EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (12 page)

Then Elle breathed.

She inhaled and air squeezed through the top edge with a fluttering whistle. Air going out. Then she exhaled, her lungs relaxed, and the plastic snapped tight to the wound to form suction. No air going in. James felt a hot bubble of breath in his throat and quietly watched this timid little miracle happen again, and again, and again. If he tore his eyes away, he feared it might stop.

A one-way valve. With duct tape and a plastic bag.

Roy chewed his lip. “Did it work?”

“I hope so.”

“They say duct tape has a million uses, but I think that’s a new one.”

James was numbly aware of the drone of an engine and the chirp of tightening brakes as the Soviet parked his jeep just a few yards down the road. He ignored it. It would only be a problem thirty seconds from now. He watched Elle, only Elle, the most important thing in his world, and waited.

“Hey, James.” Roy rose to a crouch. “Blackbeard. He’s here.”

“I know.”

“We have to think of a way to fight him.”

“Give me a minute.”

“We don’t have a minute.” Roy stared at the revolver between them and made a disgusted face. “And who the hell carries an empty gun?”

James ignored him. It didn’t matter how right Roy was, that it didn’t make sense at all. Five spent cartridges, all inside Glen’s revolver, carefully tucked back inside his holster. Why would an off-duty Montana park ranger carry a weapon like that? And what was he doing in Nevada? Then he realized Elle’s eyes were open, darting and alive, scanning the bright sky and finding him.

James forgot everything and just stared back.

She grinned goofily, without the slightest trace of self-consciousness, like she had just pounded four Lemon Drops and was beginning a slow slide off her bar stool. He grabbed her hands, squeezed, and couldn’t help but laugh, too. Huge, fake-sounding belly laughs, like a sitcom studio audience. Even though they were trapped in this hellish valley and there was an armed man twenty feet away, preparing to tow away the only thing keeping them alive – one victory at a time, right? And this was one hell of a victory. He kissed her forehead.

“I dreamt you saved us,” she said.

“Not yet.” He smiled shyly. “Working on it.”

“Are we real?”

He held her, brushed her hair from her eyes and kissed the bridge of her nose, feeling her eyelashes flutter, and knowing that this incredible person had almost been deleted from the world by something as careless as a dumb-luck ricochet. “Yeah,” he told her. “We’re real.”

Down the road, the Soviet kicked his door open.

11

His heart a marching band, Tapp inserted a fresh magazine and savored the way it glided in and locked. Ten double-stacked .338 handloads on deck, golden and eager. Plus an eleventh already chambered, snug to the micrometer, waiting only for his permission and the surgical strike of the firing pin. As he watched Svatomir step out his jeep under a billow of pale dust, he unshackled his mind and allowed it to wander a few paces. He returned to some of his greatest hits; little freeze-dried memories which still offered a jolt of pleasure.

I shouldn’t.

It’s sort of wrong—

One, many years back, had been a running headshot at 1,100 meters. He spoke in numbers but for his life he couldn’t recall the angle, the crosswinds, the elevation – he only remembered the way he’d felt when he saw her head burst like a popped zit. Intense, chocolate delight. You could say it was . . .
mind-blowing
. Somehow the fact that she had been attractive (about an eight out of ten) made destroying her face even more gratifying. Why was that?

No more.

Focus.

Another good one had been a college student with the mop of black hair and a trunk full of social studies textbooks. Bound for law school, maybe? The kill itself had been one of those happy accidents, where a standard center-mass shot took an odd curve and instead double-jointed the kid’s arm halfway from the elbow (walk like an Egyptian!). Gnarly. Tapp had done the right thing and finished him quick.

That’s enough.

But the best one was—

Enough.

But the best shot of all had a bitter taste to it, because it had been a ten-year-old girl. It had happened last year. Svatomir’s reconnaissance had missed her because she was curled up in the backseat under a Navajo blanket while her parents drove. She woke to her father’s head splitting and then the Volvo rolled twice in a curtain of gravel and glass. The mother climbed out through the windshield and Tapp broke her spine. That left the girl, a fifth-grader maybe, staggering from the car and running up the hill with tears in her eyes and chunks of hamburger in her hair. She wasn’t even following Shady Slope Road. She was running just to run. Everyone runs. Even children, apparently.

Meanwhile Tapp had screamed, cried, punched rock, ground his teeth until a filling broke. Svatomir babbled excuses in his useless half-English until Tapp tore off his headset off and threw it. He’d tasted a sea tide of stomach acid climbing his throat as that little girl fled further and further into his glass world, and he was dragged violently toward that moment.

