One Kick: A Novel

by Chelsea Cain

  The round clock on the wall said it was almost six p.m. She had to go. Kick felt a strange kind of calm settle over her.

  Mel had known this day might come. He had taught her about the Comanche, about their raiding parties, how they murdered adults and took children captive. Most of the children were slaughtered, but some, the cooperative ones, the pliant ones, would be given Indian names and welcomed into the tribe. One of the greatest and most arrogant Comanche chiefs wore a vest of Spanish armor, and many believed him to have supernatural powers because the vest repelled bullets so easily. They called him Iron Jacket.

  Tonight she would be ready for him. And she would make him tell her where Adam was, and she would make him pay for James, and she would get vengeance for her dog.

  43

  KICK TOOK HER TIME making preparations. She fieldstripped the Glock at her kitchen table, cleaned it, reassembled it, and loaded it. She kept it out as she padded around the apartment. Her apartment felt alien to her. Monster’s food bowl sat half full on the kitchen floor. His toys lay strewn around her bedroom. Everywhere she looked, she saw a ghost image of James’s apartment imprinted over her own. His blood on her floor. Monster, dead, in her bedroom. Kick looked for a place on her bookshelf to hide the knife, and her gaze fell on a framed photograph of her and Marnie. Her childhood pictures were limited to Befores and Afters. There were no photographs of her from the five years she’d spent with Mel and Linda, only photographs of Beth. Kick smiled faintly at the framed photo: two little kids grinning madly at the camera. They looked happy. Kick had no memories of her sister from Before, but she liked the idea that they had once gotten along. It was a good place to hide the survival knife. This one was military-grade. Case-hardened steel, and a leather grip darkened with the patina of her sweat and hand oil. She liked it so much, she’d bought two.

  The throwing stars were flat and easy to stow. Kick tucked them between the pages of books that she positioned at strategic areas around the living room. She opened the end table drawer and slipped a star on top of the rubber-banded stack of Christmas cards from Frank, and the bulldog wearing a Santa hat on the top card looked back at her supportively. She said the name of each location out loud so she’d remember it. “In the book on the coffee table.” “In the drawer of the end table.” “Under the couch cushion.” The Taser went into the utensil drawer with the forks. She unfolded the new Adam Rice flier on the kitchen counter and tucked a throwing star under it for good measure.

  She carried the pepper spray and the rest of the knives to her bedroom, careful to keep her eyes up so that she wouldn’t see Monster’s blanket, and balls, and rope toys. The throwing knife with the nine-inch carbon steel blade went into her bedside table. That was the one with its center of gravity at its midpoint; it was heavy and hit hard. She scattered the four-inch blades around the room, repeating each location aloud: “In the change bowl on the dresser.” “In the sock drawer.” “Under the pillow.” She could feel Adam watching her from the Missing Child posters on the wall. She opened her closet. The four white cardboard file boxes of victim notification letters were carefully labeled with black Sharpie. One word, scrawled across each box: Assholes.

  She tucked the pepper spray on the top box.

  Satisfied that her apartment was well armed, Kick stretched, loosening up her legs with squats and lunges. Then she did fifty push-ups just to get her blood pumping.

  Once she had worked up a sweat and her muscles felt warm and responsive, she made herself jar spaghetti sauce and meatballs and ate it alone at the kitchen table with the Glock on her lap.

  She was rinsing her bowl out in the sink when she finally heard him coming. She hadn’t even bothered to activate the alarm. She wanted to make it easy for him. She turned the faucet off and listened. The sound of her apartment door opening was barely audible, like someone whispering in the next room. If she had not been paying attention, she would not have heard it. But she’d been expecting him to come through that door. It was how he’d entered James’s apartment; otherwise, why go through the trouble of disabling the hallway security camera?

  Kick put the bowl down in the sink, tossed a dish towel over the Glock, and waited. It felt strange not to have Monster there, head cocked, gazing up at her. It made her feel alone. She listened as the faint beat of footsteps moved down her apartment hallway toward the living room. She placed her feet parallel, shoulder width apart, and closed her hands into fists at her navel.

