One Kick (30 page)

She nodded, paddling in place, the water lapping at her ears.

“Your father worked hard to bring you here. He counts on you to be a good girl.” The man’s voice sounded muffled through the pool, distant, but there was still something in his tone that made Beth’s stomach hurt. “Don’t you think you owe him that?”

She could feel him getting close to her, and she strained her eyes sideways. His wet, dark hair was flattened back, like paint. The water came to his bottom lip, so that his face seemed divided into two different shapes. One of the
tattooed arrows stretched up his neck, the tip pointing at his jawbone. “I know who you are,” he breathed. “I know your real name.”

Beth swallowed a gulp of pool water and choked, and her legs sank as she paddled frantically with her arms to stay afloat. She was still sputtering on the chlorine when she felt a viselike grip on her arm, propelling her to the black and white tiles at the edge of the pool.

BISHOP HEADED EAST, OVER
the Hawthorne Bridge. Below them, the Willamette River looked so tranquil, but even in the summer it could kill you—if the currents didn’t get you, the hypothermia would.

“Are you all right?” Bishop asked.

“Yes,” Kick lied. She glanced down at the flier with Adam’s photo on it in her hand.

“They don’t know where you live,” Bishop said.

She could tell he was trying to make her feel better; the problem was, he didn’t know what was wrong.

“It’s all words,” he continued. “They wouldn’t know what to do with you if they had you.” He caught himself. “That was the wrong thing to say, wasn’t it?”

Kick could feel the barrel of the Glock through the leather of the purse on her lap. “I knew what I was doing, John.”

Bishop looked at her sideways. “
John
?” he said. “I’m
John
now?”

Kick shrugged. “I was just trying it out.” It had sounded all wrong coming out of her mouth. It probably wasn’t even his real name. “I don’t like it,” she added.

“I don’t like it either,” Bishop said.

Kick put the flier back in her purse and pulled out the Glock.

“You want me to drop you off at the hospital?” Bishop asked, with a glance at the gun.

Kick ejected the magazine, inventoried the ammo, and inserted it back in the well. It needed cleaning. “Can I get into my apartment?”

“James’s place is still sealed, but there’s no reason you can’t access yours. You’ll be alone, though: all the neighbors are out until tomorrow.”

“I want to go home,” Kick said. “I can drive myself to the hospital.” She swallowed hard. “Will you be by later?” It sounded like a proposition. Maybe it was. She didn’t know yet.

Bishop hesitated. “I’m going to head back and help Joe.”

Right. He had to scour her deviant fan mail for clues. That wasn’t humiliating at all.

“You need to dry-fire that before you clean it,” Bishop said, nodding at the Glock.

“I know,” Kick said. She peered over the skyline at where Mount Hood was supposed to be and wasn’t, but it was like it had never been there in the first place. She wanted to ask Bishop where he was going to spend the night, but it wasn’t any of her business, really. She didn’t know what she was to him.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Bishop said.

For a moment she thought he had seen through her plan.

But when she looked over at him, he seemed completely unconcerned, gazing out the windshield, one hand on the wheel. “You’ll feel better sleeping in your own bed,” he said.

She couldn’t figure him out.

“I’m going to see you again, right?” she asked.

“We will see each other again,” Bishop said.

He said it with such absolute authority that Kick almost thought he meant it.

“Good,” she said.

“I KNOW WHO HE
is,” Kick whispered to James.

James’s eyelids twitched. Kick lay next to him on the bed, on the side with fewer tubes, wedged between his body and the rail of his hospital bed.

His skin felt clammy and cold. “Breathe,” she reminded him. The muscles of his neck strained. His forehead was shiny with sweat. His vitals skyrocketed, matched by the quickening electronic pulse of the monitor alerts, lights blinking. The doctors were weaning him off the ventilator, forcing him to take every other breath on his own. He had to decide, with each breath, if he wanted to live or die. It made Kick sick to see him struggle. She closed her eyes and put her forehead against his cheek. She could barely smell him anymore. The machine took a mechanical breath, and she felt James relax. The electronic pulses slowed.

“I’ve seen him,” Kick whispered.

