EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (6 page)

Glen sighed.

It sounded childish, frustrated. It reminded her of James exhaling after losing an argument. The familiarity of the sound made it comforting for a split-second, until she realized it was the sound of air leaving Glen’s dying lungs.

One-one-thousand.

She counted. She didn’t know why.

Two-one-thousand.

Then she knew. She counted because she wasn’t here anymore. She wasn’t on this godless stretch of burnt earth, pinned to rock and metal by unseen eyes. She wasn’t in the Mojave. She wasn’t even in this shitty year.

She was on the roof of the stucco Whimsical Pig apartments – the first place she and James had lived together – under a violent night sky. The summer electrical storms in southern Cali were vivid but rainless, so they had scaled the cracked drainage pipe by their kitchen window and lain together on the red tile roof, wearing only a blanket, watching the sky split open.

Three-one-thousand.

Each flash meant to start counting the seconds. Some came and went in blinks and others took their time, slithering from one horizon to the other in crackling wires. Some traced ornate patterns like tangled Christmas lights. Others were so close and so powerful that she flinched into James’ arms.

“I did this when I was a kid,” he’d said. “After the flash, you keep counting the seconds until you hear thunder.”

“Okay.”

He shifted, his leg brushed her thigh in a way that was still awkward, and he accidentally elbowed her sugary bitch-brew. The bottle skimmed the gutter and broke on the tennis court three stories down.

“It’s okay,” she giggled. “It was watermelon.”

Four-one-thousand.

“Then after the thunder comes, you divide the total seconds by five.” He interlocked his fingers with hers as another flash turned the sky purple. “Because the lightning was instantaneous, but the sound takes five seconds to travel one mile. Then the number you get – that’s how far away the lightning struck.”

“That works out to three hundred yards a second,” she said.

“Give or take.”

“Really? Three football fields.”

“Yeah.”

“Hard to believe sound travels that slow.”

He smiled. “Still can’t outrun a fart.”

She smacked him.

Five-one-thousand.

Back in the Mojave, on this bloody day, Elle Eversman heard thunder. Hollow and supernatural, it rolled through the crater like a wave, breaking and splashing on the rocks and brush and hood of the Toyota, then sweeping back out. It could have been a high-altitude passenger jet chopping the clouds, or a boulder stirring, or a gust of air thumping against distant cliffs. No one else noticed the weak and warped gunshot.

Five seconds.

One mile.

* * *

“He’s a mile away?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?” James held the largest shard of side view mirror he had recovered – a triangular splinter three inches across – daintily between his thumb and finger. Then slowly, like ice crawling down a mountain, he inched the little fragment up and over the Rav4’s hood. Rolling his head back against the top of the tire, he adjusted it until he found the craggy crater ridge in his fingers. An improvised periscope.

“I heard the gunshot,” she said. “Five seconds after he killed Glen.”

“He killed Glen?”

She pointed uphill. James saw the body twenty yards up the road, facedown. He wiped dust from his eyes and waited for an emotion to wash over him – fear, shock, rage, sadness – but nothing came. Nothing changed and he felt exactly nothing. Glen was dead. They weren’t yet. That was all. He tried to remember Glen’s driver’s license, the color of his eyes, his weird comb-over-in-the-car story, anything solid, but couldn’t and was worried to discover he didn’t much care.

Elle gritted her teeth. “Rest in peace, Glen.”

He nodded. “The sooner . . . the sooner we find out where the shooter is, the sooner we know our options.” He steadied the northern ridgeline in the mirror piece. “If he’s going to relocate and shoot at us from a different angle, maybe we can read the land and guess which way he’ll go.”

The opposite end of this hellish valley – he would need to study it in cubic segments. He rotated the glimmering blade between his fingers – slowly, slowly – to pan east and then west. He would need to take a few seconds to study each spot, because somewhere out there, in all that bleached rock and bruised earth, among the talus piles and erosion gullies, somewhere in all that formless seismic violence, was an eye and a scope and a horrifically powerful firearm, staring back.

“A mile,” Elle said.

