One Kick

by Chelsea Cain

  “Guys like that don’t get to retire.”

  “And what about me?” Kick’s voice wavered. “I just go home and pretend none of this has happened?”

  “I don’t want you to go home, kiddo,” Frank said. “Not until we know the situation.”

  Kick saw him sneak a glance at his watch.

  “But I’ve got to get back to work,” he announced, standing up. He got his jacket from the chair. He wasn’t looking at Kick; it seemed to her that he was making a special effort not to.

  She knew then what he’d done. It made perfect sense. Even as a kid, she’d figured him for a sentimentalist.

  “You called her, didn’t you,” Kick said.

  He looked sheepish, found out. She didn’t know how he’d been able to carry on an affair for a year. He cracked under the slightest pressure. “I called her.”

  Kick took a shaky breath and her eyes fell on the pile of dog hair she’d made. It really wasn’t much when it was all put together.

  Frank scratched the back of his neck. “She’s your mother,” he said.

  Paula had made a career out of it.

  “I’m sorry I can’t stay,” Frank said, pulling on his jacket. “They’ll let me know about James.”

  Kick saw through him. She always had. “You’re just trying to make an escape before she gets here,” she said.

  Frank hesitated. “I know you think I’m a coward,” he said.

  Kick wished she could take it back. They were bound, she and Frank. They understood something about one another. “You saved me,” she said.

  Frank gave her a bitter smile. “Then I broke up your family,” he said. He lowered his head and turned for the door. “I’m a real white knight.”

  Kick gathered the dog hair into her palm. “Well, there’s that,” she said under her breath.

  She heard the door open and looked up to see Frank standing face-to-face with her mother. Kick had thought she had met some emotional quota for the day, some point where the universe says, Enough. Frank jumped back, looking almost comically panicked. Paula Lannigan breezed past him with a phone to her face, wearing a shimmering gold satin blouse and chartreuse trousers. Her blond hair had been crafted into an up-do. She was in full makeup. Kick wondered bleakly if her mother had stopped for a media interview on the way to the hospital.

  Paula lowered her phone. “Hello, Frank,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Hello, Paula,” Frank mumbled. He made a jittery motion with his hands indicating the coffee table. “There’s coffee there for you. Two Splendas.”

  Paula gave him a distracted nod, then she hurried to Kick, sat down beside her, and reached an arm around her shoulder.

  Kick had a vague awareness of Frank saying good-bye and leaving. Her mother gave her shoulder a squeeze. Kick couldn’t look at her. The dress looked like bathroom wallpaper, but it had been expensive. Her mother’s gifts were always expensive.

  Instead Kick fixed her gaze on her lap. There was a dog hair on the hem of the yellow dress and she picked it up and moved it to the pile. Her mother’s arm remained around Kick’s shoulders, a steady, patient pressure.

  Her mother smelled like Eternity by Calvin Klein. She had smelled like that as long as Kick could remember.

  Kick knew what her mother would say: that Kick should have put Monster down months ago; that she’d been selfish. And Kick knew she was right, because if she had done that, then she would have been there, and her dog would not have died alone.

  Her mother patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. “You gave him a good life,” she said.

  It was the first time Kick ever remembered her mother saying exactly the right thing.

  Kick hiccuped back a sob. Then the floodgates opened. Her mother pulled her close and Kick clung to her and cried.

  27

  “I SPENT THE NIGHT at my mother’s,” Kick told James. She was dressed in her mother’s clothes, her brain fogged by her mother’s pharmaceuticals: Ambien to help her sleep last night, Klonopin for anxiety in the morning. The pills made Kick drowsy and thirsty, but she took them without protest. She wanted to dull her senses.

  “If you could open your eyes,” she continued, “you’d laugh.” Her mother’s dark denim designer jeans were an inch too long, and the heather-gray jersey top with the cowl neckline and the asymmetrical peplum had looked edgy in her mother’s closet but on Kick just made her look like she was wearing a shirt backward. The only pair of her mother’s shoes that came close to fitting were hot-pink plastic flip-flops with silver-sequined straps. “You’d die laughing.”

