by Chelsea Cain
Kick felt a satisfying pride in that.
Bishop slipped the photo back into his blazer. “You’re coming with me, and I’ll tell you why,” he said. He had lowered his voice, so that she had to lean in to hear him. “In not very long, Mel Riley is going to die in prison of kidney failure.”
He said it like it was nothing. Like it was a given. Kick was afraid to move, afraid that the smallest gesture might give away more than she wanted to.
“He’s done ten years’ hard time,” Bishop continued, “and he hasn’t given up a single detail about his network of associates.”
Bishop moved closer, and she wanted to lean back, to step away, but she made herself stand her ground. “His contacts,” Bishop said, and the word sounded vulgar. “Child pornographers, pedophiles, the scum off the sole of humanity’s shoe, the people who aided and abetted your abductors, sheltered them in some cases—they are still at it, exploiting children with impunity.”
“Stop it,” she said. Her body hurt. It was like she had more nerve endings; suddenly she could feel the perimeter of each and every bruise.
“You could have stopped it ten years ago,” Bishop said. “All you had to do was nothing.”
And there it was. He knew about the database. No one was supposed to know. That testimony had been sealed. It didn’t fit the narrative. The rescue story worked for everyone: the FBI, Kick’s family, the media. It made for feel-good television. The fact that Kick had autonuked Mel’s database of contacts and blown the FBI’s shot at taking down hundreds or thousands of criminals? That was an inconvenient truth that no one wanted to talk about. The floor felt like it was softening under Kick’s feet.
“I get why it eats at you,” Bishop said. “Why you have that map, with the pushpins, on your wall; why you paper your bedroom with abduction stories. You must think: How many Amber Alerts could have been prevented if you’d done nothing that night?”
How many? “So?” she said.
“So that’s why you’ll come with me,” Bishop said. “Not because any of that shit I just said is true, because it’s not, and you know that—you were a kid, and you’d been manipulated—but because you blame yourself anyway. And you know that sticking pushpins in a map isn’t going to change anything. But coming with me to the house in that sat photo, using your background to see things I can’t—that’s at least in the ballpark.”
God, he was maddening. It wasn’t that he was wrong; it was his complete confidence that he was right that really irritated her. “How’s your nut sack now?” she asked.
“Maybe it’s not too late to get someone else,” Bishop said.
“I’m in,” Kick said. She wanted him to look at least a little surprised, but he didn’t, which only made it worse. “Not because of your speech,” she added. She didn’t need him. She had spent most of her life training for this. She was an escape artist, a warrior. She couldn’t walk away from an opportunity like this. Because while saving a kid wouldn’t make up for what she’d done, it would be a start. “I guess I’ll get dressed,” she said.
Monster yelped with pleasure and a purple tennis ball rolled out from under the couch and across the room. Monster hustled after it as fast as a hobbled, arthritic, blind canine can.
Bishop shifted painfully, reached into his pocket, and extracted his phone. “Can I get some ice, maybe?” he asked.
Kick stared at him in disbelief. He was already busy typing a text and didn’t look up. “Get it yourself,” Kick said, turning away. “Asshole,” she added, under her breath. She stalked off, naked, toward her bedroom. Monster followed her, tail wagging, the tennis ball in his mouth.
“Welcome to the team,” she heard Bishop call after her. “I think we’re really going to enjoy working together.”
5
KICK HAD A WORRY list. She added to it every day. By keeping track of each worry, she could put off worrying in the moment and instead do it all at once during the designated worry period she set aside before dinner. The so-called list now was five composition books long. Adam Rice’s name was on it, and recently there had been a lot of entries about Monster’s health and Kick’s dwindling savings. The helicopter banked sharply, and Kick bent over her notebook and scribbled another item on the list.
Vomiting.
Her handwriting was barely legible. She clutched the airsickness bag that the helicopter pilot had given her. She could still see James standing in his apartment doorway, holding Monster’s leash. He’d pointed out that the image of Adam Rice had been enlarged, grainy; the license plate on the SUV had been too fuzzy to read. James was James. Logical. Careful. Neurotic. Kick was only one of those things.