“I know.”

“That’s
sixteen
football fields.”

“Maybe you counted to five wrong.” He steadied his palm. His head throbbed with sinus pressure, pushing in from behind his eyes. It was too damn bright. He felt strangely hung over. He forced himself to study details, to scrutinize every cluster of shadows and creeping patch of brush, but his mind wandered. He could faintly discern dark smudges speckling the skyline and knew they were those creepy walking spirits of the desert – yucca palms. From Mosby he knew those gnarled giants were over twice the height of a standing man, but he could barely keep track of them amid all the smearing earth tones. Was it possible to see a standing, six-foot human figure a mile away? Even under ideal conditions?

He realized it was a waste of time. Of course, the killer wouldn’t be standing. He would be sitting, or lying on his belly.

A mile away.

1,760 yards.

5,280 feet.

A . . . lot of inches.

It’s like playing ‘Where’s Waldo.’ Only Waldo has a gun.

His thoughts fell out of his brain. His eyes ached and refused to align. He knew heatstroke was setting in – having been spoiled by the Toyota’s silent blessing of air conditioning, he hadn’t drunk anything since that morning. And even that had been a Diet Coke from the Reagan-era vending machine at the Gore Museum. Artificial sweeteners and sodium.

“Water,” he said. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “How are we on water?”

“I’ll check.”

He heard her move to the back of the Rav4 where they kept a Costco forty-eight pack of bottled water. Hopefully it was accessible under the storage bins; he couldn’t remember exactly how he’d stacked them. He had loaded the rear bay on Saturday evening, under a sky of puffy red clouds, but it felt like weeks ago.

He heard rocks skitter under Elle’s knees and flinched. “Keep low. Below window-level, or he’ll see you.”

“I know.”

“And don’t lean out at all. He’s at about a thirty-degree angle to the road—”

“The potholes.”

“What?”

“Those potholes.” She opened the Rav4’s rear door and it double-creaked in that familiar way. “When we were driving up to Glen, those noises we heard. That was the sniper shooting our engine.”

“Yeah. I think you’re right.” He wished she wasn’t. He thumbed the glass another millimeter left and saw a small manmade structure nestled in the low end of the cliff. Bone-white. It looked like a single-room building. He couldn’t make out doors or windows. He squinted hard, turning the world into an oil painting, but discerned nothing else. “I see a house.” The glass nearly squirted between his sweaty fingers. “Or a shed, or something. Maybe he’s shooting from inside it.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s a piece of mirror. Not the Hubble Telescope.” He heard her thumping and banging around the back of the Rav4 for the water bottles –
Jesus, please keep your head down
– and he heard the bookcase settle uncomfortably. The vehicle rocked a little on its shocks, which he felt against his shoulder. He cringed at all the careless noise.

“I might have something better,” she said.

“What?”

She froze, not speaking.

“What do you have that will work better?”

“The Costco pack is empty.” She rustled loose plastic.

He sighed. He remembered the three Aquafinas in the console, minus the one they’d given Glen. “So we have two bottles,” he said quietly. “For four – no, five of us.”

“How long will that—”

Something smacked into the Rav4. It sounded like a suspension bridge cable stretched to its limit and released. As bracing as a gunshot, but strangely hollow, like a bamboo whip. The suddenness and strangeness of it turned his blood to ice water. His wife screamed.

“Elle!”

He heard crunchy bits of plastic pinging around the interior of the car. The driver side window fell out of its frame and rained gummy bits on his scalp and shoulders. He pushed forward, his hands crunching safety glass into the dirt, and saw Elle wrestle her way out of the Toyota’s rear door, hair tangled, eyes wide, mouth agape, but unharmed. She hit the ground on her back and crawled to him.

“What was that?” she gasped.

James noticed a shard of blue polymer stuck on his collar. He recognized where it came from.

Oh, shit.

“What?”

“That was my GPS,” he said quietly.

“He shot our GPS?”

“Yeah.”

She ran her hands through her hair. “Why?”

