One Kick

by Chelsea Cain

  But Iron Jacket was the only one who knew where that box was.

  She could see Bishop doing mental calculations. Sweat beaded his face. She didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to stay upright.

  Each of Iron Jacket’s breaths compressed her lungs, making it harder to take in air. “Trapped in the dark,” he said. “No food or water, not knowing if anyone is ever coming back for him. Does that bring back memories, Beth? How many months did Mel keep you in the box?”

  Beth didn’t like being alone. That was the worst part. Days and days of no one at all. . . .

  “I like it when you cry, Beth,” Iron Jacket said. “It reminds me of the Desert Rose.”

  Kick shook her head, trying to block it out. “No, no, no, no.”

  “Stay focused . . . on Adam, Kick,” Bishop said. “Nothing he says . . . matters.”

  “Once I got you out of the pool, you did everything we told you,” Iron Jacket said. Kick felt something break inside her, like glass cracking. “A real natural. I wish to God we’d gotten it all on film.” She was crying now, shoulders shaking, tears running down her cheeks. “Mel. Me. Klugman. We had a party. We broke her in. She was a real little wildcat.”

  “Stop,” Bishop said.

  Beth felt numb. She didn’t care what happened to her anymore. They had to protect Adam.

  “You want to see how good she is at following directions?” Iron Jacket asked Bishop. He opened his arms, and she felt her feet touch the floor. “Sit down, Beth.”

  She did what he said. She sat in the big chair and brought her knees to her chest and made herself as small as she could.

  “Mel was a master, wasn’t he?” Iron Jacket said with appreciation.

  Bishop was only a few feet from the chair and she watched him over her knees as he slipped a few inches down the wall. The Glock had gone off-kilter in his hand.

  “Aren’t you going to shoot me?” Iron Jacket asked, coming at him.

  “Not yet,” Bishop said. “I need Kick to do something for me first.” He made eye contact with her. “Kick,” he said. “I need you to tell me where Adam is.”

  Beth squeezed her arms tighter around her knees.

  Iron Jacket looked over his shoulder at her and chuckled as he moved his gloved hand to Bishop’s throat. Iron Jacket’s eyes gleamed as he took Bishop by the neck, and then he laughed with a bark of astonishment. He glanced down at the Glock that Bishop was barely managing to hold on to. “You’re really going to let me do it, aren’t you? You’re not going to fight back at all.” Iron Jacket’s voice trembled with excitement, his fingers dancing along Bishop’s neck. Dominating a trussed-up kid was one thing, but a grown man submitting willingly—that was a whole other level of enjoyment.

  She couldn’t look away. Bishop was staring right at her, pleading with her. It felt like he was looking at her through a peephole, a gray eye in a hole in a black wall. “He’s in a box where you were kept, Kick,” he said. The words buzzed around her ears like flies. “It’s where he found the Scrabble tile,” Bishop said. “You know where he is. You’ve got this.”

  The muscles in Iron Jacket’s arm flexed, and he lifted his heels and leaned forward, so his weight was behind the hand he had pressing into Bishop’s throat. Iron Jacket’s face twisted into a snarl. Bishop made a guttural noise like air being slowly let out of a balloon.

  She couldn’t see the Glock anymore. It was somewhere lost between them.

  “You feel that?” Iron Jacket said to Bishop in a harsh whisper. “Your pulse throbbing? Give it a minute. And it will start to slow.”

  • • •

  Beth rocked in the chair. She had to think. Think, think, think. Where are you, Adam? It had to be close to the house where they found Josie Reed’s body. Mia was moved three times over a period of a few hours. Bishop had said that Josie Reed’s absentee landlord owned a lot of properties in the neighborhood. The house next door fulfilled all the requirements: set back from the street, fenced-in backyard—and two houses side by side provided more protection from nosy neighbors.

  When the police had knocked, the three-legged dog’s owners had not been home, because the dog had been abandoned. Maybe they never came home. Kick had thought the dog had been tied to that tree all day, but what if it had been longer than that?

  Beth had had a dog once.