I don’t kill kids.

Why not, though? Why hold anything sacred in a meaningless universe full of dead stars? We’re all dust. It was a relic of a younger, dumber Tapp who held dying hitchhikers’ hands. He had no reason to value the life of a child over any other life. They haven’t been alive as long. Why should that entitle them to anything?

Doesn’t matter. I don’t kill kids.

But this one was getting away. Christ, she must have run cross-country or something. Already she was over two kilometers from Tapp, further than he had ever engaged a human target. She was well past the rim of the crater and was now at the point where scrubland becomes scabland. Where wiregrass and yuccas gives way to exposed rocks and bald mountains. Another thirty seconds and she would be lost in the churning land with one hell of a head start. Dumb luck or not, from there she had a chance of finding the highway. That was when it stopped being a choice.

I don’t kill kids—

He did. He blew her lungs out at 2,106 meters. His longest kill ever.

I hated it.

He had loved it. Remembered now, it still felt undeniably good. The feedback, the messy feedback that tells the animal part of your brain before your thoughts can even assemble – ding, ding, ding, hit! Even though the impact was soundless he swore he was there inside it. He could taste the metallic blood and feel the bone fragments crackle between his molars. He was ashamed of how good it felt.

Tapp lived for this, his special brand of wet violence, and as clouds gathered in the western sky he decided that was okay. He could stop whenever he wanted. He only did this once or twice a year. He chose his scenarios and victims carefully, like a vampire living in plain sight. That demonstrated real control, unlike the paper cutter killer from Reno or Svatomir’s idiot cousin.

“Let’s do it,” he said firmly. “Tow the car.”

Svatomir nodded in his scope.

Tapp’s mind rubber-banded back to the wife, bolting to the ranger’s body and returning. Her hands had been empty. He had only seen flattened fingers in a slicing runner’s form. She had recovered nothing from the old man. But obviously she had wanted to grab something.

What if she has the ranger’s gun?

She doesn’t.

But what if she does?

It’s not loaded.

What if it is?

* * *

“Kill him,” Elle whispered sleepily. “Kill him.”

James nodded.

“Maybe . . .” Roy tensed. “When he gets close I can take him.”

“I’ll back you up,” James said in his best bar-fight voice.

“Okay.”

Roy was a big guy. Not as tall or as WWF barrel-chested as the Soviet, but James was glad the kid was on his side. If nothing else, his swelling jaw told him that Roy knew how to deliver a punch. That was something.

“He’ll be close,” James whispered. “When he hooks the cable.”

Roy nodded.

“That’s when. No sooner, no later.”

“Okay.”

James didn’t like making the calls. He didn’t even know how the hell it had happened. He, the soft-handed salesman who’d once considered scrubbing his palms with steel wool, was now in charge of a bloody coup against two psychotic killers. And Roy, the burly alpha male from this neck of the woods, was listening and obeying. When had that started happening? And more importantly, when would it stop happening?

The Soviet approached. His shadow crept past the Toyota’s front bumper and grew taller, darker, with sharper edges. James heard the man’s crunching footsteps, the metallic creak of unspooling cable, and the gentle hiss of cowhide packed around a sweaty body and expanding and contracting with every breath. Another sound, too – like skeleton hands clapping. Working his jaw, maybe.

“Wait,” Roy hissed. “We can surprise him with the gun—”

The shadow froze mid-step.

James raised a trembling index finger –
For the sake of everything, shut the hell up
! He could see the top of the Soviet’s head through the Rav4’s pierced windshield, bisected by two jagged cracks. The man stood ten feet away. His eyes were down and something was inching through his reptilian brain. He was replaying and processing what he’d heard, or thought he’d heard. He hunched a bit, bobbed out of view like a shark slipping underwater, and let out a sticky black cough.

Roy looked at James with panic in his eyes.

It was becoming clear that this empty gun was a massive liability and nothing more. It was a situation escalator. The microsecond the Soviet saw it he would open fire and they, all three of them, would be mulched to bloody ribbons against the Toyota. All done. Roll credits. Audience rises, demands money back.