  His shape came from the shadows. She saw a figure darken the far end of the hallway where it opened onto the living room. There was a flash of movement and then stillness. Kick remained motionless, watching. Slowly, excruciatingly, the shadow bent and stretched and Iron Jacket stepped into the light. He was dressed head to toe in black: a black watch cap, black gloves, a black backpack. He was as big as she remembered him. A hulk of a man, both tall and substantial. But his round, elastic face looked soft, like it belonged on someone else’s body. He came at her, toward the kitchen. The tip of the arrow tattoo was just visible above the neck of his shirt. The muscles in his arms and chest seemed to pulse as he breathed. His hair, from what she could see under his cap, was cut military short.

  Kick inched her hand to the edge of the dish towel and let him come to her. Like she had that night in the pool at the Desert Rose Motel. As he stepped into the kitchen, she shifted her body forty-five degrees from his centerline. Her fingertips were on the butt of the Glock. “Where’s Adam Rice?” she asked.

  “You have something for me?” he asked. The knife seemed to come out of nowhere; he must have had it pressed against his thigh. Suddenly it was just there, in his hand, a ten-inch steel blade.

  Kick kept her eyes moving between his face and the knife, alert for any shift in his movement that might signal an attack. “What do you want?” she asked as she slid her hand under the dish towel.

  “The password to the offshore account,” he said. His voice was low and pleasant and sent chills down her arms.

  She had hoped, somehow, that in the end it would be about more. “Money,” she said.

  “I was supposed to get a piece of everything. Mel and I had a deal.”

  He had been in a neutral agile position, but now he lowered slightly into a crouch.

  “Maybe we can help each other,” Kick said. “Tell me where Adam is. I’ll tell you the password.”

  The blade was angled up. She saw his thumb move on top of the knife’s spine. It made for a harder thrust, so that it could penetrate more muscle, cut deeper. “What do you have under the towel, Beth?” he asked.

  She closed her hand around the grip of the Glock and raised it straight out in front of her, one hand closing around the other, elbows locked, as the dish towel fell away. Her thumb hugged the grip, her index finger stretched along the muzzle, the other three fingers were secured around the grip high up, the way she’d been taught. The fingers of her left hand wrapped around the fingers of her right, her left thumb making an X over her right thumb. Feet planted under her shoulders now, she leaned forward slightly so that her hips would take the brunt of the recoil. Then she adjusted the sights to eye level and lined up the three white dots, centering the middle one on Iron Jacket’s sternum, and placed her finger gently over the trigger. Her grip was relaxed, her breathing even. She had practiced this a thousand times. She knew how to squeeze the trigger, to wait until the end of an exhalation, and then tighten her finger slowly until it fired. “Where’s Adam Rice?” she asked again.

  Iron Jacket smiled at her. She tried to stay focused on the gun sights, on his sternum, but she could see his slow grin at the top edge of her vision. He shrugged his backpack off his shoulder and let it drop to the kitchen floor. It made a loud sound, like it was full of tools.

  Kick leveled the Glock’s sights at the center of his face. “Stop,” she said, but he continued toward her.

  “Kill me,” he said, “you never find the boy.”


  She hesitated, shifting her aim, trying to find a safe place to shoot him. The head and torso had too much bone mass, vital organs, nerve bundles; between the shock wave and the shrapnel, she couldn’t risk it. But if she went for an arm or leg, she might nick his femoral or brachial arteries. He’d bleed out in minutes.

  She angled the muzzle downward and aimed the sights at his foot. The bullet would shatter the bones, hobble him, make him hurt. But before she could fire Iron Jacket lunged toward her and she had to raise the gun to keep him back. He held the knife in his right hand, his left extended toward her. She’d studied knife combat. The left hand was his lead hand, the one that would set up the attack. He was in a mobile stance, his weight on the balls of his feet, knees slightly bent.

  She saw his eyes flick over her arms. That’s how you disarmed an opponent: you went for the joints above the wrists and elbows, or for the veins on the insides of the arms. You cut the tendons, you let the person bleed, you took the weapon. It was easy then to take your opponent by the head and thrust your blade into the hollow cavity below the jaw.

  Iron Jacket was inside the grappling zone. She only had a second to react.

