One Kick: A Novel

by Chelsea Cain

  Bishop rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, well,” he said with a shrug. “Frank kind of hates me.” He raised his eyebrows and shared a conspiratorial smile. “He likes you, though. I’ve been through your case file. All fifty-eight file boxes. There are gaps in his notes. Like someone went back later and took out pages.” Bishop’s smile dropped away. “Here’s what I do know, Kit Lannigan.” He drew out every syllable of her old name. “I know that you walked out of that Idaho farmhouse with a Scrabble tile in your hand after you were rescued,” he said. “I know it was the letter K. I know you had the tile in your pocket when you testified against Mel. I got that last bit from your mother,” he added. “Or at least from her book—which, by the way, is staggering in its epic narcissism. I assumed you still had the tile, but—just between us—I poked around your apartment while you were at the park with your mother just now. Didn’t turn it up.”

  Kick put her hands over her face, trying to block out the image of what else he might have found: the hundreds of victim notification letters, unopened, in her closet; the cards from Frank, neatly collected and hidden away in a drawer. “Ha!” she said. She closed her eyes and tried again. “Ha!” She peeked between her fingers at Bishop.

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  Kick rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “HA!”

  “Is that helping?” Bishop asked.

  The elevator felt like it was shrinking, like there wasn’t enough air. “I feel sick,” Kick said.

  “Good,” Bishop said. “That’s a good sign, Kick. You should feel sick. That means you’re not as fucked-up as you think you are.”

  Kick looked at him sideways, disgusted. “You would make a terrible therapist.”

  “Two kidnappings,” Bishop said. “Two girls, two Scrabble tiles. That’s a pretty meaningful coincidence, don’t you think?”

  A meaningful coincidence. The words snapped at Kick like rubber bands. “What did you say?” she asked.

  “I said, that’s a pretty meaningful-fucking-coincidence,” Bishop said.

  “That’s an error of inductive inference,” Kick said.

  Bishop’s eyes were attentive, his body drawn taut like a bow. “How so?”

  “It’s not synchronicity,” Kick continued. “It’s not even coincidence.” She met Bishop’s gaze. “Because they’re all my tiles.”

  Bishop waited.

  Kick held the Scrabble tile up between her thumb and forefinger. “This?” she said. “It’s mine.”

  Bishop’s brows drew together.

  “I’d palm the tiles and hide them,” Kick explained, folding her hand around the tile to demonstrate. “I’d tuck them behind rafters, between floorboards, under exposed insulation. I thought if someone ever found the secret rooms, they might find the tiles and know that I had been there.” It had been a useless exercise. “Mel counted the tiles after every game. There are supposed to be a hundred, see: ninety-eight letters and two blanks.” He’d never even acknowledged her act of rebellion, not once. “I always thought he’d get mad. But he never did. He’d just replace them. The next time he’d come to the box to play with me, all the letters would be there, like it had never happened.”

  She opened her hand again and looked down at the wooden square in her palm. The letter E. On its own, a one-point value. But for longer words, seven- or eight-tile long words, E’s became essential. Mel had taught her to hang on to E’s. Even if you turned in the other six letters on your rack, E’s always came in handy. “Only the original tiles, they were made from Vermont maple,” Kick said. She showed Bishop the tile. “This is white oak. And the letter on this tile is carved and then inked instead of stamped.” She shrugged. “It’s a good copy. He stained them to match. But you can feel the marks from the bandsaw where it wasn’t sanded down smoothly.” She moved her fingers over the tile, noting the very slightest edge marking the path of a bandsaw blade. “He made this one. And I hid it. And Mia Turner found it because they put her in one of the rooms that I was kept in fifteen years ago.”

  Bishop’s shoulders rose and fell. “Only she didn’t find it,” he said. “She said a boy gave it to her. The description she gave matches Adam Rice.”

