EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (10 page)

Tapp had smiled too, through the blue shop towel he held clamped to his mouth, and quietly wished he could see things with such vividness. Although that might require brain damage.

Why?
Sergei asked.
What do you see?

Tapp shrugged.
Just firewood with unhappy faces.

You’re a demon,
the kid said.
You just don’t know it yet.

That last remark had hung in the air with the rancid smoke. Tapp was never entirely certain how it made him feel. Some days it was inspiring that people could look at him and see such timeless grandeur, demons, and God; all that purple bullshit. Other days it just hung over him like a musty dog blanket; a title he didn’t believe in or want. What is evil, after all? What is being a self-appointed servant of God or Satan? As meaningless as being a Red Sox fan, that’s what.

Movement!

Behind the Toyota.

He leaned into his spotting scope and recognized a second camera scraping timidly forward under the vehicle’s front bumper. It was a little chunkier than the first one, black, an older model perhaps. He clucked his tongue and wondered why these survivors would try the same thing twice. Obviously he would just shoot it again. How many damn cameras did they have back there? Were they testing him? Were they probing his shooting for weakness or inconsistency? This raised the stakes, he realized.

I can’t miss now.

That would be embarrassing.

As sure as the changing wind, somehow this engagement wasn’t on Tapp’s terms anymore. It was on
theirs
. In some small way, he had lost control. While he considered the ramifications of this, he popped the tab on a second energy drink and took a warm, grape-flavored slurp.

It was definitely a . . .
long shot
.

* * *

“What’s he waiting for?”

“This better work,” Elle said. “Last camera.”

James feathered the Sony with his fingertips and figured this must be what it’s like to dangle a hand over a screaming meat grinder. He turned away to protect himself from catching an eyeful of shrapnel, but not being able to see his hand made it somehow worse. He had no idea when the shot would come, or where it would hit, or if it was even coming at all. He was starting to wish he had insisted on running for Glen’s gun instead. To his left, Roy dropped to his knees with his palms flat on the baked road in a shaky runner’s crouch. He raised his head and locked his eyes on the old man’s body. His calves bulged spring-tight.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” James asked.

Roy nodded and slipped off his Lakers cap. “After this, after I shoot the bearded guy, how do we get to his jeep? It’ll be twenty feet away, at least, if he parks like he did last time. He has a lot of cable.”

“My husband doesn’t think that far ahead,” Elle said.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.” James gritted his teeth and switched hands on the camera. The odd angle was cramping his wrist and more importantly, if he
must
lose a hand in the next few seconds, he didn’t want it to be his dominant one. “We’ll make it up as we go. But right here, right now, seconds literally count and we need that gun.”

“If it exists.”

“It does.”

“If I get all the way out there and it’s just a candy bar, I’ll come back and punch you again.”

James shrugged. “If my plan’s as retarded as you say, you won’t make it back.”

Roy smiled. “Asshole.”

James swiveled the Sony another inch to the right to keep the act authentic. This camera didn’t even have an LCD viewfinder like the Nikon – just a rubber movie-camera eyecup, impossible to see through without putting your face behind it. He hoped the sniper wasn’t tech-savvy enough to notice. There was something strangely personal to this, he realized. This long distance bluff had upped the stakes by introducing the human element, and like that eggshell silence when he first approached Glen Floyd, there was no coming back from it.

“If he was going to shoot the camera, he would have done it by now.” Roy rested on his left knee, and James smelled stale chew on his breath. “It’s been what, how many minutes now?”

“He’ll shoot it.”

“Four.” Elle clacked her phone shut. “Almost five minutes.”

“Five minutes and he hasn’t shot it yet.” Roy rubbed his eyes with his thumbs. “I think he’s onto us, James. I think he’s going to call it. So this was Plan A. Do we have a Plan B?”

“Die,” James said.

Elle nodded. “Let’s try to stick to Plan A.”

“Die,” Roy said thoughtfully, rolling his tongue over it. “I . . . I lied when I said Saray was my fiancée. If I’m going to die, it feels wrong to take that with me. So . . . Saray wasn’t my fiancée.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told her we’d get married eventually. But I have a wife right now. And a daughter, named Emma, out in Prim. She’s two. She’s . . . the sweetest little mistake ever.” His throat clogged and he forced a laugh. “She’s not supposed to exist, she shouldn’t be, but we had her, and now that’s . . . wonderful. Right?”

