One Kick (4 page)

Kick turned the cold water on in the sink, pushed up her sleeves, and started washing her hands. Ammo left lead residue on everything. She cupped her hands under the faucet and lowered her face into the water. After she dried herself, she inspected herself in the mirror again.

She undid her ponytail and let her hair fall loose. It came down to her elbows. She didn’t get haircuts. Not anymore.

Her phone buzzed in her pants pocket and she dug it out with cold fingers.

She reread the message three times. It made her stomach hurt.

An Amber Alert had just been issued by Washington State police looking for a five-year-old girl abducted by a stranger and last seen
in a white SUV with Washington State plates, heading down I-5 toward Oregon.

Kick hesitated. She knew how this went.

But she couldn’t stop herself.

Kick opened the police scanner app on her phone, picked her backpack off the bathroom floor, and headed for the door, the loaded Glock still in her sweatshirt. Whenever they had traveled, Mel put her under a blanket on the floor of the backseat and switched the vehicle plates out for fake dealer ones. The dealer plates were harder to read, and produced little information, so patrol cops often didn’t bother running them.

It’s not like she thought she’d find the car. This was something that none of her shrinks ever seemed to understand. Kick knew exactly how futile it was. She knew she’d drive up and down the interstate until she was exhausted, and stay up half the night refreshing her browser, sorting through every detail, hunting for anything familiar. She knew that the kid was probably already dead and that when the police did find the body, it would feel like a part of Kick had died too.

That’s how this went.

How it always went.

Penance wasn’t supposed to be fun.

KICK WAS FOUR HOURS
late by the time she let herself into her brother’s southeast Portland apartment. Her sweatshirt was dampened with rain. She shook off the hood, took a few steps, and accidentally knocked over one of the bags of recyclables that James had been collecting inside his front door for the last month. Plastic water bottles, empty split pea soup cans, and drained Mountain Dew bottles rolled off in all directions. Kick trudged down the hall after a can. She was always chasing after something.

“You’re late,” James’s voice called from the living room.

Her brother’s apartment was two stories below her own, and the layouts were identical. The main part of the space consisted of a living room, dining room, and kitchen, all with an open floor plan, high ceilings, and oppressively large windows. The private spaces—the bathroom and bedroom—were cramped, with ugly carpeting. Kick thought there was a metaphor there somewhere.

“You better not bring that gun in here,” James called.

Kick crammed the last plastic water bottle back into the bag. “Fine,” she said. She took the Glock from her sweatshirt pocket, double-checked the safety, and tucked the gun into her backpack. Then she slung the backpack over one shoulder, made her way past the rest of the recycling, and followed the hallway to the living room.

James was sitting at his computer as usual, his headphones
around his neck. All three monitors were on. Programming books lined the shelf above his desk, along with coffee cups and science fiction paperbacks and Mountain Dew bottles with an inch or two of flat soda at the bottom. His desk was pushed up against a floor-to-ceiling window that was covered with inspirational posters that he had Scotch-taped to the glass.
Try to be like the turtle—at ease in your own shell. Change your thoughts and you change your world.

“You were supposed to be here at eleven,” he said without turning around. “And when I said you couldn’t bring the gun in here, I didn’t mean you could bring it in here if you put it in your backpack.”

Kick scrutinized her backpack. James hadn’t even turned around. She didn’t know how he did that. Still, she ignored him, retrieved a piece of cheese pizza from a grease-stained pizza box that she had almost stepped on, and flopped down on his sofa and set the backpack at her feet. The interior wall of the living room was a collage of travel posters. Not the vintage painted kind with the art deco lettering, but the travel agenty kind, the ones with a photograph of the Eiffel Tower and the words
Visit Paris!
scrawled across the corner in a cursive font. James had never been out of the country. Kick spotted a water bill on top of an issue of
Macworld
that was open on the sofa next to her, and she stuffed the bill in her sweatshirt to pay later.

“Did you see the Amber Alert?” she asked.

Her brother was still pretending to type something on his keyboard. “Is this going to be like Adam Rice?” he asked.

