EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (24 page)

She gasped and raised the warm pistol.

He smiled. She saw black staining his lips, running down his mouth and chin, forming a waterfall down the breast of his uniform. He didn’t say anything – she wondered if he could still speak at all – and just kept grinning at her, like a hellish jack-o-lantern.

She curled her finger around the trigger.

“William Howard Tapp,” he said with a full mouth. His voice had a gurgle to it. “William Tapp . . . is a demon in human skin.”

She squeezed the gun until it rattled.

“Break that skin and he’ll . . . drip out and pool and reform himself.” His grin widened and dumped another dark mouthful of blood down his shirt. It splashed in his lap. “He hangs in the air and condenses inside people—”

“Give me your keys,” Elle ordered.

The deputy reached for his belt and produced a small key ring. He looked back up at her with it jingling in his palm, and she saw the gears turning inside his little insect brain (shoot him, shoot him,
shoot him
) but it was too late. With a flick of his wrist, the keys hurtled into Tapp’s dark prairie.

The last gasp of hope left Elle’s chest, replaced by chilled air.

So close.

“He can’t . . . die because he’s a concept,” the deputy said with increasing strain. Rising blood bubbled in his voice. “He’s . . . a
contagious idea
.”

Then the kid slackened into shadow and dropped his hand from his neck, and she heard his blood jetting into the gravel like a water spigot. His final bit of damage done, he was dead for good now.

His radio, forgotten on the road by his ankle, buzzed feedback as someone activated the connection. She held the pistol to her body, hunched tight, and waited to hear the sniper’s ugly, weedy voice again. Instead, she heard James, punching through the rain, as sharp and focused as a searchlight:

“Elle, honey, I have a plan to kill him.”

She smiled a forbidden, guilty smile.

Get him, James.

* * *

“Fine. Great.
Fantastic
.” Tapp snapped the rifle bolt shut and wiped his chin with his wrist. “Let’s see this plan.”

Downhill in dripping green, Svatomir took ten paces from the bungalow. Then he slung his Saiga 12 over his shoulder, whipped water from his ponytail, and charged the door again. The crash came to Tapp a half second later.

“You’re not cut out for this, James.” He indexed the trigger and fought the heartbeat behind his ribs. It was violent, uneven, like a drum set tumbling down stairs. He forced himself to laugh and made sure the radio heard. “You listening? I . . . I said we can negotiate. What you wanted all along. Your bread and butter. I’m offering you the closest thing you’ll see to an olive branch for the rest of your very short life, so don’t . . . don’t oversell yourself. For everything that’s happened here, you’re still a salesman. You still please people for a living. You’re still that little kid watching his father beat the shit out of his mother with a—”

“I didn’t finish.”

“What?”

“I was interrupted,” James said. “And I didn’t finish.”

“F . . .” Tapp missed a breath. “
Finish
, then.”

“There was a gun my dad kept loaded by the door,” James said. The radio connection filtered itself and became oddly perfect. All static, feedback echo, and background tone bled away until there was only James: “I grabbed it.”

“And?”

“And I ran to the kitchen, to the scream, where he had her with her left hand flattened to the counter now, to break her other hand.” He lowered his voice to a dry whisper, his words cleanly spaced: “And I shot him. In the eye. He didn’t fall over. He just kind of sat down by the dishwasher. And I watched him die, for two full minutes, and we stared at each other and said nothing.”

The connection clicked off.

Down the hill, Svatomir heeled back, lowered his shoulders like a linebacker, and charged the door again.

* * *

James opened the door.

The big man came barreling through the now-empty doorway over a rush of displaced air, wheezing with shock. Their shoulders brushed briefly as they passed – the Soviet going in, James going out.

And James was going fast. He ran three paces into the night with the third fuel jug in his right hand, glugging a trail at his feet. Then he took another running spin and hurled the container at the graveyard of broken cars, catching droplets in his eyes. Behind him he heard the Soviet’s boots squealing, the man falling on the fuel-slick floor, his shotgun clattering on cement like kitchen pans. He’d be back up in another second, turning to face James and shouldering his weapon for the kill.

