One Kick (25 page)

They both had white dust in their hair and on their eyelashes.

“That’s exactly what I need,” Bishop said.

Collingsworth tromped off to the utility room, leaving a trail of white footprints, and came back with an assortment of industrial flashlights and lanterns. “Earthquake country,” he said, by way of explanation, and he handed an LED camp lantern to Bishop.

Bishop turned the lantern on and stretched it into the darkness.

“Oh my God,” Kick whispered, feeling the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Bishop leaned in, moving the light around, but Kick stood ramrod straight, trying to absorb what she saw.

A rotting mattress lay on the concrete floor surrounded by stacks of yellowing paperbacks and moldy posters curling from the walls; a seatless toilet sat in the corner, and pop cans were scattered across the floor, coated with dust. Beyond the effects of age, the room had been preserved exactly as it had been when James was kept in it.

“Is it what you remember?” Bishop asked her.

“It’s exactly how I remember it,” Kick said slowly. She felt dazed, like she was entering a dream. “I don’t think anyone’s been in this room since James.”

“Hold this,” Bishop said, handing Kick the lantern. He pivoted away, already dialing someone on his phone.

Collingsworth stepped forward, gazed solemnly into the room, and took off his cap.

“It’s me,” Bishop said into the phone. “I need you to run a check on a name and address for me. Rental records. Tax records. Anything you can find.” He paused. “Klugman. . . . I don’t know how it’s spelled. You find out for me. . . . I don’t know the first name. He was at this address fourteen years ago.” He rattled off the address.

The posters were so moldy that Kick couldn’t make out what they were; she couldn’t remember.

“I’m going to take a look around,” Bishop said. He was wearing latex gloves now and took the lantern back from her, then stepped through the broken wall.

“I’ll come with you,” Kick said quickly.

“It’s a crime scene,” Bishop said, looking back at her through the hole, his face lit by the lantern. “Think back: we’ve been over this.”

“His mother sold him,” Kick said. “He wasn’t abducted.” Bishop had already turned away from her and was moving toward a far corner, his body blocking her view of what the lantern was revealing. “Without a complaining victim, the statute of limitations on child sex abuse is ten years,” Kick continued. “You’d need James to wake up and file a police report, and that will never happen. Even if he does wake up, he would never agree to go through a trial—that would mean dealing with people. So, assuming you manage to someday find Klugman, which is highly unlikely, you’re better off prosecuting him for human trafficking. Or you could have the bastard put away for life for child pornography. Then you don’t need the room at all.” She didn’t want to testify, but she’d do it for James. “You just need me.”

The lantern appeared again, and Bishop with it. “Congratulations on the law degree,” he said.

“I have a special interest in this area,” Kick said.

He extended a hand to help her step over the lower part of the wall. Kick ignored the gesture and clambered through the passage unaided. The floor on the other side was concrete. The air felt immediately
colder. Everything smelled sour and dank. She lit a path with her flashlight and made her way past the mattress to the posters on the wall. Even up close, in direct light, she couldn’t make out the images. The bloom of mold had blotted out everything.

“You know what they are?” Bishop asked, stepping beside her.

The light of his lantern, combined with her flashlight, brightened the wall just enough that a sliver of stone crenellation was visible in the poster’s image. It was a castle—Kick could see its shape now—one of those old castles tourists visit in places like Bavaria.

“They’re travel posters,” Kick said. How many hours had James spent, locked in this room, dreaming of faraway lands? “Places he wanted to go.”

“What’s this?” Bishop asked. He moved his light to where the corner of the poster had curled off the wall, and Kick saw a piece of paper tucked there. Bishop reached for it with his latex-gloved hand and slid out a postcard.

It had been protected somewhat from the entropy of the room, but when he held it in the light, they saw that the image on the front was largely consumed by mold. He flipped it over. The back was blank except for a logo:
The Desert Rose Motel
. Kick felt a jolt of recognition. She looked around for something she could use to clean the card.

“Take off your shirt,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Bishop said.

“Your shirt’s already dirty,” Kick said. There was no way she was taking her shirt off. “Mine isn’t.”

