One Kick: A Novel

by Chelsea Cain

  Found?

  Kick didn’t understand.

  “She turned up in a motel room in Tacoma,” Bishop said. “The room was rented yesterday afternoon by a fiftyish blond female. Housekeeping found the child alone in the room at checkout about thirty minutes ago.”

  The TV news went to a live shot of a motel. It looked drab but clean. The marquee touted free HBO and in-room coffeemakers.

  “She doesn’t appear to have been hurt,” Bishop added.

  Fiftyish. Blond. The description fit. “Josie Reed,” Kick said.

  “She checked in under the name Elinore Martinez,” Bishop said.

  Kick rocked forward on the balls of her feet. The hair on the body she had seen in the box had looked blond too. Adam Rice, Josie Reed, Mia Turner, the house explosion—they were all connected. If Mia had been saved, maybe Adam still had a chance. “We have to go there,” Kick said as the TV news feed went back to the studio.

  “Shh,” Bishop said. He put a finger to his lips and his eyes went to the ceiling. Kick listened. She could just hear the faint steady chop of helicopter blades.

  “That’s your ride home,” Bishop said.

  He had a lot of gall, dragging her up there, almost getting her killed, and then sending her packing. He couldn’t just make her come and go as he pleased. “What about Adam?” Kick asked.

  Bishop turned off the TV and tossed the remote aside. He looked drained, like he hadn’t slept at all. “He’s been gone four weeks,” he said. “That photo is ten days old. You and I both know what his odds are.”

  He didn’t care at all. Not really. She had been right about him. “Sure,” she said. “No one lasts longer than that.”

  The chopper was louder now, getting closer.

  “Your clothes have been cleaned,” Bishop said, “and are in the top drawer of the dresser in your room. You should probably get changed.”

  “Excuse me,” a woman’s voice said, and Kick and Bishop turned in unison toward the door.

  The woman fumbled to close the red robe she was wearing. She was not quick enough that Kick didn’t notice she was naked underneath it.

  “Sorry,” the woman giggled to Bishop. “I was looking for coffee.”

  “Try the kitchen,” Bishop said. “Through the door to your left.”

  “You two want anything?” The woman tucked her blond hair behind her ear and glanced at Kick, and as their gaze met Kick recognized her doe-like features, even without the ponytail. She was prettier without her uniform, or maybe that was just postcoital glow.

  “No, thanks, I only drink kava,” Kick said. “For anxiety.”

  The blonde disappeared down the hall, the robe fluttering open behind her.

  Kick leveled an incredulous look at Bishop. “The paramedic?”

  Bishop gave her a sort of half shrug.

  So he had not spent the whole night in a chair in the guest room after all. Kick felt like a fool for supposing that he had. “Thanks for pausing your one-night stand every few hours to make sure I was still alive,” she said.

  Bishop tapped his forehead. “You should get that looked at,” he said. “But if anyone asks, you fell. We were never in Renton. Our names aren’t in any of the police reports.”

  “Is that why you brought me to your house: so we could get our stories straight?”

  “I brought you to my house because you didn’t seem to want to go with your mother. I brought the paramedic here to help take care of you . . . and,” he conceded, “because I wanted to have sex with her. Now, go home to your dog.”

  He started walking away in the direction of the coffee and the naked woman wearing his robe.

  Kick had a hundred questions, so many that she didn’t even know where to begin, which was probably why the one she settled on seemed so random.

  “Whose pajamas am I wearing?” Kick asked.

  Bishop stopped, his back to Kick, and shook his head with a chuckle.

  Kick didn’t see what was so funny.

  The wall of windows rattled in their casements. Outside, branches bent in the wind and leaves swirled. Inside the room, everything was still. Kick could smell coffee brewing.

  Bishop looked back at her, over his shoulder. He was still smiling, but there was something about the smile that struck Kick as particularly joyless. “My wife’s,” he said.

  11

  SOMETIMES, KICK COULD MAKE herself disappear. It was a trick, like magic, based on gimmicks and artifice. Don’t make eye contact. It invited people to look at you. Don’t smile, don’t frown; it attracted attention. Keep your face still. Keep your head down. Never initiate conversation, but if someone talked to you, answer as briefly as possible. If everyone else was eating, eat; if everyone else was reading, read. Blend in.

  Toward the end, Mel could take her to air shows, to the community pool, to the mall. No one gave her a second glance. The most famous missing girl in America went unnoticed.

  It’s all she had wanted ever since. A hiding place.

  It was harder now. Especially with the headache. Kick stood outside the charter terminal at PDX, hunched against a brick wall, far away from doorways and trash cans, waiting for James. There had been no kava on the flight back, not even Flight Attendant Barbie and her come-hither scowl. The bright sky made Kick’s eyes ache, and the roar of planes passing overhead was unrelenting. She stayed in the shade and tried to keep track of her surroundings. Eight other people loitered out front, most of them with roller bags, probably waiting to be picked up. They were all staring at their smartphones, so Kick had hers out, too, even though the screen was black. Hiding in plain sight, Mel called it.

