EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (21 page)

It felt like a receipt, but bigger. Thin paper, slippery and crackling. He started to say, “He—,” but his voice cut out and she felt a rush of his body heat envelop her. At first it reminded Elle of urine, a splashing hotness, and then she blinked and realized it was slopped all over her, coating her eyelids, sticking in her hair, hardening on her lips with the taste of copper. She looked up and saw Roy was still standing but only barely. Most of the letters in I PISS EXCELLENCE were now gone. His hand was still on hers where he’d handed her that mysterious paper, and his fingers now squeezed tourniquet-tight, and in them she felt his heartbeat. A slowing metronome.

He tried to speak again. “He—”

His warmth scattered from the air and his blood turned icy on her skin. Elle’s mind sluggishly processed this new information –
Tapp can see in the dark
– and knew she should be breaking away and running for her life, but what was the point of dying tired? There were only football fields of open ground in all directions. So she lingered in this dreamlike moment with the dying mechanic and for some reason, all she could think about were Roy’s words after he’d chickened out of running for Glen’s revolver, emasculated and hurting:
I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of dying an asshole.

She tucked the paper into her pocket, unpeeled his fingers from hers, and looked him in the eye.

“You’re not an asshole,” she told him.

She wasn’t sure if Roy even heard. Tapp’s second shot jerked his head backward, as if tugged by a chain, and when it recoiled back to face her it was deflated and leaking, no longer human.

* * *

Tapp experienced two distinct surprises.

The first was the woman. As the last neon bits of Roy Burke speckled the ground around her, she rocked on her heels, wiped little clam chowder chunks of viscera from her eyes, and turned slowly to face his night vision scope. She wasn’t looking at Tapp, exactly – without first seeing a muzzle flash, she couldn’t possibly locate him on the black horizon – but the gunshot had thrown around just enough sound to give her a general direction. She was helpless, blind inside his green x-ray, but her face turned to stone. She wasn’t afraid of him.

Her lips moved in an exaggerated way, like she wanted him to read them. At this range it was impossible to know, but Tapp thought he saw:
My husband is going to kill you.

Pretty cute.

It did raise a troubling question. Why had James chosen to stay in the arroyo while Roy and his wife fled? Had he been injured in the crash? Was he lying in wait to ambush Svatomir close-quarters for his Saiga 12? An armed James would be bad, but not terrible. A shotgun versus a night-scoped rifle at four hundred meters – yeah, good luck with that.

Tapp knew the hardest part, zeroing this new BlackEye optic, was over now. When you mounted a scope on a rifle you had to calibrate the crosshairs to zero exactly on the rifle’s natural point of aim (layman’s terms: where the bullet goes). Often the only way to do this was by shooting at a sheet of paper and then setting your crosshairs to the hole. His shortcut here had been a bore sight – a .338 cartridge-shaped gadget designed to lock inside the chamber and project a red laser dot. While he listened to James’ hand-crushing story, he had read this dot at two hundred meters off the south wall of the bungalow (he thought he saw a flicker of movement behind the motor pool, but dismissed it) and adjusted the BlackEye for a loose sight-in. This, combined with the stored ballistic data on his handheld computer, allowed him to fire a six hundred and seventy-two meter center mass hit on Roy. A second adjustment for elevation and wind, and he popped the mechanic’s head like a grape. Easy.

My husband is going to kill you.

No worries. Tapp would finish her off quick.

He was just crawling the BlackEye reticule – a bladed red chevron – up the woman’s body and teasing the trigger with the very tip of his finger, when his Motorola crackled and he received his second surprise.

James’ voice: “I’m in your shed. I just turned off your cell phone jammer.”

20

“Sir?” The dispatcher hesitated. “Who are you talking to?”

James crouched on the concrete floor with the EMS dispatch lady in his left hand and Tapp, stunned to silence, in his right.

“Sir?”

He had already told her everything in a long, breathless spurt. He was shocked she’d understood any of it. It had taken three tries to enunciate Shady Slope Road. Twice she had urged him to slow down and breathe. He heard a keyboard click-clacking under her voice and it gave him a small comfort to know that this was being recorded. Somewhere in Paiute County, Nevada, there now existed a log of this nightmare.