“Because . . .” Something big, impossibly huge, occurred to him and he rolled his head back against the hot door and stared at the sky. Glass fell from his hair. The world wobbled.

“
Why
, James?”

He crunched a shard in half between his fingers. “Because the GPS had a satellite emergency SOS function. This whole time.”

6

Sometime around then, twenty-two-year-old Saray lost consciousness and died.

Don’t think about her.

Her passing had no drama, no pomp or spectacle. She took an otherwise unremarkable breath, and then there were no more after. Whatever awful things she had called her mother the other day quietly cemented into history. That was that.

There’s nothing you can do for her now.

James estimated it had already been an hour since Saray had taken the bullet. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and unpeeled with a Velcro crackle. His neck and face were fiery hot to the touch and a morbid part of his mind imagined he could feel his flesh slowly cracking and blistering in the sun. Like old paint peeling off a house. The more rational part of him knew that every drop of sweat, wrung from every inch of exposed skin, was a drop he would never get back. The sun would go down in a few hours but it would return. The sniper was out there, a mile away, presumably sitting atop a mountain of food, water, and ammunition, fully equipped to outlast them. After a day or two in these badlands, he realized, catching a bullet would be the easy way out.

That answered his question – the killer hadn’t relocated because there was no need to. Eventually, as the sun set and rose, they would either wither from the creeping death of dehydration or choose to break cover and make a futile run back up the northern wall of the crater. And then the bastard would enjoy hundreds and hundreds of yards of luxurious open ground to pick them off, one by one.

James couldn’t decide which death was better. Maybe, he decided, they were past better and worse, and the new yardstick was
shitty
and
less shitty
. As he considered this, Elle stirred, moved to his lap and lay with her hands around his shoulders and her face buried in his dusty white shirt. She sniffed once and squeezed the back of his neck. He knew she shouldn’t be here. Her life was hard enough. Miscarriages and a nonstarter career and her two beloved pets gone forever. He had to get her out of here, at any cost. He rallied himself and tried to pare the enormity of this nightmare into something smaller, simpler, more bite-sized and manageable.

Think of it like a puzzle.

He’d loved puzzles as a kid. He’d had books of them – little one-off situational riddles less than a page or two long. They’d give you a location, list the objects at your disposal, set a few ground rules, and then it was up to you to engineer a solution. Many involved escaping inescapable concrete rooms or solving unsolvable murders. He loved them. He was great at them. He never had a sibling and he built only shallow friendships, but James Eversman always had his puzzles. Even – no, especially – after his dad died.

You’re crouched behind a car,
he thought grimly.
A sniper, a mile away on the opposite ridge of the valley, has you in his scope. You’re thirsty and tired. It’s a hundred degrees, and you only have two bottles of water for four people. You have no cell phone signal. You’re surrounded by hundreds of yards of open prairie, in all directions, with nothing to hide behind. Every inch is no man’s land. Any mistake, any exposure, is instant death.

He sighed.
And the asshole shot your GPS.

He wanted to do something he had never allowed himself to do – flip to the back of the book and read the solution. It was always reassuring to know that a solution existed (however cheap or poorly constructed) and that was comfort he sorely missed here. There might be no humanly possible way to overcome this situation, and if that was the case, what then?

“You said you’d think of something.” It was Saray’s sister – tall, waifish, dyed blue hair. Ash? He hadn’t gotten a good look at her when she was inside Roy’s Acura. Her voice was hoarse, and he knew she’d been crying, watching her sister bleed out.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She sniffed and said something unclear, choked with tears.

He knew his words were hollow. There were no words worthy of the moment. It came to him then, a crushing wave of guilt – why hadn’t he thought of something? A distraction? Anything? Sure, he’d intervened, but he might have actually made things worse. Failing any breakthroughs, he should have at least given Roy the go-ahead to try and save her, if he’d really wanted to risk it. He was certain the sniper would have shot Roy. Right?

Did I save a life? Or let one go?

He would have done it for Elle, he realized. In a heartbeat. He would have grabbed her and hauled her dying ass back behind the car. He wouldn’t have even thought about it. And Elle would have done it for him, too.