  Kick could hear herself breathing; she could practically hear her own cells dividing. “So he’s still alive?” she whispered.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I haven’t talked to her myself, and she’s five years old, so not exactly a reliable witness. But she says she was moved to at least three houses over the course of the day, always transported under a blanket in the backseat. She can’t describe any of the houses she was kept in, just that she was kept somewhere inside and very dark. But if she’s right, based on the time frame, the three locations must all be in the Seattle area.”

  Kick couldn’t bring herself to ask the next question, but Bishop must have read it in her eyes.

  “It doesn’t look like she was physically or sexually abused,” Bishop added.

  Kick exhaled slowly.

  “Do you remember being in Seattle?” Bishop asked.

  Kick didn’t know. There had been so many houses, and she had been kept inside so much of the time. In many ways, it was a blur. But if Adam had found her Scrabble tile, whereever he was, she had been there first. “I don’t remember,” she said. “But we moved a lot,” she added. “Maybe we were there the first year, before they let me outside.” The truth was, she couldn’t locate the house any more than Mia Turner could.

  The only person who could do that was Mel.

  “Oh,” Kick said, finally getting it. She felt foolish for not seeing what Bishop wanted from her sooner. He didn’t care about her lock-picking skills or her steady shooting hand or her ability to squat deeply in a park for almost seven minutes. The thing that interested him was the same thing that interested everybody. Her enduring social capital. It would not matter what Kick did with her life, what she accomplished; her obituary would begin and end with Mel Riley.

  The outline of the envelope in Kick’s pocket pressed against her skin, like a hand on her thigh. Kick rolled her eyes to the ceiling and laughed at the bitter irony of her life.

  “He has a world of information that could help us,” Bishop said.

  Us, Kick noticed, like they were a team now.

  She cleared her throat. “He won’t give up the safe houses,” she said. “He’s always refused to give up anything. You said so yourself.”

  Bishop nodded. He checked his phone. He rubbed the back of his neck. The air in the elevator had gotten thick. The steel walls gleamed. “You’re right,” he said. He pivoted away from her, turned the little key, and pressed the button for the fourth floor.

  The sudden motion of the elevator was startling. Kick’s eyes shot to the numbers above the door as they were illuminated one by one above the back of Bishop’s head. Second floor. Third floor.

  Monster looked at her and whined.

  Fuck it. “Can you get me in to see him?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Bishop said, turning around.

  “I haven’t seen him since I was twelve, at the sentencing.” The words tumbled out in a rush.

  Fourth floor.

  “I know,” Bishop said.

  Kick was holding the end of Monster’s leash so tightly, she could feel it cutting into her palm. “He might not want to talk to me.”

  The elevator chimed and the doors opened.

  “He wants to talk to you,” Bishop said.

  Monster tilted his nose toward the door and wagged his tail. He knew where they were, or at least knew they were somewhere. He headed off out of the elevator, pulling at Kick to follow.

  “When?” Kick asked Bishop.

  “I have a car.”

  Kick stopped mid-step. Something sour turned in her stomach. The world went shaky. Bishop couldn’t mean today; he wouldn’t make her do that, not on the ten-year anniversary.


  “Drop the dog at your brother’s,” Bishop said, pushing the lobby button. “Put on something nice. I’ll meet you downstairs. And, Kick?” he said, nodding at her hand. “I need the tile.”

  Kick didn’t have time to think of a response. She tossed Bishop the tile. She hurled it, actually. He caught it through the doors, just before they closed.

  16

  NOT A LOT OF people on Kick’s block drove black hybrid Porsche Panameras, so Bishop wasn’t hard to spot. Kick got into the car wordlessly and buckled her seat belt with the kind of cautious attentiveness more often seen in electric-chair technicians. She kept her purse on her lap. She’d tucked the letter from the Trident Medical Group in the inside pocket at the last minute; she wasn’t sure why. The purse was a cherry-red leather square the size of a vinyl record, with silver grommets punched into one side in the shape of a skull, which seemed especially apt. Kick didn’t usually carry purses, but seeing as her backpack had been blown to smithereens, she’d had to improvise.

