It was the paramedic.
He had hired the paramedic he’d bedded after Kick’s concussion.
“You’re unbelievable,” she said. He really couldn’t go twenty-four hours without getting laid.
“She’s got an excellent bedside manner,” Bishop said.
Kick gave him a sideways look.
“I’ll be in touch,” Bishop said. He bent down, kissed her chastely on the cheek, and then turned and headed toward the helipad.
The next thing Kick knew the paramedic had swept behind her wheelchair and was whisking her across the lawn toward James, the wind from the chopper beating at their backs.
Bishop could fly off wherever he wanted, Kick told herself. She had James, and he was the only person she really needed. Pale, hair fluttering in the wind, wearing the wrong glasses and pajamas that were several sizes too big, James was right there in front of her. Kick was nearly overcome. When the paramedic pulled her up to her brother and parked the wheelchair next to the bench, Kick and James just sat grinning at each other for a good several minutes. The slutty paramedic slipped away behind them. The chopper landed.
James offered Kick his hand and she took it.
“I missed you,” Kick said. The words were lost in the whine of the helicopter’s rotors, but James seemed to understand anyway. He squeezed her hand and said something back, and she, too, understood, one word: Monster.
James’s eyes filled with tears. He had loved Monster almost as much as Kick had.
Kick looked sadly at their entwined hands. She still could see Monster’s empty eyes as he lay lifeless in her lap. James gave her a quick squeeze. His mouth was moving, but she couldn’t catch the words. He frowned, and bit the tip of his tongue, the way he did when he was figuring out how to break down a complicated concept into the simplest explanation possible. With new determination, he gestured emphatically with his chin at something behind the bench. Kick winced in pain as she shifted around to look. Douglas firs towered above them at the edge of the woods. The manicured lawn gave way to wild blackberries and old-growth trees. She scanned the dense trees, but James squeezed her hand again, and redirected her attention closer. The wind tickled the small hairs on her arms, but Kick felt bathed in warmth. The mound of raw dirt stood out on the band of green lawn. It wasn’t large—just a few square feet—packed tightly so that it rose only a few inches above the grass line at its highest point. Ringed with rocks, it looked like a small garden bed waiting to be planted. Nestled at its center was a purple tennis ball.
Kick drew in a shaky breath.
Bishop had buried her dog.
The noise of the helicopter surged, and Kick looked up just as it lifted from the helipad. It hovered five feet off the ground, the frantic beat of its blades plastering her hair against her skull, and then slowly traveled overhead, gleaming white, with a black logo on the door: a W with a circle around it.
Kick had seen that logo before, stitched on the seats of Bishop’s private plane. She craned to catch another glimpse, ignoring the pain of her incision, and as the helicopter leveled off over Puget Sound, she got one more look. This time she saw the logo for what it was. Not a W at all. A trident. Poseidon’s trident, with its three prongs. What better to represent a company that made its fortune selling weapons than a spear? Bishop had said his boss was named David Decker Devlin. Three prongs, one for each D in his name.
She lowered her eyes to the hospital bracelet that encircled her wrist.
Trident Medical Group.
There had been no prisoner’s rights organization behind the campaign to match Mel with a donor. Even organizations like those wouldn’t touch someone like him, a dying pedophile, a child abductor, a child pornographer. Kidney donations required going through all kinds of mental and physical health hoops, but not this time. It was like they had been waiting for her call. She had been in surgery within hours. Everything paid for. Mel whisked out of prison. She knew of only person who had that kind of wealth and influence. Devlin. He’d arranged all of it. They wanted Mel alive. And now, she thought, with a sickening pang, her kidney was inside him.
“Are you okay?” James asked.
Kick sat up straight. Her incision barely bothered her at all anymore. Change your thoughts and you change your world. Devlin and Bishop were up to something, and she was going to find out what.
Kick lifted her arm and waved at the glinting chopper. “Smile and wave,” she said to James, plastering a fake smile on her face. James gave her a nervous glance, and then raised his own hand and waved it. Kick did a covert scan of the grounds. The paramedic was wandering the path to the beach. Kick didn’t know if anyone else was on the property. Not that it mattered.