“Right.”

“So I drive a lot. I pick a direction and I just go. And I pretend that I can keep driving and I don’t ever have to turn around. The desert is great for that. Infinity in all directions. Simplifies things. Makes you feel small, and I like feeling small, and feeling like what I do to people doesn’t matter, because of the sheer bigness of the world.” He exhaled, motored his lips and looked up at James tiredly. “I lie to people. I lied to Saray and her sister. We went to the amphitheater. It was a fun night. Ash threw up in someone’s hair, I think. And now I’m here. And I think about Emma and I wonder if God is punishing me. Like I deserve this.”

Noticing the rainclouds stacking on the horizon, James decided
what the hell
and offered him a sip of water. “Nobody deserves this.”

Roy refused. “Maybe I do.”

“You don’t.”

“What was your life before this?”

James shrugged. He was having trouble keeping a serious conversation going with a man in an I PISS EXCELLENCE shirt.

“I work on cars,” Roy said. “You said you sold stuff?”

He nodded but said nothing. It’s strange how you can go to work every day for five years and lose everything only five days after quitting. He retained the memories but they felt second-hand, like they belonged to someone else. He had already forgotten what the coffee machines sounded like. He tried to picture his office and remember if his scanner was parallel to the cabinet or beside it. Between spells of productivity he used to stare up at the radio group logo on the wall –
Your Advertising Dollars at Just Under the Speed of Light!
– and try to fathom how anyone with a business degree could think up something so asinine. He’d made some good friends there. Most left to work in television, web startups, or retire. A good one, Keith, had been killed by a drunk driver on Christmas Eve. James remembered being one of the last people to see him alive as he left the holiday party, and couldn’t even remember what final things they’d talked about. Did it matter?

In that life, in that city, he and Elle had discovered a fate worse than misery. Comfortable mediocrity. Things were never truly bad, but they were never truly good, either. Every miscarriage seemed to pull Elle closer to an unknown precipice. Some days they felt like sad shadows of themselves, sleeping like siblings in a shared bed. He could recall entire days where they didn’t speak, and didn’t care to. Just incompatible strangers sharing a house; an insufferable optimist and an insufferable pessimist. The fire was just an excuse, really. James and Elle had decided to reshuffle the deck, head to Tulsa, and take a mulligan on life.

They could have stayed, of course. Even after the fire. They could have found another home in Sacramento, maybe up on the fancier East Ridge (known to the locals as Douchebag Ridge) since his client list had bumped him up an income bracket. He could have continued to play kiss-ass with media buyers and sell invisible, weightless airtime to pawn shops, assisted living facilities, and car lots. She could sell reptiles at the pet store by day and do contract work by night – a wedding here, a brochure there, maybe an independent film credit or two. They’d keep the same restaurants, the same traffic escape routes, the same tired faces and fallbacks.

That life wasn’t theirs anymore, he realized. Even if he and Elle somehow survived today, that comfortably mediocre life in Sacramento was gone forever.

He noticed tears in his wife’s eyes.

“Elle?”

“I deserve this,” she said.

“Why?”

“I had an abortion. When I was sixteen.”

He held her arm and squeezed. “I . . . I know.”

“James, I’ve never told you that before.”

He nodded. “You told me when you were drunk. Once.”

“That wasn’t official.” She smiled bashfully and a spurt of wind caught her ponytail. “Now it’s official because we’re both sober. And because of that, because of that one stupid choice I made forever ago, I wonder if something changed and it’s my fault.”

The wind drew silent.

“Now . . .” Her voice broke. “I wonder if it’s my fault we can’t have kids.”

James exhaled. He tried to find something comforting to say but he was too exhausted, his nerves drawn too tight.

WRACK!

The Sony exploded beneath his fingers and he felt a bite on his knuckle. He kicked backwards, clutching his hand, hoping everything was still there and intact, and he screamed hoarsely at Roy beside him. Now was his moment.
The
moment. Everything hinged on what happened in the next few seconds.

“
Roy, go
!”

Roy didn’t go.