James grimly decided that they needed to grab him when he attached the winching cable and then pull him down behind the car. And keep him there, out of the sniper’s view, while they (hopefully) overpowered the big man. It might have seemed plausible sixty seconds ago but not anymore. He held the pepper spray in his right hand. Crappy Korean multitool blade in his left. Then he sank to his knees, heels arched, coiled to lunge. Time was moving strangely now, at once too fast and too slow. The Soviet would either walk into the trap or he wouldn’t. It was all out of his hands now, out of Roy’s hands, what that hesitant shadow would decide to do.

Come on.

The shadow stood still.

Come on, you asshole.

The right arm raised with a leathery creak, fingers opened spiderlike on the road, and the winching cable dropped. The hook clattered.

What?

Roy looked at James.

“I don’t know,” he mouthed. “I think—”

Footsteps approaching.

The Soviet paced a wide circle around the Toyota and the shadow grew taller, taller, moving away . . . until they finally saw the man, all of nearly seven feet of him, a walking silhouette under the fiery sun. He watched them over his shoulder as he closed the loop and halted maybe ten, twelve feet up the road. Hanging loose in his right hand was a stubby machine pistol with a stick magazine, all right angles and cheaply stamped aluminum, scarred with oily discoloration and razor-thin scratches. It looked illegal. Untouchable in the sunlight, the Soviet fixed his eyes on them and slowly lowered to a crouch on the gravel. His other hand disappeared inside his duster, eyes forward, striking an oddly balletic pose of predatory focus.

Ten feet away. Too far to pepper spray.

He knows we have a gun,
James thought coldly.

“I can feel his eyes on me,” Elle whispered in dreamy singsong.

James tightened his hands into fists behind his back, feeling that sense of powerlessness reach a frustrating new peak. The pepper spray and multitool were concealed for now. Not that it made a difference – the Soviet had a machine gun. Maybe he could arc the pepper spray a bit, aim high and rain it into the man’s eyes? Wishful thinking.

“What’s he doing?” his wife whispered.

“I don’t know.”

The Soviet pulled a yellowed notebook from an inner pocket of his duster. It was crinkled and ragged. It was the notebook from the Fuel-N-Food on the outskirts of Mosby, forever ago. He tucked the machine pistol under his elbow, thumbed the pages, and chewed a pencil that had materialized in his hand from nowhere. He spat a glob of charcoal on the road and James realized his eyes were on Elle again, only Elle, as if she was the last woman on earth.

“I hate being watched,” she said softly.

“I know.” James desperately wished he had bought her the damn ten-foot pepper spray last Christmas. “Trust me. Just trust me.”

She buried her face in his shoulder.

“Third best,” the Soviet said abruptly.

Silence.

James stared blankly.

“Third best,” the Soviet said again. His voice was toneless, uninflected, like a teenager dryly reciting literature he didn’t care for. He didn’t seem to hear his own words. He layered them with no emotion or subtext. He meant exactly what he said and nothing more.

James realized that the Soviet was holding his notebook up and out, and he didn’t remember seeing it open. Under the man’s black fingernails, flapping just a little in the breeze, hung another drawing. There was an inherent beauty in charcoal art; James had always admired the contrast of dagger-sharp lines meeting the watercolor blur of thumbed shadows, and there was plenty of that to appreciate here. It was too far away to discern, even if he squinted, but it looked like a car, a sedan, hurled on its side with bruised doors and messy divots in the ground where it had tumbled.

“Too far away,” James said, but the Soviet ignored him. He was staring at Elle.

She didn’t speak. Had she passed out again?

“Second best.” The man licked his lips, quickly flipped pages and showed a new one. Again, too far away to tell. It looked like a black and white rendition of . . . a city skyline, maybe? Steep angles and corners shaded in deep darkness, with lots of negative space.

No one spoke.

The big man exhaled with frustration, tilted the notepad back toward himself, and scanned crackling pages forward and back for a long minute before deciding on another and revealing it with a showman’s flourish. “First best,” he said with a grin. Like a child presenting a glowing report card.

James narrowed his eyes but couldn’t make it out at twelve feet. He didn’t even have the energy to imagine what it might be. It looked like a mushy inkblot test of confused shapes.

“Just tow the car,” Roy said. “Please.”

The Soviet slapped his notebook shut and stuffed the mess back inside his duster. His eyes looked hurt now, and James felt a strange twinge of sympathy. Even psychos felt the sting of a mediocre review. Hell, maybe psychos felt it worse.

“I like that one,” Elle said.

He looked up at her.

She hesitated. “I . . . it’s good.”

He canted his head, skeptical but also, like all artists, eternally hopeful.

She raised a hand, palm out, and lowered her voice: “Bring it closer.”