  • • •

  Now Monster was dead. Iron Jacket had killed him.

  Bishop’s eyes were glassy half slits. His forehead and temples were a latticework of engorged veins. His mouth was open, making tiny, silent gulping motions.

  Iron Jacket’s eyes rolled back with half-mad pleasure. “Mmm,” he moaned. “There.” He smiled at Bishop. “Feel that? Ba dump. Ba . . . dump. Ba . . . dump.”

  • • •

  “Hide,” Beth whispered. “Get somewhere safe.”

  Visualize a backyard.

  The tire swing is warm from the sun. Kick’s father is kneeling beside her in the grass. In his palm there are two cherries, twin berries connected by a short stem. A large cherry tree is rare, he says, exceptional, like she is. He points heavenward, and she leans her head back and lets her eyes travel up the rope that tethers the tire to a branch, to the green leaves and red berries up above. They have the biggest cherry tree of all. Her father eats one of the twin berries and she reaches for the other one. His fingers are long, his palm smooth, his thumb has a bump at the end.

  She knows that hand. It’s not her father’s hand. It’s Mel’s.

  • • •

  Kick snapped her eyes open. “I know where Adam is,” she said.

  Bishop fired.

  *dpgroup.org*

  45

  THE TELEVISION IN KICK’S hospital room was tuned to coverage of the sensational rescue of Adam Rice. The footage was five hours old, but they kept replaying it in a loop, shots of the bomb squad going into the house in their crazy bomb squad suits, followed by the Seattle police and the paramedics. In the blaze of a billion news lights, the house looked dingy and exposed.

  Kick was riveted by the images, even knowing how it turned out. She held her breath as the camera stayed focused on the house’s front door, waiting for some news from the first responders inside. It felt like years that they were in there, or maybe the TV correspondents just made it seem like years. Then the door opened, and the media pressed closer, and a young uniformed cop appeared on the porch. He hesitated. Then he gave a buoyant thumbs-up. You could have heard the cheer on the other side of the world.

  “That’s my favorite part,” Kick said.

  “How many times have you watched this?” Frank asked.

  “A bazillion,” Kick said. “Shh.”

  On the TV, the cop held open the front door as paramedics rushed a shape on a gurney to a waiting ambulance. A wall of patrol cops jogged alongside, using their bodies to block the news cameras. As the TV reporters lined the perimeter of the yard to file their reports, Kick caught a glimpse of a three-legged collie being led away by animal control. For Iron Jacket, the dog had been an extra layer of security, to dissuade unwanted visitors. But Kick liked to think that the dog had betrayed Iron Jacket, too, and that it barked madly that night as if to say, Here, you jackasses, try here.

  “How did you know?”

  “The cherry tree,” Kick said. “I remembered it. Then everything else made sense.”

  A nurse came in, pushing a hospital stretcher, and wheeled it parallel to Kick’s bed. Her fitted mint-green scrubs had the words Trident Medical Group stitched on the chest. “We’re all ready for you, Miss Lannigan,” the nurse said.

  Frank stood awkwardly. “She won’t have contact with him, right?” he asked.

  “They’ll be in separate operating theaters,” the nurse assured him. She depressed the stretcher’s brake with her foot and came around to Kick’s shoulder. “He’s under heavy guard. Everything’s been arranged.”

  Kick scooted sideways onto the stretcher and lay down while the nurse checked her IV port. Frank tu
rned away. Kick knew his resolve was crumbling.

  “Swear to me you won’t call Paula, Frank,” she said, lifting her head. “I mean it. I’m an adult.”

  “I won’t call Paula,” Frank muttered.

  Kick put her head back down. The ceiling of the room was bone white. Two sprinkler spigots looked back at her like eyes. Frank came around to the stretcher’s bedside.

  “Any news from Bishop?” she asked.

  “They sent a chopper for him,” Frank said. “He’s probably shot full of steroids and painkillers and being a pain in the ass at the scene right now,” he added, with a glance at the TV.