* * *

A mile away, Tapp threw the bolt sixty degrees and ejected a golden .338 brass casing. He was relieved to see such a decisive hit. The streak continued! Nothing ruined a day like a single blown shot – much like shooting paper targets, you wing a hole at ten o’clock and it’s there forever. You can’t unshoot it. But if this day was to be dashed by such a failure, it hadn’t happened yet.

Not yet.

I’m still good.

Like butter, I’m on a roll—

Mid-throw with his eye half on scope, he caught a rabbit-dart of motion in his curved glass world. He snapped back in, bruising his cheekbone, pounding the rifle’s action forward with the palm of his hand and locking a fresh round in the chamber. Through the magnification he drew on a figure breaking into a dead sprint from the rear of the Toyota Rav4. Dashing north, directly away from Tapp and directly up the road, in a perfect straight vector that almost eliminated the need for any lateral holdover at all.

The wife.

9

“Elle!”

She heard her husband screaming somewhere far behind her but there was no time to listen. She exploded into the open ground, flattened her hands into blades and dug her feet deep into powdery earth, every muscle in her body focused forward. Only forward. The microsecond she broke free of the Rav4’s safe shadow she felt an overwhelming vulnerability, a nakedness, as if treading the surface of Mars without a spacesuit. She punched through the fresh air, so frigidly cold by comparison, so hard and so fast that her hair tugged and her ears whooshed.

One second elapsed.

Glen’s body came up fast. Three yards. Close enough that she needed to slow down, to lose momentum, or she would tumble over and past him. She dropped both shoulders, kicked up the toes of her Converse and skidded hard, hitting the road on her back with her left elbow scraping gravel in a flash of searing pain. Her feet, turned sideways, threw dust and jangling rocks.

Two seconds.

She landed on her ass beside Glen. Perfect. She rolled once, sucking in a hard breath, and was on top of the body. Straddling the man’s stomach. The scope was on her now. She felt a gathering tingle on her spine and knew it was the killer’s crosshairs hungrily forming a crucifix. She threw open Glen’s MPR jacket with her left hand, slashing her mouth on the corner. With her right hand she searched, grasped for the holster above his hip, under his belt, behind his clammy back. She found nothing. Nothing at all.

Three seconds.

Cold panic. Her stomach sank and her heartbeats thumped like machinegun fire. The gun, the holster, was on Glen’s left side. James had said so. His left? Or hers? She pivoted, hurled open the jacket’s other side with a crackle of hardened blood, and her fingers hit treated leather. Milled metal. Something solid and heavy.

Four seconds.

Too late . . . already too late . . .

She found the wooden butt of the gun and a thin strap. She thumbed it and felt a button click free like a single popcorn kernel. She pulled the gun but it stayed. Didn’t budge an inch. Was there a second strap? Somewhere lower, maybe, deeper inside, where she couldn’t see? She brought in her left hand, fumbled, couldn’t find it under his tucked shirt.

Five seconds.

The air drained away and turned cold. She tried again to pull the whole thing with brute force, the entire damn holster with the gun, but it was firmly attached to Glen’s belt, and her fingers were too slimy with sweat to grip it – then a blast of pressurized air exploded in her face. Her eyes stung, her sunburnt cheeks felt slapped, and she heard the buzz louder in her right ear. Not unlike a jacket zipper, only much harder and faster. She fell backward, sprawling on her shoulders, hitting the back of her head on the road hard enough to spark flashbulbs, and all she saw was blue sky and a shower of gritty earth sprinkling back down around her.

“
Elle!
” her husband screamed, louder and sharper.

She watched the last bits of rock settle and realized some of it was sticky and wet. Like hot raindrops, Amazon showers, pattering loudly to the ground. Blood. She felt another surge of animal panic. Was it Glen’s blood? Or hers? She hurled her head to the right and saw a red trench sliced up Glen’s thigh, opening him up like meat. That’s where it hit. The sniper’s bullet had passed right over her elbow, or just below her armpit perhaps, and missed her by an eyelash.

“I’m okay,” she gasped.

“Come back!” Roy shouted.

Run
, she urged herself.
Now.
Forget the stupid gun. Get back to the car. Had she already spent a full second on the ground? Probably. She kicked, heaved sideways—

“Don’t move!” James shouted.

She froze.

“Don’t move,” he said again, his voice small and distant. “He thinks he hit you.”

