EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (17 page)

The Soviet shoved his hand out the window, holding that vicious scratched machine pistol. His entire arm was slimy with rusty blood now, like his skin was sloughing off inside his sleeve. He leaned out, cocked his head to face them with the wind tugging his beard, and pulled the sights up to align with his red eyes. Finger on the trigger, curling—

“Shit,” Roy screamed. “
Now! Now! Now!
”

“Now?” Elle looked at James, her eyes wide. Her calm sarcasm was gone. She was terrified, her jaw quivering, her stomach rising in her throat, waiting for her husband to say it, to
please just say it
.

He waited a half second, and then a half second more, as the jeep nudged a few more inches ahead, and the Soviet had to cross his arm to track them, and lean up and out his window to follow them down the stubby iron sights, and (yes!) their right tire was just about even with his back tire—

“Now!” James screamed in her ear.

She wrenched the wheel hard right.

16

To Tapp, they looked like toy cars colliding down a long hallway. Svatomir’s jeep swung a silent jackknife in front of the SUV and its tires lifted free of the road while its right dug into it, spewing dust in a graceful arc, like a handful of sand thrown into the wind. The cloud obscured both vehicles and billowed lazily. Then the Toyota, James Eversman’s goddamn powerless Toyota, punched through the curtain. Still coming, still rolling, still growing inside his scope, leaving Svatomir sideways, stalled, and far behind.

How the . . .?

James’ vehicle tore past the nine hundred meter flag, fearless and unstoppable. For a terrible half second, Tapp entered free-fall. A sour tequila shot of panic. He was terrified. This was so wrong. Everything had gone wrong today. He found himself nurturing such an awful thought, he could only whisper it in the back of his mind and approach it from oblique angles, just a meek little voice . . .
The situation is slipping out of my control.

And even worse . . .
I might not win this.

“William Tapp!” James shouted triumphantly into his ear, his voice tinny and crackling. “Are you afraid yet?”

* * *

The impact had scooted the Motorola across the floor and James found it by his ankle. He held it to his teeth as he spoke, shivering with a wild adrenaline high. Elle punched the steering wheel and whooped – the sound college girls made when they took shots together – and he saw she was smiling, laughing, and crying all at once. “How’s my driving,
asshole
?”

“He almost flipped back there,” Roy said. “He’s off the road, in a ditch. He’s gonna be stuck awhile.”

Elle looked to James. “Was that the easy part or the hard part?”

“Not sure yet.” He reached through the broken window and grabbed the side view mirror – crushed by the collision, dangling by bent fiberglass – and scanned the cracked reflection for the Soviet. No luck. All he saw was a wall of dust, boiling and churning like a Mount St. Helens-esque pyroclastic cloud, sliced by shafts of orange sunlight. He would have to take Roy’s word for it.

“Four hours left,” Elle whispered cryptically.

“What?”

“Four hours left,” she said again, as if it should be obvious. “Remember?”

“Yeah. Tapp said it on our car radio.”

“He said it over three hours ago.” She grinned. “And now I know what he was talking about.
Daylight.
I should have figured – a scope is like any other lens. Camera, binocular, telescope – it needs light to work. He only has so much daylight left to kill us. He has less than an hour, in fact, until the sun is down.”

James let out a shocked sigh. The sniper’s words whiplashed back at him:
You almost made it to nightfall.
Of course! How had he missed that? The sun was the timer, the big-ass ticking clock in the sky, dimming behind pink clouds with every passing second. Through the hollowed windows he could see the eastern sky was already fading to a deep purple against jagged crater walls. A shadowed twilight was descending over Tapp’s land as they raced toward the killer. If only it would descend a little faster.

“That would . . .” Elle’s voice was muffled by something scraping off the chassis and tumbling. “That would explain why he wanted Roy to kill you. He’s getting desperate but he can’t show it, like a poker player with too much on the table and a shit hand. He’s running out of time, out of usable daylight, and he knows it.”

Tapp, getting desperate. James couldn’t imagine a happier thought.

“Sundown in a half hour,” Roy said. “Maybe less.”

“Survive thirty minutes.” Elle waved her hand. “Easy.”

