One Kick

by Chelsea Cain

  “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.

  Not today, she thought. Please, just don’t die today.

  Her gut tightened. She approached the bed slowly, arm extended, forcing each foot forward, the muscles in her face drawn into a grimace. She put a hand on the duvet, summoned all her courage, and snatched back the bedding like she was ripping off a Band-Aid.

  The air rushed out of her lungs in a sob of relief.

  It wasn’t Monster, just a balled-up sheet. The dog hair that she’d disturbed when she pulled back the bedding hung in the air.

  So where was he?

  Kick spun around and whistled again, so hard it hurt, so hard that James probably heard her two floors below. But Monster didn’t come. She had never realized before how much her apartment smelled like dog, how much dog hair there was.

  She heard it again: bthmmp, bthmmp.

  It was coming from the living room.

  Kick snatched Monster’s favorite bacon-flavored tennis ball off the floor and started down the hall with it. She was halfway to the living room when she noticed that her backpack had been moved.

  She stopped in her tracks.

  At first glance, the backpack looked like it was exactly where she had left it, on the floor inside the door to the apartment, propped against the wall. It was where she always left it when she went to punch the security code into the alarm pad. The backpack was facing the same direction it always did, shoulder straps against the wall. The zippers were still zipped. Except something was just a tiny bit off. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone else would ever notice. But she had a blind dog, and she had places for things, and the place for that backpack was three inches over.

  Bthmmp, bthmmp.

  Kick squinted down the hallway. The living room lights were off. The Realtor had talked up the floor-to-ceiling living room windows as a selling point when Kick had bought the building. They let in so much light, the Realtor said over and over again. Kick installed blinds before she even finished unpacking: seeing out meant that other people could see in, and the last thing she wanted were telephoto-lens photographs of her in her living room ending up in Us Weekly. Now, when the blinds were closed, daylight barely penetrated.

  Kick squeaked the bacon tennis ball. “Monster,” she hissed, even though she knew he couldn’t hear her.

  She checked the alarm pad on the wall. She hadn’t even wanted the stupid thing; her mother had insisted on it. Kick could protect herself. Most of the time, she didn’t even set the alarm. But it was on now, the green light blinking contentedly. Then, as she was looking at it, it stopped blinking. The light went out. Kick drew her towel tighter around her chest. The pad’s digital screen was dark. She pushed the panic button and held it for four seconds. Nothing happened. She pushed “police” and “medical” and “fire.” They depressed silently, uselessly.

  Kick put her back to the wall.

  She knew she should get out of the apartment. It was Self-defense 101: Awareness is the best self-defense. Escape is the second. But she couldn’t leave without Monster. It was a promise she’d made to herself the first time they were separated: she would not leave without her dog.

  With a cautious glance toward the dark living room, Kick moved quickly to the backpack, knelt, and pulled the zipper open. The Glock was still there. She put her hand around the grip and removed it tenderly from the backpack. Mel had taught her how to shoot a .22, but it had been Frank who taught her how to shoot a .45. Kick held the Glock in one hand and the bacon ball in the other.

  Pfttnk, bthnnk. The hair on the back of her neck stood up. It was the same sound, but now she could hear it more clearly.

  Kick peered down the hallway. She knew that sound. She rolled the bacon ball around in her palm and then bounced it hard on the floor so it rebounded off the wall and back into her hand. Pfttnk, bthnnk.

  A ball bouncing.

  She let the ball drop from her hand, secured her towel, lifted the Glock, and started moving forward along the wall.

  Her bare feet were silent on the wood floor. She took slow, deep breaths through her nose, letting her diaphragm do the work instead of her lungs. She made herself quiet.

  Pfttnk, bthnnk.

  As she got closer, the darkness took on shape and texture. She could see only part of the living room from her vantage point, and none of the dining room or kitchen areas. But she could make out the geometry of the modern furniture that her mother’s decorator had picked out. One of the blinds was cranked slightly open and slivers of light penetrated between the slats, drawing bright stripes across the floor. Kick leaned around the corner, trying to see more, and followed a blade of light across the silhouette of her Eames-style chair.

  Something moved.

  Kick drew back and flattened herself against the wall.

  She had seen a foot, she was sure of it—as if someone were sitting in the chair and had shifted a foot back out of the light.

  She closed her eyes.

  She was not young. She was not soft. She was safe. She knew how to take out someone’s eye using her finger as a fishhook. She could shoot, and take a fall, and break someone’s trachea with a snap of her elbow.

  She opened her eyes, felt around the corner for the light switch, flipped it, raised the Glock and entered the room.

  The man sitting in her living room smiled at her.

  If Kick had not been so startled, she would have shot him.

  He didn’t look like a meth head out to steal her TV. She guessed he was in his mid-thirties. His dark hair was short and sculpted with a sharp part on the side. He was clean-shaven. But there was something about him that seemed off, something dead about his eyes. His face was gaunt and his features were all hard angles, light and shadow. His hawkish features made the smile seem menacing.

  He was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and the sort of fashionable sneakers you aren’t supposed to exercise in. The shoes looked new, never worn. A black blazer was draped over the arm of the chair, folded neatly. He didn’t have the comportment of someone in the midst of committing a crime. He was fit and long limbed, his body draped in the chair like he sat there all the time, like she was the one who’d barged in on him. One of his elbows was propped on the arm of the chair, and in that hand he held a purple tennis ball.

  He seemed to be expecting h
er.

  Monster was sitting at his feet, quivering with anticipation, his tail wagging.

  The man held up the tennis ball, then bounced it off the floor, against the wall, and caught it without looking. Monster followed the motion of the ball with his head.

  Kick moved her finger over the Glock’s trigger and aimed the sights at the man’s head. “Get away from my fucking dog,” she said.

  *dpgroup.org*

  4

  THE MAN DIDN’T MOVE. Kick didn’t move. A trickle of cold water dripped between her shoulder blades.

  Then he let the ball go again.

  Again it hit the floor, bounced off the wall, and back into his hand. Again, Monster tracked it with his frosted corneas. Kick didn’t know if her dog could somehow hear that ball, make out a blur of color, of if he was just smelling it, but he was mesmerized.

  Kick inched closer, her eyes moving between her dog and the man. Her small steps were meant to keep the towel up as much as they were out of any sort of caution. She felt hyperaware of her body: the bottoms of her feet pressing against the floor, the air in her lungs, the way her eyelids stuck for a fraction of a second when she blinked. The Glock remained perfectly steady in her hands. Out of the corner of her left eye, she could see the orange plastic handle of the comb, still stuck in her hair. It was the same color as the man’s shoes.

  Now the room seemed too bright, too colorful, like spilled candy.

  Monster whined and nosed at the ball.

  “I guess Frank and I have something in common,” the man said smoothly.

  Kick hesitated at the mention of Frank’s name. Her eyes flicked to the end-table drawer by the man’s elbow. She never responded to Frank’s Christmas cards, but she read them, and displayed them, and then saved them, in a stack with a rubber band around it, in that drawer. “What are you talking about?” Kick demanded.

  The man’s irises were dark gray, like stones. “Now you’ve pointed a gun at both of us,” the man said. He smiled some more. But his eyes remained empty.