One Kick (21 page)

She was almost crying then, when she heard voices coming from the garage. She was so relieved that she almost opened the door without knocking. She caught herself, and knocked, and her father’s voice called for her. When she opened the door, there they were, her father and Mr. Klugman. The garage door was open. The bright San Diego sun poured in. It was so warm, like not being outside at all.

“It’s Miss America,” Mr. Klugman said, and Beth beamed.

“I thought you’d left,” she said.

“Mr. Klugman got a new car,” her father said.

The car glistened red, like cherries.

“Where’s James?” Beth asked.

“He’s gone,” her father said.

Beth knew better than to ask any more questions.

JAMES WAS GONE. THEY
had taken him away on a stretcher.

Kick didn’t know who these people were. But they were leaving her alone, stepping around her on the floor. She had pulled Monster halfway onto her lap and held him in her arms. His body was limp and heavy. Her dress was covered in dog hair and blood and something like blood, but stickier. The floor was red where James had been. Bloody footprints made tracks across the papers strewn around the room. Kick recognized the shapes of her own sandals.

James’s wire man was ruined. She didn’t know how to fix him. She twisted the ring she’d made of him around her finger. James would be furious.

Where was he? She remembered Bishop sitting back, letting the paramedics take over compressions, seeing them loading James on a stretcher. Someone took the sweatshirt out of her hand and put it into a plastic bag.

And then James was gone.

The paramedics were gone.

She smoothed down the fur over Monster’s forehead.

Bishop was still there. He was talking to one of the men with guns.

FBI agents. That’s who they were. They were all carrying Glocks.
Like the ones who’d come for Beth. Only Kick was Beth. Kick was Beth that night at the farm. She could still hear Frank’s voice in her head.

“I had a dog,” she said, remembering.

Frank was motionless. “What was its name?” he asked.

There was shouting.

“You took her to see him?” a voice said incredulously. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

It was Frank.

His voice—now, here, in this room. For real. Kick strained to locate it.

But it was Bishop’s voice she heard. He was talking to someone who had just come in. “I don’t work for you, Frank,” Bishop was saying. “I didn’t have to call you. I could have just walked away.”

Kick threaded her fingers deeper into Monster’s fur, unsure what was real.

She watched Frank point a finger in Bishop’s face. “Not even you are that much of a prick,” Frank said.

A poster on the wall had a picture of footsteps on a white sand beach.
Your Dream Vacation, Today!
it promised.

“It’s him,” Bishop told Frank. “James was one of his victims. This? It’s him. There’s security footage of the conversation at the prison. You know who to talk to about getting a copy.”

Monster’s head was so heavy. “She’s a kid,” Frank said, his worried eyes glancing in her direction.

“Not anymore,” Bishop said.

Frank came toward her then, carefully making his way around yellow plastic evidence markers, pausing to find a spot to place his foot.

“Don’t touch her,” Bishop called to him. “Her clothing hasn’t been processed. And she doesn’t want to let go of the dog.”

Monster looked peaceful. She had closed his eyes. As long as she
didn’t look below his shoulders, she could almost believe he was asleep. James was asleep. They could sleep together.

Frank was standing above Kick now, and she was gazing up at him. His rust-colored eyebrows were still thatched with blond.

“Are you really here?” she asked. She wanted to reach out, to touch him, to see if he was smoke. He was shorter than she remembered him. His eyes were squintier. Seeing him now, she realized that he wasn’t even that old. She was the old one. She was as old as the universe.

Frank lowered himself into a squat. “I show up when you need me. That’s our deal.”

Kick moved her fingers over Monster’s head, feeling his skull, his realness. “He killed my dog,” she whispered.

Frank’s mouth twitched. “I know.” He turned his face to his shoulder for a moment and when he looked back his eyes were red. “But it’s time to go now.”

“I don’t want to leave him alone,” Kick said. She could feel Beth’s panic in her chest. Beth had never liked Frank. Beth had wanted to shoot him dead. “Don’t take me away from him,” she begged.

Frank rubbed his eyes with a thumb. “When I found you, you couldn’t even say your own name, remember?” he asked. His shoulders rose and fell. “But you told me about your dog; you remembered Monster’s name. And that’s how I knew who you were. He helped get you home.” His jacket hung open, and Kick could see his Glock 27 with Smith & Wesson .45 ammo, close enough to snatch. “And he has been a great dog, hasn’t he?”

Kick looked down at Monster. This would be the last time she’d see him, his graying muzzle, his furry ears, his rough nose.

Oh, Monster, no.

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.