and the dartboard clattered to the floor.

  “Yeah,” James said drily. “You’re fine.”

  “Sorry,” Kick said, under her breath. She kissed her brother on the cheek and stood up. “I smell like gunpowder. I need a shower.” She put two fingers in her mouth and blew out an
earsplitting whistle.

  James cringed. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said.

  “It’s the only thing he can hear,” Kick said. She waited, her eyes fixed on the hall, and a moment later her dog came shuffling from James’s bedroom. His muzzle was white and his gait was arthritic and he was nearly blind and almost entirely deaf, but he could still hear her whistle.

  “He would have been fine by himself at your place,” James said.

  Kick watched as her dog limped across the living room, wagging his shaggy tail. He was part border terrier and part Australian shepherd, with a few other breeds thrown in that no one could identify. “He likes to be with family,” she said. He came right to her, a big grin on his face, panting, and pressed his black snout against her knee.

  “Your mail’s on the counter,” her brother said, turning his gaze to his monitor. “You got another letter from the court.”

  The federal victim notification system spit out a form letter every time Kick’s image showed up in a child pornography prosecution. Because she had been the star of one of the most collected series the industry had seen, her image showed up on a lot of hard drives. They were referred to as “the Beth Movies,” and there was, incredibly, no way to get them off the Internet.

  Kick scratched under Monster’s hairy chin and looked into his milky eyes. She didn’t care what the vet said: sometimes she could swear that dog could see her.

  “Hey, Monster,” she said. “Did you miss me?”

  3

  THE LETTER FROM THE court went with the others, unopened, into a cardboard file box in Kick’s bedroom closet. The boxes took up half the closet now, three rows, four boxes high. Before she filed for emancipation at seventeen, the letters had come addressed to her mother. Kick hadn’t known anything about them. A few weeks after she moved into her apartment, the first letter showed up, addressed to Kathleen Lannigan, Kick’s legal name.

  She had opened that one.

  A man named Randall Albert Murphy was being prosecuted in Houston, the letter stated, for trading nearly three thousand child pornography photos and videos online. Sixty-seven of the images were of her.

  After that, Kick stopped opening the envelopes. She kept track of the numbers for a while, adding to the running tally every time one arrived. After five hundred, she stopped counting.

  Kick turned her back on her closet. Monster was staring blankly out the bedroom door, down the hall, with his head cocked.

  She went over and scratched him on the top of his skull as she studied the map.

  The Rand McNally pull-down classroom map of the United States hung from a bar mounted near the ceiling on the south wall of her bedroom. The map was as tall as she was, and wider than she could reach. It had come out of a classroom in Wisconsin—at least, that’s what the people on eBay had said—and it had those cheery elementary school colors: lemon-yellow landmasses, tangerine-orange mountain ranges, cerulean-blue oceans and lakes. Florida was a little wrinkled, there was a tear near Delaware, and at some point in the map’s life someone had circled Death Valley with a black Sharpie.

  Kick had done much more damage since then. Pushpins marked the locations of kids who had been taken since Adam Rice had disappeared three weeks earlier. Oakland, Riverside, Chicago, Columbus, Richmond, Baltimore, San Antonio, and on and on. Red pushpins meant a stranger abduction; blue pushpins meant a runaway; white pushpins meant custodial interference. The system was imperfect. Runaways might leave out of free will but get abducted off the street. Custodial interference might result in the abductor parent panicking and harming or abandoning the child.

  Kick ran her fingers over the surface of the map, feeling the tiny holes where pushpins had pierced the map and then been removed. A hole meant a kid had been found—dead or alive. The small perforations were hard to see with the naked eye, but under Kick’s fingers the map felt like it had been peppered with buckshot.

  Monster nudged her leg with his snout and Kick lowered her hand back to his head.

  Printouts of Adam Rice papered the wall around the map. They’d released two Missing Child posters, and Kick had found several more pictures of him online. She had Google Street View images of the apartment building where he was taken, and a street map of the area with Post-it notes marking the locations of witnesses. Not that anyone had seen anything particularly useful. Adam’s mother had been inside her first-floor apartment, twenty feet from the yard he was playing in. A utility worker installing new cable line at the corner had seen Adam still in the yard. A neighbor had seen Adam as she left to run an errand. He was there. And then he wasn’t.

  Monster slipped away from under her hand and a moment later dropped a ball at Kick’s feet. She picked it up and tossed it behind her through the bedroom door, down the hall, and Monster went loping after it.