  She didn’t have luggage, wasn’t wearing shoes, and was sporting a blunt-force injury to her forehead, but so far no one seemed to care. Such were the benefits of private air travel.

  By the time James pulled up in Kick’s car at the charter terminal at PDX, it was almost three p.m. Kick saw him coming a mile away, inching along, his right-turn signal blinking for no reason. He drove in the least gas-efficient way possible, alternating between paranoid caution and reckless endangerment. She stepped out of the shade and waved, and the car accelerated, swerved toward her, and jumped the curb with one wheel.

  James didn’t even acknowledge Kick as she climbed into the passenger seat, so she knew he was pissed. He didn’t like to leave his apartment, much less drive. He stared straight ahead out the dirty windshield, fingers twitching on the steering wheel. He was still wearing the TARDIS T-shirt.

  “Your turn signal’s on,” Kick said quietly.

  James gave her a withering look.

  Someone behind them honked.

  “Do you want me to drive?” Kick asked hopefully.

  “I thought you were dead,” James said, his hands fidgeting on the wheel. “I was up all night trolling police reports, calling hospitals.” His eyes darted to the rearview mirror.

  She had seen him like this before. But it didn’t usually come on this fast.

  “They’re following me again,” James said.

  “James?” Kick asked. “Did you take your medicine this morning?”

  Another jackass behind them laid on his horn, and James practically jumped out of his skin. Kick held her middle finger up over her shoulder.

  “I don’t feel well,” James murmured.

  Kick put a hand on his cheek. He felt clammy. His breathing sounded labored. His knuckles had gone white around the steering wheel. “I’m here,” she told him. She reached across his lap and unrolled the driver’s-side window, then settled her arm lightly around his slender shoulders. “Anxiety is a normal emotion,” she reminded him. “You’re safe. You are relaxed and calm.”

  James took a shaky breath, squeezed his eyes shut, and nodded.

  “You enjoy leaving the house,” Kick continued. “You enjoy open spaces.” They had done this s
o many times before, the affirmations rolled off her tongue like state capitals. “Say it,” she said.

  “I enjoy leaving the house,” James said, nodding.

  Kick took his hand, threading her fingers through his. The scars across his wrist quivered with his pulse. “Take a minute,” Kick said soothingly. “Breathe deeply.” She took a few long slow breaths to demonstrate. “Ready?”

  James nodded again.

  “Okay,” she said.

  She squeezed his hand and closed her eyes, and they inhaled together and started to scream—full-throated, openmouthed, at-the-top-of-your-lungs screaming. It felt like the car was vibrating, like the windshield might break. Primal therapy had never really worked for Kick. Screaming your head off was supposed to eliminate the hold of your childhood trauma. Mostly it just made Kick’s throat hurt. But James had taken to it right away. He could scream like his life depended on it.

  “Miss?” a voice demanded.

  Kick opened one eye and squeezed James’s hand, and they both went silent.

  An airport cop was crouched by the window. “You okay?” he asked Kick.

  She glanced at James. His fingers had loosened around the wheel. His breathing had slowed. The panic attack had subsided.

  Kick felt a rush of relief. “We’re fine,” she said.

  The cop was real, not TSA. He had a silver Portland Police Department badge and a Glock in his holster. It was probably a Glock 17. Short recoil, standard magazine capacity of seventeen rounds. A respectable 9mm.

  Kick let her hair fall forward to cover the bruise on her forehead. “I thought I saw a snake,” she said.

  She heard James stifle a giggle.

  The cop leaned forward and for a moment Kick thought he’d recognized her. But a call came over his walkie-talkie and he glanced at it, distracted. “You need to move along, son,” he said to James.

  “Yes, sir,” James said.

  James pulled out sharply into traffic, causing a gray Taurus to slam on its brakes behind them. Kick reflexively braced for impact, but the two bumpers missed each other by an inch. She smelled burnt rubber from the Taurus’s tires. James didn’t seem to even notice. She could hear the tick-tick of his right-turn signal, still on.

  She put on her seat belt. “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?” she asked.

  “I’m okay,” James said, glancing in the rearview mirror.

  At this point Kick wasn’t worried about James. She was worried about her paint job. “Your turn signal’s still on,” Kick said.

  James rolled his eyes and flipped the signal off, accidentally turning the windshield wipers on first. “They found Mia Turner,” he said.

  Kick reached over to plug her phone into the car charger. “I heard.” She glanced in the backseat, a nest of fur-coated pillows and dog toys. “Where’s Monster?” she asked.

  “I told him you’d been murdered,” James said. “I told him you must have been murdered because you’d promised that you’d text every two hours and I hadn’t heard from you in eight.”

  “I called,” Kick protested.

  “Twenty minutes ago,” James said. “From the airport. Because you needed a ride.”

  Kick resented his tone. She had needed a ride. But she had also called the first moment she could so he’d know she was okay. “I told you, my phone’s dead,” Kick said. “And I lost my charger when my backpack blew up.” She really did feel bad about making him worry. “I’m sorry you had to come get me. My wallet blew up, too, or I would have called a cab.”

