EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (15 page)

No answer came.

He couldn’t believe he was pleading for fairness from a man who shot unarmed strangers from a mile away. In the face of this towering evil he felt small. Worse than small, he felt like he was already dead and his body sinking into the earth, decomposing, becoming dirt.

Drunk one night beside the embers of a beach bonfire, Elle had asked James if he remembered his father’s suicide. He had lied, of course, and claimed he had been deeply asleep. He’d seen a tinge of quiet pain in her eyes, like she sensed there was more to it (much more) and couldn’t help him without him first admitting that.

The gunshot had filled the inlet kitchen, rattled pans, rung off jungle-green tile, cracked windows in their frames, and the echo still lingered somewhere in the back of the house like trapped thunder. The air stank with wet fireworks. A splat of blood powdered the ceiling by the light and the rest was wafting back down like coal dust. Nine-year-old James had watched from the doorway, drawn by the noise and now shivering with his socks half on ceramic tile, half on spotted carpet. He hadn’t known if he should approach or stay put.

His father had stood motionless in the kitchen for a long moment. His posture was so stilted and strange, he didn’t seem to be attached to the floor. Like he was hanging from a hook between the shoulders. Then he sat down with his legs folded and his back against the dishwasher, and he looked up at James with only his right eye. His left was a black tunnel with a single upper eyelid, hanging white and bloodless like a window shutter. No explanation. No words. No emotion at all, just a cool indifference. This little moment of eye contact lasted a minute or two, and then the right eye turned milky and looked up at the blood on the ceiling.

James stood and watched until he was certain his father was dead. It kept looking like it would happen, and then another lax breath would croak out or another little twitch would squeal his boot against tile. Finally his chest stilled, and James quietly counted to one hundred. When his father still hadn’t moved, he walked to the cigarette-burned sofa in the living room and curled up in a little fetal ball. Had he cried? He couldn’t remember. What he had felt was something worse than grief. Something hollow. Wastefulness.

James hadn’t known what the Tip-over was or why it was so important, but he would have pretended to in a heartbeat. He would have loved to be in the living room with the Anti-Weathermen, slurping a beer, bullshitting about the coming revolution with his father and the Tall Man. In the end, he just wanted a dad. Any dad. Even an awful one.

“Why are you doing this?” James asked the sniper.

“Because I can.”

“How long have you done it?”

“Years.”

“How many . . .” Flecks of sand stuck in his throat. “How many have you killed?”

“Fifty-seven,” Tapp said. “Counting you.”

Elle sighed hopelessly.

“That’s impossible,” Roy whispered.

James nodded in tacit agreement. No way. You couldn’t possibly conceal fifty-seven missing people, all last seen traveling down the same rural highway. Not in this age of smartphones and geosynchronous satellites. Local law enforcement would be all over the disappearances in their jurisdiction – no, it would be a federal thing. These were serial killings. Helicopters would come, special agents and criminal profilers. It would be plastered over the news and net. A nation full of ‘gore hounds,’ Elle’s people, would gobble it up, waiting hungrily for the made-for-television docudrama to churn out like cynical clockwork. The media would even brand Tapp with an insipid name, like the Shady Slope Sniper or some crap.

“Oh, no,” his wife whispered.

“What?”

The Soviet had been staring intently down the bore of the revolver and now stiffened as if jolted by an electric current. Something flickered behind his eyes and a leering smile crept up his face, rippling the ash streaks in his beard. It was the grin of a child winning an argument with an adult. He looked south to the distant crater wall, to Tapp, and raised his left hand skyward with all fingers out.

James understood and his heart plunged. Five fingers, for five shots.

“Yep, I knew it,” Tapp said. “The cylinder of a five-shooter is visibly different from that of a six-shooter. You . . . yeah, you really should have covered it up with your hand, James. Big fat mistake.”

The Soviet leaned forward and spat a yellow mouthful in James’ eye. Then he snatched his key ring back from Roy and pivoted hard, kicking a spray of dust to draw ocher shafts of sunlight, and marched off the road. The land took a dip and coarsened so he took high steps. Dead grass crackled under his feet like firewood.

“Good try.” The sniper exhaled. “It was like . . . woo-hoo! Fuckin’
plot twist
.”

Elle watched the Soviet leave. “Where’s he going?”

“To rebuild his gun,” James said, wiping warm saliva from his eye.

“Well.” Roy shrugged. “That’s that.”

James nodded brokenly.

“You . . . you three almost survived to nightfall. Just amazing.” Tapp took a hissing breath. His voice fluctuated and rearranged itself again, doubling back into something whimsical and curious. Almost friendly. “James, let me ask you something. How do . . . how do you see today ending?”