Adam Rice had disappeared three weeks ago from the yard of his mother’s apartment building in Tacoma. It’s what had set Kick off. She didn’t know why—she never did. Maybe it was because Tacoma wasn’t that far away. But from the first moment she saw Adam’s picture, she felt a connection with him.

The pizza was cold and stale. Kick took a bite anyway. “I have it under control,” she said. She got a pack of throwing stars out of her backpack and stowed them in her sweatshirt pocket. She could relax better if she had weapons immediately handy.

James spun his chair around to face her. His
Doctor Who
TARDIS T-shirt had a green crusty stain on the neck. Split pea soup, Kick hoped.

He pushed his brown hair out of his eyes and adjusted his glasses. “So the app worked?” he asked. He had recently started trying to grow a mustache. Kick didn’t have the heart to tell him that he still looked fifteen. Most people were surprised to learn that he was two years older than she was.

“You designed it,” Kick said. “Of course it worked.”

“What did you do?” he asked heavily. “Drive up and down I-5 all morning, looking for white SUVs?”

He made it sound so ineffectual.

“It’s not healthy,” he said. “You know that.” He pointed at the pizza in her hand. “That’s five days old,” he said.

She took another bite of the pizza and chewed it slowly right at him with her mouth open.

“That is so unnecessary,” James said, rolling his eyes as he turned his chair back toward his desk.

He made a show of being absorbed in something on his computer screen.

Kick didn’t take the bait.

Finally, James said, “Want to see what I’ve been doing?”

He was supposed to be getting an online certification in some new programming language. Kick craned forward, noticing that her brother’s monitors weren’t filled with their usual coding gibberish. She got up off the couch and joined him at the desk. It was spread with clutter, except for the area in front of his keyboard where James kept his talisman, a little man made of twisted wire. His largest screen, the center one, was checkered with video thumbnails. Kick reached across James for his computer mouse, but he swatted her hand away. “I’ll do it,” he said, and guided the cursor to one of the thumbnails and clicked to expand it.

The window enlarged to reveal a video feed of cars on the interstate.
Kick scanned the other thumbnails. They were all similar. “What are those?” she asked.

The corner of James’s mouth turned up into a satisfied smile. “Traffic cameras,” he said. “I have a program that takes a screen shot of any vehicle I specify. For instance, white SUVs.” His fingers grazed his keyboard and a window opened on another monitor. “Look here,” he said. At least a hundred screen shots of white SUVs filled the screen.

Kick’s eyes hurt trying to tell one from the next. “That’s a fuckload of white SUVs,” she said.

“I’ve crowdsourced the images,” James explained. “So I’ve got volunteers all over the world looking at all these live as they come in. If any of them spot a vehicle with a matching plate, or dealer plates, I’ll know immediately. It’s faster than whatever the police are doing.”

Kick wrapped her arms around her brother’s neck and kissed him. His T-shirt smelled like he’d been wearing it for days. “You’re brilliant,” she said.

James’s face reddened. She could tell he was pleased. He hadn’t exactly been Mr. Sunshine lately, so it felt like a good sign. Kick sat down on the arm of his chair and leaned against him as they both watched his monitor. All the video was in black-and-white and every car appeared to be a shade of gray. Every few moments James would minimize one video and enlarge another one. There were so many cars, and so much water on the road, that the license plates were passing blurs.

Kick glanced away from the monitor and noticed a new poster on the window. It had a picture of a baseball and a Babe Ruth quote:
Don’t let the fear of striking out hold you back.

“That’s two stranger abductions in the last month,” Kick said.

James didn’t say anything. He reached for the little wire man. The scars on his wrists were faint white stripes. She’d never asked about them. The wire man was an inch tall, small enough to hold in your hand. But James didn’t let Kick touch it.

“You know what that could mean,” Kick said.

James pushed his glasses up his nose. “You called the police again, didn’t you?”

He knew her too well. “They said that they still don’t need my help and suggested I call my therapist,” she said.

“You want to help?” James asked. “Use some of your settlement money to buy them a better computer system.” Then he smirked and set the talisman back in its place. “Or cuter uniforms.”

Kick opened her mouth to say something smart-ass, but she forgot what she was going to say as her eyes fell on James’s monitor. “Motherfucker,” she said.