James didn’t look back. He kept running, ten yards from the building now. He heard the fuel jug land and splash by the front of the motor pool where Roy’s Acura (and its full tank of gas) had been parked. He didn’t turn to look at that, either; he was out of the building’s safe shadow now. He was inside Tapp’s scope. Right now, those hungry crosshairs were finding him, intercepting him like white blood cells zeroing in on a virus. He imagined the half second of delight Tapp was feeling right then –
there you are!
– and hoped it would dull the sniper’s reflexes for another half second as he wrenched the first emergency flare from his left pocket and groped for the pull-wire with slippery fingers. Missing a step, losing momentum, he tugged once, twice, three times, until the world turned red.

He imagined Tapp’s mild surprise:
Oh? What’s this?

Heat on his cheeks. Hissing sparks. The stench of damp fireworks. Around him splashed a twenty-foot radius of crimson light, of jagged shadows scattering and re-gathering with every step. He dug his feet in and whirled, slicing a fiery gash through the night, and threw the flare thirty feet toward the building’s open doorway. Where the Soviet stood.

The Soviet was just bringing his shotgun up to fire at James when the flare came twirling at him, skimmed off the doorframe and flew past his left ear. He turned to watch the burning projectile bounce off Tapp’s workbench and splash on the wet floor behind him.

He looked back at James.

James wasn’t looking. He fell to one knee and covered his face.

The air ignited. Raindrops boiled away. Every molecule turned hostile to life. A wall of pressurized air (
Mount St. Helens-esque
, James managed to think) whipped his road jacket taut, and when he caught himself with an outstretched hand in the mud, his ears rang in answer to a blast he never heard.

* * *

White.

So much white. An instant nuclear flash.

Tapp’s BlackEye X3S, which had a suggested retail price of $2,899, became a sheet of blank paper. He leaned back, his brow suctioned free from the eyecup, and he saw what the gadget couldn’t. The explosion burned as bright as the sun for a moment, and then shapes took form and through seared retinal shadows he saw the bungalow’s walls had disintegrated into a hail of sheet metal, thrown by a fountain of fire.

Think, he told himself. Think.

Instead he watched dumbly, slack-jawed, as the heat wave came rushing to him. He felt it on his cheeks and exposed knuckles, hot as a hearth oven even in the downpour. The report filled the air and blended into the next thunderclap. The fireball melted from orange to red before swallowing itself in a mushroom cloud, building to a hundred meters of cauliflower smoke. Flames leapt from the structure’s black ribs, coiling in the suction of returning air to form a surreal tornado, a storm of swirling fire aching to meet the sky.

Think.

He eyeballed back to his scope. Still a white-out. Arctic white. Not the faintest hint of green. In the corner, flashing urgently: OVRLD. He hadn’t opened the manual in months, but he suspected it stood for
overload.
Too much light. The image intensifier tube was burning out, photocathodes popping, two grand worth of circuitry in there sizzling like toast—

Think
—

He couldn’t. He felt like that little blinking OVRLD icon. His thoughts lost their bones and jellied into mush. He didn’t even know where to start; everything had changed in a microsecond. So many plates had been hurled in the air and were now falling, and he only had two hands to catch them with – Paiute County’s Deputy Sergei Koal slain by his own sidearm, the pillar of fire visible for miles like Mosby’s jealous rendition of the Roswell crash, Svatomir burning alive right now, the emergency call to Mindy that
personally named him
. It overwhelmed him, but his mind stuck on that particular image – a dumb woman full of smart questions, her cow-like eyes as wide as dinner plates. There was no damage control for this. No cover-up would be elaborate enough. Tomorrow’s light would reveal Sheriff William Tapp, the most reviled lawman in national history.