She needed to move. Badly. She inched her right hand forward, tarantula-crawled her fingers over the road and miraculously found the revolver beside her. Yes! She must have yanked the little weapon free of whatever was snagging it when she tumbled backwards, somehow. She clasped her thumb and index finger around what she hoped was the safe end. How embarrassing would it be to accidentally shoot herself, here and now?
Here lies Elle Eversman: Shot at by a homicidal sniper. Shot herself to save him the trouble.

“I have it,” she said. “Glen’s gun.”

“Don’t even talk,” James said. “He might see your lips move.”

Her chest was rising and falling with adrenalized breath – if the killer could see her lips move he could damn well see that, too. She felt her heartbeat again, swelling in her neck. She was starting to hate herself. She had no idea why she’d done this. What recklessness! And for what? She hadn’t admitted it to James, but she’d never really believed that Glen had a gun on him. Even in her hand, she somehow doubted its existence. Like God, like an afterlife with wings and clouds and harps, it just felt too
easy
to be real.

Why had she run for it, then?

A warm wind passed over her, raising drifts of sand and peppering her dry eyes. Her contacts burned. She desperately wanted to rub them but knew it would be a dead giveaway. But what did it matter? The sniper might have already fired his next shot anyway. The supersonic bullet might already be racing toward her, right now, and she wouldn’t know until it hit her.

“Don’t breathe,” James said.

She blinked once, twice, wincing from the sudden pain and digging her fingers into the road. Her elbow felt hot and damp where she’d scraped it. Somehow she sensed the crosshairs were back on her, if they’d ever left her at all, and she felt
his
eyes, silent patient eyes, moving up and down her body with piggish amusement, just like the Soviet Cowboy at the Fuel-N-Food. God, she hated being stared at.

“What do we do, James?”

“I’m thinking.”

* * *

Tapp was thinking, too.

The wife had crumpled in that weightless, soundless way that bodies always did inside his scope. Part ragdoll, part muscle spasm. She had landed on her back beside the park ranger’s corpse, arms flat at her sides. He saw a jetting fog of pink but he couldn’t ascertain an exact point of impact, so he leaned into his 100x spotting scope and scanned her nice little body for a wound. She was hyperventilating but struggling to control it. He saw the fingers of her left hand clawing and holding fistfuls of chalky dirt. He couldn’t see what the right was doing.

Tapp figured he should shoot her again, in the head. To be humane.

The visceral pleasure of the shot – the impossible, wind-curving, against-all-odds shot – was unmatched, but watching the victim succumb to the damage was the uncomfortable and necessary evil that came with it. Yet another shooting myth nurtured by movies is the pleasant fantasy that a gunshot to the torso equals instant death. It doesn’t, unless the heart is pulverized on impact, and even then the victim still has ten to twenty seconds of miserable awareness while their circulatory system depressurizes. Shot anywhere else in the torso, the human body takes its sweet time.

That was Tapp’s first kill in a nutshell, back in the dewy Oregon field where he’d watched a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker in a brown Nirvana shirt choke to death on his own ribs. His breathing had sounded like fluorescent light rods crackling. His fingers had crunched into vulture claws. Mouthfuls of blood rising like tidewater. Tapp had turned away. He couldn’t watch. He couldn’t be near that awful fireworks display of human misery. Until you’ve actually killed a person, nothing can prepare you for how bad
it will be.

Stay with me
, Nirvana Shirt had said.

Tapp had been hunched over a fence, power-puking into the nettles. At first he’d thought he’d only imagined the hitchhiker’s voice, or maybe he’d just hoped he had, but the second time was unmistakable:
Stay with me. Please.

Nirvana Shirt hadn’t even seemed upset. Certainly not angry. He was shivering, teeth clicking, and his face was graying out. He looked like he’d spent an hour in a walk-in freezer. So Tapp took a knee and awkwardly held the boy’s hand. It had been excruciatingly uncomfortable, like square dancing, where you sometimes had to hold a guy’s hand. And the damn false alarms! He’d kept looking like he was going to die – this is it, here comes the final breath – then he would swallow and stoically wheeze on.

Don’t go
, he gurgled.

I won’t
, Tapp said.
I’ll stay with you.

Another light rod fractured in his chest.
Thank you.

What?

Thank you.

Certain this was a misunderstanding, Tapp said:
I did this to you.

I know
, Nirvana Shirt said peacefully.