  The news was in the happy cycle now: the joyful reunion, the celebrating crowds, the parade of psychiatrists optimistic about his reintegration. The next cycle would reveal all the missed chances law enforcement had to find him sooner; leak details of his abuse; feature the same parade of psychiatrists, now armed with new and darker predictions; and, finally, showcase the real experts, the kidnap moms, in expensive clothes bought with their children’s settlement money, hawking books and dispensing sage advice.

  Iron Jacket was dead, but the investigation into the extent of his crimes was just getting started. For now, “Dennis” was the only clue they had to his real identity. “I know you have other places to be,” Kick said.

  Frank laid a hand on her forearm. “I show up when you need me, kid,” he said. “That’s our deal.”

  The stretcher jerked as the nurse lifted the brake, and Kick flinched. “Here we go,” the nurse announced cheerily. She gave the stretcher a push and wheeled it out into the hall. Frank was right next to her again as soon as they cleared the door.

  “Check on James for me tonight, okay?” Kick asked.

  “You sure you want to go through with it?” Frank asked one last time.

  “It’s a kidney,” Kick said with false bravado. “I have another one, right?”

  46

  WHEN KICK WOKE UP, she was not in the hospital room. The ceiling was not white. It was crisscrossed with timber beams. She lifted her wrist. The IV port was still there; a tube snaked to a bag hanging on an IV pole. She tried to lift her head but was struck by a nauseating wall of pain.

  “Take it easy,” Bishop said.

  “Where am I?” Kick whispered.

  “At my house,” Bishop said. “The surgery went well. Both yours and Mel’s.”

  Kick’s head was fuzzy from morphine. It hurt to breathe. “Good,” she said.

  Bishop looked at her over his folded hands. He was wearing a collared shirt and a tie, and Kick wondered why he was so dressed up, then realized he was probably just trying to hide the bruises that purpled his neck.

  “Did Frank call you?” she asked weakly.

  He hesitated. “I know people at the hospital,” he said.

  Kick tried to smile. “You just want the password,” she said. “You think I’ll mutter it in my sleep.”

  Bishop gazed at her thoughtfully. She could see the bulk of the bandages on his shoulder under his shirt. The small lesions on his face had been expertly stitched with clear sutures. But his cheek was swollen and bruised, and a blood vessel in his right eye had ruptured, coloring the white of the eye red. “I already know the password,” he said.

  There was no smirk, no hint that he was kidding.

  “The Scrabble letters you hid,” he said. “You said they were always the same letters. Mia had the E. You had the K. What other letters did you hide? Do you remember what you were spelling?”

  She still didn’t understand. “Nothing, probably.”

  “What words does a kid that age know how to spell?” He took her hand, and her heart jumped. “Kit. Kick. Beth. So many names,” he said, turning over her hand in his. He put his thumb on her palm. “But as far as the Social Security office goes, you just have one.” His thumb drew a line down the inside of her wrist and hooked under the plastic hospital bracelet that encircled it. “It’s your legal name,” he said. “Kathleen.”

  Flashes of memory splintered through Kick’s brain. A, H, N. She remembered those letters, feeling them in the dark, memorizing them. “I was spelling my name,” she murmured. Not Kit—not her nickname—but her legal name, the important one. “That’s the password?”

  “That’s the password,” Bishop said.

  “You tried it?”

  “We found the banking account number on Iron Jacket’s BlackBerry.”

  Kick hesitated. “How much is there?”

  “Thirty million and change.”

  She inhaled so sharply, it felt like her stitches might burst, and she had to let the pain ebb before she could talk again. “I don’t want to touch it,” she said.

  “It’s yours to touch or not touch,” Bishop said. “Just keep it offshore or you’re going to run into some legal issues.”

  Kick’s body was somehow both floaty and full of stones. Maybe it was the painkillers. Maybe this is how she was going to feel from now on.

  Bishop stood and straightened his tie with the hand of his good arm.

  “How’s the throat?” Kick asked.

  “Fine,” Bishop said. But she could hear the strain in his voice when he spoke, like his vocal cords were still swollen. He stepped back, toward the open door. “But do me a favor,” he said, rolling a wheelchair into the room. “Try to be just a tiny bit faster next time.”