  James’s head was tipped back on a pillow and his mouth was open around a clear tube that had been forced down his throat and secured with clear surgical tape around his lips. The other end of the tube led to a ventilator. The hiss of every forced breath had a mechanical quality, each breath lasting exactly the same duration, spaced exactly the same length apart. His slender shoulders were bare. He had too many surgical dressings to wear a gown; the bandages had to be changed, ports flushed. Tubes drained from his abdomen; a catheter fed fluid into a bag below his bed. His thin arms were threaded with IVs and wrapped with more surgical tape. Bandages covered the fresh ligature marks on his wrists.

  He wasn’t asleep or even unconscious; he was sedated, which was worse. He didn’t stir or flinch or flutter his eyelashes. His chest and chin rose in rhythm with the machine. Otherwise he lay there like a corpse.

  Kick watched him for a while, then she dug her handcuffs out of the purse under her chair and she cuffed her wrist to the side bar of James’s hospital bed. It was an activity, a way to stay focused, like playing solitaire. Kick could do it in her sleep. But something went wrong. She flattened the paper clip, she notched the end, but it wouldn’t catch in the keyhole. She wiggled it, but it was no use. Frustrated, Kick started over, this time notching the other side of the paper clip and trying that. The metal cuff rattled against the bed railing as she worked the paper clip fruitlessly in the lock. Kick started to sweat. James’s chest expanded and deflated. Kick’s own breathing was twice as fast. She glanced at the door and tried to figure out how she was going to explain this to the next nurse who walked in. “This isn’t funny,” she told James.

  The paper clip slipped from Kick’s hand and bounced under the bed.

  Kick rested her forehead against the edge of the mattress and tried to collect herself.

  The door opened. She peeked up, expecting to see a nurse. Instead, Bishop strolled in. He tipped his head to the side and looked at her curiously. Kick tried to seem casual. She lifted the hand she had cuffed to the bed and waved. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” Bishop said. He crossed to the computer terminal opposite the bed and typed something on the keyboard. Kick watched as James’s medical reports appeared on the screen and Bishop proceeded to page through them.

  “Things seem to be in a holding pattern here,” he said, scanning the screen. He turned his attention to James. There was no reaction on his face, but he looked at James for what seemed like a full minute. Then he bent over, scooped the paper clip up from the floor, and handed it to Kick without comment.

  Kick started working the keyhole again.

  “I spent the night at my mother’s,” she said.

  “That explains the clothes,” Bishop said. “And why you smell like Eternity.”

  Kick looked down at her shirt with a stab of self-consciousness. “She gave me pills,” she said. “My head’s a little muddy.” Eternity? How did he know her mother’s perfume? He hadn’t had trouble obtaining a fresh change of clothes, she noticed. Black jeans, gray T-shirt, black blazer—he probably kept a bloodstain-free ensemble in every city, just in case. She gestured helplessly at the cuffs. “Can you give me a hand?”

  Bishop glanced at the cuffs. “I don’t know how to pick a lock.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No idea,” Bishop said.

  “Why are you even here?” Kick said, peering into the keyhole, trying to see w
hat she was doing. “He can’t answer any questions.”

  “I can access his medical chart from my phone,” Bishop said. “I wanted to check on you.”

  She could feel him looking at her; it made the back of her neck warm. “Did you find anything useful at the apartment?”

  “It’s possible the lab might still turn something up,” he said.

  She knew that meant they had turned up nothing. She’d known it the moment Bishop walked through the door, because he could be there for only one reason. Kick wiggled the paper clip.

  “You want me to talk to Mel again,” she said.

  The ventilator hissed. James’s chest rose and fell.

  “No,” Bishop said.

  Kick looked up, the paper clip poised in her hand. “James can’t help,” she said. “Mel knows everybody in that world. If he can’t give us more information, he can tell us how to find someone who can. I can handle it. I want to talk to him. I want . . .” She stopped herself before she said it.