That made Tapp angry. Or something – a white-hot flash of something stirred snake-like in his gut. He wasn’t sure what reaction he had been hoping for (he still wasn’t) but this quiet forgiveness sure wasn’t it.

I did this to you
, he told Nirvana Shirt again with more of a snarl:
I saw you crossing the field and I knew there was no one for miles, so I pulled over and grabbed my .270 and sat on the tailgate and shot you. On a lark. Like a split-second decision to pull off at a gas station for Cheetos, I ended your life. I did this to you, I destroyed your entire world, and it means almost nothing to me.

I know
, Nirvana Shirt said again with Christ-like peace. Then he had quietly died, somehow winning the argument forever.

Tapp would never be fully okay with killing. He had accepted that. Hadn’t that guy on the news (the one in Reno, who cut up his aunt and uncle and baby twin sisters with a paper-cutter blade) said that he would have killed more if he hadn’t been caught? He had grinned through his trial like a fat Cheshire cat with yellow teeth. That guy was a monster, a genuine piece of human garbage. He deserved the chair and got it last spring. Tapp knew he
was something else, something better.

Yes. This woman has suffered enough.

Let’s punch her ticket. Shall we?

Dust curled around the wife’s body in smoky wisps. Her breathing had stilled and her hands had stopped moving. She stared straight up at the sky, her shoulders flat to the road, anguished but unmistakably alive.

Not for long. Like the blue-haired girl, Tapp would excuse her from a slow death of blood loss by splitting her head like a squashed melon. This, again, was the kindest gesture he could offer another—

Wait.

What’s this?

* * *

James stood up.

Elle rolled onto her stomach, kicked up another swirl of dust, and looked at him with gaping horror. He saw the gun –
Oh my God, it exists
– a tiny black thing, clenched in her right hand. She tucked it in her back pocket.

“Run!” he screamed.

She hunched her legs, raised her heels, and launched into a dead sprint. She shouted something but he couldn’t make it out. He felt like he was underwater. One ear rang, then the other.

Keep standing . . .

He turned to face the sniper. ‘Feeling exposed’ didn’t do it justice. He felt like he might plunge off the surface of the earth at any moment and keep falling. The world was a colossal fishbowl, the horizon stretching in all directions and lazily curving to meet the infinite sky. A small, selfish part of his body urged him to sit back down –
That’s enough, she’ll make it
– but he swallowed it. His mind darted to memories of rock climbing, to the part where you’d scaled the artificial wall and now you had to let go. You fall into your belay rope so your partner can winch you back down. The fall of faith. It always looked easy from fifty feet below, until you’re the idiot clinging to concrete and fiberglass by your fingers and toes. You had to ignore millions of years of evolved self-preservation instinct inside yourself, will your mind over your body, and just do it. That had been over two years ago and there sure as hell wasn’t anything resembling a belay line here.

Keep standing . . .

I’m not afraid of you
, he thought, which was a lie. He was terrified.

He heard Elle’s footsteps racing back behind him, kicking a wake of hissing dust. She was close, almost back to safety. He couldn’t turn around. He kept his eyes locked on that distant cliff rippling with heated air, on that invisible killer a mile away, who was certainly staring back at him now. He hoped he was making history here. He hoped that if the sniper did cut him down, he would never forget the one man who stood up and stared back.

Keep standing.

The wind tugged his shirt and hair, surprisingly cool. A sweat stain on the back of his shirt had turned freezing cold. The ringing in his ears became an ambulance siren. He knew enough time had passed now, at least two or three seconds, and that the sniper had to have pulled the trigger. He was certain that a mile across the crater, the end of his life was racing toward him at thousands of feet per second—

“James!”

She’d made it.

He threw himself to the road, back to earth and shadow. Sure enough, he felt the shot slice the air above him, buzzing like a hornet and snapping a concussive blast in his left ear, and he flinched only a little because he already knew he was alive and had literally just dodged a bullet. When he hit the ground beside the Rav4 she was already there. He wanted to tell her how stupid she was, how furious he was at her for risking everything, but words were weak and small and not enough. He grabbed the back of her neck, mashed her forward and kissed her, every inch of her goddamn stupid face. Her hands clasped the sides of his head, bracing hard, fingers squeezing. The report of the sniper shot came and went, but they didn’t care.