  “What do you know about his health?” Bishop asked.

  Kick reached into her open purse, past the letter, and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. “What I read on the Internet,” she said. She snapped a bracelet on each of her wrists.

  Bishop glanced at the cuffs without comment and then returned his gaze to the road.

  “I know he’s been on dialysis for three years,” Kick said. She reached with her cuffed hands back into her purse and began feeling around for a paper clip. “I remember he would get sick sometimes. He had kidney infections. His lawyers tried to get the judge to consider his health at the sentencing.” Her fingertips touched the paper clip and she fished it out and started unbending it.

  “Well, he’s in the prison infirmary,” Bishop said. He wasn’t looking at her. “Things seem to be deteriorating.”

  Kick pressed her fingers against the curve of the paper clip, forcing it apart until it gave. When she thought of her father now, she made herself think of Jerry, not Mel. It had been hard at first. Kick had few memories of before she was taken, and Jerry had left four months after her return. But she had one perfect memory of him from that earlier time, and she clung to it. It was her relaxing experience, her calm blue ocean. She used it to remind herself that she had, at least once, known normalcy.

  The backyard. The tire swing. Her father’s hands on her back, pushing her higher and higher, toward the clouds.

  She flipped the straightened paper clip toward her cuffed wrists and used her right hand to guide it into the keyhole at the base of the left bracelet. With the tip of the wire inserted in the hole, she bent it about seventy degrees, one way and then the other, until the end of the wire formed a small notch. Then she removed the wire from the hole and, bending her wrists at angles that made them throb, wiggled the bent end of the wire back into the hole, hooking it so that the end of the wire pointed toward the locking arm, at a ninety-degree angle to the keyhole. Using her left hand, she turned the wire like a key, hooking and lifting the locking device. The right bracelet sprung open.

  She freed her right hand and immediately transferred the wire to the keyhole on the left bracelet. She turned the notched wire. The locking device inside the cuff lifted. The bracelet opened. Kick glanced at the clock on the Porche’s GPS screen. It had taken her just over two minutes.

  Too long. She was distracted.

  She snapped the handcuffs back on and tossed the mutilated paper clip back into her bag.

  “You got a new car,” she said as she felt around her purse for another clip with her cuffed hands.

  “I have a lot of cars,” Bishop said.

  Kick located another paper clip, slid her purse from her knees to the floor between her feet, and began unfolding the wire in her lap. The dress came to her mid-thighs and her knees were pale and scabbed with scrapes. The wire straightened, Kick notched it in the right-side keyhole, extracted it, and then hooked the notch back into the hole at a ninety-degree angle, pointed toward the locking arm. Twist. Click. Spring. The air coming through the vents on the dash fluttered the hem of Kick’s skirt. She turned her attention to the left cuff. Her mother had bought her the dress. It was not something Kick would have picked out: pale yellow patterned with tiny daisies. It looked like bathroom wallpaper to her. She’d never worn it. She didn’t know why she’d chosen it today. Probably because it wasn’t anything like her; it belonged to some completely different person. The left cuff opened. She glanced at the time. Just under two minutes.

  “I shouldn’t have said that to you, that thing about putting on something nice,” Bishop said.

  Kick snapped the handcuffs on and tossed the straightened paper clip into the purse. “You don’t get to apologize and feel better,” Kick said. She bent forward, reached into her purse on the floor, and dug for a fresh paper clip.

  The truth was, she had torn apart her closet looking for the perfect thing to wear. Something Beth would like. Kick found a paper clip and bent it open.

  Beth liked yellow. Because it was Mel’s favorite color.

  “Are you going to be doing that the whole drive?” Bishop asked.

  It took an hour to get to Salem, Oregon, the state capital and home of the state penitentiary.

  Kick jammed the end of the wire into the first hole. Her wrists were sore from overflexing them, and faint red welts had started to form. “It relaxes me,” she said.