I told him not to save her.

He felt sick now; his stomach coiled and heaved. Elle’s teeth chattered against his shoulder and she sniffed again, wetly. She was crying but fighting to hide it. She didn’t like anyone to see her cry. Not even him.

“You’re an asshole, James.” It was Roy now. His voice shivered with rage. “You told me you were thinking of something. So I waited. I waited for you to think of something and
now she’s dead
.”

“I’m sorry.”

Elle stirred and put her lips to his ear. “Don’t listen to him.”

“You don’t . . .” Roy spat in the dirt. “You don’t tell people you’ll help them if you can’t. Your optimistic shit . . . You’re lying to them. You told me, so I waited. That’s on you, you piece of shit.”

“You did everything you could,” Elle whispered.

James closed his eyes and ignored Roy. He knew his wife was lying and that he had already screwed up terribly, but he appreciated it. He needed a new project now. He needed to busy himself, to do something, to keep his thoughts in motion. He couldn’t allow himself to lose momentum and dwell on his mistakes, on that poor girl he’d failed, because if he allowed himself to step into that quicksand he would never claw himself out.

“Don’t hate yourself,” Elle said. “Just keep thinking.”

Goose bumps crawled up his arm. She could read his mind sometimes.

Water
, he decided.
Drinking water for the survivors will be my project.
He rolled over, grabbed the two Aquafinas and held one in each hand, swollen with hot liquid. One for him and Elle. One for Roy and Ash.

“She was right there.” Roy coughed. “She was ten feet away—”

James arched his back and two vertebrae popped like gunshots. He kneed his way to the rear of the Toyota and peered around the taillight to see Roy, huddled on his knees by the Acura’s grill, holding Ash by her shoulders. The vehicle sagged, something internal drip-drip-dripping a steady beat, forcing them to hunch even lower to stay out of the killer’s view. It was eerie seeing such a big man bent under the hood of the sporty car, shoulders sloped, spirit crushed. He couldn’t see Ash’s face, just a waterfall of blue hair in the indecisive wind.

“Water,” he said hoarsely.

Neither of them looked up.

He tossed the bottle – too hard. He watched in horror as it twirled over Saray’s dead legs, tumbled past both Roy and Ash before they could lunge for it, and – oh,
thank God
– wedged under the Acura’s front tire with a puff of dust. A few inches from Ash’s sandaled toes, gleaming hot in the sunlight.

“It’s all we have,” James sighed. “Make it last.”

Neither of them reached for it. Fair enough.

James broke the seal on his own bottle and took a half sip. He swished it through his teeth and tried to enjoy it, but there was nothing to enjoy. It tasted like boiled plastic and burned the roof of his mouth. Reluctantly he swallowed and let it disappear forever. The Aquafina bottle held twelve fluid ounces – how much was that sip? A quarter-ounce? He dealt in advertising market shares and percentages at work, so his brain immediately jumped there and estimated that miserable little sip had cost them two percent.

He passed it to Elle and she took a big gulp. Ten percent.

He didn’t want to argue. What difference would it make?

When you’re trapped in an ambush . . . you charge your enemy.

A military thing he’d heard from his father while watching a fuzzy Audie Murphy movie on the brown living room carpet. He was only seven – he didn’t know if it was true or even tactically sound. What had it mattered then? His father only spoke to him when there was another entity in the room, like a chattering radio or television, to fill the quiet spaces. In another year, his father would be slumped against the dishwasher, one eye shut, slain by the walnut-colored squirrel rifle he kept loaded by the front door.

The idea being, if you’re in an ambush, you’re already exactly where the enemy wants you to be. They built this engagement. If you stay where you are, and try to fight on their terms, you will die.