So yes, the police were coming now, but how soon? How many? How many under-equipped Deputy Doogie Howsers or highway patrolmen would it take to fight a scoped killer on his own turf? Tapp was comfortably roosted and overlooked miles of open ground. He could see all approaches. He would spot them before they even knew they were at the right place and his supersonic bullets would smash windshields and perforate flesh like jelly. It wouldn’t even be fair. It sure as hell wouldn’t be a gunfight. It would be more of the same, more of Tapp’s rigged game, while husbands, sons, and fathers walked themselves into the meat grinder. When the good guys finally surrounded him and prevailed, they probably wouldn’t even have the satisfaction of gunning him down. Tapp would simply off himself on the hilltop with his last bullet. Like the lowest form of human life, the school shooter.

He realized it had been a long time and the killer hadn’t spoken.

“Is . . . is Elle still alive?” he asked on the Motorola. He was terrified of the answer.

Silence.

Say something, Tapp.

The dispatcher had fallen quiet, too. He could hear her faint breathing as she listened. Nothing moved. The world dared itself to be still. The silence made James flinch in anticipation of whatever would break it. He tasted greasy nausea, rising in contracting tugs, while this awkward moment dragged and dragged. Somewhere on the north side of the building, a metal sheet warped in the falling temperature like a big drum.

“Sir?” the dispatcher asked again, but he ignored her and squeezed Tapp’s radio until it trembled. He bit his lip to hold his jaw steady and felt a trickle of sweat run down the bridge of his nose. It clicked on the floor.

Please, you bastard. Say something.

The quiet was powerful now. It wasn’t an absence of something. It was a presence. It thickened the air into Jell-O. Somewhere up the hill outside, close but not close enough, Tapp was recalculating his strategy, rerouting his plans to accommodate this unexpected new wrinkle. If he hadn’t already, he might shoot Elle right now. He might try to broker a truce. Or, more likely, he might just descend the hill, kick down the door, and execute James right here in his shed.

Please—

“Alright, James.” The killer exhaled. His voice was utterly calm, placid, bereft of emotion. The polar opposite of how James felt. “Are you listening?”

He fumbled for the TALK button: “Yes.”

“If you call the police,” Tapp said, “I will shoot your wife.”

The dispatcher again: “Sir, if you can hear me,
please
—”

James closed a fist around his cell phone to muffle the woman’s voice and held a breath until his lungs bloated. He needed to decide how to answer Tapp’s ultimatum. He thought for a few good seconds and finally closed his eyes and raised the Motorola to his peeling lips like it was a microphone. He knew there was no coming back from this.

“If you shoot my wife,” he said quietly, “I will call the police.”

Distant thunder rumbled.

His mind whispered:
Except I already did.

“Okay,” Tapp said.

“Okay?”

“Okay.” The sniper coughed. “I have night vision and you have a cell phone. We have . . . a truce, then.”

Another croak of thunder.

James was a god-awful liar. His cheeks were already burning, swelling into feverish blood balloons. How was it so easy when you were a kid? He was so bad at lying that he was almost physically allergic to it, and he hoped,
prayed
, that he was pulling it off right now.

“Well, hell.” Tapp exhaled stiffly, like he was making small talk in an elevator. “This is . . . really awkward.”

“Sir?” The dispatcher’s voice chirped through his fingers. She sniffed, fighting back sympathetic tears: “If you can’t talk right now, just press a button . . .”

“James?” Tapp said.

“Yeah?”

The dispatcher’s voice peaked with alarm. “Sir, units are coming, okay? We’re
going to help you—”

“I’m going to kill you,” the sniper said with metallic clarity. His voice seemed to meld into the circuitry to form a new sound, precise and inhuman. “Don’t for one microsecond think that we’re on the same level now. I am the end of your world. Start counting, because every one of your heartbeats is numbered. Every . . . mouthful of air, every electrical signal in your brain, every second of consciousness, all numbered. I can’t tell you exactly what the numbers are right now, but I assure you, they’re fuckin’ small.”

He’ll kill Elle
, James realized in a stab of terror. He would kill her the instant the police arrived. What else would he do? There was no other outcome here.
How could I be so stupid?
This isn’t a truce. It’s a ticking bomb
.

