EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (13 page)

12

It went beautifully at first.

At the last moment, the Soviet Cowboy stuffed his machine pistol into his duster so he could present the drawing to Elle on his outstretched hand. James memorized that spot. Then Roy, from the left, grabbed the man’s wrist and tugged him off-balance. James came up from the right with the pepper spray. The red button depressed easily with a visceral clack, and a jet of grey liquid sprayed across the Soviet’s left shoulder, slapping and splashing off oilcloth – James found his aim as he found his footing – and then arced it up at the man’s beard, pressure-washing his front teeth, shooting up his nose, blowing back a tangle of hair. The Soviet slapped a hand to his face, way too late to stop any of it.

Elle screamed something.

Suddenly pepper spray was everywhere. Everywhere. It was like opening Pandora’s Box, and the box was full of goddamn pepper spray. It filled the air, turned it solid, and James was instantly engulfed. He felt crystalline grains under his eyelids, digging into the soft whites of his eyes. Hot tears on his cheeks. He tasted habanero peppers, wheelbarrows full of habanero peppers, stuffing his mouth and ramming spicy flakes up his nostrils and deep into his sinuses. Head down, world spinning, he heard Roy beside him, somehow fighting through the chemical burn, still going strong, beating the hell out of the Soviet with the soft slap of knuckles pounding flesh, bone, teeth.

James forced his eyes open and saw only silhouettes behind falling water.

The Soviet head-butted Roy with a wet crack, threw his shoulders back, his wrist slipped free of Roy’s grip – “He’s getting away!” – and he staggered out of the Toyota’s safe shadow, grunting and huffing globs of snot and drool, right out into the untouchable open air.

James went after him.

Kill him.

He followed him, multitool in hand, riding a surge of adrenaline, no time to think. He didn’t play contact sports – he hadn’t tackled anyone since grade school – but dammit, he tackled the Soviet at the shoulders and brought him down sideways. It felt thunderous, brain-jarring. Next second they were both on the packed dirt, rolling and kicking, James on top, blinking back waves of incendiary tears. The man’s notepad had burst open. Papers fluttered and scattered around them in a whirlwind.

Stab him.

He fumbled for the blade and it nearly twirled free while the Soviet thrashed under him with clawed hands to his face. His wrists covered his neck, most of his face was protected, but his fingers were pulling his eyelids sideways in a forced squint. His eyes were exposed. The multitool was suddenly so sharp, gleaming with hungry sunlight. It would pierce an eyeball like jelly. It would tunnel right in. It had to happen. It needed to happen. The Soviet would die quickly. It would be easier for both of them. So why hadn’t James done it yet?

The sniper was watching. Crosshairs tingled on the back of his neck.

Stab him in the eye.

But something in him wouldn’t allow it. He couldn’t. Eyes were special to James. Always had been. It didn’t matter who owned them or what evil resided behind them. He flinched and gagged at the thought of hurting them, puncturing their gently distended surfaces with unsympathetic metal, bursting them like grapes between teeth. Eyes were our link to the world. Windows to the soul. The Soviet struggled harder, and a blind swipe jangled his teeth. Windswept yellow papers swirled around them.

Out of time.

He stabbed the Soviet in the stomach. It slid in easily. The man squirmed, kicked, and clamped both hands to the multitool handle flopping in his gut like a gross little flagpole. He made very little noise; just an eerie hiss through crooked teeth.

I did it
, he realized.
Oh my God, I did it.

More than a second had passed. A bullet could be coming—

Stab him again.

The last of the loose papers fluttered to the road, revealing a cold silence and that pitiful wounded hiss. Time smeared. James tried to focus, tried to cut through the sweaty panic and think—

Pull the multitool out and stab him again.

He fought for the tool’s handle but the Soviet’s knuckles were fastened around it now. The man lay tense, impossibly tense, spine arched, all muscles tightened, quietly biting down on his tongue until red bubbled through his teeth. No anguished cuss or cry of pain. Only that damn inhuman hiss, like the Dumeril ground boa at the reptile store where Elle had once worked – a current of air rushing from cold-blooded lungs. There was fear in it, but that only made it more menacing. The tiny knife had penetrated maybe two inches into his flabby stomach. It wouldn’t kill him; it would only infuriate him. Never wound what you can’t kill.

“James!” Roy shouted. Then something else.

He heard whooshing air as he went for the Soviet’s gun. He had to. He had no choice now. It was kill or die. He threw open the man’s duster, drawing the oilcloth tight to the multitool handle and ripping it out of the man’s gut. It made a sound like smacking lips and skipped across the gravel, dark with blood. James searched for that gun, feathered his fingertips over something metal, or at least hard polymer, buried in—

The Soviet punched him in the neck.