  “Mel slipped into a coma this morning,” Bishop said quietly.

  Kick’s hand shook and the paper clip made a frantic tapping noise against the cuffs. “Oh,” she said. She set the paper clip on James’s white hospital blanket.

  Compared to the smooth pace of the ventilator, Kick’s own breaths seemed suddenly shaky and shallow.

  She fixed her attention on the paper clip. She made it her whole world. She didn’t try to laugh, or scream, or tell herself affirmations. She didn’t want to feel.

  “I need to ask you some questions,” Bishop said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “What year was it when you were in San Diego?” he asked.

  Kick was aware of her hand hanging limp in the cuff; of James’s wire talisman, still snug around her finger; of the paper clip on the white blanket. “I don’t know.”

  “How old were you?” Bishop asked.

  The ventilator hummed. “James was nine,” she said. “So I was seven.” She picked up the paper clip and pushed the end back into the keyhole.

  “How long were you there?”

  “A few weeks,” Kick said. “It was summer.”

  “It’s always summer in San Diego,” Bishop said.

  “No,” Kick said firmly. “It was July. I remember the fireworks on the Fourth. I could hear them.”

  James’s breaths were like a ticking clock. Each mechanical lungful of air counted against him. Every day that James was on the ventilator increased the chances he wouldn’t wake up.

  “Could you find the house?” Bishop asked.

  Kick looked up, puzzled. “In San Diego?” she said. “Klugman is gone. He’s probably changed his name ten times by now. Even if you could find him, he sold James to this guy fourteen years ago. He’s not going to be able to help you find him.”

  “Can you find the house?” Bishop repeated evenly.

  Kick jammed the paper clip around in the hole. James didn’t even look like himself. He looked like a shell, like a skin he’d shed and left behind.

  She could sit there in her mother’s clothes, listening to a machine count down the minutes to her brother’s death, or she could find out who did this. Kick felt the paper clip catch, and she turned the wire ninety degrees. The lock clicked and the bracelet opened.

  She sat back in her chair with a sigh. The pills were wearing off and her brain was feeling sharper. “That jet isn’t yours, is it,” she said.

  “No,” Bishop said. “But I get to use it. It’s one of my corporate perks.”

  She had conditions. “I want a gun,” she said.

  Bishop smiled. “Is that a yes?”

  “It’s a maybe.” It would be something to do; it would get her out of that room. The idea of a life without Monster or James made Kick more terrified than she could ever admit to anyone. “I could maybe find the house.”

  Bishop reached underneath his jacket, to the small of his back, and pulled out a 9mm semiautomatic and handed it to Kick.

  Kick turned the pistol over in her hands, her heart quickening. The polymer construction, the black finish, the hammer-forged, Tenifer-coated barrel, beveled at the front for easy holstering. She knew this gun. It was her Glock. “You said . . .”

  “I lied,” Bishop said.

  28

  “DO WE NOT GET fancy cars anymore?” Kick asked, gazing glumly around the bland interior of the Chevy Impala that Bishop had rented at the San Diego airport.

  “Fancy cars stand out,” Bishop said.

  “This car is electric blue,” Kick said.

  “It’s topaz, and it was the only full-size model they had available,” Bishop said. “Besides, it has a big trunk.”

  Kick let the topic drop. She didn’t want to know why Bishop considered a big trunk a plus. They certainly didn’t need it for their luggage. Bishop had a carry-on–size suitcase and a duffel bag, and Kick had her red purse and a shopping bag from the Target they’d stopped at so she could get supplies on the way to the airport. They could have fit all they had with them in the trunk of a Miata.

  She had changed out of her mother’s shirt and into a black T-shirt with studded sleeves that she’d picked up at Target. The gray shirt was probably more suitable to San Diego’s climate, but Kick felt better in the black shirt. She wanted all her clothing to have studs. It felt like armor.

  “Anything?” Bishop asked.

  They had been driving around for over two hours. Every so often Kick would glimpse the Pacific Ocean down a side street. The car’s outside temperature reading said it was eighty-three degrees—not that they’d know it, since Bishop had the AC cranked up so high.