The world came alive with possibility again. After night fell, would Tapp really be blinded? That would be an incredible reversal. If so, they would only have to outrun the Soviet. In the dark they would have an edge over the injured man, and if he were stupid enough to fire up a flashlight, they’d literally see him coming for miles. They could follow the arroyo east, as far as it went, and cross the valley under cover of darkness to reach the rough hills by the highway. Once they reached the highway they’d be as good as free. Could it really be that easy? Just survive four hours, until the killer ran out of light?

Now it turned to acid in his stomach. When was anything ever that easy? And of course, he remembered, that hadn’t been all. Tapp had said one more thing on that scratchy signal bleed three hours ago.

“Black eye,” James said. “What’s that?”

The Rav4 hit a violent rut and knocked his head against the glove box. That was when he noticed the dry rushing sound – like the wind at Gray beach, or the army of cooling fans in his radio station control room – and realized it was the desert air blowing through the windshield. It tugged hair and flapped bloodstained clothes. The Toyota had picked up speed as the incline steepened.

“Too fast. No brakes.” Roy winced, choked with pain. “We land in the riverbed like this and we’re crash test dummies.”

Curiously tomato-like.
James remembered nearly rear-ending that dumbass deputy four hours ago and thanking God he hadn’t, because back then, that had been the worst nightmare he could envision. Wasn’t that funny? He and Elle had narrowly avoided a fatal car accident, only to fall into the trap of a psychotic killer, and while trying to escape said killer, were now fixed to die in another fatal car accident.

He supposed the parking brake was an option, but on this terrain, it could just as easily flip them over. And it wouldn’t get them inside the gully –
that
was the goal. Getting inside the gully, sheltered from Tapp’s scope, forcing the sniper to move in close. Everything else was secondary.

“Seatbelts,” he said, groping for the first buckle in the seat behind him. It felt comically futile, like those old photos of Cold War children ducking under their desks to survive a nuclear attack.

“I lost the mirror,” Elle said. “How close is it?”

He peeked over the dashboard, into Tapp’s no-man’s-land, and squinted hard into the low sunlight. They were well off the road now, jangling and crashing. The arroyo itself, a winding talus floor following the crease of the valley, loomed three hundred yards downhill and raced closer every second. Flash floods wouldn’t come more than once every few years out here, but he could read the erosive imprint on the land; where the waters had swept away sand and silt but left jutting monoliths of exposed granite and car-sized basalt pillows, oxidizing bright red and choked with huddled plants. He couldn’t tell how deep it was. It might be a shallow creek trail or it might be a cousin of the Grand Canyon. There was no way to tell.

“Guess we’ll find out if seatbelts really save lives,” Roy said flatly. It might have been a joke or it might have been hopeless resignation. Again, no way to tell.

James looked at Elle. “Remember how we met?”

“I like that story.” She smiled and gritted her teeth. “Tell it.”

A yucca sapling crunched against the Rav4’s grill and branches stabbed through the windshield. Elle gave a muffled cry. Bony fingers grasped over them, slashing exposed skin. A big frond stuck in the passenger headrest and flapped furiously, like a tarpaulin in the wind.

“Okay. Riverside Apartments.” He collected his thoughts, closed his eyes, and felt the seat vibrating under his chin. “I’m walking to my door. And I see this plate of brownies sitting on the floor with a little red bow, maybe two feet from my front door.”

“No,” she said. “It was
his
door.”

“It was like, fifty-fifty. Between my door . . . my door and the neighbor’s door.” The Toyota took another crashing rise and fall. Rocks pinged like bullets.

“You should’ve assumed they weren’t for you,” she said.

“I gave the brownies the benefit of the doubt.”

“You deserved it—”

The rear bay door rattled open, caught a rush of air, and slammed shut.

“I had . . .” He flinched. “I saw you when you visited him. Next door. Always on Thursdays. I thought you were so beautiful. I didn’t dare look you in the eye, even when we passed at the mailbox—”

“I remember that.” She was crinkling her nose, trying not to cry.

He checked over the dash again. The arroyo was a hundred meters away now, coming fast.

“He was an idiot for what he did to you, Elle. And thinking you wouldn’t find out.” He reached over, grabbed the driver seatbelt, and wrapped it around her shoulder. “So
of course
you’d make him a plate of laxative brownies.”