All those years, Mel was teaching her escape tricks, teaching her to be afraid. It wasn’t the FBI he was worried about. He had borrowed money from a dangerous man, a fixer for the Family, a man with a military background and a child bondage fetish. A man like that, he wouldn’t just invest blindly in a project: he would want to know what he was getting into; he would want to inspect the merchandise. She had met him, when she was a kid, at the Desert Rose
Motel. He had made her get out of the pool that night.
You owe him,
the man had said. But a child’s description and a vague memory of a tattoo were not going to help Bishop find him.

“He’ll come tonight,” she said.

She knew Iron Jacket was watching her. The gray Taurus had been behind them on the way down to the state pen, but it hadn’t been there on the trip home, because it had turned around and doubled back as soon as Iron Jacket realized where she was headed. Her visit with Mel had been the trigger.

James was struggling to breathe again. Kick caressed his cheek. If they made it through this, she would tell him everything. All he had to do was breathe.

Poor, sweet James. “I think all of this might be my fault,” she said. They had assumed that James had been attacked because of his history with Iron Jacket. But why now, after all these years? No, it had been about Mel. James and Monster had been hurt to send Mel a message. It had been a threat.
Give me what I want or I will kill your daughter. I will kill Beth.
James and Kick lived in identical apartments. If he could get to James, he could get to her. She remembered how her skin crawled when Iron Jacket came up out of the pool next to her.
I see you.

She took James’s hand, the wire talisman pressed between them. She wondered if he could feel it too. If he even knew she was there.

The round clock on the wall said it was almost six p.m. She had to go. Kick felt a strange kind of calm settle over her.

Mel had known this day might come. He had taught her about the Comanche, about their raiding parties, how they murdered adults and took children captive. Most of the children were slaughtered, but some, the cooperative ones, the pliant ones, would be given Indian names and welcomed into the tribe. One of the greatest and most arrogant Comanche chiefs wore a vest of Spanish armor, and
many believed him to have supernatural powers because the vest repelled bullets so easily. They called him Iron Jacket.

Tonight she would be ready for him. And she would make him tell her where Adam was, and she would make him pay for James, and she would get vengeance for her dog.

KICK TOOK HER TIME
making preparations. She fieldstripped the Glock at her kitchen table, cleaned it, reassembled it, and loaded it. She kept it out as she padded around the apartment. Her apartment felt alien to her. Monster’s food bowl sat half full on the kitchen floor. His toys lay strewn around her bedroom. Everywhere she looked, she saw a ghost image of James’s apartment imprinted over her own. His blood on her floor. Monster, dead, in her bedroom. Kick looked for a place on her bookshelf to hide the knife, and her gaze fell on a framed photograph of her and Marnie. Her childhood pictures were limited to Befores and Afters. There were no photographs of her from the five years she’d spent with Mel and Linda, only photographs of Beth. Kick smiled faintly at the framed photo: two little kids grinning madly at the camera. They looked happy. Kick had no memories of her sister from Before, but she liked the idea that they had once gotten along. It was a good place to hide the survival knife. This one was military-grade. Case-hardened steel, and a leather grip darkened with the patina of her sweat and hand oil. She liked it so much, she’d bought two.

The throwing stars were flat and easy to stow. Kick tucked them between the pages of books that she positioned at strategic areas around the living room. She opened the end table drawer and
slipped a star on top of the rubber-banded stack of Christmas cards from Frank, and the bulldog wearing a Santa hat on the top card looked back at her supportively. She said the name of each location out loud so she’d remember it. “In the book on the coffee table.” “In the drawer of the end table.” “Under the couch cushion.” The Taser went into the utensil drawer with the forks. She folded the new Adam Rice flier on the kitchen counter and tucked a throwing star under it for good measure.

She carried the pepper spray and the rest of the knives to her bedroom, careful to keep her eyes up so that she wouldn’t see Monster’s blanket, and balls, and rope toys. The throwing knife with the nine-inch carbon steel blade went into her bedside table. That was the one with its center of gravity at its midpoint; it was heavy and hit hard. She scattered the four-inch blades around the room, repeating each location aloud: “In the change bowl on the dresser.” “In the sock drawer.” “Under the pillow.” She could feel Adam watching her from the Missing Child posters on the wall. She opened her closet. The four white cardboard file boxes of victim notification letters were carefully labeled with black Sharpie. One word, scrawled across each box:
Assholes
.