So, he had a head start on the manhunt by at least . . . what, four hours? More, if seventeen years here taught him anything about small-county emergency coordination. He considered the logistics of fleeing the law – eating, sleeping, scratching out a secret nomadic life in a world where every dumb bitch in a Dairy Queen could pull up his face on a smartphone – and that’s where things fell apart. It sounded like a lot of work, and frankly, made him feel tired and old. He would much rather just take a dirt nap out there. To quote James Eversman in a moment of sensibility:
I’ll be dead. Won’t be my problem.

He couldn’t quite reach the long-barreled rifle to his head without sacrificing his grip on the trigger, but he could certainly brain himself here and now with his little target pistol. Of course, the .17HMR was an iffy kill caliber; small, high-velocity, zipping through meat like a laser beam with minimal deformation or trauma. What if he accidentally pulled a park ranger job on himself – a Glen Floyd, you might call it – and merely blew his ability to read and write out of the top of his skull? Or sentenced himself to a coma? That would be embarrassing.

The first debris-meteorites were landing now, touching down on his hill in flashes of ember. A big one, wreathed in fire, crashed down somewhere to his left. The air thickened with burnt powder, melted plastic, white-hot aluminum.

Suicide. He scooped up his thoughts like loose sand. Sure. Suicide would do well enough. He just had a few little things to tie up first—

As if on cue, another kernel of red light ignited at the foot of the blaze as James lit a second emergency flare. The salesman, the lanky white-collar guy with the self-deprecating shrug and the yellow Rav4 crammed with furniture, was coming to kill Tapp. This was it. It was
on
, as the kids say.

Okay, James. You ruined me. Before I go, I’ll ruin you worse
.

A scythe of sheet metal twirled over the sniper’s head like a fiery windmill blade. Tapp didn’t even flinch as he peeled off his headset microphone, and when the shrapnel banged into rock a few meters behind him, all he heard was his deceased, biggest fan:

You’re a demon. You just don’t know it yet.

23

James was starting to climb the sniper’s hill when he heard Roy’s Acura ignite behind him and the escarpment throbbed under another wash of light. A secondary blast thumped from the skeleton of Tapp’s building, and then a third. He supposed there were more acetylene tanks in there than the two he’d seen, but it didn’t matter now. He heard Tapp’s library of ammunition and exotic gunpowder cooking off like machine gun fire, popping in ragged bursts. Thousands of candy wrappers rained down like a ticker-tape parade from Hell. Sheet metal came crashing down around him, warping and twanging, some glowing molten. His scalp and back tingled with second-degree burns and he recognized the dense stench of burnt human hair. Somewhere behind him, the Soviet was howling like a kenneled dog, his lungs full of bubbling fire, burning alive. James ignored all of it.

Elle is running out of time.

Get up there and kill him.

The grade steepened immediately as the land crested around the building in a harelip and became a wall of columned rock and scree piles. Granite emerged from the land like bones tearing through skin. Every step loosed a small landslide. Wiry brush tore out in handfuls. Even the rain worked against him as it ran down the hill in torrents, washing rock faces clean and spurting dirty water in his eyes and mouth.

His arm ached from holding the second signal flare skyward like an Olympic torch. It burned erratically in the downpour, hissing and snapping, dumping flurries of sparks. It threatened to die at any second. Weren’t they supposed to be waterproof?

“Keep burning.” He didn’t recognize his voice. “Please.”

Because it had been almost sixty seconds now and James wasn’t dead yet, he knew his plan was working. It was like a horror movie – stay out of the shadows and the monster couldn’t grab you. As long as he remained in the light, Tapp’s night vision scope couldn’t see him. Light beats darkness. The coughing flare, the reflective jacket, the burning building; so far, it was enough.

Up, up, up. Rock faces grew taller. Footholds fewer. He was ascending further from the well of orange firelight, or maybe the flames were already dying behind him. That would be bad. He didn’t have time to turn around and check. He could only go forward. Only forward.