Bishop hesitated and then put the lantern on the floor and pulled his shirt over his head. “Now what?” he said.

“Clean off the front of the card,” Kick said, picking up the lantern.

Bishop placed the postcard against the wall and used his shirt to scrub at the mold. Kick turned her head as tiny spores rose into the air and floated in the light.

“That’s the best I can do,” Bishop said.

Kick inched closer to the card. The mold had smeared and formed a fine, streaky gray paste. But Kick could see a ghost of an image underneath. A fifties-style courtyard motel with a pool, surrounded by desert. A neon sign in front read
The Desert Rose Motel, Vacancy
.

She knew it. She’d been there.

“This place,” she said. “We went there on a vacation. They let me play in the pool. Be outside. Linda met us there, but Mel and I were there for days, alone.” The Desert Rose pool—that’s where Mel had taught her how to do the back float. He’d mentioned it at the infirmary. “Yesterday,” she said. “I think he mentioned this vacation. He told me to remember it. I thought it was after San Diego. But it must have been before. I think this is where Mel met Klugman.”

Bishop worked a finger under the moldy poster where they’d found the postcard and a moment later another square of paper came free from underneath and dropped into Bishop’s waiting hand. He wiped it with his shirt and then planted it on the wall in front of her. “Is this Klugman?” he asked.

The photograph was surprisingly well preserved. James as she had first known him, a gawky nine-year-old, with a bad haircut and too-small clothes. In this picture he was grinning. A man had his arm around him. The man was turning his head away from the camera, his anonymity protected except for the side of his jaw, his ear, and his sideburn. They were standing side by side in the shallow end of a swimming pool. James, his bare chest sunken and skinny, looked puny next to Klugman’s hairy barrel shape. But he was outside, in the backyard pool. He had not always been kept in the dark.

Kick looked away. “It’s him,” she said. She didn’t need to see his face; she recognized his shape, his torso and limbs, his square head.

Bishop pocketed the postcard and the picture and they looked
around some more, carefully peeling the posters off the walls, but they didn’t find any more hidden clues. Kick leafed through James’s sci-fi paperbacks. Bishop went through the pockets of a small pile of rotting clothes. They flipped the mattress over.

That’s where the little figure was, so small that when Kick first saw it in her flashlight beam, she thought it was an old screw. It was only when she picked it up that she saw it was a little man made of wire, a twin to the talisman she wore on her finger. James had probably found the wire scraps in his room or pilfered them from the basement.

“What is it?” Bishop asked.

“A toy,” Kick said. She couldn’t take it with her. It would be like stealing something from a grave. She set the little man back down in the dust.

When they climbed back through the wall, Collingsworth was waiting for them, his cap still in his hands. “I didn’t know it was there,” he said shakily. “All this time, I didn’t know.” He was still covered with debris. Drywall stuck to his eyelashes.

Bishop glanced at Kick. “The boy who lived in there,” he said to Collingsworth. “He got away.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie, it just wasn’t the whole truth. Bishop sold it, though. Collingsworth looked relieved.

Bishop used his shirt to clean the sweat off his chest and the drywall dust off his arms and head, and then he tossed it over his shoulder through the hole they’d smashed in the wall. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Collingsworth,” he said, shrugging his blazer on over his bare torso.

Collingsworth looked confused. His eyes went to the dungeon on the other side of his rec room.

“What do you want me to do with all that?” he asked.

Bishop produced a checkbook from the blazer pocket and scribbled something out on it. “Gut it,” he said. He tore the check out and handed it to Collingsworth, who looked agog at the amount. “Put in a playroom for your grandkids.”

Collingsworth gave Kick a questioning look.

“Spare no expense,” she said.

“Besides, look on the bright side,” Bishop added, clapping Collingsworth on the back. “You just doubled the square footage of your basement.”

IT TURNED OUT THAT
the Desert Rose’s neon sign was the most glamorous thing about it. The sun had not quite set when Kick and Bishop pulled up and parked. The foothills were distant humps on the horizon, and the setting sun had turned the sky deep periwinkle. The motel was fifteen miles from the nearest town and surrounded on all sides by the empty desert. When they parked the car and got out, Kick could have sworn she heard a coyote howling. It was eighty-nine degrees in the shade.