  He brought his lead hand in toward her shoulder and she fired reflexively, jerking the trigger rather than squeezing it.

  Iron Jacket grunted when the bullet hit. An exhalation of surprise, followed by a sigh. Kick staggered back, out of the grappling zone, breathing hard. The smell of gunpowder filled the room. Iron Jacket was still standing, the knife in his fist, upright, alert, seemingly unharmed. She searched his body for the entry point, hoping for a through-and-through, something painful but not deadly.

  Then Iron Jacket slowly stepped sideways and pivoted, revealing a figure behind him. Kick’s stomach dropped. Bishop stood there, one hand pressed against his shoulder, blood between his fingers.

  Kick glanced down at the Glock she had just fired. Then back up at Bishop.

  “That’s . . . why . . . I don’t . . . like guns,” Bishop said.

  Iron Jacket stepped beside Bishop and drove an elbow hard into his skull, flattening him.

  44

  KICK WATCHED, TERRIFIED, AS Iron Jacket unpacked his backpack on her kitchen table. He’d pushed the table to the wall and she couldn’t see exactly what he was unpacking from her position on the floor, but every item he set down made a sickening clunk. She tried to wriggle her hand out of the handcuff that Iron Jacket had used to cuff her wrist to Bishop’s, but it was useless. Their hands were secured on either side of the steel handle of her refrigerator. Sitting on the floor with her back against the fridge, her wrist shackled above her head, she couldn’t get a good angle to even see the lock.

  She nudged Bishop with her foot, trying to rouse him, but he was deadweight, his arm hanging like meat from the cuff, his body slumped to the side, head hung over his chest. His blood smeared the fridge door between them. The bullet had gone through his shoulder and out his back, leaving a silver-dollar–size hole in his T-shirt and exposing flesh the color of raspberry jam underneath.

  He’d come to help her. He had figured out what she was up to. He must have noticed the hair, that she’d put it to the left. Beth had done that only once, only in the first movie, before Mel had told her it was prettier on the right.

  She bent her knee, drew her leg up, and thrust the ball of her foot into Bishop’s thigh.

  He drew a sharp breath and opened his eyes, then winced in pain as he pushed himself up into a sitting position with his feet.

  He was awake. Kick practically sobbed with relief. She glanced at Iron Jacket. He was examining the edge of a new knife he’d just unpacked.

  Bishop blinked woozily down at his shoulder. “You shot me,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Kick said. They didn’t have time for this. Iron Jacket looked over at them from the table. “You need to get us out of here,” Kick hissed at Bishop.

  “Where’s the gun?” Bishop asked.

  “On the table,” Kick said. What was she supposed to have done? “He made me give it to him. He threatened to cut your throat.”

  Bishop glanced bleakly up at their cuffed hands. “He’s going to cut my throat anyway,” he said.

  “No he’s not,” Kick said. “Because you’re going to get us out of here.”

  Bishop gave the handcuffs an obligatory tug. “Can you open these?”

  “I only know how to do it with a paper clip,” Kick said. She didn’t have a paper clip. Couldn’t he see that? Bishop was looking past her. She saw his eyes darken, and she turned to see Iron Jacket swinging a length of heavy chain and gazing up at the exposed beam that ran the length of her kitchen ceiling. He positioned one of her kitchen chairs under it, slung one end of the chain over the pipe, and hooked the chain to some sort of winch. “What’s he doing?” she whispered.

  Bishop took a slow breath. “He thinks you have some kind of password?”

  Kick nodded.

  “Do you, by any chance?”

  “No,” Kick said. Iron Jacket attached the nylon cord from the winch to his belt loop and snatched something off the table before he crossed toward them. Kick pressed herself against the fridge and wedged herself against Bishop. A black strap dangled from Iron Jacket’s hand. The winch made a click-click-click sound as the cord unspooled. Kick squeezed her eyes shut.

  “He’s not coming for you,” Bishop said.

  She opened her eyes. Bishop gave her a wan smile. She didn’t understand. Click-click-click.

  Iron Jacket squatted in front of Bishop and squinted at the wound in his shoulder. “I don’t like people sticking their noses in my business,” Iron Jacket said.