He spoke in circles sometimes, but James listened patiently because his father was undeniably fascinating. He would work his jaw in circular, wolfish motions mid-sentence, like he was trying to yawn but not quite pulling it off. He made violent gestures with his hands, stabbing the air emphatically through curls of smoke. He touched his beard – not a stroke, not an adjustment – just a touch, as if checking on it. Sometimes his friends would come over, ragged men with long hair and loud laughter. Camouflage pants, mullets, and dirty fingernails. The Anti-Weathermen, they called themselves, with sarcasm or pride or maybe a mix of both. His mother would hide James in the bedroom, and the tiny house would rattle with voices and stink of skunk marijuana. James would sleep watching the cracks of light around the door, hearing only fragments. Something about a coming war. A great war. The Tip-over, they called it.

So you charge your enemy. You charge the fucker, close-quarters, and surprise them, and most importantly, you relocate yourself out of their kill zone. And maybe, if you’re lucky, you can swing your odds back to fifty-fifty.

Charge your enemy.

When the Tip-over happens, James, you remember that.

Now James had a crazy-stupid idea. If he could kick the Toyota into neutral, and he and Elle ducked low in the seats, they could roll the car down the sloped road and crash it somewhere in the darkened riverbed at the center of the crater, a half mile away. Anywhere but here. Maybe, just maybe, the arroyo would be defiladed from the sniper’s scope, if they survived the crash. He knew it was a desperate idea (moving
toward
the armed killer?) and it chilled him to realize that yes, he was indeed this desperate. The situation was that bad. Then he remembered the Rav4’s shift lock release was useless without the keys, which had been jingling in his fingers when Saray took the bullet. In the ensuring blur, he had no idea where he’d dropped them. And Elle’s set, of course, had been lost in the house fire.

She capped the water bottle, set it between her knees and looked at him purposefully. Her tears had smeared her eyeliner, giving her raccoon eyes.

“What?” he asked her.

“I lied.”

“When?”

“I lied when I told you I sold my cameras on Craigslist.” She brushed a flyaway bang from her eyes and grinned, half-embarrassed. “I couldn’t do it. I have both of them still, in a black case under the clothes, under the crib.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He kissed her forehead, scorching hot. “I told you not to sell them.”

“I did it so . . . so I could prove a point to myself. So if I ever came back to it, it would mean something.” Her voice lowered, as if divulging a secret: “The Nikon has a telephoto zoom.”

“How far?”

“Far.”

“Far enough to see him?”

She smiled cautiously. “I think so—”

A hollow
snap
interrupted her, and a pillar of dust billowed from Roy’s Acura and scattered into the prairie. The hiss of falling sand came and went. A few clods of dirt pattered down. James tensed his back against the driver door and shouted to the other car: “Hey! What was that?”

Silence.

“Roy, Ash, you still alive?”

“Bullshit.” It was Roy’s voice.

“What happened?”

“Asshole just shot the water bottle.”

* * *

Tapp clacked the bolt and the ejected brass pinged off limestone to his right, ringing like a little bell. He couldn’t hear his victims but he liked to imagine their shocked reactions to his power:

Oh my God.

Did he really?

How is that even possible?

It was an incredible shot. A small bottle swollen with warm water, sideways on the gravel, 1,545 meters away, and behind two sporadic crosswinds. It was barely a dot in his hyper-magnified optic. It could have been a speck of windblown sand on the lens, or an opaque cell inside Tapp’s own eye. It was a minor miracle that every intuition and rounded decimal point had guided his hand-loaded projectile to exactly where he wanted it to go. No other marksman alive, in any army or competition, could hit a target that size, at that range, with any degree of certainty. Simpler men might find the supernatural in Tapp’s work, and he could think of at least one who did.

Just like how he shot our GPS.

Could he be military? Ex-Special Forces?

He has to be.

He hoped they understood how difficult shooting was. Movies fostered grotesque misconceptions about marksmanship. It’s not point-and-click, even at the shortest ranges. The human body was the shooter’s greatest enemy – a furiously pumping machine full of spasms, aches, and softness. To plot a bullet’s trajectory every environmental force had to be calculated. The parabolic tug of gravity, the elevation and angle, the air pressure, the air temperature, the round’s ballistic coefficient, the rotation of the earth, and of course, the devastating, unpredictable wind.