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tense. “Oh.”
    A local news site was streaming live on the screen below the traffic cam footage. Kick sat up and rocked forward. A female news anchor was speaking from behind a desk. She was in her mid-fifties, with coiffed black hair and a familiar pendant. A graphic took up much of the screen next to her: a photograph of Kick, hood up, just beginning to reach for the spent cartridge at the gun range. “She was a reporter,” Kick said. She hadn’t been texting; she’d been taking a photo with her phone. “She was at the range this morning,” Kick explained to James. She scowled at the screen and balled her hands into fists. “I knew I should have kicked her teeth in.”
    “Do you want me to turn it up?” James asked hesitantly.
    “No,” Kick said, eyes still glued to the silent images on the monitor. A teaser below the image read: Kit Lannigan Update! From Kidnap Victim to Ace Shot. She’d never be able to go to that gun range again.
    Kick’s photograph dissolved and another photograph appeared. Kick recognized it right away as the author photo from a book called My Story: Lessons I Learned from My Daughter’s Abduction . Her mother had written that one. It had been the last straw before Kick filed for emancipation. Tonight at five, interview with kidnap mom Paula Lannigan!
    Kick’s stomach twisted. It was a constant struggle—not strangling her mother. “Kidnap mom.” Who knew that was a career?
    Then the screen went to video footage of a thickened, bearded man in a suit trying to climb the wide concrete stairs to an office building while a reporter shouted questions at him. This was the only time Kick saw Frank: when he popped up on the news, a boom mic stuck in his ruddy face. James turned up the volume. “Any comment on Mel Riley’s health, Agent Moony?” the reporter hollered. “Are you glad he’s dying?” Frank glowered at the camera and shoved his way past the reporter.
    He’d never given an interview.
    “Turn it off,” Kick said quietly.
    James tapped a button and the video window vanished from the screen. Kick’s pulse throbbed in her ears.
    “You want to talk about it?” her brother asked with a nervous glance.
    A poster of a frog, caught mid-hop, was taped above the printer. Leap, and the net will appear.
    “No,” Kick said. She slid the pack of throwing stars out of her pocket, extracted one, pinched it between her thumb and forefinger, and zinged it hard at a dartboard James had hung on the opposite wall. It sank into the center target and the dartboard clattered to the floor.
    “Yeah,” James said drily. “You’re fine.”
    “Sorry,” Kick said, under her breath. She kissed her brother on the cheek and stood up. “I smell like gunpowder. I need a shower.” She put two fingers in her mouth and blew out an earsplitting whistle.
    James cringed. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said.
    “It’s the only thing he can hear,” Kick said. She waited, her eyes fixed on the hall, and a moment later her dog came shuffling from James’s bedroom. His muzzle was white and his gait was arthritic and he was nearly blind and almost entirely deaf, but he could still hear her whistle.
    “He would have been fine by himself at your place,” James said.
    Kick watched as her dog limped across the living room, wagging his shaggy tail. He was part border terrier and part Australian shepherd, with a few other breeds thrown in that no one could identify. “He likes to be with family,” she said. He came right to her, a big grin on his face, panting, and pressed his black snout against her knee.
    “Your mail’s on the counter,” her brother said, turning his gaze to his monitor. “You got another letter from the court.”
    The federal victim notification system spit out a form letter every time Kick’s image showed up in a child pornography prosecution. Because she had been the star of one of the most collected series the industry had seen, her image showed up on a lot of hard