One Kick (8 page)

Bishop was halfway up the stairs to one of the larger private planes. Emblazoned on the fuselage, glistening in the wet slick of rain, Kick noticed a logo, a black
W
in a circle. It probably stood for “Weasel.” A flight attendant was waiting at the top of the stairs with a huge black umbrella. Kick knew she was a flight attendant because she was dressed like some sort of caricature of a flight attendant, like Flight Attendant Barbie. Kick called Bishop’s name but he didn’t turn. Kick considered shooting him to get his attention but decided it would take too long to draw her weapon. Bishop disappeared through the plane door just as Kick reached the bottom of the stairs. Flight Attendant Barbie was at the door folding the umbrella. Kick stomped up the steps. Flight Attendant Barbie looked up, seemingly flummoxed by Kick’s arrival, or maybe by the complex mechanism of the umbrella. Her sky-blue uniform was spotted with raindrops. Her white blouse showed a lot of freckled cleavage. She was wearing nude pantyhose and stilettos that could take out someone’s eye.

“Excuse me,” Kick said, shoving past her, out of the rain and into the cabin.

The interior of the plane was all light wood and creamy leather. It smelled like an expensive car, like it had just been Armor All’d. No industrial blue carpeting. No foldout trays. No fighting for space
in an overhead bin. Six enormous cushioned seats sat on either side of the plane.

Kick stood motionless, dripping onto the carpet.

“Take a seat anywhere,” Bishop said. He had settled into one of the chairs at the back of the plane and had his nose in his smartphone again. He didn’t look up. She wasn’t sure how he even knew she’d come on board.

Flight Attendant Barbie had managed to fold the umbrella and had wriggled around Kick through the door. She pulled the door closed behind her and locked it.

Kick tightened her grip on her backpack strap and considered her seating options. Then she plunked down in a chair a few chairs back from Bishop. She put the worry book on her lap and the damp backpack at her feet. The chair swiveled. She pushed off the floor and spun around. Flight Attendant Barbie dropped a towel in Kick’s lap, then moved on to Bishop.

“Would you like a drink, sir?” Flight Attendant Barbie asked him. Kick watched her, fascinated. Her face was somehow both pretty and indistinct, and she had the curves of one of those girls from the mud flaps of eighteen-wheelers.

“No, thanks,” Bishop said. He looked back at Kick and smiled. It was a reptilian smile, thin-lipped and hard to read. “But I’d love a bag of ice,” he said.

“Certainly, sir,” said Flight Attendant Barbie, and she appeared authentically delighted at the task. She wiggled past Kick on her way to the galley, eyes fixed with purpose. She didn’t ask Kick if she wanted a drink.

Kick’s phone buzzed in her lap, startling her. It was a text from James.
YOU STILL OKAY?
it read. When she’d dropped Monster off she had agreed to text James every two hours.
YES
, Kick typed back.

Then she crossed
Vomiting
off the list.

Flight Attendant Barbie tottered back with the ice. Kick turned
off her phone for the flight. When she looked back up, Flight Attendant Barbie was hovering over Bishop with ice in a ziplock bag and towel. Her blouse was tight. She’d lost the jacket somewhere between the main cabin and the galley.

“Where would you like it, Mr. Bishop?” she asked.

Bishop was checking texts again. The neck of his shirt flopped down in a triangle where Kick had ripped it. He swiped at his phone’s touch screen, opened his knees, and gestured to his lap.

Flight Attendant Barbie bent at the waist, all rounded buttocks and toned calves, and pressed the bag of ice against Bishop’s groin. “How does that feel, Mr. Bishop?” she asked.

Unbelievable.

Bishop’s eyes lifted from his phone.

So that’s what it took to get his attention.

Kick would sooner shoot him in the back.

Kick coughed to remind them she was there.

Bishop leaned his head back. “A little to the left,” he said, and Kick thought she saw him look at her again, but she couldn’t be sure.

Flight Attendant Barbie shifted the ice.

“Much better,” Bishop said.

“I have a gun,” Kick said.

Both the flight attendant and Bishop turned and looked at her. The flight attendant’s hand was still cupped against Bishop’s groin. She had lipstick on her front teeth that hadn’t been there before.