  17

  THE OREGON STATE PENITENTIARY was surrounded by guard towers and a twenty-five-foot wall topped with razor wire. Even after an hour to prepare herself, the prison appeared too soon, and Kick regretted the fact that there hadn’t been a multivehicle accident to slow down the interstate. The gray Taurus that had been tailing them since they left Portland had dropped out of sight when they exited I-5. She knew that Bishop had seen it too. His eyes had returned, again and again, to the rearview mirror. But he hadn’t said anything, and he hadn’t tried to lose it.

  She tossed the cuffs back in her bag as they were waved through the prison gates. The guards seemed to know Bishop by sight. He steered around the compound of institutional buildings and found a place to park like he’d been here before.

  He didn’t try to give her a pep talk; he didn’t talk to her at all. When she got out of the car, she followed him. The closer she got to Mel, the more blank she felt. Like she was shedding herself, cell by cell, molting down to nothing.

  She could do that. She could disassociate.

  Reactive attachment disorder, one of her early shrinks had called it, when Paula complained that Kick wasn’t showing the proper level of affection.

  The spring after Kick’s rescue, Paula had shipped her off to a clinic in Colorado for a week of in-patient rebirthing compression therapy. Every day, two practitioners would restrain Kick, wrap her tightly in sheets, and then simulate contractions by sitting on her until she managed to “emerge from the birth canal.”

  If Kick hadn’t had an attachment disorder before that, she certainly had one after.

  Years later she had found the clinic’s report in some of her mother’s things. They’d diagnosed her based on how she scored on a set of twelve items, including “seeking comfort when distressed,” “responding to comfort when offered,” and “willingness to go off with relative strangers.”

  “Kick?” Bishop said.

  Kick looked up to find a prison guard in a blue uniform staring at her expectantly from the other side of a counter. A cacophony echoed from every surface: buzzers, walkie-talkie static, footsteps. Everything smelled like concrete.

  “Ask her again,” Bishop said to the guard.

  “You carrying any weapons, sweetheart?” the guard asked Kick. She looked at Kick with an air of professional boredom. If she recognized Kick, she didn’t show it.

  Kick pulled open her red purse and showed her the army fixed-blade survival knife, the recon camo tactical knife, a three-pack of throw
ing knives, the Leatherman, her lipstick pepper spray, a pouch of throwing stars, the handcuffs, and a pen with a steel tip that could be used as an emergency window breaker.

  “Anything else?” the guard asked.

  Kick unzipped one of the purse’s inside pockets, reached behind the envelope from Trident Medical Group, retrieved her nunchakus, and dropped them on the counter with a ka-thunk.

  Bishop gave the guard an apologetic smile. “She’s safety conscious,” he explained.

  The guard handed her the key to a locker and told her to put her arsenal in it. Then she put two orange vests on the counter. Bishop reached for one and started to put it on.

  “What are these?” Kick asked.

  “Put it on,” Bishop said. “If anything goes wrong, the guards will know not to shoot you.”

  Kick pulled the orange vest on over her dress.

  Once they cleared the metal detector, the first full set of metal bars closed behind them, and they were issued prison ID badges that clipped to their vests.

  Kick shed another layer of skin.

  Bishop gestured for her to follow him, and Kick had the uneasy realization that they were not going to get an escort. “I know where I’m going,” Bishop said, already walking. She followed him. It came easily, matching his steps as they moved down cinder-block corridors. She found it comforting, actually. A strange type of surrender. When they came to a barred door, Bishop would hold his ID badge up to the security camera mounted above it, and the door would unlock with a pop. Kick kept her face neutral and her head down, trying to disappear behind her hair. But there was no way to blend in. The guards they passed were in uniform; the prisoners were in orange jumpsuits; she was wearing an orange vest with the number three ironed on the back. Bishop stopped. They were outside a large gray door stenciled with the word INFIRMARY. On the other side of the door, she could hear someone crying.

  This was really happening.

  She was rooted to the spot. She couldn’t move.