Free One Kick by Chelsea Cain Page B

like the one on the outside of the plane. “I told you,” Bishop said.
    “I know,” she said. “You have friends in the government.”
    The plane lifted into the air and began its steady incline into the sky. There was no getting off now, no turning back. Kick hoped it was a smoother ride than on the chopper. She studied the photo of Adam Rice looking earnestly up from the digital file. The flight attendant came back with a new shirt for Bishop that looked exactly like the old one. Kick peeked up as he put it on. Then she flipped to the back of the worry book, where she kept a list of self-destructive behaviors she needed to work on, and wrote, Getting into vehicles with strangers. She underlined it.

6
    KICK KNEW A LOT about cars. She knew how to execute a hairpin turn, she knew to always cross her palms over her chest before jumping from a speeding vehicle, and she knew that every American car made after 2002 had an emergency release lever inside the trunk should you happen to find yourself in need of one. She knew that the car Bishop retrieved from a hangar at Seattle’s Boeing Field was a Tesla Model S. She knew that it had cost a hundred grand, standard, and that—judging by the abundance of leather and the car’s all-glass panoramic roof—Bishop had gone with some add-ons. The touch screen on the dash was bigger than her home computer monitor.
    They were headed south on I-5, technically still in Seattle, though all the good parts of Seattle were behind them. The interstate sliced through California, Oregon, and Washington, and extended all the way from Mexico to Canada, and nothing good ever happened on it. Kick had a theory that 30 percent of the drivers on it at any given time were actively committing a crime.
    “I thought you’d have a driver,” Kick said to Bishop, hitting “send” on the text she’d just sent James.
    Bishop smirked. “I’m trying to remain inconspicuous,” he said. He whipped the Tesla around a Saab.
    The road was dry, but the Seattle sky was veiled with low cloudcover. Portland got a few more inches of actual rainfall, but Seattle had Portland beat when it came to smothering gloom. It was cloudy 201 days out of the year, and partly cloudy 93 days. Kick knew a lot about weather too. She liked forecasts, almanacs, tide charts. She liked to know what was coming. It was a safety precaution not enough people took.
    “How fast does this thing go?” she asked Bishop.
    “One-thirty-two,” Bishop said with a grin.
    He could drive. Kick saw how he shifted his attention between the vehicle in front of theirs and the ones six or eight ahead, anticipating traffic. He used the accelerator smoothly, and when he braked, he squeezed the pedal before he put his foot down and then tapered off so that the motion of the car was always fluid.
    Bishop gave the wheel a sharp turn and veered around a van into the carpool lane. He didn’t turn the wheel too soon like most people did, so he didn’t have to let up on the throttle. Most drivers merged too slowly, making the engine work harder than it needed to.
    They were at the southern edge of the city. Thick trees formed a hedge on either side of the interstate, protecting drivers from the sight of auto dealerships and office parks. The slate-colored sky was darkening. Not so much a sunset as a progressive dimming of light.
    “Is anyone meeting us there?” she asked.
    “Like who?” Bishop asked, merging right, across two lanes.
    “The cops? Your bodyguards? Blackwater mercenaries? Your royal footmen?”
    “It’s not called Blackwater anymore,” Bishop said.
    That wasn’t the point. “It’s just us?” Kick asked. Her throat constricted slightly. “We’re going to a house that might be connected to two child abductions, and it’s just us?”
    “That’s the point.” Bishop veered right and exited the interstate. He didn’t lift his foot off the gas. Accelerating is the hardest thinga car can do; the more you kept your foot on the