One Kick: A Novel

by Chelsea Cain

  The paper clip slipped from Kick’s hand and bounced under the bed.

  Kick rested her forehead against the edge of the mattress and tried to collect herself.

  The door opened. She peeked up, expecting to see a nurse. Instead, Bishop strolled in. He tipped his head to the side and looked at her curiously. Kick tried to seem casual. She lifted the hand she had cuffed to the bed and waved. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” Bishop said. He crossed to the computer terminal opposite the bed and typed something on the keyboard. Kick watched as James’s medical reports appeared on the screen and Bishop proceeded to page through them.

  “Things seem to be in a holding pattern here,” he said, scanning the screen. He turned his attention to James. There was no reaction on his face, but he looked at James for what seemed like a full minute. Then he bent over, scooped the paper clip up from the floor, and handed it to Kick without comment.

  Kick started working the keyhole again.

  “I spent the night at my mother’s,” she said.

  “That explains the clothes,” Bishop said. “And why you smell like Eternity.”

  Kick looked down at her shirt with a stab of self-consciousness. “She gave me pills,” she said. “My head’s a little muddy.” Eternity? How did he know her mother’s perfume? He hadn’t had trouble obtaining a fresh change of clothes, she noticed. Black jeans, gray T-shirt, black blazer—he probably kept a bloodstain-free ensemble in every city, just in case. She gestured helplessly at the cuffs. “Can you give me a hand?”

  Bishop looked from her to the cuffs and back. “I don’t know how to pick a lock.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No idea,” Bishop said.

  “Why are you even here?” Kick said, peering into the keyhole, trying to see what she was doing. “He can’t answer any questions.”

  “I can access his medical chart from my phone,” Bishop said. “I wanted to check on you.”

  She could feel him looking at her; it made the back of her neck warm. “Did you find anything useful at the apartment?”

  “It’s possible the lab might still turn something up,” he said.

  She knew that meant they had turned up nothing. She’d known it the moment Bishop walked through the door, because he could be there for only one reason. Kick wiggled the paper clip.

  “You want me to talk to Mel again,” she said.

  The ventilator hissed. James’s chest rose and fell.

  “No,” Bishop said.

  Kick looked up, the paper clip poised in her hand. “James can’t help,” she said. “Mel knows everybody in that world. If he can’t give us more information, he can tell us how to find someone who can. I can handle it. I want to talk to him. I want . . .” She stopped herself before she said it.

  “Mel slipped into a coma this morning,” Bishop said quietly.

  Kick’s hand shook and the paper clip made a frantic tapping noise against the cuffs. “Oh,” she said. She set the paper clip on James’s white hospital blanket.

  Compared to the smooth pace of the ventilator, Kick’s own breaths seemed suddenly shaky and shallow.

  She fixed her attention on the paper clip. She made it her whole world. She didn’t try to laugh, or scream, or tell herself affirmations. She didn’t want to feel.

  “I need to ask you some questions,” Bishop said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “What year was it when you were in San Diego?” he asked.

  Kick was aware of her hand hanging limp in the cuff; of James’s wire talisman, still snug around her finger; of the paper clip on the white blanket. “I don’t know.”

  “How old were you?” Bishop asked.

  The ventilator hissed. “James was nine,” she said. “So I was seven.” She picked up the paper clip and pushed the end back into the keyhole.

  “How long were you there?”

  “A few weeks,” Kick said. “It was summer.”

  “It’s always summer in San Diego,” Bishop said.

  “No,” Kick said firmly. “It was July. I remember the fireworks on the Fourth. I could hear them.”

  James’s breaths were like a ticking clock. Each mechanical lungful of air counted against him. Every day that James was on the ventilator increased the chances he wouldn’t wake up.

  “Could you find the house?” Bishop asked.

  Kick looked up, puzzled. “In San Diego?” she said. “Klugman is gone. He’s probably changed his name ten times by now. Even if you could find him, he sold James to this guy, like, fourteen years ago. He’s not going to be able to help you find him.”

  “Can you find the house?” Bishop repeated evenly.

  Kick jammed the paper clip around in the hole. James didn’t even look like himself. He looked like a shell, like a skin he’d shed and left behind.

  She could sit there in her mother’s clothes, listening to a machine count down the minutes to her brother’s death, or she could find out who did this. Kick felt the paper clip catch, and she turned the wire ninety degrees. The lock clicked and the bracelet opened.

  She sat back in her chair with a sigh. The pills were wearing off and her brain was feeling sharper. “That jet isn’t yours, is it,” she said.

  “No,” Bishop said. “But I get to use it. It’s one of my corporate perks.”

  She had conditions. “I want a gun,” she said.

  Bishop smiled. “Is that a yes?”

  “It’s a maybe.” It would be something to do; it would get her out of that room. The idea of a life without Monster or James made Kick more terrified than she could ever admit to anyone. “I could maybe find the house.”

  Bishop reached underneath his jacket, to the small of his back, and pulled out a 9mm semiautomatic and handed it to Kick.

