by Chelsea Cain
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.
6
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, a
lmanacs, 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.
Bishop was in the front yard, waiting in the shadows, looking up at the house.
Somewhere, a dog started barking. Kick gazed at the cheerless house.
Something wasn’t right.
There was no white SUV to be seen. In the photo there had been a bamboo wind chime hanging from the porch overhang. Now it was gone. Kick squinted up at the second story. The railing was empty. In the photo, there had been plants.
A Realtor’s lockbox hung from the doorknob.
Kick lowered the Glock.
No one lived in this house. “When was the photo really taken?” she demanded.
“I told you you wouldn’t need a gun,” Bishop said.
Heat rose in Kick’s cheeks. She raised her weapon and aimed at the front of the Tesla. “I wonder what would happen if I put a bullet through the 1,000 pounds of battery under your hood,” she said.
It was the first time she’d seen Bishop flinch. “The sat photo was taken ten days ago,” he said, eyes on the gun. “I didn’t get it until early this afternoon. I sent my people here immediately, but the place had already been cleared out.”
His people? He hadn’t mentioned any people. What else wasn’t he telling her?
She raised an eyebrow and flipped the safety off with her thumb. The Tesla was twenty feet away. Even in the low light, the hood practically gleamed. It would be like hitting the broad side of a barn.
Bishop directed a worried look at his car and then reached into his blazer, withdrew a small spiral-bound black notebook, and opened it. “According to the landlord,” he read, “the occupant moved out ten days ago. Josie Reed, in her fifties. Worked at home. No kids living at the residence, neighbors think she might have had a boyfriend, but no one got a good look at him. She drove a decade-old Outback. Packed a U-Haul trailer and moved out in the middle of the night, no forwarding address.” He closed the notebook with a flick of his wrist and looked at Kick. “Josie Reed isn’t her real name,” he said. “She used a fake social, and the landlord never ran a background check. He owns several properties in the neighborhood but isn’t very hands on due to the fact that he is currently living in an assisted-living facility. He says he’s keeping her deposit.” Bishop scratched his temple. “Anything else you want to know?”
“Why did you bring me here?” Kick asked warily. The dog was barking its head off now. No one yelled at it to shut up.
“I wanted to know what you thought of the house,” Bishop said.
“The rent seems a little high.”
His gray eyes didn’t leave her. “Tell me about the house, Kick. Does it look right?”
She knew what he meant. She had lost track of how many houses she had been moved to during her life with Mel. Forty? Fifty? They never stayed anywhere long. The houses changed, but their attributes remained the same. Each was ideally suited for one purpose: hiding a child.
Kick took a tiny step back and slowly lowered the Glock. The bottoms of her feet itched. She tried to focus, to push back the tide of fractured images she was so practiced at keeping at bay. “You said she drove a Subaru?” she asked.
Bishop nodded.
Then it wasn’t her white SUV. “What did the boyfriend drive?” she asked.
“No one noticed.”
Kick scrutinized the house. The ranch style allowed for a big footprint, and a big footprint meant a big basement. “If I wanted to hide a kid,” she said, “I’d want a sizable basement like this one.” She peered at the basement windows closest to them. Both had been blocked from the inside with dark cloth. She cleared her throat. “I’d want a rental, month to month, ideally. Streets with no sidewalks means no foot traffic, few unplanned interactions with neighbors. I’d want a hedge around the property, or a tall fence.” She turned and looked behind them down the driveway. “I didn’t see any bikes in the yards we passed. I’d look for that too. I’d want a neighborhood without too many kids. Kids notice other kids in a way that adults don’t. And they talk to one another. So if a new kid moves into the neighborhood, all the kids know.” She snuck a glance at Bishop. He was studying her. Not the way that people usually did. She didn’t see any of the usual sorrow-tinged pity. But the weight of his attention still made her uncomfortable. She slipped the gun into the pocket of her jacket. “So, yeah,” she said, “the house looks right.”
“What else?” Bishop asked.
He was still testing her. Kick didn’t like it. It made her feel like a child. “I don’t trust you,” Kick said. “I don’t even like you.”
Bishop did not appear overly devastated by this news. “I don’t care,” he said. “What else?”
“The chalk,” Kick said. “There’s a piece of light-blue sidewalk chalk on the porch steps.”
“Good girl,” Bishop said.
Good girl. The words sucked the air out of Kick’s lungs. Some words were like that: they circled her head like flies. She didn’t know why.
When she was a kid, the shrinks told her she had anger issues. But she didn’t have anger issues, at least not the way that they meant. She was just angry.