  A newspaper photograph of Adam’s mother making a statement to the press a few days after his abduction was taped next to the Pacific Ocean. Her expression was raw with grief, her eyes so swollen she could barely open them. She hugged a stuffed elephant in her arms. She told the press that she was keeping the elephant company until her son came home.

  Kick reached for the box of red pushpins, took one out, and pushed it into Seattle with enough force that it left an imprint on her thumb. Tacoma was just a half hour south of Seattle, so close that the two red pushpins touched.

  Monster didn’t come back with the ball. Kick noticed it, vaguely, but Monster was old and he was easily distracted, so she didn’t think much of it. She still hadn’t showered. She peeled off her sweatshirt and walked to the bathroom, anxious to smell like something other than gunpowder.

  • • •

  Kick used showers as an opportunity to conduct injury checks. She started at her feet. Her blackened big toenail was progressing nicely. The nail was already starting to separate as the skin beneath it healed. She beamed at it proudly, wiggling the toe on the wet shower floor. She’d driven that toe into another student’s thigh at the dojo, and his femur had been way worse off than her toenail. Kick twisted around to catalog the bruises on her legs. She’d been working on learning how to take a fall, throwing herself forward on the mat at the gym again and again until she knew how to reflexively roll. She ran her hands over the sore spots on her ribs where she’d taken hits sparring at the boxing gym, and over a scrape on her shoulder from when she spontaneously decided to take a fall on concrete just to see if she could do it. She examined the scabs on her knuckles from practicing breaking boards with her latest karate move. Each injury made her feel stronger. Not young. Not soft. Safe.

  Satisfied, she turned the water off, opened the glass door, grabbed a towel, and stepped out of the shower, her skin instantly pebbling with goose bumps. She could have retreated back into the warm shower stall to dry off, but she was working on making herself tougher. She rubbed herself dry, trying to ignore the slow sucking sound the water made as it fought its way down the shower drain. This was the price of having elbow-length hair: it had a way of collecting in pipes, of forming dams and obstructions. It seemed to have an agenda all its own.

  Kick wrapped herself in the towel. The condensation was clearing off the mirror. She was never as badass-looking as she imagined herself.

  As she combed out her hair, the last of the shower water wheezed down the drain. The quiet only lasted a moment before she heard a faint dripping sound: bthmmp, bthmmp. Kick ignored it, pulling at a snarl. Her phone was on the counter. She checked it. There were no developments in the Amber Alert case. She looked back at her image in the mirror. A puddle of water was forming at her feet where runoff from her hair had pooled. Maybe I should get a Mohawk, she thought.

  The words hung in the silence. And then: bthmmp, bthmmp.

  Kick opened the shower door and tightened both of the knobs. She stared up at the showerhead. She didn’t see any drops of water hanging from it. She stepped back and let the shower door close
.

  Bthmmp, bthmmp.

  She spun around. It wasn’t coming from the shower; it had to be coming from another source. As she surveyed the bathroom, she realized something else.

  Monster wasn’t there.

  Her dog usually curled up on the rug in front of the sink while she was showering, and then, as soon as she got out, he’d follow her around, licking up the water she left in her wake. She didn’t know why he did it. James thought it was because the water tasted like her. Eau de Kick, he called it.

  Kick opened the bathroom door. The comb was still in her hair, stuck in a snarl over her ear, but she just left it there. She didn’t see Monster in the hall.

  She whistled.

  He didn’t come.

  A tiny thread of fear tightened around her throat. Monster was old. He had habits. He knew his way easily around her apartment; she never moved any of the furniture and was careful not to leave things on the floor where he might run into them. But he stuck close. In the past few months he had gotten confused a few times and settled down in a room without her. When she found him, he seemed surprised, like he hadn’t known she was even home. Mild dementia, the vet said. Then the vet started talking about quality-of-life issues, and Kick scooped Monster up and got out of there before they gave her another brochure on euthanasia.

  She wasn’t in denial, no matter what the vet said. Kick knew Monster would die one day. Just please don’t let it be today, she pleaded silently to the universe. She walked barefoot to her bedroom, leaving a trail of wet footprints, the comb still stuck in her hair. Monster slept in her bed, and when his body finally failed him, she knew that’s where he’d go.

  Her feet hit the bedroom carpet and she switched on the light. The map loomed over everything: her green desk, her dresser, her bedside table, her bed. Her heart sank. Under her twisted bedding, she could see a dog-shaped lump at the end of the bed where Monster always slept.

  She was certain, then, that her dog was dead. She felt his loss like a physical pressure on her chest. She had imagined this so many times. Monster was so old. He’d been dying for the last year. She wanted to let him go, to let him die in his sleep, but she wasn’t ready.