  Kick turned the pistol over in her hands, her heart quickening. The polymer construction, the black finish, the hammer-forged, Tenifer-coated barrel, beveled at the front for easy holstering. She knew this gun. It was her Glock. “You said . . .”

  “I lied,” Bishop said.

  28

  “DO WE NOT GET fancy cars anymore?” Kick asked, gazing glumly around the bland interior of the Chevy Impala that Bishop had rented at the San Diego airport.

  “Fancy cars stand out,” Bishop said.

  “This car is electric blue,” Kick said.

  “It’s topaz, and it was the only full-size model they had available,” Bishop said. “Besides, it has a big trunk.”

  Kick let the topic drop. She didn’t want to know why Bishop considered a big trunk a plus. They certainly didn’t need it for their luggage. Bishop had a carry-on–size suitcase and a duffel bag, and Kick had her red purse and a shopping bag from the Target they’d stopped at so she could get supplies on the way to the airport. They could have fit all they had with them in the trunk of a Miata.

  She had changed out of her mother’s shirt and into a black T-shirt with studded sleeves that she’d picked up at Target. The gray shirt was probably more suitable to San Diego’s climate, but Kick felt better in the black shirt. She wanted all her clothing to have studs. It felt like armor.

  “Anything?” Bishop asked.

  They had been driving around for over two hours. Every so often Kick would glimpse the Pacific Ocean down a side street. The car’s outside temperature reading said it was eighty-three degrees—not that they’d know it, since Bishop had the AC cranked up so high.

  “No,” Kick said. Bishop had signed into the hospital network from her phone, allowing Kick to see James’s digital chart in real time as it was updated. Kick glanced down to check it.

  “Eyes up,” Bishop said.

  “The light hurts my head,” Kick said. It wasn’t true, but he was starting to annoy her. “Concussion, remember?”

  “You’re fine,” Bishop said. “If you were
going to have an intracranial hemorrhage, it would have happened by now.”

  Nice.

  Kick sighed and stared out the window. There was nothing to see. None of it looked familiar, and yet every block was the same as the one before it. Gated condos, adobe-style houses, manicured lawns.

  “Is that place on the island even your house?” she asked.

  “Technically it belongs to my employer,” Bishop said. “He lets me live there when I’m working in the area.” They stopped at a light. “I’m not there a lot.”

  Kick was tired of looking out the window. She turned her attention back inside the car. “What about the old ball and chain?” she asked, with a nod at the naked left hand Bishop had on the steering wheel. “She mind you not wearing a wedding ring?”

  “Eyes up,” Bishop said.

  Kick crossed her arms and looked back out the window. “It was light colored and one-story,” she recited by rote. “It had a pool. And it was near the ocean.”

  Two boys played basketball in the driveway of a house with a red clay roof and two palm trees in the front yard.

  “There was a school,” Kick said. She had forgotten that until now. “An elementary school. I could hear the kids out at recess. I wasn’t allowed outside. But I could hear them.” She twisted to look up and down the street they were on. “Have you noticed that half these houses are for sale?”

  “Public or private?” Bishop asked.

  “Huh?” Kick said.

  “The school,” Bishop said impatiently. “Was it public or private?”

  She caught a glimpse of the ocean again, a chunk of blue at the end of a street. She had a feeling this was the closest she was going to get to it. “Do they sound different?” Kick asked.

  “You said it was July,” Bishop said. “It was probably a public school. They go year-round here.”

  All the cars they passed, the houses, they were too fancy.

  “Tell me about the pool,” Bishop said.

  “I don’t know,” Kick said helplessly. “There was one.” She didn’t know what he wanted from her. Her memories were fragmented, like a series of clips in the wrong order. “It was in the backyard,” she said. “The backyard had a wooden fence. It had some vine growing on it. It had dark-pink flowers.”

  “Bougainvillea,” Bishop said. “Who maintained the pool?”

  She didn’t know. “I was a kid,” she said. “We were there for two weeks.”

  “What was over the fence?” Bishop asked.

  “I wasn’t allowed near the fence.”

  “Did you see airplanes flying overhead? Were there trains? Ship horns?”

  Kick looked at her wire-man ring and felt a pang of guilt for not being with James. “I don’t remember.”

  “How do you know you were near the ocean?”

  She wanted him to leave her alone. “I could hear it. I could hear the roar of the waves.”

  Bishop pulled to the curb and lowered Kick’s window from the driver’s-side controls. “Listen,” he said.

  Kick listened. It made Bishop shut up for a minute, at least. She focused all of her attention out the open window. She practiced being present in the moment. She didn’t know what the hell she was supposed to be hearing. She could see a slice of the ocean between condo buildings. She could smell the salt water. But she couldn’t hear the waves. So she didn’t know what good this was doing. She couldn’t hear the ocean at all. Then it dawned on her: if she couldn’t hear the ocean now, then she wouldn’t have been able to hear the ocean then. “It wasn’t the ocean,” she said.

  “It was a freeway,” Bishop said.

  This was good. This was a breakthrough. So why didn’t Bishop look more excited?

  “Doesn’t that help?” Kick asked.

  Bishop leaned back against the headrest. “There are more houses near freeways in San Diego than near the ocean.”

