One Kick

by Chelsea Cain

  “Every time I talk to you, I regret it,” Kick said. “You’re not even a real person.” She had to concentrate to walk straight, had to think about placing one foot in front of the other. Monster pressed against her calf, as if trying to give her ballast. But when they got to the door, Bishop didn’t budge. A scar on his throat turned up slightly on each side. It looked like it was smiling at her.

  “Move,” Kick said.

  Bishop stepped to the side. Monster leaned hard against her leg. If the dog moved suddenly, she’d fall. Kick looked at the key in her hand and went to insert it in the lock as she’d done a thousand times before. She missed. She tried again. Monster was panting. She jammed it toward the lock again, and this time the door seemed to sink away from her, and the keys fell from her hand.

  Bishop caught her by the elbow as her knees buckled. She felt like she was floating, like the laws of gravity had changed. It took her several moments to get her bearings. Bishop didn’t say anything. He just held her firmly, at a decorous distance, while Monster circled, nose in the air, whining softly.

  “She’s okay, buddy,” Bishop said to the dog. “I got her.”

  Monster glanced at Bishop and then put his ears back and settled down in the space between their feet.

  “I got you,” Bishop told Kick. The grooves her nails had dug into his forearms were starting to scab.

  “I’m fine,” Kick said. “I just need a second.” She practiced her intentional breathing and tried not to stare at Bishop’s scar. Her hair felt sticky with sweat. Her clothes stunk. He kept holding her. His fingers pinched her skin, but she didn’t care.

  “See? I’m real,” he said.

  Kick felt a feathering of nerves in her stomach. “I meant on the Internet,” she said. “James researched you. He used a custom-designed neural”—she searched her foggy brain for the right words—“something.”

  “A neural network filtering algorithm,” Bishop said.

  “Right. That,” Kick said. She balled up her hand and then opened it between them. “Poof,” she said, showing him her empty palm. “Nothing.” She lost her balance, and Bishop tightened his grip.

  For an instant Kick thought she’d caught him looking at her with an expression something like concern, but then it was gone, and she wasn’t sure it had ever really been there. “How did you do it?” she asked him. “How did you erase yourself?”

  “I told you,” Bishop said. “I have a lot of friends.”

  “Can they help me?” Kick asked, regretting the words even as they left her mouth. She hadn’t meant to blurt it out.

  Bishop recoiled slightly, like he’d been burned, and he loosened his grip on her. “Erase your image from the Web?” he said.

  She held her breath.

  “No,” he said, firmly. “No, Kick. They can’t.”

  Kick’s disappointment acted like smelling salts. It cut through the mental haze; everything was clarified. She shifted her weight to her own feet. “Let go of me,” she said.

  Bishop removed his hands, swooped down for the keys she had dropped, and placed them in her hand. “Double vision,” he said as his fingers closed around hers, the keys in her palm. She steeled herself against his touch, growing armor over her skin. “Loss of balance.” He was moving his hand up along the length of her arm, his fingers just above her skin, not quite touching her. “All expected side effects of a concussion.” His hand hovered at the side of her face, then he brushed a stray piece of her hair behind her ear. “This is the worst of it.”

  Kick turned her head away from his hand and concentrated on putting the key in the lock. “Fucking a paramedic doesn’t make you one,” she said, pushing open the door.

  “Ah, another classic symptom,” Bishop said. He followed her through the door into the lobby. “Irritability.”

  Kick pulled Monster toward the elevator as Bishop tagged along, reaching down to pet her dog.

  “I’m not going with you this time,” Kick said. “Whatever game you’re playing, I’m out. You’re rich. You’re bored. I get it. You want a hobby. You sold guns. Now you feel bad about it. So you want to track down missing kids. Whatever. I have a headache. And I want to lie down.”

  “You can’t, Kick. I’m sorry.”

  His expression was impenetrable. The elevator dinged and the doors opened. Kick made a slight movement and he blocked the elevator door with his arm.

  “Mia Turner had something you might be interested in,” Bishop said.