She tucked the pepper spray on the top box.

Satisfied that her apartment was well armed, Kick stretched, loosening up her legs with squats and lunges. Then she did fifty push-ups just to get her blood pumping.

Once she had worked up a sweat and her muscles felt warm and responsive, she made herself jar spaghetti sauce and meatballs and ate it alone at the kitchen table with the Glock on her lap.

She was rinsing her bowl out in the sink when she finally heard him coming. She hadn’t even bothered to activate the alarm. She wanted to make it easy for him. She turned the faucet off and listened. The sound of her apartment door opening was barely audible, like someone whispering in the next room. If she had not been paying attention, she would not have heard it. But she’d been
expecting him to come through that door. It was how he’d entered James’s apartment; otherwise, why go through the trouble of disabling the hallway security camera?

Kick put the bowl down in the sink, tossed a dish towel over the Glock, and waited. It felt strange not to have Monster there, head cocked, gazing up at her. It made her feel alone. She listened as the faint beat of footsteps moved down her apartment hallway toward the living room. She placed her feet parallel, shoulder width apart, and closed her hands into fists at her navel.

His shape came from the shadows. She saw a figure darken the far end of the hallway where it opened onto the living room. There was a flash of movement and then stillness. Kick remained motionless, watching. Slowly, excruciatingly, the shadow bent and stretched and Iron Jacket stepped into the light. He was dressed head to toe in black: a black watch cap, black gloves, a black backpack. He was as big as she remembered him. A hulk of a man, both tall and substantial. But his round, elastic face looked soft, like it belonged on someone else’s body. He came at her, toward the kitchen. The tip of the arrow tattoo was just visible above the neck of his shirt. The muscles in his arms and chest seemed to pulse as he breathed. His hair, from what she could see under his cap, was cut military short.

Kick inched her hand to the edge of the dish towel and let him come to her. Like she had that night in the pool at the Desert Rose Motel. As he stepped into the kitchen, she shifted her body forty-five degrees from his centerline. Her fingertips found the butt of the Glock. “Where’s Adam Rice?” she asked.

“You have something for me?” he asked. The knife seemed to come out of nowhere; he must have had it pressed against his thigh. Suddenly it was just there, in his hand, a ten-inch steel blade.

Kick kept her eyes moving between his face and the knife, alert for any shift in his movement that might signal an attack. “What do you want?” she asked as she slid her hand under the dish towel.

“The password to the offshore account,” he said. His voice was low and pleasant and sent chills down her arms.

She had hoped, somehow, that in the end it would be about more. “Money,” she said.

“I was supposed to get a piece of everything. Mel and I had a deal.”

He had been in a neutral agile position, but now he lowered slightly into a crouch.

“Maybe we can help each other,” Kick said. “Tell me where Adam is. I’ll tell you the password.”

The blade was angled up. She saw his thumb move on top of the knife’s spine. It made for a harder thrust, so that it could penetrate more muscle, cut deeper. “What do you have under the towel, Beth?” he asked.

She closed her hand around the grip of the Glock and raised it straight out in front of her, one hand closing around the other, elbows locked, as the dish towel fell away. Her thumb hugged the grip, her index finger stretched along the muzzle, the other three fingers were secured around the grip high up, the way she’d been taught. The fingers of her left hand wrapped around the fingers of her right, her left thumb making an X over her right thumb. Feet planted under her shoulders now, she leaned forward slightly so that her hips would take the brunt of the recoil. Then she adjusted the sights to eye level and lined up the three white dots, centering the middle one on Iron Jacket’s sternum, and placed her finger gently over the trigger. Her grip was relaxed, her breathing even. She had practiced this a thousand times. She knew how to squeeze the trigger, to wait until the end of an exhalation, and then tighten her finger slowly until it fired. “Where’s Adam Rice?” she asked again.