One Kick

by Chelsea Cain

  Frank reached out and petted Monster’s neck. He cleared his throat. “He’s not warm anymore, is he?”

  Kick swallowed back tears, coughed, and shook her head. He wasn’t warm.

  “It’s time to go,” Frank said again.

  She could do this; she had to do this. Frank helped her slip out from under Monster’s body. Frank got to his feet and held his hand out to her. “Come on.”

  She went with him. Maybe because that’s what she had done all those years ago at the farm, when he’d led her out of Mel’s basement, up the rabbit hole, out into the world. Maybe she was just tired. The blood on her yellow dress had started hardening and the fabric scratched her skin as she moved.

  Frank pointed at the floor, at the blizzard of papers and blood. “Very carefully.”

  She tried to step where he pointed. Around James’s Cthulhu mug, which lay broken on the floor. Dog hair fluttered from her dress as she moved. A dozen people inched around the perimeter of the living room, taking pictures, writing in small notebooks, coming and going. A Glock 22, a Glock 23, a Glock 27.

  “Where’s James?” she asked. Her voice no more than a whisper.

  “I’m going to take you to him,” Frank said. “We just need to have a look at you first.” He led her over to where Bishop stood on a square of plastic sheeting and positioned her alongside him. The sound of the plastic crinkling under her sandals made her teeth hurt.

  A camera flash went off.

  A woman stepped in front of Kick. She was wearing blue latex gloves and a black FBI windbreaker and she had a friendly, freckled face. She didn’t have a gun. She gave Kick a reassuring smile. “I’m Mina,” she said. “Short for Benjamina.” She smirked. “My parents were expecting a boy.” She had kind eyes, and Kick concentrated on them. “I’m just going to do a once-over, make sure you haven’t picked up any hair or fibers that might be useful in the investigation.”

  Kick felt her head nod.

  Frank had his hands on his hips and was looking around the room, emitting a low whistle. “Was the place tossed?” he asked.

  Notes layered the floor. Printouts papered the walls. James’s dartboard was still on the floor where it had fallen. Kick felt a pang of guilt that she hadn’t hung it back up.

  “It’s how she thinks,” Bishop said. “She prints everything out and stares at it.”

  How did he know how she thought? He didn’t know her at all.

  “Well, it’s going to take all night to process,” Mina said. She made a swiveling motion with her finger and Kick, always obedient, turned around. The collage Kick had made the night before fanned out across the wall in front of her. All the missing boys, all her erratic notes, and behind them an array of exotic destinations: See Italy! Cruise the Maldives! Visit Israel!

  Bishop turned around, too, so that they were now facing the wall side by side.

  Between them, at eye level, was the photograph of Adam Rice above the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Around Adam, circling his image, ten pictures of other dark-haired Caucasian boys from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children website. Kick’s eyes moved from image to image, each one clicking into place.

  “You figured out a lot,” Bishop said, nodding at the wall.

  “James saw the pattern,” Kick said. Her voice sounded small and faraway. “He’s good at patterns.”

  But she was not. She hadn’t seen it, and it had been right in front of her. The coloring, the slight build. If she’d taken a photograph of James the day they’d met, she could have put it right up on the wall along with the missing boys. “The person who was here,” she said. “It’s him. The man Mel talked about.”

  “Did you see James’s wrists?” Bishop asked.

  Kick felt a flush of cold settle on her skin. She tightened her fingers together so that she could feel that the wire talisman was still there.

  “Fresh ligature marks,” Bishop said.

  The activity behind them faded into white noise. It was just Kick and Bishop and the wall and James’s blood. “Why?” she asked. After all this time, why would he come back for James?

  “Take off your shirt,” Frank said to Bishop, and Kick was startled back to the reality of the apartment, the police, the crime scene investigators, everyone picking over James’s possessions.

  “Excuse me,” Bishop said to Kick. He turned around and pulled his T-shirt over his head and dropped it in a plastic bag. Kick was surprised to see the scattering of black stitches still in his back, the skin still inflamed; surprised to realize that it had only been a day since the paramedic had sewn up Bishop’s wounds.