The flare wheezed and for a second, blackness rushed in on all sides.

“Oh, God.” He sheltered it with his hand. “Don’t go out.
Please
.”

Wet limestone under his feet, slick as ice. His knees slammed down and sickening pain shot up his legs. He lost the flare, groped frantically for it, and found it rolling in a puddle, gurgling and bubbling red fish eggs. He recovered it with both hands while his mind screamed at him:
I’m running out of time. Elle is dying
.
Not fast enough. He’s—

Ahead, something stirred in the darkness.

He shot upright and held the flare forward like a lantern, his breathing labored and his heart thudding in his eardrums. It was a flag. A yellow flag, triangular, flapping in the deluge, just like those meticulously spaced flags Elle had first spotted on Shady Slope Road, forever ago. He came closer, dousing it in red light, and read jotted black Sharpie: 150M. Somehow he knew immediately, instinctively, that M stood for meters. He was only a hundred and fifty meters away. So
close
.

“Tapp!” he screamed into the darkness. “I’m coming for you.”

A dry gunshot popped in answer – James couldn’t discern from where – and slapped into the ground somewhere close to him. He fought a jolt of panic. He felt thick globs of dirt stick to his face and as the fear subsided he fought something else, something unexpected – a shit-eating grin. Tapp had fired at him and missed. It was working.

Don’t stop. Keep going.

Another shot cracked and landed somewhere behind him. This one was closer, disturbing the air above his neck like a fastball and peppering his back with rock chips. He shook it off, tucked his head and pumped his arms to cross a patch of level ground at a sprint. Already he could see the sniper’s hundred-meter flag, coming fast.

* * *

Tapp slammed the bolt up, back, forward, down and ejected brass to his right. He clicked the scope to one-power but still couldn’t locate James in the pulsing blowout of confused whites. So much light. So much changing light. The optic could open and close its iris on the fly to adapt to changing conditions like high beams and enemy torchlights, but not to this. The contrasts were too severe. He considered firing a third blind shot but every second James climbed closer, the range pulled in shorter, and his scope grew more cumbersome.

He hunched both legs to his belly, grabbed his rifle by the checkered grip and hand guard, and rose to a bladed rifleman’s stance under a double-flash of lightning. It wasn’t even remotely graceful but he didn’t care. The chrome barrel was forward-heavy and tugged him on his toes. His hanging belly didn’t help. His biceps were already burning under the weapon’s twenty-four pounds and he could feel the growing tremor in his nerves. Rain bounced off the useless BlackEye scope, beaded on the barrel and ran down his tattered ghillie camouflage in streams.

James climbed closer. With that flare, he was a moving red beacon.

The marksman sucked the rifle to his shoulder to accommodate the .338 Lapua Magnum’s punishing kick and estimated his point of aim. Firing downhill helped his balance and took much of the strain off his arms. He tracked James’ path from the hip, swung the bore to match him like a skeet shooter zeroing in on a clay pigeon, and in a split-second he discarded everything he had mastered about the art of the rifle – the trigger squeeze, the sight picture, the half breath – and handled the thing like a shotgun. He slapped the trigger, the weapon barked in his slippery hands, and James kept coming.

He drove the bolt home and tried again. The scope had finally gone black (
Black
Eye – ha, ha!) because the processor had judged it to be daytime and automatically powered down to prevent damage. It was okay. Fine. He’d expected it. He was back in his confident rhythm. Cool, unhurried, with nimble fingers and an agile mind. There was such finality to this battle, a culmination of every terrific shot he had taken in his life, and it was a special exhilarating rush. He caught himself giggling and didn’t try to suppress it. Why bother? Not even the sun lives forever.

Downhill at the base of the towering fire, he noticed a figure pushing through and staggering out. Wearing a coat of flames, palms out, it walked a few paces and collapsed in a blind, burning lump. Now Svatomir could join Sergei in nonexistence. Tapp couldn’t let it distract him.