  Kick tugged Monster’s leash and stepped back, away from Bishop. He didn’t make a move to come after her. He kept his head down, his cap obscuring his eyes, like someone who was good at disappearing, like someone who had a reason not to be noticed; Kick recognized the tactics. Her eyes went up to the lobby security camera mounted in the ceiling corner. The camera. Bishop was positioning himself so that he couldn’t be identified on the video feed.

  The elevator doors had closed behind Bishop’s arm. Someone who didn’t want to attract attention wasn’t going to risk making a scene. Kick stepped forward and reached around Bishop to press the elevator button. The car was still on the first floor, so the doors opened instantly. Bishop raised his eyebrows. She ducked under his arm and pulled Monster into the elevator with her.

  “You can’t walk away from this,” Bishop said, letting his arm drop.

  Monster looked back and forth between Kick and Bishop.

  “Kick?” Bishop called as the elevator doors closed.

  He tossed something through the narrowing gap between the closing doors. Kick caught it in her fist. She didn’t want to open her hand, because she knew what it was, what she’d find in her palm. She could already see it in her head, the shape taking form in her imagination. She felt a stab of vertigo as the elevator went up, up, up.

  Kick opened her eyes and unclenched her fingers, revealing the Scrabble tile, the letter E. The elevator stopped and the doors opened on her floor. She could see her apartment door across the hall. James’s apartment was a mirror below it, a matching set. He was home right now and he’d know what to do. All Kick had to do was select the second floor, and ride the elevator down, and step off when the doors opened. Her hand hovered over the button. But her finger didn’t select his floor; instead she pressed L, for “Lobby.” Monster pulled at his leash, disoriented. The elevator began its descent. The doors opened.

  Bishop was standing exactly where she’d left him. He stepped into the elevator and hit a floor without looking at the buttons.

  The doors closed.

  “It was found in Mia’s pocket,” he said.

  He inserted a small key into a keyhole on the elevator control panel and Kick felt the elevator halt with a bump.

  Bishop took off his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. “You should think about installing a camera in here,” he said, looking around. “You’d be amazed how much crime goes on in elevators.”

  Kick stared, mesmerized, at the nineteen-millimeter-by-nineteen-millimeter wooden tile in her hand. It was almost weightless yet seemed to burn a hole in her skin. “Where did she get it?” she asked.

  “You first,” Bishop said. “What does it mean?”

  Kick glanced up from the tile. Bishop had his arms crossed, feet apart. The elevator remained frozen, a box in a wall. All the access Bishop seemed to have, and he didn’t know this? “I thought you knew Frank,” Kick said.

  Bishop rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, well,” he said with a shrug. “Frank kind of hates me.” He raised his eyebrows and shared a conspiratorial smile. “He likes you, though. I’ve been through your case file. All fifty-eight file boxes. There are gaps in his notes. Like someone went back later and took out pages.” Bishop’s smile dropped away. “Here’s what I do know, Kit Lannigan.” He drew out every syllable of her old name. “I know that you walked out of that Idaho farmhouse with a Scrabble tile in your hand after you were rescued,” he said. “I know it was the letter K. I know you had the tile in your pocket when you testified against M
el. I got that last bit from your mother,” he added. “Or at least from her book—which, by the way, is staggering in its epic narcissism. I assumed you still had the tile, but—just between us—I poked around your apartment while you were at the park with your mother just now. Didn’t turn it up.”

  Kick put her hands over her face, trying to block out the image of what else he might have found: the hundreds of victim notification letters, unopened, in her closet; the cards from Frank, neatly collected and hidden away in a drawer. “Ha!” she said. She closed her eyes and tried again. “Ha!” She peeked between her fingers at Bishop.

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  Kick rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “HA!”

  “Is that helping?” Bishop asked.

  The elevator felt like it was shrinking, like there wasn’t enough air. “I feel sick,” Kick said.

  “Good,” Bishop said. “That’s a good sign, Kick. You should feel sick. That means you’re not as fucked-up as you think you are.”

  Kick looked at him sideways, disgusted. “You would make a terrible therapist.”