The helicopter dipped and banked again. The pilot looked like Thor, or at least like a low-rent, steroid-fueled version of him. Kick was sure she was green. Bishop didn’t look airsick at all. He was up in front next to Thor, with his phone out and his orange sneakers on the chopper’s dash. The windshield was streaked with rain. They were flying low, below the cloud cover. If Kick looked down, she could see rush-hour traffic crawling along the Banfield. But mostly she avoided looking down.
She added Helicopter crash to the list.
The helicopter swooped earthward and Kick’s insides took a second to catch up. She braced a hand on the back of the pilot’s seat, lowered her head, and watched as her long braid swung between her knees. I will not vomit. I will not vomit. I will not vomit. Thor’s blond hair was tied back with a leather strap. The back of his bomber jacket had a lightning-bolt insignia embroidered on it and something else that Kick couldn’t make out. She snuck a peek at Bishop. His expression was vague, or maybe bored, or maybe that’s just what assholes looked like. She tried to see what he was reading on his phone in the reflection of his sunglasses, but they weren’t polarized enough. Reading. Even thinking about reading made Kick’s mouth fill with warm saliva. She swallowed it down. I will not vomit. Bishop hadn’t said a word to her since they’d climbed aboard the helicopter on her roof, even though all of them, including Thor, were wearing headsets with microphones. The headsets were supposed to reduce the noise, but as far as Kick could tell, hers wasn’t working.
She was relieved when she recognized landmarks that indicated they were close to the airport. That huge sign, four yellow letters on blue, all capitals: IKEA. Wasn’t there an IKEA near every airport in the world?
Thor tilted the helicopter toward the ground. Kick shut her eyes.
She knew the instant the chopper touched down. Her body was still, settled, once again her own. The engine changed in pitch as the pilot shut down the engine and rotors.
Kick opened her eyes. The passenger-side door was open and Bishop was gone. Kick unlatched her seat belt, threw off her headset, heaved her heavy pack off the floor, put her worry book under her arm, and pushed open the chopper’s back door. Rain spit in her eyes, and her braid lashed around like a whip.
This was not a part of Portland International Airport that she had ever been to before. Sleek small planes dotted the runway. She spotted Bishop headed toward one. She didn’t have the address of the house in the satellite photo. If he left without her, she realized, she’d have nothing.
Technically, you’re not supposed to exit a helicopter until the blades stop rotating. But if the chopper is on level ground, the main rotor blades are going to be above your head. Kick knew this, and she also knew that most people who got chopped up by helicopters trudged right into the tail rotor. She took hold of her hair, hunched under the main rotor blades, and cleared the tail rotor by fifty feet, her black boots slapping against the wet runway.
Bishop was halfway up the stairs to one of the larger private planes. Emblazoned on the fuselage, glistening in the wet slick of rain, Kick noticed a logo, a black W in a circle. It probably stood for “Weasel.” A flight attendant was waiting at the top of the stairs with a huge black umbrella. Kick knew she was a flight attendant because she was dressed like some sort of caricature of a flight attendant, like Flight Attendant Barbie. Kick
called Bishop’s name but he didn’t turn. Kick considered shooting him to get his attention but decided it would take too long to draw her weapon. Bishop disappeared through the plane door just as Kick reached the bottom of the stairs. Flight Attendant Barbie was at the door folding the umbrella. Kick stomped up the steps. Flight Attendant Barbie looked up, seemingly flummoxed by Kick’s arrival, or maybe by the complex mechanism of the umbrella. Her sky-blue uniform was spotted with raindrops. Her white blouse showed a lot of freckled cleavage. She was wearing nude pantyhose and stilettos that could take out someone’s eye.
“Excuse me,” Kick said, shoving past her, out of the rain and into the cabin.
The interior of the plane was all light wood and creamy leather. It smelled like an expensive car, like it had just been Armor All’d. No industrial blue carpeting. No foldout trays. No fighting for space in an overhead bin. Six enormous cushioned seats sat on either side of the plane.
Kick stood motionless, dripping onto the carpet.