  “No,” Kick said. Bishop had signed into the hospital network from her phone, allowing Kick to see James’s digital chart in real time as it was updated. Kick glanced down to check it.

  “Eyes up,” Bishop said.

  “The light hurts my head,” Kick said. It wasn’t true, but he was starting to annoy her. “Concussion, remember?”

  “You’re fine,” Bishop said. “If you were going to have an intracranial hemorrhage, it would have happened by now.”

  Nice.

  Kick sighed and stared out the window. There was nothing to see. None of it looked familiar, and yet every block was the same as the one before it. Gated condos, adobe-style houses, manicured lawns.

  “Is that place on the island even your house?” she asked.

  “Technically it belongs to my employer,” Bishop said. “He lets me live there when I’m working in the area.” They stopped at a light. “I’m not there a lot.”

  Kick was tired of looking out the window. She turned her attention back inside the car. “What about the old ball and chain?” she asked, with a nod at the naked left hand Bishop had on the steering wheel. “She mind you not wearing a wedding ring?”

  “Eyes up,” Bishop said.

  Kick crossed her arms and looked back out the window. “It was light colored and one-story,” she recited by rote. “It had a pool. And it was near the ocean.”

  Two boys played basketball in the driveway of a house with a red clay roof and two palm trees in the front yard.

  “There was a school,” Kick said. She had forgotten that until now. “An elementary school. I could hear the kids at recess. I wasn’t allowed outside. But I could hear them.” She twisted to look up and down the street they were on. “Have you noticed that half these houses are for sale?”

  “Public or private?” Bishop asked.

  “Huh?” Kick said.

  “The school,” Bishop said impatiently. “Was it public or private?”

  She caught a glimpse of the ocean again, a chunk of blue at the end of a street. She had a feeling this was the closest she was going to get to it. “Do they sound different?” Kick asked.

  “You said it was July,” Bishop said. “It was probably a public school. They go year-round here.”

  All the cars they passed, the houses, they were too fancy.

  “Tell me about the pool,” Bishop
said.

  “I don’t know,” Kick said helplessly. “There was one.” She didn’t know what he wanted from her. Her memories were fragmented, like a series of clips in the wrong order. “It was in the backyard,” she said. “The backyard had a wooden fence. It had some vine growing on it. It had dark-pink flowers.”

  “Bougainvillea,” Bishop said. “Who maintained the pool?”

  She didn’t know. “I was a kid,” she said. “We were there for two weeks.”

  “What was over the fence?” Bishop asked.

  “I wasn’t allowed near the fence.”

  “Did you see airplanes flying overhead? Were there trains? Ship horns?”

  Kick looked at her wire-man ring and felt a pang of guilt for not being with James. “I don’t remember.”

  “How do you know you were near the ocean?”

  She wanted him to leave her alone. “I could hear it. I could hear the roar of the waves.”

  Bishop pulled to the curb and lowered Kick’s window from the driver’s-side controls. “Listen,” he said.

  Kick listened. It made Bishop shut up for a minute, at least. She focused all of her attention out the open window. She practiced being present in the moment. She didn’t know what the hell she was supposed to be hearing. She could see a slice of the ocean between condo buildings. She could smell the salt water. But she couldn’t hear the waves. So she didn’t know what good this was doing. She couldn’t hear the ocean at all. Then it dawned on her: if she couldn’t hear the ocean now, then she wouldn’t have been able to hear the ocean then. “It wasn’t the ocean,” she said.

  “It was a freeway,” Bishop said.

  This was good. This was a breakthrough. So why didn’t Bishop look more excited?

  “Doesn’t that help?” Kick asked.

  Bishop leaned back against the headrest. “There are more houses near freeways in San Diego than near the ocean.”

  Kick inventoried her mind for anything, any detail no matter how random, that might possibly help. She came up with nothing. Just one small fact that was probably stupid to even bring up, but she did anyway. “The basement leaked,” she muttered.