White flared behind his eyes. His windpipe stung with a gasp of air rushing down a vacuum – having the wind knocked out of you was even more painful in an arid atmosphere – and suddenly he was on the ground, on his ass, staring dumbly at Windex-blue sky and Elle was screaming behind him.
Everything’s okay,
he would have consoled her if he’d had the air to speak,
I have his gun.
He had the Soviet’s machine pistol in his hand. He knew it. It was heavy, dense, block-like.

How many seconds had it been?

“James!” Elle screamed. Terror in her voice. “Come back!”

He threw himself back and somersaulted into the Rav4’s safe shadow, slamming into the driver door, and he sucked in a second helping of bone-dry air, whirled around, and wrenched the stolen weapon forward with two knuckled hands to aim it at the Soviet. The shape immediately registered wrong – rectangular. He realized it was a radio. He was holding a radio.

Really?

A radio. The man’s trail duster was probably bulging with guns and James had reached in and grabbed the one goddamn walkie-talkie in it.

The Soviet Cowboy was doubled over on his knees now. He held his right hand stiffly to his flank, high under his left arm, where his gun actually was. His watery eyes slid open and fixed on the three of them. James wondered why he hadn’t shot them to hell yet. Shouldn’t they all be dead by now? Then he recognized something he had never expected to find in the man’s eyes, not in a million years – the frozen fear of an animal facing danger and recalculating its options.

The Soviet wasn’t even looking at James. He was looking behind James.

“Alright,” Elle said, calmer now. “I have him.”

He turned and saw her sitting with her white fingers wrapped around Glen’s stubby revolver, her eyes set, her teeth bared.

James realized no one had told her the gun was empty.

13

Elle didn’t want to shoot him but feared she would have to.

She aligned the blocky sights, mating the u-shaped rear to the squared front just as her sister had taught her. Although this was a wheel gun and not one of Eowen’s smooth automatics, the fundamentals seemed to be the same. The sights snapped together like Legos and she pulled the interlocking steel up and over the man’s face to obscure all but his glistening forehead. She was still half-out, a little dizzy, and desperately willed her body and mind to pull together.

Her wrist trembled a little. Only a little. She had it under control.

The trick,
Eowen had told her over a skunkish porter homebrewed in a giant glass carboy,
is to allow your target to blur. Let your eyes just . . . fall out of focus on the target, and the rear sight as well, while your front sight remains absolutely clear, hard as quartz.

She did that now.

“Elle,” James whispered beside her. “Don’t shoot him.”

She blinked sunlight from her eyes, saw the reds of her eyelids, and steadied her aim with a second hand. She made sure not to do the movie hold – the
cup and saucer hold
, Eowen had called it with a crinkled nose, wherein the actor clearly has no firearm experience and is merely cradling the weapon like a teacup. She squeezed the thing too, because that’s what you’re supposed to do – squeeze it until your palms are checkered white. Her fingers were strangely dry, as if coated in chalk dust or that stuff James used to put on his hands while rock climbing. Back on the gun range in Oklahoma, her hands had dripped with nervous sweat. Her sister had teased her for that, too –
I’m sorry. Is this offending your liberal Californian sensibilities?

That had always been a gulf in their relationship. Eowen didn’t
not
like James – or at least, she never fessed up to it – but whatever playful criticisms she had for Elle’s blue state life had always seemed to come back to her husband. His embarrassingly well-paying office job, his unassertive presence, his self-deprecating jokes. As if she expected Elle to marry a cowboy? The last time they had visited her in the wheat field outskirts of Tulsa, Eowen’s on-again, off-again boyfriend had tried to talk cars with James. When that hadn’t worked, he’d tried baseball. Finally, they’d discussed beer, of which James drank only Bud Light. Worst guy-talk ever. It had been excruciating.

“Elle,” James said again with a strange desperation rising in his voice. “Elle, don’t.”

She felt another wave of disorientation. She shook her head and the world shook with her. Her tongue burned with peppers. Her heart pumped angrily, blooming in her eardrums, and she felt as if an invisible hand was crammed invasively inside her chest with fingers wrapped around her right lung and slowly, oh-so-slowly, squeezing. With every breath she heard a crinkle of plastic under her arm and sensed a whisper of moving air. James had engineered . . .
something
there that seemed to operate on Looney Tunes physics. It didn’t seem real.
Am I real? Is this real?
She couldn’t remember anything after sprinting back to the safety of the Rav4 and finding her tank top suddenly slick with blood. She felt displaced, as if she had time-traveled through surgical anesthesia or a night of brutal drinking.