She smiled guiltily as he raised her arm and looped the belt under her. The buckles met with a piercing click.

“Roy,” he gasped. “Hang on back there.” He grabbed the passenger seatbelt and twisted it around his own shoulder, then arched his back, lifted a thigh, and brought the buckles together. Another cold click.

“I used the whole box of laxatives, too.” Elle sniffed. “Like, twenty-four doses. I only expected him to eat one or two—”

“I love brownies, Elle.”

“He didn’t like chocolate.”

“I ate
eleven
.”

She laughed and he felt her breath on his face.

He squeezed her fingers. “Worst forty-eight hours of my life.”

Somehow all the noise and glass and metal and wind drained away, and it was just them, their small voices, and the scent of her green apple shampoo.

“It was worth it.” He closed his eyes and braced. “Because it gave me something to talk about when—”

* * *

Tapp couldn’t see the vehicle crash down into the arroyo (his view was obscured by the rising land) but the hollow crack reached him in just over a second. It sounded like a femur breaking. The flashflood crevasse was only four hundred meters downhill from his roost. Just over four football fields. By a sniper’s measure, that was pissing distance.

He worked a jittery chill out of his spine and darted his scope to Svatomir, five hundred meters back up the hill, right where James’ tire tracks left the road. The big man now stood at the lip of a ditch where his jeep rested brokenly, one tire canted hard. He was bending low and circling a crusty basalt boulder – in his hands was that loop of ever-useful winching cable – and he tucked the hook, planted his boot to the lava rock, and drew the cable tight. He would be out of that rut in a minute. Two, tops. Then he would descend the slope and corner James Eversman and his gang of moving targets inside the riverbed and hose them down with his Mac-11.

Unless, of course, James somehow managed again to—

Stop.

He could maybe—

Nope. He can’t. He won’t.

Tapp needed another energy drink. Without caffeine his mind unraveled like mummy bandages. Questions fluttered.
How badly is Svatomir injured? Is there enough sunlight for my objective lens? Do I have to pee again?
And lesser thoughts, half-formed, coming faster than he could handle them – that coyote with a black skeleton arm in its jaws, credit card interest, drool crusted on his pillow, variable winds. Too many things to catch at once, all emergencies. His body was curling into a defensive fetal pose, his thighs creeping to his elbows. He felt his heartbeat revving up like railroad ties under a locomotive. He hated himself. He never could have been a real sniper, and
this
was why.

He grabbed his third energy drink, popped the tab, and swigged half the thing. His hyperactive mind – what an unbecoming trait for a marksman, to be cursed with a brain like a bag of cats – leapt now to his homemade camouflage suit. His familiar coat of threads and crispy grass, rank with sweat and gun smoke. His costume, his masterpiece, his
ghillie suit.

He tipped his beverage. Empty. He hurled it and grabbed another.

Ghillie suit. Noun. Derived from ‘gille.’ Scottish Gaelic word for ‘lad’ or ‘servant.’ In feudal times, gille gamekeepers under the employ of their lords would don this shaggy mesh of netting, scrub their skin with dirt and moss, and melt into the trees. There these men would lay concealed in plain view, waiting weaponless for their prey to—

Shit!
He slashed his thumb on the drink tab. Hot blood all over the sipping edge. He didn’t care. He drank anyway.

After hours or days, the buck would draw near. It’d be a wraith in the trees; a magnificent huffing beast made of rippling muscles and tightened nerves. And the invisible, scentless gille crawls and creeps – sometimes taking an hour to move a single meter – to within whisper-distance and ambushes the animal with his bare hands. Pins it, binds its legs. Then he drags his quarry back into town, into his lord’s fenced arena, which is adorned with planted ferns and ringside audience seating, and cuts the buck loose. So some faggot Scottish prince can stroll in, dust off a bow, nock an arrow between clean fingernails, and kill the animal in a staged hunt. Cue polite applause – but everyone knows who the real badass is.

Which one am I?

He crunched another empty can on his forehead (four) and dropped it. He needed to focus. The stakes here and now were incredible. If James, or any of them, escaped his valley and reached the local authorities, it’d be over. Done. Fin. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. He’d be strung up like the Unabomber, crucified and mainlining barbiturate.