  Bishop didn’t look away. “Whatever happens, I can handle it,” he told her. Iron Jacket slapped him hard across the face, and Bishop’s head slammed against the fridge door. Kick screamed and curled her knees against her chest. Iron Jacket took Bishop’s free hand and wrapped the black strap several times around Bishop’s wrist.

  “It’s okay,” Bishop said to Kick. His cheek and jaw were red. His eyes swam. Blood collected at the corner of his mouth. “I can handle it.”

  Iron Jacket lifted Bishop’s wrists together overhead, wrenching Bishop’s shoulder. Bishop made a grunting sound, and Kick could see him steeling himself against the pain as Iron Jacket bound his wrists together with the strap.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to work.

  Bishop was going to rescue her. That’s why he was here.

  Iron Jacket unsnapped the cord from his pants and hooked it to Bishop’s wrists, then unlocked Bishop from the handcuffs they shared and secured Kick directly to the fridge.

  “I’m sorry,” Bishop mumbled to her.

  The winch started to retract, and Bishop’s arms lifted as the nylon cord stretched taut. Click-click-click went the winch. Kick watched in horror as the cord lifted Bishop’s wrists.

  “I don’t have the password,” Kick called after Iron Jacket, panicked. “I swear. I don’t know anything about it.” But Iron Jacket barely glanced at her as he walked back to the winch and then stood there, waiting.

  Bishop was pulled forward, onto his knees. He swayed there briefly. “I’m going to try to stay conscious long enough to buy you time,” he said to Kick.

  She didn’t know what he meant. Buy her time to do what?

  He wrapped his hands around the cord, got one foot in front of him, and managed to get shakily to his feet, then stumbled forward, away from her, following the cord drawing him to Iron Jacket. He came to a stop underneath the winch, next to Iron Jacket, and gazed upward as the retracting cable lifted his wrists above his head. Click-click-click-click. Bishop took a sharp breath, arched his back, and was lifted off the floor.

  He hung like that for a long moment, dangling there, his back to her, every vein in his arms visible, fingers splayed.

  And then Iron Jacket spun him aro
und toward her. Bishop’s face was red and contorted, the muscles of his neck taut, threads of saliva hanging from his chin, and she could hear him wheezing, struggling to breathe, his arms pressed against the sides of his head, his toes just inches from the floor.

  “Wrist suspension puts pressure on the muscle sheath around the chest, compressing the lungs,” Iron Jacket said. He threaded his gloved hands in front of him and leveled his gaze at her. His face was smooth, unworried, a man without a concern in the world. “He’ll suffocate if we leave him there too long.” He lifted his chin toward Bishop’s bound wrists. “Then there’s the strap,” he said. “It presses against nerves and cuts off circulation to the hands.” He frowned sympathetically, and Kick noticed that Bishop’s hands appeared to be darkening even as she watched, going from dark pink to crimson. “See there, how his finger’s twitching,” Iron Jacket said.

  Kick would have told him whatever he wanted to know. He should know that. He should know that she would cooperate if she could. “I swear,” she pleaded with him. “I don’t know any passwords. I don’t care about some old bank account. You can have it.”

  “You think you’re so clever,” Iron Jacket said. “You had Mel wrapped around your little finger. But you don’t fool me. You think he came up with the idea of putting all the proceeds away for you on his own?”

  All the proceeds?

  “You’re still a big earner,” he added. “I see the statements every month. That was Mel’s way of shoving it in my face.”

  Bishop had his head back and was looking up at his wrists, his fingers pulling uselessly at the cord. His shirt was darkened with sweat and blood, so that she couldn’t tell where one left off.

  “What kind of password is it?” Kick asked, stalling. “A word? A number? Does it have to have a symbol? I can figure it out. Give me a minute.”

  Iron Jacket unthreaded his hands and looked right at her as he shifted his stance. She knew what was coming an instant before Iron Jacket placed his palm over his fist and drove an elbow hard into Bishop’s gut, before she heard Bishop’s sharp, guttural exhalation of pain. Iron Jacket stepped away, and Bishop swung back and forth from the winch.