The Soviet clasped one hand to his belly where James had stabbed him. She saw a greasy splotch on his duster, as if his blood was part crude oil. His other hand, the one that frightened her, hovered by his flank with his fingers busily kneading air. Like a cowboy in an old movie, fixing to draw. She could read his little mind. Right now the man was considering precisely how fast, in fractions of seconds, he could draw his chunky little weapon and hose them with automatic fire.

Her index finger hadn’t touched the trigger until now. It was one of Eowen’s cardinal rules:
Never touch the trigger unless you’re about to fire.

Elle was about to fire.

“No!” James grabbed her wrist but she barely felt it. “Elle, don’t shoot him.”

“His hand is on his gun,” she said.

It was. The Soviet had already parted his duster and the butt of his machine pistol glimmered in the shoulder holster. His eyes were still locked on her but his outstretched fingers were doing that feathery dance just a few inches from the weapon—

“Stop!” she shouted. She didn’t recognize her voice. “Stop or I shoot.”

He touched steel with one index finger.

“
Stop.
Don’t move.”

One by one, the Soviet extended his other fingers and wrapped them comfortably around the weapon’s grip. His eyes never left her, and she forced herself not to look away. How she hated eye contact . . .

“I said don’t move.” The revolver’s hammer cocked hungrily in her hands, startling her. She hadn’t realized she was unconsciously squeezing the trigger. It was tightening and creaking under her finger, like a bicycle changing gears. There couldn’t be much more to it. An ounce left, maybe? Just another millimeter and the tensed metal would release. It wasn’t something she wanted to do, but the Soviet was making it easier by the second—

“Please.” James crawled his hand up her wrist. Toward the gun. “Please.”

She shoved her husband away. What the hell was he thinking? The Soviet was a half second from killing them both. A single distraction was all it might take. The bastard had his entire hand wrapped around the machine pistol now.

“Let go of your gun,” she commanded.

He didn’t.

“Let go.”

He didn’t blink. He was the only one here who didn’t seem to give a damn. He had been more emotionally invested in his art show than he was here at gunpoint.

“Let go, or I shoot you.”

“Elle.” James was close, his lips to her ear and his hand on the back of her neck. “Think.”

Think?

She hated when he told her to think. It was one of his go-to maneuvers in an argument, guaranteed to push her buttons:
Elle, think. Think about how wrong you are, and therefore how right I am. I flipped the bird to this murderer at the gas station and apparently that was okay, but right now I’m lecturing you on thinking.

The Soviet slid the machine pistol an inch out of its holster. He was testing the water, and apparently it felt just fine.

Think.

Her mind shuttered. Against her pride, she admitted to herself that something about this revolver did feel wrong. As she slid back into the world one scattered thought at a time, she wondered why James and Roy would choose to fight the man hand-to-hand when they had a loaded gun. She tried to remember but her memory was slippery; as detailed as an IMAX in places but utterly barren in others. She had been so pleasantly surprised to find Glen’s pistol resting in the dirt beside her. Had it been knocked aside in the scuffle? Maybe. It had felt so cool in her hands, like it had been inside an air-conditioned room this entire time.

Could she do it? She honestly didn’t know at this point. She suspected this new version of herself – talking coldly, holding a gun, squeezing the trigger without realizing it – wasn’t really working and the Soviet wasn’t buying any of it. Maybe Eowen could have filled these shoes better, and maybe she could have delivered the action-movie dialogue with more zest. Elle, the quieter sister with the less interesting name, didn’t have any of that right now. She didn’t want to kill this childlike man, even if he was a muscle-twitch from killing James, Roy, and her.

That was when the Soviet’s machine pistol came up and out.

* * *

James exhaled and sagged with relief.

Elle hadn’t fired. She’d come within maybe a millimeter, maybe less, but thank God she hadn’t fired and given away the whole bluff.

The Soviet held his boxy weapon with two fingers and dropped it. The evil little Venezuelan-drug-lord automatic clacked on the road with its barrel pointed at James. Hands half-raised, the greasy man glowered up at Elle again, only Elle. As far as he seemed to be concerned, Elle was the only thing here worth listening to or possibly saving. Had James or Roy aimed the revolver at him, he likely would have just grunted and shot back.

“Okay,” James said. “Do you have any other guns?”

The Soviet shook his head.

Of course, he could be lying. Why would he tell the truth?