  Frank held a box of Huggies baby wipes out to Bishop. “Clean yourself up,” he told him.

  Mina picked something off Kick’s shoulder, and Kick turned her attention back to the faces of the missing boys. The wet slurp of wipes being pulled from the box punctuated the conversation behind her, and she could smell their distinctive talcum scent. Her eyes moved down the wall to the notes she’d written on torn copy paper. They were highlighted and circled in purple: Former weapons dealer. But doesn’t like guns. Excellent driver. Private jet. How did he get the scar on his neck? Island. Adulterer. Wife. Entitled asshole.

  Something plopped onto the plastic sheeting at her feet and she looked down to see one of the used wet tissues, pink with blood, discarded near Bishop’s heel. Her gaze moved up his body. The muscles in his long arms tensed as he rubbed the blood off his hands.

  “You’re done,” Mina said. Still dazed, Kick turned back to the room. Mina was putting away her tools. “We’ll need the dress,” she said to Frank.

  Kick looked down at the front of the dress, the blood, Monster’s fur, the last traces of her dog. “No,” she said, pleading. “Frank, please.”

  Frank coughed and looked away.

  “Everything on the dress is from the dog,” Bishop said. “The blood on her hands belongs to the victim. And you’ll want her shoes.” Bishop drew another wipe out of the box and started scrubbing the blood out of the beds of his fingernails.

  “Yeah, okay,” Frank said.

  Kick let them do what they wanted to her, position her for whatever photographs they needed. Someone unbuckled her shoes and spirited them away, leaving her barefoot on the plastic sheeting.

  Finally it was over. Frank took her blood-caked hand and gently started dabbing at it with one of the wipes. It felt wet and cold. He touched the wipe against the wire-man ring.

  “Stop,” Kick told him.

  Frank looked up at her quizzically. Kick took the wipe from him. “I can do it,” she said, starting to clean her own palm. “I want my purse,” she added. “It’s in the hallway. It has my nunchuks in it, and my throwing stars.” Frank gave her a slight nod. But what she really needed was information, and Frank couldn’t help her with that. There was only one person who could. “I need a minute,” she said. She shot a look at Bishop. “With him.”

  Frank’s posture stiffened. “He will lie to you,” Frank said. “I know him. And he will lie to you.”

  “You lied to me,” Kick reminded him.

  She saw Frank wince.

  Bishop stood motionless, watching them.

  Frank’s eyes roamed to the ceiling, then landed on Bishop. His freckled ears were pink. “Tread carefully, my friend,” he said to Bishop. “I don’t care who you work for.” He turned back to Kick. “I’m going to make a call. It will take about four minutes. We’ll get your purse on the way out.”

  Frank stepped away, got his phone out, and slipped around the corner into the hallway. Kick heard the sound of a plastic bottle bouncing across the floor, and then Frank swearing. Mina was taking fingerprints off the surface of James’s desk. The monitors had all been turned off, and another tech was packing all the computer equipment into evidence boxes.

  “It didn’t have anything to do with you,” Bishop said quietly.

  Kick gave him a sharp glance. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “He had an affair
with your mother,” Bishop said. “It didn’t have anything to do with you.”

  Kick’s pulse throbbed in her temples.

  “Frank hasn’t been promoted in almost a decade,” Bishop continued. “So whatever happened between them, I’m guessing the Bureau knows about it.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Kick snapped, closing her hand into a fist. “You think you do, but you don’t.”

  “Okay,” Bishop said.

  Kick took a fresh wipe from the box in his hand and began to scrub furiously at the blood on her palm. “You owe me,” she said to Bishop. She looked him in the eye. “You’re some kind of cop.”

  Bishop pulled out another wipe from the box. “I used to be some kind of cop. Now I work in private security.”

  “You said you were a weapons dealer,” Kick said.

  “I was,” Bishop said, cleaning between his fingers. “Part of my responsibilities to my employer was to be the public face of his operation. Now I work on special projects.”

  “Who do you work for?” Kick asked.