“Take a seat anywhere,” Bishop said. He had settled into one of the chairs at the back of the plane and had his nose in his smartphone again. He didn’t look up. She wasn’t sure how he even knew she’d come on board.
Flight Attendant Barbie had managed to fold the umbrella and had wriggled around Kick through the door. She pulled the door closed behind her and locked it.
Kick tightened her grip on her backpack strap and considered her seating options. Then she plunked down in a chair a few chairs back from Bishop. She put the worry book on her lap and the damp backpack at her feet. The chair swiveled. She pushed off the floor and spun around. Flight Attendant Barbie dropped a towel in Kick’s lap, then moved on to Bishop.
“Would you like a drink, sir?” Flight Attendant Barbie asked him. Kick watched her, fascinated. Her face was somehow both pretty and indistinct, and she had the curves of one of those girls from the mud flaps of eighteen-wheelers.
“No, thanks,” Bishop said. He looked back at Kick and smiled. It was a reptilian smile, thin-lipped and hard to read. “But I’d love a bag of ice,” he said.
“Certainly, sir,” said Flight Attendant Barbie, and she appeared authentically delighted at the task. She wiggled past Kick on her way to the galley, eyes fixed with purpose. She didn’t ask Kick if she wanted a drink.
Kick’s phone buzzed in her lap, startling her. It was a text from James. YOU STILL OKAY? it read. When she’d dropped Monster off she had agreed to text James every two hours. YES, Kick typed back.
Then she crossed Vomiting off the list.
Flight Attendant Barbie tottered back with the ice. Kick turned off her phone for the flight. When she looked back up, Flight Attendant Barbie was hovering over Bishop with ice in a ziplock bag and towel. Her blouse was tight. She’d lost the jacket somewhere between the main cabin and the galley.
“Where would you like it, Mr. Bishop?” she asked.
Bishop was checking texts again. The neck of his shirt flopped down in a triangle where Kick had ripped it. He swiped at his phone’s touch screen, opened his knees, and gestured to his lap.
Flight Attendant Barbie bent at the waist, all rounded buttocks and toned calves, and pressed the bag of ice against Bishop’s groin. “How does that feel, Mr. Bishop?” she asked.
Unbelievable.
Bishop’s eyes lifted from his phone.
So that’s what it took to get his attention.
Kick would sooner shoot him in the back.
Kick coughed to remind them she was there.
Bishop leaned his head back. “A little to the left,” he said, and Kick thought she saw him look at her again, but she couldn’t be sure.
Flight Attendant Barbie shifted the ice.
“Much better,” Bishop said.
“I have a gun,” Kick said.
Both the flight attendant and Bishop turned and looked at her. The flight attendant’s hand was still cupped against Bishop’s groin. She had lipstick on her front teeth that hadn’t been there before.
“A Glock 37,” Kick said, liking the way the name of the weapon made the flight attendant flinch. Kick also had pepper spray, a Leatherman, a Taser, two extra magazines of .45 GAP ammo, and a box of Winchester jacketed hollow points in her backpack. “I have a permit,” Kick added. “But I need to check it, right?” Firearms had to be declared, unloaded, stowed in a hard-sided locked container, and checked. Everyone knew that. She didn’t want the Glock confiscated while she made her way through a month of TSA paperwork.
Bishop was back on his phone. “This isn’t commercial air travel,” he said. Then he seemed to suddenly remember the woman whose hand was on his cock. “I want wings up in five,” he told her.
Flight Attendant Barbie straightened up with a disappointed sigh. “Yes, sir,” she said. Duty called. “Anything else?”
Kick resisted asking for a glass of water.
Bishop pulled his ripped T-shirt off over his head. Kick was so startled, she forgot to look away. He was muscular, she had to admit, lean but toned, with enough definition to catch the light. He tossed Flight Attendant Barbie the shirt. She cradled it, along with the ice.
“Can you get me a new shirt?” Bishop asked.
As Flight Attendant Barbie slunk off through a door at the back of the plane, Kick leaned forward over the side of her chair and could just make out what looked like the corner of a king-size mattress.