Right now, somewhere close, the first responding police cruiser raced through the night, lightbar splashing red and blue, a screaming beacon visible for miles, just dwindling minutes and seconds from shattering this ceasefire. He had bought Elle time, but how much? How long until an incensed Tapp spotted police lights in his night vision, realized he’d been played, and shot Elle?

Shit, shit,
shit
.

He set the Motorola on cement and held his cell phone in both hands. “This is important,” he told the dispatcher with a shiver in his voice. “How soon . . . how soon are they getting here?”

“I . . .”

“How much time do I have?” Another roll of thunder came as he spoke, closer.

“Oh.” She smacked her lips.

“What?”

“Oh . . . Okay—”

“
What is it
?”

“Strange luck.” She lowered her voice. “Sheriff’s deputy just pinged back.”

“How many?”

“We only have one, dear.” The woman turned uncertain, as if she suddenly whiffed something rotten. “He’s on patrol, on the Plainsway. He knows the area and he’s . . . he said he’s almost there.”

* * *

It was just beginning to rain when Elle saw a police car at the rim of the valley. First came the pulsing lightbar, and then white headlights up and over the rise. Dust burning red in the taillights. She hit her knees, caught herself on her palms, and choked down a wheezing gasp. She had to blink before believing it was real.

The cop descended Shady Slope Road and flicked on his high beams. She hesitated there, half-crouched, the better part of a mile downhill and a few dozen yards west of the road. The lope of his motor flattened against the plains. She found herself moving automatically toward the road, to intercept the cop, without even thinking about it. The way mosquitos are drawn to a bug-zapper, and the parallel wasn’t lost on her.

Why hasn’t Tapp shot me?

The question of the day. The runners up were: How did this cop get here? Why hadn’t Tapp shot him? And the returning classic: where was James?

As she half-ran, half-staggered, the rumble of deluge came sweeping in from the south, rattling the earth and splashing grit on her ankles. It instantly overtook her, the combined din of a million raindrops pummeling the Mojave floor. Brass marbles pounded the back of her neck, tapped her shoulders, and kicked up jets of dust at her feet like the bullet impacts back at the arroyo.

Already the first chills vibrated through her bones and she felt stranded in a dream. Nightmare logic took over, where things happened for no reason, locations shifted under your feet, and faces morphed like goblins. Nothing was real.

Where the hell was James?
What
was happening?

As the cop’s headlights drew closer, a silent fork of lightning crossed the sky.

Roy’s paper – allegedly the key to everything, the ultimate insight into Tapp’s power – crinkled uselessly in her hand. She couldn’t read it in the dark.

* * *

James found something eerie in the way his cell phone died. With a gentle pop, the EMS dispatcher was torn away mid-sentence. The feedback slurped away and suddenly he was sitting on the floor with a plastic briquette to his ear, alone under the machine-gun clack of rain on the metal roof.

Not alone, he realized. Worse than alone.

“James.” Tapp surfaced again.

He picked up the radio. “What?”

“You lied to me.” The sniper exhaled and flushed the connection with static. His voice shuddered and he sounded oddly wounded. Like a kid who had just tumbled off his bike, fighting tears to look tough for his friends. “I know that now. So now . . . now I need to admit that I lied to you as well. And it’s only fair, now that your cards are down, that I show you mine.”

Thunder growled, perfectly timed.

“Yeah? What now?” James forced a hollow laugh and tried to fathom how this day could get any worse, or how this blackened shadow of a man, with his childish puns and his one-mile kill shots and his goddamn
night vision
, could become anything more alien and horrible.

“You have a day job, James?”

“I used to.”

“What?”

“Account executive. I mean . . . it’s a salesman, basically.”

“I have a day job, too.” Tapp cleared phlegm from his throat. “Inside the shed with you there’s a reflective road jacket.”

“Where?”

“By the door.”

“I see it.”

“Look behind it.”

James pulled it aside and saw a sandy brown uniform folded neatly over dark slacks. It smelled like seat leather and sweat. A black gear belt rattled on the wall with an empty holster, a canister of pepper spray, and a dangling shoulder radio on a spiral cord. The nametag, glimmering in the swampy light, read SHERIFF BILL TAPP.

“I know,” the sniper said. “It’s a
cop-out
.”