“I don’t know.” He raised the revolver again and drew a shaky bead on the Soviet’s back while he clambered through knee-deep brush. He tugged the trigger and a pathetic part of himself hoped that maybe, just maybe, they had all been wrong and there was somehow a single miraculous round of live ammunition left in there.

The hammer dropped. CLICK.

Elle buried her face in her hands.

“Alright.” Tapp audibly smiled. “How do you want it end?”

“With me. Driving to Oklahoma with my wife.” He let the worthless gun drop from his fingers and clatter on the road. “We left good jobs behind. Some friends. Some roots. We left because we didn’t like our lives and, truthfully, maybe we didn’t even like each other anymore. So we rebooted. New place. New home. New everything.” His eyes watered and he took a gulp of salty air. “And we were going to start a family. We had to keep trying. Maybe somewhere else, our luck would be . . . I don’t know.”

Elle squeezed his shoulder. He didn’t want her to see him cry so he turned away into the amber fire of the lowering sun.

“Kids?” the sniper asked softly.

“Yeah.”

“Why couldn’t you?”

“Medical stuff.”

Tapp sighed. “I’m . . . sorry to hear that.”

“No, you’re not,” James said.

“You’re right. I’m not.” The marksman spat under his breath and again his voice morphed. This time it curdled the way room temperature stews milk in the carton, fermenting into something else entirely, cloudy and sour: “It’s a blessing, though. Really. Be glad . . . be glad you two never made any kiddies. Because if you had, I would have shot them last, so that they could first watch Mommy and Daddy die.”

James pressed the receiver to his teeth and felt his own hot breath curling back at him. He surprised himself by saying it, and by meaning it:

“Before today is over, William Tapp, I will kill you.”

14

A mile away, the sniper bristled. White-hot emotions and half-thoughts fluttered through his mind like trapped birds but he wasn’t articulate enough to make them real, so he tried them out inside the safe echo chamber of his own mind.

Alright, James. Okay. Fine. Let’s examine your options here.

You run . . . You die.

You stay behind the car . . . You die.

Even if you somehow achieve the impossible, something no one else has ever done, and walk across hundreds of meters of descending open prairie, cross the arroyo, climb another four hundred meters up my perch of shorn rock, and somehow reach up toward me with bloody, desperate hands grasping to touch the face of God . . . God is dug in, ghillied up, and armed.

You still die.

With feline reflexes he clicked open the bolt and caught the ejected cartridge mid-spin. He thumbed three handloads into the dark breech, topping off his ten-count magazine, and inserted an eleventh directly into the chamber. He stared at that final bullet for a long moment – a gleaming gold missile, curved to a perfect aerodynamic point – before sliding it into battery and closing the bolt behind it, and reminded himself that this James Eversman, for all his frightening unpredictability, was still 1,545 meters away.

* * *

“We’re kicking the car into neutral,” James told them. “And we’re rolling it at him.”

Elle gasped. “You’re serious?”

“Roy. You said you worked on cars?”

He nodded.

“Good. Okay. I can’t change gears because we don’t have the keys.” James drummed the door with his knuckles. This plan was pure, hot-blooded inspiration, coming to him while he spoke it. “Can you change gears without the engine, and without using the shifter?”

“Yeah,” Roy said. “If I get under it.”

“Fast?”

He unzipped the tool bag. “No promises.”

“We have a minute. Maybe two.” James squinted and saw the Soviet clambering thirty yards out in the ocher brush, scanning in methodical sweeps. One hand packed tightly to his bleeding gut, the other holding a recovered piece of his subgun – the stout barrel. “Until he finds all the pieces of his gun. And he comes back and he . . . you know, kills us.”

“Anywhere but here,” Elle whispered, giving him a jolt of déjà vu.

“Amen. Anywhere but here.”

Roy twirled a screwdriver. “There’s more to this idea, right?”

“Yeah.” James blinked grit from his eyes and pointed around the headlights, downhill. “We push the car until it rolls and jump inside. We ride it downhill, to the gully down there. See it? At the bottom of this big valley. That dark area.”

Elle squinted. “Right at the sniper’s front door?
That
dark area?”

“That’s the point.” He fought a grin. “Since he’s up there on that big rise, he might not have an angle to see down into the little channel. He might not be able to see us in there, and if so, he’ll—”

“Might not?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

She smiled weakly. “Those are the best odds we’ve had all day.”

“Great,” Roy said. “Another plan.”

“The last one worked,” James said.

“Your wife got shot.”

“Other than that, it worked.”