“What?” James asked. She felt him tense. “Oh.”

A local news site was streaming live on the screen below the traffic cam footage. Kick sat up and rocked forward. A female news anchor was speaking from behind a desk. She was in her mid-fifties, with coiffed black hair and a familiar pendant. A graphic took up much of the screen next to her: a photograph of Kick, hood up, just beginning to reach for the spent cartridge at the gun range. “She
was
a reporter,” Kick said. She hadn’t been texting; she’d been taking a photo with her phone. “She was at the range this morning,” Kick explained to James. She scowled at the screen and balled her hands into fists. “I knew I should have kicked her teeth in.”

“Do you want me to turn it up?” James asked hesitantly.

“No,” Kick said, eyes still glued to the silent images on the monitor. A teaser below the image read:
Kit Lannigan Update! From Kidnap Victim to Ace Shot.
She’d never be able to go to that gun range again.

Kick’s photograph dissolved and another photograph appeared. Kick recognized it right away as the author photo from a book called
My Story: Lessons I Learned from My Daughter’s Abduction
. Her mother had written that one. It had been the last straw before Kick filed for emancipation.
Tonight at five, interview with kidnap mom Paula Lannigan!

Kick’s stomach twisted. It was a constant struggle—not strangling her mother. “Kidnap mom.” Who knew that was a career?

Then the screen went to video footage of a thickened, bearded man in a suit trying to climb the wide concrete stairs to an office building while a reporter shouted questions at him. This was the only time Kick saw Frank: when he popped up on the news, a boom mic stuck in his ruddy face. James turned up the volume. “Any comment on Mel Riley’s health, Agent Moony?” the reporter hollered. “Are you glad he’s dying?” Frank glowered at the camera and shoved his way past the reporter.

He’d never given an interview.

“Turn it off,” Kick said quietly.

James tapped a button and the video window vanished from the screen. Kick’s pulse throbbed in her ears.

“You want to talk about it?” her brother asked with a nervous glance.

A poster of a frog, caught mid-hop, was taped above the printer.
Leap, and the net will appear.

“No,” Kick said. She slid the pack of throwing stars out of her pocket, extracted one, pinched it between her thumb and forefinger, and zinged it hard at a dartboard James had hung on the opposite wall. It sank into the center target and the dartboard clattered to the floor.

“Yeah,” James said drily. “You’re fine.”

“Sorry,” Kick said, under her breath. She kissed her brother on the cheek and stood up. “I smell like gunpowder. I need a shower.” She put two fingers in her mouth and blew out an earsplitting whistle.

James cringed. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said.

“It’s the only thing he can hear,” Kick said. She waited, her eyes fixed on the hall, and a moment later her dog came shuffling from James’s bedroom. His muzzle was white and his gait was arthritic and he was nearly blind and almost entirely deaf, but he could still hear her whistle.

“He would have been fine by himself at your place,” James said.

Kick watched as her dog limped across the living room, wagging his shaggy tail. He was part border terrier and part Australian shepherd, with a few other breeds thrown in that no one could identify. “He likes to be with family,” she said. He came right to her, a big grin on his face, panting, and pressed his black snout against her knee.

“Your mail’s on the counter,” her brother said, turning his gaze to his monitor. “You got another letter from the court.”

The federal victim notification system spit out a form letter every time Kick’s image showed up in a child pornography prosecution. Because she had been the star of one of the most collected series the industry had seen, her image showed up on a lot of hard drives. They were referred to as “the Beth Movies,” and there was, incredibly, no way to get them off the Internet.

Kick scratched under Monster’s hairy chin and looked into his milky eyes. She didn’t care what the vet said: sometimes she could swear that dog could see her.

“Hey, Monster,” she said. “Did you miss me?”

THE LETTER FROM THE
court went with the others, unopened, into a cardboard file box in Kick’s bedroom closet. The boxes took up half the closet now, three rows, four boxes high. Before she filed for emancipation at seventeen, the letters had come addressed to her mother. Kick hadn’t known anything about them. A few weeks after she moved into her apartment, the first letter showed up, addressed to Kathleen Lannigan, Kick’s legal name.