“Kick the gun to us.” James widened his stance. Once that weapon was in his hands, he knew he would need to execute the Soviet with it. Any other course of action would be irresponsible; the man was too dangerous to remain alive and in play on this long-distance chessboard. James dreaded that part and hoped Roy was still up for shooting the bastard in the face, to use his exact words. He wasn’t judging him for that. Hell, if he’d been asked five minutes ago he would have given the same answer.

The man hesitated, like a cautious child in the company of a parent.

“Kick it,” James said again. “Kick it toward—”

“Throw it,” said a disembodied voice floating in shallow static.

Silence.

The Soviet glanced to his radio unit, resting in the dirt by James’ left knee. So did James.

“Throw it, Svatomir. Right now.” The weedy voice clipped under electronic garble and James recognized it from earlier today. The signal bleed on 92.7 FM! Of course. He tried to recall what the two mystery phrases had been, but then the ghost of Abraham Lincoln spoke again: “Field-strip the Mac-11 and throw every piece out into the desert.”

Roy gasped. “No, no, no.”

Elle squeezed the revolver, but what could she do?

The Soviet, caught between two guns, obediently scooped up his machine pistol. In a flash, the weapon was in two parts, then three, and then he extracted a long, oily spring and made four. Wincing with pain, he wound up and hurled each piece deep into the sky, and they touched down soundlessly somewhere in the distant scrub grass to the east.

James saw only one of them land, and even then he didn’t see the actual piece landing – just a quiver of disturbed brush. He relaxed, but only a little. At least now all of the guns had been removed from the equation (excluding one very important one a mile away). He reached for the radio, a gnarled Motorola two-way unit wrapped in electrical tape. It was hot and damp with a malty odor that reminded him of wet paint. He turned it over and found a rectangular button on the top-right, built into the contour, stenciled PUSH TO TALK. He thumbed it and heard feedback static.

Elle and Roy looked at him. So did the Soviet, grudgingly, as he rubbed his irritated eyes at gunpoint.

“Who . . .” James fumbled words, but only for a second. He pulled the radio closer to his teeth and found his voice:

“Who am I speaking to?”

* * *

Tapp hesitated.

The husband’s voice, timid but gathering conviction, reached across the gulf and touched him like an ice cube between the shoulder blades. He felt a shade of panic, as if he was suddenly under close assault, and flattened his body to feel strands of dead grass and jute threads pool at his sides. He wanted to liquefy and sink into the earth like something molten, to quietly morph into it and not exist at all.

Say something.

Even in the real world Tapp hated conversation. When you got down to it, it was fundamentally false. When someone asked you how your day had been, they weren’t really asking if you’d passed a kidney stone that morning (quick hint – don’t talk about the kidney stone). And every barber, clerk, and waitress just
had
to share all the tedious details and small dramas of their lives, as if someone’s boyfriend’s father’s new Buick with a bad muffler was supposed to leave William Tapp starry-eyed. Sometimes he felt like a man with a fork trapped in a world of soup.

Say anything.

In his scope he could only see Svatomir’s upper half, a few paces from the Toyota, standing dumbly at gunpoint. Hopefully this would be a learning experience for him. He had been warned about the (possible) revolver, but he hadn’t been able to resist showing off his personal art gallery.

Svatomir was like that. He had always been a sensitive fortysomething prone to inexplicable, white-hot tantrums – breaking car windows with rocks, shooting armadillos on the road, spitting on the Fuel-N-Food hot dogs after the old man asked him to leave for bringing porn into their bathroom – and one day he’d taken an odd stumble off a dirt berm, concussed himself, and somehow got even weirder. His drawings got worse. He spoke less. He stopped picking up new English words. He got a little tougher to handle every year, too, like a baby gorilla transforming into dangerous adulthood.

Maybe they’ll kill him for me
, Tapp thought. That’d be nice.

He freed his right hand from the rifle’s grip and it made a Velcro hiss. Sweat and pressure had formed a fierce suction between his fingers, transforming the cozy polymer into a sticky bed on a summer night. He cracked his knuckles one-handed, a five-shot salvo of wet blasts, then resumed his firing stance.

Really, nothing much had changed. He knew that even with this unexpected wrinkle, all possible outcomes remained the same.
They kill Svatomir – they’re still trapped. They run for Svatomir’s jeep – I kill them. They remain behind the Toyota – I relocate and kill them.
The only question was how many extra minutes these three would buy themselves. This engagement was deliciously thrilling but in a manageable, safety-netted way because he still knew how it would end. It was like munching candy and enjoying a rousing summer blockbuster while knowing that no matter how hairy it gets, the dinosaurs won’t eat the kids.