  “A man named Devlin.” He pulled out another wipe and offered it to her.

  “Devlin?” Kick said. “He just has one name?”

  “David Decker Devlin,” Bishop said. “But you won’t find him on the Internet either.”

  Kick didn’t know if she was supposed to believe him or not. She tossed the wipe she was using and took the fresh one from Bishop. “Why’s he so interested in finding missing kids?”

  Bishop’s eyes were impenetrable. “His interest is in keeping me happy. I do a lot of work for him. This is just one piece of it.”

  “Bishop isn’t even your real name, is it?” Kick said.

  He smiled faintly. “You saw my driver’s license.”

  Frank came back around the corner and strode toward them with something under his arm.

  “I’ll find whoever did this,” Bishop said under his breath.

  So will I, Kick thought.

  Frank tossed Bishop something sealed in a Visqueen pouch. “Mina wants you to take off your pants,” he said. “You can put this on. I assume your employer will be wanting you to observe the processing of the crime scene?”

  “He’ll appreciate your cooperation, as always,” Bishop said. He handed Kick the wipes and the Visqueen pouch, which had a label that read Tyvek Coveralls, and started unbuttoning his jeans.

  Frank gave an exasperated sigh. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Bishop stood shirtless with his pants open and low on his hips. A trail of black hair led down his midsection to his black underwear. He shrugged at Frank. “What?”

  “I’m taking the kid to the hospital to see the boy,” Frank said.

  The hospital.

  The box of wipes and the Tyvek coveralls dropped from Kick’s hands onto the floor.

  James was alive.

  “He’s not out of the woods,” Frank added quickly. “He’s lost a lot of blood.” Kick followed Frank, stunned, as he led her off the plastic sheeting. “They transfused him in the ER and he just went into surgery.” He shot a begrudging glance back in Bishop’s direction. “But apparently our friend is not a half-bad medic.”

  “You should put a guard on his room,” Bishop called after them. He had stepped out of his pants and was stuffing them into a plastic bag.

  “Protect the only person who can identify a child killer,” Frank replied. “I would never have thought of that.”

  Kick looked at her hand, at James’s wire talisman, then back at the place on the floor where she’d found it, where Monster lay sprawled.

  “You want the boxers too?” Bishop called to Frank.

  Monster didn’t look like he was asleep anymore. He looked too flat somehow, like some substantial part of him had deflated. Next to him, on the floor, was a yellow plastic evidence marker with the number 24 printed on it in black. That’s what he was now: evidence. Another crime scene biohazard.

  “What’s going to happen to my dog?” Kick asked Frank.

  Frank sucked in a long breath and looked like he had a sudden headache.

  He had never been good at giving her bad news.

  Kick looked over at Bishop, who had one leg in some kind of white zip-up paper suit. “What’s going to happen to my dog?” Kick called to him.

  Bishop paused, pants around his knees, and his eyes went to Frank.

  “There are protocols,” Frank said, touching his ear. He couldn’t even look at her. “For disposing of crime scene . . . biological evidence.”

  “You mean,” Kick said numbly, “that he’s going to get incinerated with a bunch of biowaste.” Thrown away and burned up. Discarded. It made it worse somehow. Made her failure to protect him more complete.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Bishop said.

  “What?” Kick asked, unsure she had heard right.

  Bishop had the suit on and was zipping it up, not even looking at her. “I’ll take care of your dog,” he said. He adjusted the cuffs on the white paper arms. “I’ll bury him. When we’re done.”

  And despite all his lies, Kick believed him.

  26

  THE HOSPITAL WAITING ROOM was cold and the yellow dress felt threadbare and insubstantial. A pair of hospital footies did little to warm her bare feet. Kick picked a piece of Monster’s hair off the daisy-printed fabric and set it gently in a little stack she was making on the couch upholstery next to her. Everything seemed louder, brighter: she was acutely aware of the hospital’s ventilation system blowing air against her skin, the incessant hum of the fluorescent can lights overhead. The static of the hospital intercom announcements seemed earsplitting. Colors looked different; even the drab earth tones of the furniture seemed electric. But the color in the room that stood out most was the red on Kick’s dress. It was the reddest red Kick had ever seen. She peeled a piece of Monster’s hair from the blood-encrusted fabric and set it with the others.