“Sniper-guy. Tapp. He’ll shoot us.” Roy rolled on his back and scooted under the Rav4, mumbling with a screwdriver in his mouth. “While we’re in the rolling car. Through the windows.”

“He’ll try. But we’ll duck low to the floor, heads down, bodies flattened under the seats. The engine block will shield us from the front. And all this crap will help.” He pointed at the detritus of their old life – the television stand, the bookshelf, the sandwiched boxes in the back seats. He couldn’t fight it anymore and let it wash over his face, a shit-eating grin of stupid excitement. Reckless hope. He knew it was crazy but that somehow made it even better. Every second was a celebration because it was a second Tapp had failed to take from them.

“The angle will change.” Roy’s voice was a flat echo under the car. “It’ll steepen. He’ll see up, over the engine. And he’s thirty degrees off the road. That angle will widen as we get closer, and he could put a bullet through a door—”

“You can stay here if you’d like.”

“I’m just saying, man, there’s problems.”

James was well aware of that. He turned to Elle, breathless. “You and I will be in the front seats. We just . . . we have to clear room in the back for Roy.”

“What’s the plan when we get to the gully?” she asked.

He swung open the other door. “We’ll make it up as we go.”

“Not funny.”

“That literally is the plan.”

“Still not funny.”

James looked over his shoulder and squinted. The Soviet was fifty yards out now, a hunched silhouette half-obscured by wiregrass. He took a lurching step and his arm came into view with at least two pieces of his gun clasped underhand. Two to go.

“And him,” Elle said. “He’ll be behind us. Chasing us.”

“Yep.”

“And shooting at us.”

“Probably.” He grabbed a swollen cardboard box with both hands – their desktop Mac, purchased on credit after graduation. The hard drive contained Elle’s demo reel, her thesis, and thousands of hours of raw work. “Roy! How’s it going down there?”

“Got the cable.” His foot jerked. “Give me thirty seconds.”

“Tell us when you put it in neutral. So we can hold the car if it rolls.” James braced a foot to the door, wrenched the computer box free, and let it crash to the road. Something broke inside with a pressurized pop and the monitor rolled out like a hubcap.

Elle winced.

“It’s just stuff, Elle. It’s not us.”

“I know.”

He tore out the bookcase next, dumping crispy hardcovers and yellowed paperbacks, and then their maroon bedding. Electric candles. A juicer. A cardboard box of Snow Village models – painted glass houses and sledding children – slid out and crunched. Did they belong to Elle’s mother or aunt? He couldn’t remember. He wiped sweat from his eyes and realized that if they died today, these relics would be the only physical evidence they’d existed at all. He felt like he was willfully vanishing, shoveling dirt over his own grave.

It’s just stuff
, he had to remind himself.

He had cleared almost enough room for Roy in the back seats, if he lay on his belly in the floor space. All that needed go now was Elle’s grandmother’s crib, that hulking eyesore that had survived the Nazi occupation of Poland and a house fire. It was a slab of dark chocolate oak as dense as cement.
Your grandmother could have left it in Lublin
, he’d told her once.
The Nazis would have mistaken it for the Ark of the Covenant.

She watched him pull the creaking beast free and dump it on the side of the road to join the rest of their junked things, heaped indifferently like trash. “Tell me we’re going to make it out of this,” she said faintly. “And we’re going to have kids.”

“We’re going to have kids.”

She swallowed. “Okay.”

“I promise—”

“Say it again.”

“We’re
going to have kids
, Elle.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her, feeling the tremor in her breaths, while a bullet sliced through the air somewhere above them, flushing a warm breeze and quivering her hair.

* * *

Tapp threw the bolt and let out a hot breath. He was better than this. He shouldn’t be firing at half-discerned shapes like some runny-nosed Walmart shopper with a deer rifle. In the jittery glass of his spotting scope he saw – or thought he saw – two blurred scalps skimming over the Toyota’s hood, so he rolled over to his rifle, guestimated, and fired off a dumb luck Hail Mary of a shot. Why did he do that?

He made those shots sometimes, often late in the afternoon when he was growing fanciful and bored. They were almost always misses, embarrassing misses, and he loathed himself for the wasted handload and worse, the sloppiness.

He was fatiguing and he knew it. His eyes were drying, spider-webbing with blood vessels, and his eyelids made a
squish
with every blink, like a grapefruit crushed under a boot. The muscles in his right wrist, his index finger, and his inner forearms were throbbing. Worst of all, he was out of Cheetos – a grand total of one hundred and twenty-seven in that bag.

He knew what was happening – he had reached that unpleasant point where his heart simply wasn’t in it. He was shooting for a result, not enjoyment. He had to knuckle down on his wandering mind and force himself to remember that this was still happening, that the heat and sweat and burnt gunpowder was real, and hadn’t gotten any less real in last three hours. Staying in the zone was exhausting.