  He parked the wheelchair at her bedside and offered her his elbow like he expected her to take it and jump to her feet. Kick looked at him like he was out of his mind. “I just had an organ removed,” she reminded him.

  His expression didn’t waver. His elbow remained at the ready. He stared at her, his left eye half filled with blood.

  The wheelchair had a steel frame and black vinyl upholstery. It didn’t look particularly comfortable.

  “The recovery protocol requires you to be up and active as soon as possible,” he said.

  “I can’t sit up,” Kick said.

  “I’ll help you,” Bishop said. He put his hand behind her back and supported her as she gritted her teeth and elbowed herself up into a sitting position. Every contraction of her stomach muscles made Kick grunt in pain, but she somehow managed to get upright. She didn’t get any time to rest. Bishop lifted one of her arms and ducked under it so that it was around his neck, and then he took her by the waist. “This might hurt,” he said. He pivoted her around so that her bare legs slid off the bed and the only reason that Kick didn’t scream profanities was because it hurt too much to talk. The instant the toes of her socks touched the floor, Bishop lifted her to her feet. Kick’s knees buckled and Bishop barely managed to keep her off the floor. By the time he was able to grapple her into the chair, they were both panting. Kick scowled up at Bishop, who sat perched on the edge of the bed nursing his injured shoulder. “Don’t ever do that again,” she said.

  Bishop dragged a blanket off the bed and piled it on her lap, and then started fiddling with her IV pole.

  “What’s this for?” she asked about the blanket.

  “I want to show you something,” he said. He hooked the IV pole to the back of the wheelchair.

  “I need to rest,” Kick said. “I’m convalescing.”

  Bishop dropped to his knees in front of her chair, folded down each footrest, and forcibly placed her feet on them.

  “I feel like you’re not listening to me,” Kick said.

  “Think of it as an opportunity for fresh air,” Bishop said.

  There was no point arguing. Kick didn’t even like fresh air. But she also wasn’t looking forward to getting manhandled back into the bed, so if Bishop wanted to wheel her around the grounds, then what the hell. She straightened the blanket on her lap and sat back as Bishop steered her out of the guest room and down the hall.

  A glass door led outside to a vast expanse of lawn that stretched to the edge of woods on one side, and to the beach on the other. Beyond the strip of rocky shore, the chilly water of Puget Sound looked like glass. Two seagulls fought over t
he scraps of something dead on the beach. The air tasted like salt. Kick lifted her face to the sun and felt another wave of pain medicine hit.

  She was jerked back to the moment by a faint but familiar sound—the distant hum of chopper rotors. Kick scanned the sky, but didn’t see a helicopter. The seagulls started to squawk loudly at each other. She was only barely aware of them—she was focused on the helicopter. But the squawking continued. It almost sounded like they were calling Kick’s name.

  “I think someone is trying to get your attention,” Bishop said.

  He pointed a finger across the lawn where two figures sat on a garden bench at the edge of the woods. One of the figures was a woman, the other appeared to be a slight young man, wearing what looked like a robe over pajamas. Kick inhaled in surprise, and then glanced uncertainly up at Bishop. Bishop gave her a nod. Grinning, Kick placed her trembling hands on the chair’s wheels and rolled herself forward a few feet.

  James waved at her from across the yard.

  Kick made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

  The grass swirled and flattened between them. The thrum of helicopter blades was clearly audible now. Kick’s eyes went to the vacant helipad, and then skyward, where a chopper approached over the trees.

  “I’ll be back in a few weeks,” Bishop said.

  “No,” Kick said.

  “You and James, enjoy the house for as long as you like,” he said. “I’ve arranged for full-time medical care.” The beat of the chopper’s rotor echoed in Kick’s ears. Bishop’s necktie flapped against his shirt. “That’s your private duty nurse now,” Bishop said, looking across the yard.

  The female figure sitting next to James stood and started walking toward them. She was wearing pink hospital scrubs. Her blond ponytail slapped sideways in the chopper’s wind.