“Is that a bedroom?” Kick asked. She didn’t even want to think about what went on in there. “Seriously?”
The plane started taxiing, and Kick put on her seat belt.
“Check your phone,” Bishop said.
Kick studiously avoided looking at his abs. “For what?”
Bishop held up his own phone and wiggled it. “I sent you something,” he said.
“I turned it off,” Kick said.
“Again,” Bishop said, “not commercial air travel.”
“Right,” Kick said. She retrieved her phone, enabled her browser, and checked her email. She had a new message from [email protected]. No subject line. She clicked on the email. There was no message, only an attached PDF. She opened it and found a sixty-five-page series of documents. Most of it consisted of documentation regarding the abduction of Adam Rice. Interviews, photographs, forensics.
“Is this a police report?” she asked. The plane was going faster. The runway flashed by out the window.
“I told you I have friends in the government,” Bishop said.
Actually, he’d said he had friends with expensive toys, but Kick decided not to quibble. Instead, she pretended to scan the attachment while she surreptitiously forwarded it to James.
“How do you know my email address?” she asked Bishop.
He swiveled his chair around so that he was no longer facing her. There was a logo on the back, stitched into the flap of cream-colored leather that draped over the headrest: a W with a circle around it, like the one on the outside of the plane. “I told you,” Bishop said.
“I know,” she said. “You have friends in the government.”
The plane lifted into the air and began its steady incline into the sky. There was no getting off now, no turning back. Kick hoped it was a smoother ride than on the chopper. She studied the photo of Adam Rice looking earnestly up from the digital file. The flight attendant came back with a new shirt for Bishop that looked exactly like the old one. Kick peeked up as he put it on. Then she flipped to the back of the worry book, where she kept a list of self-destructive behaviors she needed to work on, and wrote, Getting into vehicles with strangers. She underlined it.
6
KICK KNEW A LOT about cars. She knew how to execute a hairpin turn, she knew to always cross her palms over her chest before jumping from a speeding vehicle, and she knew that every American car made after 2002 had an emergency release lever inside the trunk should you happen to find yourself in need of one. She knew that the car Bishop retrieved from a hangar at Seattle’s Boeing Field was a Tesla Model S. She knew that it h
ad cost a hundred grand, standard, and that—judging by the abundance of leather and the car’s all-glass panoramic roof—Bishop had gone with some add-ons. The touch screen on the dash was bigger than her home computer monitor.
They were headed south on I-5, technically still in Seattle, though all the good parts of Seattle were behind them. The interstate sliced through California, Oregon, and Washington, and extended all the way from Mexico to Canada, and nothing good ever happened on it. Kick had a theory that 30 percent of the drivers on it at any given time were actively committing a crime.
“I thought you’d have a driver,” Kick said to Bishop, hitting “send” on the text she’d just sent James.
Bishop smirked. “I’m trying to remain inconspicuous,” he said. He whipped the Tesla around a Saab.
The road was dry, but the Seattle sky was veiled with low cloud cover. Portland got a few more inches of actual rainfall, but Seattle had Portland beat when it came to smothering gloom. It was cloudy 201 days out of the year, and partly cloudy 93 days. Kick knew a lot about weather too. She liked forecasts, almanacs, tide charts. She liked to know what was coming. It was a safety precaution not enough people took.
“How fast does this thing go?” she asked Bishop.
“One-thirty-two,” Bishop said with a grin.
He could drive. Kick saw how he shifted his attention between the vehicle in front of theirs and the ones six or eight ahead, anticipating traffic. He used the accelerator smoothly, and when he braked, he squeezed the pedal before he put his foot down and then tapered off so that the motion of the car was always fluid.
Bishop gave the wheel a sharp turn and veered around a van into the carpool lane. He didn’t turn the wheel too soon like most people did, so he didn’t have to let up on the throttle. Most drivers merged too slowly, making the engine work harder than it needed to.
They were at the southern edge of the city. Thick trees formed a hedge on either side of the interstate, protecting drivers from the sight of auto dealerships and office parks. The slate-colored sky was darkening. Not so much a sunset as a progressive dimming of light.