“A Glock 37,” Kick said, liking the way the name of the weapon made the flight attendant flinch. Kick also had pepper spray, a Leatherman, a Taser, two extra magazines of .45 GAP ammo, and a box of Winchester jacketed hollow points in her backpack. “I have a permit,” Kick added. “But I need to check it, right?” Firearms had to be declared, unloaded, stowed in a hard-sided locked container, and checked. Everyone knew that. She didn’t want the
Glock confiscated while she made her way through a month of TSA paperwork.

Bishop was back on his phone. “This isn’t commercial air travel,” he said. Then he seemed to suddenly remember the woman whose hand was on his cock. “I want wings up in five,” he told her.

Flight Attendant Barbie straightened up with a disappointed sigh. “Yes, sir,” she said. Duty called. “Anything else?”

Kick resisted asking for a glass of water.

Bishop pulled his ripped T-shirt off over his head. Kick was so startled, she forgot to look away. He was muscular, she had to admit, lean but toned, with enough definition to catch the light. He tossed Flight Attendant Barbie the shirt. She cradled it, along with the ice.

“Can you get me a new shirt?” Bishop asked.

As Flight Attendant Barbie slunk off through a door at the back of the plane, Kick leaned forward over the side of her chair and could just make out what looked like the corner of a king-size mattress.

“Is that a bedroom?” Kick asked. She didn’t even want to think about what went on in there. “Seriously?”

The plane started taxiing, and Kick put on her seat belt.

“Check your phone,” Bishop said.

Kick studiously avoided looking at his abs. “For what?”

Bishop held up his own phone and wiggled it. “I sent you something,” he said.

“I turned it off,” Kick said.

“Again,” Bishop said, “not commercial air travel.”

“Right,” Kick said. She retrieved her phone, enabled her browser, and checked her email. She had a new message from [email protected]. No subject line. She clicked on the email. There was no message, only an attached PDF. She opened it and found a sixty-five-page series of documents. Most of it consisted of documentation regarding the abduction of Adam Rice. Interviews, photographs, forensics.

“Is this a police report?” she asked. The plane was going faster. The runway flashed by out the window.

“I told you I have friends in the government,” Bishop said.

Actually, he’d said he had friends with expensive toys, but Kick decided not to quibble. Instead, she pretended to scan the attachment while she surreptitiously forwarded it to James.

“How do you know my email address?” she asked Bishop.

He swiveled his chair around so that he was no longer facing her. There was a logo on the back, stitched into the flap of cream-colored leather that draped over the headrest: a
W
with a circle around it, like the one on the outside of the plane. “I told you,” Bishop said.

“I know,” she said. “You have friends in the government.”

The plane lifted into the air and began its steady incline into the sky. There was no getting off now, no turning back. Kick hoped it was a smoother ride than on the chopper. She studied the photo of Adam Rice looking earnestly up from the digital file. The flight attendant came back with a new shirt for Bishop that looked exactly like the old one. Kick peeked up as he put it on. Then she flipped to the back of the worry book, where she kept a list of self-destructive behaviors she needed to work on, and wrote,
Getting into vehicles with strangers.
She underlined it.

KICK KNEW A LOT
about cars. She knew how to execute a hairpin turn, she knew to always cross her palms over her chest before jumping from a speeding vehicle, and she knew that every American car made after 2002 had an emergency release lever inside the trunk should you happen to find yourself in need of one. She knew that the car Bishop retrieved from a hangar at Seattle’s Boeing Field was a Tesla Model S. She knew that it had cost a hundred grand, standard, and that—judging by the abundance of leather and the car’s all-glass panoramic roof—Bishop had gone with some add-ons. The touch screen on the dash was bigger than her home computer monitor.

They were headed south on I-5, technically still in Seattle, though all the good parts of Seattle were behind them. The interstate sliced through California, Oregon, and Washington, and extended all the way from Mexico to Canada, and nothing good ever happened on it. Kick had a theory that 30 percent of the drivers on it at any given time were actively committing a crime.

“I thought you’d have a driver,” Kick said to Bishop, hitting “send” on the text she’d just sent James.

Bishop smirked. “I’m trying to remain inconspicuous,” he said. He whipped the Tesla around a Saab.

The road was dry, but the Seattle sky was veiled with low cloud
cover. Portland got a few more inches of actual rainfall, but Seattle had Portland beat when it came to smothering gloom. It was cloudy 201 days out of the year, and partly cloudy 93 days. Kick knew a lot about weather too. She liked forecasts, almanacs, tide charts. She liked to know what was coming. It was a safety precaution not enough people took.