  She heard Frank’s footsteps in the hallway, and then the door opened and Frank backed into the room with two cups of coffee. She had her head lowered so that her hair formed a screen around her face, and he must not have been able to see her eyes, to see that she’d looked up at him. For an instant she saw his real face, spent and haggard, stained with weary sadness. But when he set one of the coffee cups down in front of her a moment later, his features had rearranged into gentle concern.

  How strange that he would be here, now, for this.

  The shrinks always asked about Frank. Kick had made the mistake of telling the Jungian about the Christmas cards. She hadn’t said a word about Frank to a therapist since.

  Kick looked at the coffee that Frank had set in front of her. She didn’t touch coffee, but Frank would have no way of knowing that. The only version of her that he knew was twelve years old.

  “He’s still in surgery,” Frank said. He took his time taking off his jacket and draping it on a nearby chair. His soft belly hung over his belt. The armpits of his white shirt were darkened with sweat. He rolled up his sleeves and stretched, then gingerly sat down next to her. Kick felt the couch slide back an inch. He didn’t say anything. She didn’t mind. It had been nine years. And Frank had never been good at small talk. The only person she’d ever seen him make sparkling conversation with had been her mother. They had been at the hospital for three hours now, and Kick hadn’t said a word the whole time, so he was probably used to the silence. He stared contemplatively at the lid of his coffee, and his face went hangdog again. He exhaled a deep sigh. As Kick studied him through her hair, she realized that he wasn’t sad at all; the lines had just etched in his face this way.

  Frank caught her looking at him and his eyes brightened. He reached for his jacket and pulled a candy bar out of the pocket. He held it out to her. “Here, eat this,” he said. He lowered his eyebrows. “You still like Snickers?”

  He had done this during the trial: brought her candy to keep her spirits up.

  “You bought me a candy bar,” Kick said skeptically. It was such a strange
gesture, she didn’t know what to make of it.

  Frank shrugged. “You’re too grown-up for candy bars now?”

  Actually, she was starving. She snatched the Snickers bar from Frank’s hand, tore the wrapper open, and took a bite of the chocolate. For an instant she actually felt better.

  Frank took the plastic lid off his coffee cup and blew on it, looking pleased with himself.

  Kick ate half of the candy bar, swallowing sometimes after only a couple of chews. She could feel flakes of chocolate at the corners of her mouth.

  “You get my cards?” Frank asked.

  Kick stopped chewing in mid-bite.

  Frank must have realized that this wasn’t the time, that she wasn’t ready, because he withdrew slightly on the couch. “It’s okay,” he said, scratching his neck. “Never mind.”

  She started to chew again, but the chocolate had made her saliva thick and her mouth felt sticky. She set the rest of the candy bar on the table. “Do you know his real name?” she asked.

  Frank blew some more on his coffee. “Nope,” he said.

  They sat in silence for a while, Frank blowing on his coffee, scratching his beard, then taking a tiny sip from the cup, then blowing on it some more; Kick picking the hairs of her dead dog off her dress and adding them to the stack on her cushion. “And the FBI just lets private citizens elbow in on investigations now?” she asked.

  Frank breathed a heavy sigh and slugged back a full sip from his cup even though it was still steaming and looked like it hurt. Then he settled the cup on his knee and held it there.

  “The guy he works for,” Frank said, “this guy, he topples regimes.” His eyebrows lifted an inch. “He wins wars, Kick. If our government has a special interest in the outcome of a revolution—and we always do—Bishop’s boss gets a call. He gets the weapons in. He gets the blood on his hands. No congressional hearings. The U.S. gets to look above the fray. Our international interests are protected.” He chuckled and shook his head. “A guy like that? You give him anything he wants.”

  Kick noticed that Frank had never used Devlin’s name, so she didn’t either. “I thought Bishop’s boss was retired,” she said.