She was an invited guest, and Bishop had said he’d be gone for weeks.
That gave her plenty of time to search the house.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I OWE A BIG thanks to my editor, telephone counselor, and cheerleader Marysue Rucci for taking a risk on me and this series. She was and continues to be one of Kick’s greatest fans and she is the reason this book exists in the world.
I want to also thank Carolyn Reidy, Jon Karp, Cary Goldstein, Lance Fitzgerald, Andrea DeWerd, Loretta Denner, Lisa Erwin, and Louise Burke. Jackie Seow and Marlyn Dantes, you made a beautiful book jacket. Special thanks to Sarah Reidy and Grace Stearns. Sarah spent her day off texting me when I was stranded at an airport for 11 hours and is the only reason I am not in detention at JFK to this day. My editor’s former assistant Emily Graff (now an S&S editor) and her current assistant Elizabeth Breeden possess both patience and organization, qualities I lack and envy them for. Thank you, Joy Harris and Adam Reed of The Joy Harris Literary Agency, for all of your awesomeness and for putting up with me. Usually the publisher avoids even telling us writers our copyeditors’ names, lest we hire contract killers to track them down and kill them—but check it out, David Chesanow, I know who you are. And I’d like to thank you for a fantastic job finding the words that I meant to use, instead of the words that I used because they were kinda sorta similar. Well done, sir. No need to get the locks changed.
Elizabeth Lannigan (or as she is known in my daughter’s second-grade classroom, Mrs. Lannigan) gave this character a great gift, her name. Zach Greenvoss is James’s technical advisor, and I’m pretty sure he installed RAT malware on my laptop years ago. Thank you, Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction, for continuing to inspire me creatively, for your friendship, and for “bthmmp bthmmp.” Brian and Alisa Bendis supply a third of my family’s weekly caloric intake. Kelley Ragland, you still influence my work in so many ways.
As always I am indebted to my weekly writing group: Chuck Palahniuk, Lidia Yuknavitch, Erin Leonard, Mary Wysong-Haeri, Diana Page Jordan, Suzy Vitello, Monica Drake, and Cheryl Strayed (Ret.). I am also lucky to have many writer friends whose work dazzles me. Special thanks to Eliza Mohan, Sophie Evans, Danielle Khoury, Nina Khoury, Piper Bloom, Daisy Zlatnik, Emily Powell, Sophie Jacqmotte-Parks, and Stella Greenvoss (København campus)—eight nine-year-old girls who teach me a lot about writing.
Finally, my husband Marc Mohan and our daughter Eliza Fantastic Mohan are simply my favorite people in the whole world. How lucky that I get to live with them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© LAURA DOMELA
CHELSEA CAIN is the author of the New York Times bestselling Archie Sheridan/Gretchen Lowell thrillers Heartsick, Sweetheart, Evil at Heart, The Night Season, Kill You Twice, and Let Me Go. Her Portland-based thrillers have been published in twenty-four languages and recommended on the Today show, have appeared in episodes of HBO’s True Blood and ABC’s Castle, and are included in NPR’s list of the top 100 thrillers ever written. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, a film critic, and their daughter, a third-grader. She is also writing this bio in third person, which is kind of weird, right? One Kick is the first installment in an ongoing series that will follow the exploits of Kick Lannigan. Look for the second book about Kick in August 2015.
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ALSO BY CHELSEA CAIN
Let Me Go
Kill You Twice
The Night Season
Evil at Heart
Sweetheart
Heartsick
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Verité, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2014
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Interior design by Robert E. Ettlin
Jacket design by Evan Gaffney
Jacket photograph © Andreas Ackerup/ Link Image/ Galley Stock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cain, Chelsea.
One Kick : a novel / Chelsea Cain.—First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
pages cm
1. Kidnapping victims—Fiction. 2. Kidnapping—Fiction. 3. Post-traumatic stress disorder—Fiction. 4. Marksmanship—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.A385O54 2014
813'.6—dc 23 2013044441
ISBN 978-1-4767-4978-5
ISBN 978-1-4767-4988-4 (ebook)
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chelsea Cain, One Kick
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