  Kick inventoried her mind for anything, any detail no matter how random, that might possibly help. She came up with nothing. Just one small fact that was probably stupid to even bring up, but she did anyway. “The basement leaked,” she muttered.

  Bishop turned slowly toward her. “The house had a basement?”

  “The houses always had a basement,” Kick said. She’d told him that, in Seattle. It was a given. She looked out the window. A five-year-old kid on a Razor scooter sped past on the sidewalk, followed by his father.

  “This is San Diego,” Bishop said.

  “So?” Judging by the For Sale signs up and down the street, no one wanted to live there.

  Bishop rubbed his temples like he was the one with the concussion. “Do you know why people build basements?”

  “Storage?” Kick guessed.

  “To stabilize their homes,” Bishop said. “Soil, when it’s saturated, expands, causing anything built on top of it to shift. That’s why building codes require foundations to go below the frost line.” He gestured with his chin out the windshield. “There’s no frost here. The frost line is, like, a foot underground. You don’t need a basement. They’re not required by code. No developer is going to sink a shitload of money building a basement unless the code says they have to.”

  Kick was starting to feel a little defensive. “The house had a basement,” she insisted. “A cellar, or whatever. Mr. Klugman had partially finished it.” She could see it as clear as anything, as clear as any part of the house. She could remember the stale air and how dust came off when she ran her finger along the concrete wall.

  She would always remember that basement.

  The kid on the skateboard fell. Kick didn’t see it happen. He was down the block, a small, distant figure. But the window was still open and she heard him start to wail. His father rushed to him and held him in his arms. Kick felt a stab of bitterness. She didn’t know why she had assumed the man was the boy’s father. He could be anyone at all.

  “We made the first movie down there,” she said. “Mr. Klugman filmed it. That’s why we were staying there. Mel used the money he made to buy his own equipment.”

  She glanced at Bishop, to see how he’d react. He was already getting out his phone, dialing a number. He held up a finger for her to be quiet. She saw his eyes on the For Sale sign across the street. The sign had a photograph of the Realtor, Stacy Smith, San Diego’s Prime Bungalow Specialist. She had a dark mane of hair, a bright smile, and a 1-800 number.

  “Hi, Stacy,” Bishop said smoothly into his phone. “This is Phil Marlowe.” He winked at Kick. “Barbara recommended I give you a call. My wife and I are looking to buy a house sometime next year, but we’re in town unexpectedly for the afternoon and wanted to take the opportunity to get to know the area so we can move quickly when the time comes. Well, my wife’s from back east and she’s set on having a basement. I know. I explained that, but she’s insisting. We want an area with some privacy, a little space between houses. A fenced-in yard. Maybe a pool. Also, we’ve got a third grader, so we’re looking for a property with an elementary school within walking distance. And I’ll be working up in Irvine, so I’m going to need access to the freeway. Can you give me a few ideas? Thanks. She’s checking. Yeah, I’m here. Excellent. Okay. Read that to me again. Okay. Got it. Well, we’ll take a look. Thanks so much. We’ll be in touch.”

  He turned to Kick. “She said she hasn’t sold a house with a basement in this town in nineteen years as a real estate agent. But there are two older neighborhoods we should take a look at. She says most of the houses have at least partial basements. They don’t come up on the market much. Most of them are rental properties. She was worried about our son walking to school in this one, because there aren’t any sidewalks.”

  29

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD THAT THE Realtor had sent them to was ten miles from the ocean and tucked next to a tangle of interstates. The houses were mostly one-story and ranged from Spanish-style adobe to bo
mb-shelter-style cinder-block. Many of the homes were run-down but they were on big lots and had fenced-in yards.

  Bishop followed the directions to the elementary school and started circling the neighborhood from there.

  Kick had the window down again, hoping that the din of the playground would spark some other memory, but it was Sunday and the school was closed.

  The street gently curved around a bend. She could hear the irregular pulse of interstate traffic in the distance, and birds. Her eyes studied the houses they passed. She didn’t really expect to recognize the house from the front. She didn’t know what she was expecting—maybe a psychic recognition, like she’d see an aura or something.

  But she knew the place the instant she saw it.

  It was entirely indistinct, a one-story rectangle with gray siding and white trim. Someone had added a covered patio in front, and two neatly painted aqua chairs sat side by side. The yard was sand. She remembered that now. Rocks were arranged here and there, along with a few scrawny palm trees, as if the house had been set down in the middle of the Mojave Desert. She had looked at it from the front window, a sandbox she could never play in. In the middle of this arid landscape an American flag fluttered on a pole planted in the sand. The flagpole was twice as tall as the house.

  “There,” she said.

  Bishop didn’t question her. He pulled the car over and they got out. Above the house, white clouds floated by in the blue afternoon sky. A fifteen-foot wall of bushes separated the property from a neighboring house to the west, and an empty lot, overgrown with foliage, sat to its east.

  Behind the house, Kick could see the school in the distance.

  They walked toward the front door. The path had been repaved and two names had been drawn into the concrete: Stella and Eliza. A third name followed a few steps later: Grandpa Bob.