She followed Bishop into the lobby. A counter stretched across one side, and a mud-colored Naugahyde sectional formed a seating area at the lobby’s center. A set of glass doors on one wall led to the pool; glass doors on the opposite wall led to a restaurant, which was, according to the handwritten sign on the door, Open Most Mornings. The lobby floor was ceramic tile. Kick remembered slipping on it once when she had wet feet from the pool. Other than that, nothing else about the lobby struck her as particularly familiar.

The only motel staff appeared to be the clerk minding the check-in counter. She was engrossed in a celebrity magazine, a position that effectively displayed the cleavage her V-neck T-shirt exposed. Her thick, dark hair was blown out into soft shoulder-length waves and her caramel-colored skin was flawless. She looked up from the magazine with glazed eyes, but when they landed on Bishop, they
instantly brightened. She batted her false eyelashes. “Can I help you?” she asked.

Bishop grinned. Kick could practically hear the blood rushing to his crotch. He slid her a sideways glance as if to say,
I got this.

Kick hung back a few feet as he swaggered up and slid the photograph of James and Klugman on the counter in front of the clerk. The clerk leaned forward, arching her back a little, so that her T-shirt drew tighter in the right places. Bishop’s eyes moved over her breasts with an appreciative smile.

Kick wondered if she should wait in the car.

“Have you seen this man before?” Bishop asked. His voice sounded different, like he was auditioning to host a late-night radio show.

The clerk looked up from the photograph. “He’s not as cute as you are,” she said.

“No, he’s not,” Bishop agreed.

The clerk blushed, and Bishop shifted his weight forward so that his forearms and elbows were on the counter.

“I’m going for a walk,” Kick announced.

“Wait,” Bishop said. He put his palm on the counter and slid the magazine toward Kick. “Take something to read,” he said. He tapped the magazine with his finger, drawing Kick’s attention to it.

She did a double take.

Her own image was splashed across the cover; she was crouched in horse pose at the park next to her mother and Monster. A bright yellow headline announced the cover story:
Ten Years of Freedom! Kidnap Mom, Paula Lannigan, Exclusive!

Kick flipped the magazine over and drew it toward her.

“That’s mine,” the clerk protested.

Bishop stepped between them, and Kick saw his fingers brush the clerk’s bare arm.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Carla,” she said, her eyes back on him.

“I’m John,” he said.

Kick backed away with the magazine, toward the sliding glass door.

She noticed how Bishop leaned his head toward the clerk’s, repositioning the photograph on the counter so that the clerk was entirely in his orbit. “Do you recognize him, Carla?” he asked.

“I can only see his ear,” the clerk said.

“Does his ear look familiar?” he asked, and Kick wondered if the clerk could hear the flicker of impatience in his voice.

Apparently she couldn’t. “Do you work out?” the clerk asked. “I work out. I’m only doing this job for the summer. I’m an actress. In LA. What do you do?”

Kick neared the door.

“I’m a casting agent,” Bishop said without missing a beat.

The clerk giggled uncertainly. One of Kick’s palms was on the glass, the other on the plastic door handle. The door was sticky, and Kick jiggled it, trying to get it to glide along its track.

“Are a lot of the staff here seasonal?” Bishop asked.

Kick glanced back at him. He was entirely focused on the clerk, his fingertips on her forearm. Screw it. Kick muscled the door open, stepped through it, and slammed it behind her. Ten percent of the moisture in her body immediately evaporated in the desert air. Her lips instantly felt chapped. The warm, dry heat made her skin buzz, like the faint electrical current created when you put a tongue to a battery.

And a weird thing happened: Kick relaxed. Maybe it was the pool. It was lit from below and glowed in the twilight like an aquamarine jewel. Even Kick, who hadn’t liked pools since she was a kid, found herself drawn to it.

The courtyard itself was nothing special. The two-story concrete-block motel surrounded it on three sides and the kidney-shaped pool was at its center. The pool was empty, the courtyard abandoned. Most of the motel room windows were shuttered and dark. A child’s pink foam pool noodle floated discarded in the shallow end.