  “Two kidnappings,” Bishop said. “Two girls, two Scrabble tiles. That’s a pretty meaningful coincidence, don’t you think?”

  A meaningful coincidence. The words snapped at Kick like rubber bands. “What did you say?” she asked.

  “I said, that’s a pretty meaningful-fucking-coincidence,” Bishop said.

  “That’s an error of inductive inference,” Kick said.

  Bishop’s eyes were attentive, his body drawn taut like a bow. “How so?”

  “It’s not synchronicity,” Kick continued. “It’s not even coincidence.” She met Bishop’s gaze. “Because they’re all my tiles.”

  Bishop waited.

  Kick held the Scrabble tile up between her thumb and forefinger. “This?” she said. “It’s mine.”

  Bishop’s brows drew together.

  “I’d palm the tiles and hide them,” Kick explained, folding her hand around the tile to demonstrate. “I’d tuck them behind rafters, between floorboards, under exposed insulation. I thought if someone ever found the secret rooms, they might find the tiles and know that I had been there.” It had been a useless exercise. “Mel counted the tiles after every game. There are supposed to be a hundred, see: ninety-eight letters and two blanks.” He’d never even acknowledged her act of rebellion, not once. “I always thought he’d get mad. But he never did. He’d just replace them. The next time he’d come to the box to play with me, all the letters would be there, like it had never happened.”

  She opened her hand again and looked down at the wooden square in her palm. The letter E. On its own, a one-point value. But for longer words, seven- or eight-tile long words, E’s became essential. Mel had taught her to hang on to E’s. Even if you turned in the other six letters on your rack, E’s always came in handy. “Only the original tiles, they were made from Vermont maple,” Kick said. She showed Bishop the tile. “This is white oak. And the letter on this tile is carved and then inked instead of stamped.” She shrugged. “It’s a good copy. He stained them to match. But you can feel the marks from the bandsaw where it wasn’t sanded down smoothly.” She moved her fingers over the tile, noting the very slightest edge marking the path of a bandsaw blade. “He made this one. And I hid it. And Mia Turner found it because they put her in one of the rooms that I was kept in fifteen years ago.”

  Bishop’s shoulders rose and fell. “Only she didn’t find it,” he said. “She said a boy gave it to her. The description she gave matches Adam Rice.”

  Kick could hear herself breathing; she could practically hear her own cells dividing. “So he’s still alive?” she whispered.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I haven’t talked to her myself, and she’s five years old, so not exactly a reliable witness. But she says she was moved to at least three houses over the course of the day, always transported under a blanket in the backseat. She can’t describe any of the houses she was kept in, just that she was kept somewhere inside and very dark. But if she’s right, based on the time frame, the three locations must all be in the Seattle area.”

  Kick couldn’t bring herself to ask the next question, but Bishop must have read it in her eyes.

  “It doesn’t look like she was physically or sexually abused,” Bishop added.

  Kick exhaled slowly.

  “Do you remember being in Seattle?” Bishop asked.

  Kick didn’t know. There had been so many houses, and she had been kept inside so much of the time. In many ways, it was a blur. But if Adam had found her Scrabble tile, whereever he was, she had been there first. “I don’t remember,” she said. “But we moved a lot,” she added. “Maybe we were there the first year, before they let me outside.” The truth was, she couldn’t locate the house any more than Mia Turner could.

  The only person who could do that was Mel.

  “Oh,” Kick said, finally getting it. She felt foolish for not seeing what Bishop wanted from her sooner. He didn’t care about her lock-picking skills or her steady shooting hand or her ability to squat deeply in a park for almost seven minutes. The thing that interested him was the same thing that interested everybody. Her enduring social capital. It would not matter what Kick did with her life, what she accomplished; her obituary would begin and end with Mel Riley.

  The outline of the envelope in Kick’s pocket pressed against her skin, like a hand on her thigh. Kick rolled her eyes to the ceiling and laughed at the bitter irony of her life.

  “He has a world of information that could help us,” Bishop said.

  Us, Kick noticed, like they were a team now.

  She cleared her throat. “He won’t give up the safe houses,” she said. “He’s always refused to give up anything. You said so yourself.”