Snipers – true military snipers – were machines. Tapp had been in their presence before at gun shows. Ironically (given their particular skill set) he could spot them from across a crowded fairground building every damn time. Even in flannel and jeans with their all-American blonde wives hooked on their arms, these men never took a false step. He could see it behind their eyes – this subconscious situational alertness – as they processed the license plates of every parked vehicle outside and quietly tallied the number of bodies in the room and exits available. In the field, these men would lie motionless for days with every cell in their bodies perfectly trained and waiting for a single window, suspended uneasily on a single chancy moment, to then take a single shot. Or most impressive of all, to recognize that this correct moment never materialized – the wind flared, the morning mist never burned off, the Sudanese general walked his Labrador behind the barracks instead of beside them, whatever – and then quietly cancel the mission and extract without a shot fired.

Tapp knew he never could have been a Marine Scout Sniper or an Army sniper, and he was too old and too fat to even be a designated marksman. He didn’t possess the discipline or mental hardness for the role, even if his raw talent placed him among the best shooters currently alive. His mind wandered. He was prone to fantasy, distraction, and curious little impulses. And most damning of all, he was deeply impatient. He knew this. He had long known all of these things, so it didn’t sting now as it had when he was twenty-two. But it still ached somewhere dark inside him, where he forever knew that ‘sniper’ was a term that would only apply to him in uninformed civilian shorthand. The way they call magazines ‘clips.’

You’re a demon
, said Sergei Koal.

You just don’t know it yet.

He dialed his spotting scope down to 80x to brighten the image and nudged it a few jittery millimeters right to find Svatomir wading in scrub brush. He had the Mac-11’s upper, lower, and recoil spring in his oven mitt hands. All he needed now was the skinny little bolt, about the size of a cigar, hidden somewhere in the low grass. He would find it eventually. Might take seconds, might take minutes, might take until after sundown. Tapp wanted, and wanted badly, to simply radio him and tell him to forget about his stupid little subgun and just tow the damn Toyota. But that resourceful bastard James had Svatomir’s radio now.

Which gave Tapp another idea.

“Roy Burke,” he said into his headset. “Kill James. Or your family dies.”

* * *

Everyone froze.

James sighed tiredly. “Of course.”

“What?” Roy slid out from under the car. “What did he say?”

“How did he know your last name?” Elle asked.

No static. Silence.

The Soviet’s radio lay in the packed soil at the edge of the Toyota’s shadow. James reached for it but Roy snatched it with both hands and clasped it, squirrel-like. He turned it over and over, searching busily for the PUSH TO TALK button. “I’m serious,” he snarled. “What the hell did he say about me?”

Elle chewed her lip.

“Roy Burk,” James said placidly, testing it on his tongue. He looked up at Roy, who had suddenly become a stranger again. “He knows you.”

He swallowed. “I don’t know how.”

“Are you lying?”

“Why would I lie?”

“He’s lying,” Elle hissed.

“Fuck you.” Roy spat a little. “I’m not—”

“Roy, this offer will only stand once.” Tapp’s voice came dribbling through the radio and Roy’s fingers parted as if it was corrosive. “And you can’t save yourself. So we’re clear, I will kill you today and nothing will change that.”

Roy tried to speak but had no words.

“I hate him,” Elle whispered. “I hate him so much.”

James listened thoughtfully.

“Roy Burke, here’s my offer.” Tapp paused for half a breath and let it sink in. “If you kill James, I’ll . . . kill you and our business is done. If you don’t kill James, I still kill you. But then our business isn’t done. I go after your family.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Elle said. “He’s playing you.”

Roy winced. “Shut up.”

“He’s trying to turn us on each other. He’s afraid of James—”

“Your house, Roy-boy, is on 126 Tyler Road in the town of Prim. Sixty miles down the Plainsway, give or take.” Tapp’s voice came in startlingly clear, like he was crouched among them. “I don’t know what you were doing with those two girls, but it’s not my business. Your wife Liza is . . . ah, twenty-three. Your daughter is almost two. I’ll come in tonight, after dark, when things have settled and Emma is in her crib. I’ll kick in the back door and I’ll come in with a suppressed pistol. I’ll go room by room, inch by inch, and I will kill everyone I find with two shots to the sternum and one to the forehead. Young. Old. Awake. Sleeping. Nothing in that house will survive. Do you have a dog or cat? I’ll kill them, too. I’ll . . . I’ll pour bleach in the fucking
fish tank
. Do you hear me, Roy Burke? Is this getting to you?”