We’re all dead.

We’ll all be dirt by morning.

He wiped a dribble of saliva from his mouth and fired at James again, and thunder boomed overhead in unison.

* * *

A firecracker of chipped rock exploded in James’ face as he passed the fifty-meter flag. Stinging shards buried themselves in his nose and lips. He felt a fragment rattling between his front teeth like a popcorn kernel and spat it out. He elbowed back up to his feet, rubbed blood and rainwater from his eyes – yes, his eyes were undamaged and he could still see.

He laughed. “You missed!”

But Tapp hadn’t missed by more than a foot. His shots had inched closer ever since the first, and as the distance continued to narrow, it seemed inevitable that the sniper would regain the advantage. Even crippled by firelight, at close quarters a sniper rifle was still better than a screwdriver. That was probably why no armed force on earth outfitted its troops with screwdrivers. He couldn’t even allow himself to think about how the hard part wouldn’t be over when he finally clawed his way up into the sniper’s nest – no, the hard part was just beginning. It would be like running a marathon and then fighting a bear. With a screwdriver.

His laughter faded. He realized that he was still going to die tonight. It had been a pleasant few minutes, pretending that any other outcome was still possible.

Keep going.

But he was losing momentum now. His limbs felt heavier. The flare sputtered and the red light flickered, inspiring another realization – as this engagement morphed into touch-and-go combat, broadcasting his exact location was becoming an awful idea. His natural night vision was absolutely destroyed. He could only see what the flare saw, twenty feet around him in a warping zone of red light. All else was blackness, black as space, cold and hopeless and indifferent. Tapp could be anywhere in it, moving, positioning, aiming, preparing his ambush like a craftsman measuring out wood before the first cut. This is what he does, after all. Orchestrate ambushes.

He sees me
, James realized.
I can’t see him.
We’re right back to where we started.
He swallowed nauseous terror.

Keep going.

But he was exhausted. His knees melted. His throat burned with smoke and hard breath. Blood ran over his eyes and glued his eyelids shut. His cheeks and lips stung with what felt like a face full of birdshot. If Elle were here she would have a remark for it, maybe something about looking like he’d gone hunting with Dick Cheney, but she wasn’t. She was almost a mile away, dying alone.

Another gunshot boomed, tugging the jacket off his left shoulder. It trailed like a cape. He was numbly aware that a large-caliber bullet, the kind that would kill a buffalo, had come within an inch or two of ripping off his arm. By now he was used to being shot at. Whatever, right? He was close to Tapp. Maybe thirty meters? Twenty-five?

The rocks grew taller and he climbed on all fours. Scrub grass sliced his cheeks and raindrops pounded his eyes. He had to shield his face with an elbow, spitting clots of blood, climbing forward, only forward, nowhere but forward. In his other hand he held the screwdriver as an icepick, piercing soft shelves of earth and hauling himself up and over, like he was climbing a glacier wall.

Keep going. For Elle—

That was when Tapp shot him. It was true – you never heard the one that got you. Something monstrous slammed his body down flat and he heard the sheriff’s wormy voice, crowing from uphill: “Oh,
no
! My night scope is back, James. My night scope is back and I can see your wife. Dumb bitch was safe in the car but now she’s . . . she’s crawling around the grass looking for something. Oh, no! I’m gonna pop her head off like a goddamn water balloon. Oh, no . . . oh, no . . . oh, no . . .”

He heard the deadbolt click-clack of Tapp’s weapon. It was sharp, piercingly metallic, and it made him think:
Oh, Christ, I made it so close to him.

I’m so close.

Then the floor dropped out and James was falling, plunging, becoming weightless, and all he heard was the ragged monster that was Tapp, half-wounded, half-hysterical, fading fast like water swirling down a sink:

“Why was my old AR15 like Bob Marley? Because it was always jammin’. Oh, no . . . oh, no . . .
oh, no, James
. . .”