  Bishop nodded. He checked his phone. He rubbed the back of his neck. The air in the elevator had gotten thick. The steel walls gleamed. “You’re right,” he said. He pivoted away from her, turned the little key, and pressed the button for the fourth floor.

  The sudden motion of the elevator was startling. Kick’s eyes shot to the numbers above the door as they were illuminated one by one above the back of Bishop’s head. Second floor. Third floor.

  Monster looked at her and whined.

  Fuck it. “Can you get me in to see him?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Bishop said, turning around.

  “I haven’t seen him since I was twelve, at the sentencing.” The words tumbled out in a rush.

  Fourth floor.

  “I know,” Bishop said.

  Kick was holding the end of Monster’s leash so tightly, she could feel it cutting into her palm. “He might not want to talk to me.”

  The elevator chimed and the doors opened.

  “He wants to talk to you,” Bishop said.

  Monster tilted his nose toward the door and wagged his tail. He knew where they were, or at least knew they were somewhere. He headed off out of the elevator, pulling at Kick to follow.

  “When?” Kick asked Bishop.

  “I have a car.”

  Kick stopped mid-step. Something sour turned in her stomach. The world went shaky. Bishop couldn’t mean today; he wouldn’t make her do that, not on the ten-year anniversary.

  “Drop the dog at your brother’s,” Bishop said, pushing the lobby button. “Put on something nice. I’ll meet you downstairs. And, Kick?” he said, nodding at her hand. “I need the tile.”

  Kick didn’t have time to think of a response. She tossed Bishop the tile. She hurled it, actually. He caught it through the doors, just before they closed.

  16

  NOT A LOT OF people on Kick’s block drove black hybrid Porsche Panameras, so Bishop wasn’t hard to spot. Kick got into the car wordlessly and buckled her seat belt with the kind of cautious attentiveness more often seen in electric-chair technicians. She kept her purse on her lap. She’d tucked the letter from the Trident Medical Group in the inside pocket at the last minute; she wasn’t sure why. The pur
se was a cherry-red leather square the size of a vinyl record, with silver grommets punched into one side in the shape of a skull, which seemed especially apt. Kick didn’t usually carry purses, but seeing as her backpack had been blown to smithereens, she’d had to improvise.

  “What do you know about his health?” Bishop asked.

  Kick reached into her open purse, past the letter, and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. “What I read on the Internet,” she said. She snapped a bracelet on each of her wrists.

  Bishop glanced at the cuffs without comment and then returned his gaze to the road.

  “I know he’s been on dialysis for three years,” Kick said. She reached with her cuffed hands back into her purse and began feeling around for a paper clip. “I remember he would get sick sometimes. He had kidney infections. His lawyers tried to get the judge to consider his health at the sentencing.” Her fingertips touched the paper clip and she fished it out and started unbending it.

  “Well, he’s in the prison infirmary,” Bishop said. He wasn’t looking at her. “Things seem to be deteriorating.”

  Kick pressed her fingers against the curve of the paper clip, forcing it apart until it gave. When she thought of her father now, she made herself think of Jerry, not Mel. It had been hard at first. Kick had few memories of before she was taken, and Jerry had left four months after her return. But she had one perfect memory of him from that earlier time, and she clung to it. It was her relaxing experience, her calm blue ocean. She used it to remind herself that she had, at least once, known normalcy.

  The backyard. The tire swing. Her father’s hands on her back, pushing her higher and higher, toward the clouds.

  She flipped the straightened paper clip toward her cuffed wrists and used her right hand to guide it into the keyhole at the base of the left bracelet. With the tip of the wire inserted in the hole, she bent it about seventy degrees, one way and then the other, until the end of the wire formed a small notch. Then she removed the wire from the hole and, bending her wrists at angles that made them throb, wiggled the bent end of the wire back into the hole, hooking it so that the end of the wire pointed toward the locking arm, at a ninety-degree angle to the keyhole. Using her left hand, she turned the wire like a key, hooking and lifting the locking device. The right bracelet sprung open.