  She opened the glove box and dug through half a dozen survival knives and a box’s worth of loose bullets until she found a pair of sunglasses.

  James looked like he was concentrating. “Your wallet and charger blew up in your backpack?”

  It had seemed too complicated to get into over the airport pay phone.

  “My backpack didn’t blow up,” Kick said. The sunglasses didn’t help: it was still too bright, like her pupils were a millimeter overdilated. “The house blew up,” she explained. “My backpack happened to be in it.”

  By the time James steered them onto I-84, Kick had told him everything, sparing no detail and indulging in some pretty vivid ones having to do with her current opinion of John Bishop.

  “The house had a box,” James repeated.

  He was going forty miles per hour in the passing lane. It was the kind of thing that Kick might usually mention, but she knew he wouldn’t take it well right now.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I was in it,” Kick said. She hadn’t told James everything. She hadn’t told him about Beth.

  The loose bullets in the glove box jangled. “What was it like?” James asked.

  Kick could hear Beth’s voice in the dark, an echo of her own. “It was kind of nice,” she said. It sounded crazy. But she knew James would understand. She glanced over at him. “Except for the dead body and the bomb,” she added.

  “Is that what happened to your head?” James asked.

  “Can you see it?” Kick asked. “Is it bad?” She flipped down the sun visor and adjusted the mirror.

  “It’s hideous,” James said.

  Kick studied her reflection and beamed. The lump on top of her forehead was developing a faint purplish hue. Her face shimmered in and out of focus. Kick blinked.

  For a moment she thought it was the mirror, that it needed cleaning or was warped and refracting poorly. But when she moved her eyes away from her reflection, she noticed that everything in her view seemed to have a halo, a ghost of itself.

  “By the way, your friend John Bishop doesn’t exist,” James said. “You’d know that if you checked your messages. He gave her a knowing smirk. “I know how to find people online. The guy doesn’t show up on any networking sites, he doesn’t have a PayPal account, he’s not on mailing lists, he doesn’t show up on any of the people-finding sites, he’s not on alumni lists.”

  Kick was dubious. “You’re telling me there’s no one named John Bishop with a PayPal account?”

  “There are half a million John Bishops with PayPal accounts. None of them him.” James took a deep breath. “This involves data mining automated agents,” he explained, “and a custom-designed neural network filtering algorithm, and my ingenious hack of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Still interested?”

  “Sorry, I spaced out,” Kick said. “What were you saying?”

  “The point is, the results came back empty,” James said.

  Kick was puzzling over that when she saw James do a double take in the rearview mirror. She turned her head just in time to see a gray Taurus slip out of sight behind a bus in the next lane. It looked like the car that James had cut off at the airport.

  James’s breathing had quickened. He took a hand off the wheel and wiped the sweat off his palm on the thigh of his pants.

  “It doesn’t mean we’re being followed,” Kick said. James had paranoid tendencies under ordinary circumstances. She needed him undistracted, reliable, so she could be the crazy one.

  “I know,” James said. But she saw his eyes dart back to the rearview mirror.

  12

  “THE HOUSE WAS ON Vashon Island,” Kick said. She sat cross-legged, Monster’s head in her lap.

  James typed on his keyboard, staring at his center monitor. “He’s not listed on any property deeds for Vashon, or any of the surrounding islands,” he said.

  “What about the Tesla?”

  “We did that already,” James said. “He doesn’t match any listings for the Washington DMV. There are only three hundred Teslas registered in Washington, none of them under his name. Look, the filtering algorithm would have found this stuff.” He paused. “You could call Frank.”

  “I’m not calling Frank,” Kick said. The front of her head hurt. She reached up for the ibuprofen on James’s desk, rattled a few into
her hand, and knocked them back with a swallow of flat Mountain Dew. “I thought it wasn’t possible to delete someone from the Internet,” she said.

  “It shouldn’t be,” James said. “Not like this.”

  But if it were. Kick knew not to get her hopes up, but she couldn’t help it. If John Bishop could wipe his own identity off the Internet, then . . .

  James read her face. “The Beth Movies are in a whole different category,” he said. “They’re hosted on file-sharing services. They’re traded between individuals. There are millions of copies.” He shrugged miserably. “If there was a way to get them down, I’d know about it. I’d have done it already.”

  Kick knew he’d already spent thousands of hours trying. “Yeah,” she said, unable to keep the disappointment from her voice.

  Something shook loose from Kick’s brain. “The boys,” she said.

  “What?”

  “He had photographs in his house, of two boys,” Kick said excitedly. “I think one of them was him. And the other one was maybe his brother. I think something happened to the brother. He disappears. There are all these pictures of the two of them, and then there are a few of Bishop, and he gets older, and the other boy isn’t there. Maybe that’s why Bishop is so interested in missing kids. Check the website.” She didn’t have to say which website. There was a time when Kick had spent more hours on the website for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children than anyone thought was healthy.