“How fast does this thing go?” she asked Bishop.

“One-thirty-two,” Bishop said with a grin.

He could drive. Kick saw how he shifted his attention between the vehicle in front of theirs and the ones six or eight ahead, anticipating traffic. He used the accelerator smoothly, and when he braked, he squeezed the pedal before he put his foot down and then tapered off so that the motion of the car was always fluid.

Bishop gave the wheel a sharp turn and veered around a van into the carpool lane. He didn’t turn the wheel too soon like most people did, so he didn’t have to let up on the throttle. Most drivers merged too slowly, making the engine work harder than it needed to.

They were at the southern edge of the city. Thick trees formed a hedge on either side of the interstate, protecting drivers from the sight of auto dealerships and office parks. The slate-colored sky was darkening. Not so much a sunset as a progressive dimming of light.

“Is anyone meeting us there?” she asked.

“Like who?” Bishop asked, merging right, across two lanes.

“The cops? Your bodyguards? Blackwater mercenaries? Your royal footmen?”

“It’s not called Blackwater anymore,” Bishop said.

That wasn’t the point. “It’s just us?” Kick asked. Her throat constricted slightly. “We’re going to a house that might be connected to two child abductions, and it’s just us?”

“That’s the point.” Bishop veered right and exited the interstate. He didn’t lift his foot off the gas. Accelerating is the hardest thing
a car can do; the more you kept your foot on the gas, the better. “I just need you,” Bishop said.

Was that supposed to make her feel better? Kick unzipped her backpack, moved her Glock to her lap, got out her worry book, and opened it.

Bishop looked at her sideways. “What’s that for?” he asked.

“It’s a worry book,” Kick said. “If I have a worry, I—”

“I meant the Glock,” Bishop said.

“Shooting the kidnappers.” Obviously.

“No guns,” Bishop said firmly. “I don’t like guns.”

Everything about this guy made Kick’s head hurt. “I thought you were a weapons dealer,” she said.

“I used to be,” he said.

Bishop was paying a lot of attention to the road behind them. His eyes darted between his rearview and side mirrors. “Keep a lookout,” he said.

Kick twisted around so she could see out the back window. The street was quiet. She didn’t see any headlights behind them. She didn’t see anything. “For what exactly?”

“We’re almost there,” Bishop said.

Kick wiped the palm of her trigger hand on her thigh and then rewrapped it around the grip of the Glock.

When people thought of Seattle, they thought of Craftsman houses and coffee shops and grunge guitar chords and sensible rain gear and guys throwing fish around at Pike Place Market. But Seattle had crappy neighborhoods, like anywhere. This was one of them. Split-level ranch homes with ugly yards, one after the next. There was nothing to walk to and no sidewalks to walk on. The only business Kick spotted was a burned-out low-rent motel surrounded by a chain-link fence and No Trespassing signs. Bishop took a left down a dark residential street. Televisions flickered in the windows. RVs sat in the driveways. The houses were big and cheap and indistinguishable. The road they were on snaked alongside the
edge of the hillside and a No Dumping sign warned that there was a $5,000 fine for tossing trash below. A hundred feet later they came to a Dead End sign to the left of a fifteen-foot laurel hedge.

It was the kind of neighborhood where people didn’t ask too many questions.

Bishop pulled the car around the hedge, past a For Rent sign that promised 3+ bedrooms for $1,300, and up a gravel driveway. Kick’s body tensed and she inched down in her seat and tightened her grip on the Glock. This was not how she had imagined this going. Where were the helicopters? Where were the friends in the government? The gravel grinding under the tires seemed unbelievably loud. She peeked over the dash, which radiated a violet glow from the touch screen. The sky had faded to a bleak twilight and the house was dark except for a porchlight, but Kick recognized it from the satellite photo, a split-level ranch like all the rest, except more isolated. Bishop pulled to a stop. He braked so expertly the gravel barely crackled. Then he opened the driver’s-side door, stepped out of the car, and left her. Kick hesitated for a second before she followed. Then she strapped on her backpack, tossed the worry book aside, and went after him. She raised the Glock as she exited the car, using the Tesla for cover. The smell of fresh paint fumes lingered in the air.