EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (25 page)

24

Elle saw the keys.

Ten feet away, in the cone of illumination produced by the miniature keychain flashlight she’d discovered under the deputy’s driver seat, they glimmered silver in the packed soil by the road’s edge.

Coming closer.

She gripped the flashlight with her mouth as she crawled and the checkered metal scraped against her teeth. With her cuffed hands forward like a swimmer preparing a dolphin dive (much like running, she
hated
swimming) she pushed forward on knees and elbows, croaking dry breaths and feeling more cold and uninvited air ballooning her chest every second.

Closer.
Then she could breathe again.

She didn’t care that Tapp could probably see her in his night scope. She would rather probably die out here than certainly die in the police car. At least out here she had a paper-thin,
it’s-not-impossible-it’s-just-unlikely
shred of hope. She couldn’t believe she was doing this, crawling through mud with a flashlight in her teeth and her tortured breaths whistling like a wet flute. Mud in her hair. Black fingernails. She must look like a ghost from a J-horror movie. She didn’t even feel like herself. Not her real self, at least. She felt like the badass, blood-soaked version of Elle that James had imagined when he saw her eat shit on that hurdle track. Elle Eversman: the girl who
wanted it.

What do I want?

I want kids.

I want kids with James.

I want kids so bad.

No matter if her uterus was made of arsenic, or Drain-O, or whatever the hell her problem was that baffled every doctor in California and kept her grandmother’s Ark-of-the-Covenant crib empty and desolate inside a “baby room” that slowly morphed into a home office before finally being reduced to ashes. She would keep trying. They would keep trying. And for God’s sake, she would name every one of them with James, because we’re all nothing before we’re something, and every chance of existence, even the tiniest and most blade-thin, deserves to be believed in.

Here lies Elle Eversman. She gave a damn.

Closer . . .

The handcuff keys reflected a ring of light and she let the flashlight drop from her mouth. Were her hands not clasped together, the keys would be close enough to reach right now, but she had to make one final lunge.

She did this and reached for them with both hands—

And she heard a
gunshot
over Deputy Doogie Howser’s radio. Not the hollow knuckle-cracking pop of distant gunfire – no, this was booming, deep, close. It was as powerful and unsympathetic as a car accident. Every detail smeared and her mind whiplashed from the roof of the Whimsical Pig with James, to the speeds of sound and light, to a single juddering train of thoughts, tugged by the slamming beats of her heart:

Gunshot.

At me.

Move.

* * *

Rarely did a shot feel so right to Tapp. The trigger broke as cleanly as the tick of a pendulum. He hardly registered the recoil against his shoulder, or the thunderclap report, or even the warm cloud of rich smells – charcoal, gunpowder, rainwater sizzled to steam – and he was already unseating his hand from the grip to work the bolt while leaning back into the BlackEye viewfinder. He found her again in his green world, doubled over and crawling, unaware that the end of her life was less than a second away, racing toward her at thousands of miles per—

She dodged it.

She had started moving the microsecond his trigger broke, and she was now completing her somersault. She hurtled sideways and the .338 Lapua Magnum round skimmed over her shoulder (maybe slicing off a centimeter of skin, but probably not) and touched down with a spray of wet dirt.

She fucking dodged my shot.

She couldn’t have seen the distant pinprick of the muzzle flash; she was facing the wrong direction. It couldn’t have been dumb luck, either. There was a purity of intention to her movement. She had somehow known exactly when Tapp had fired and removed herself from the bullet’s path.

He clacked the bolt home and prepared a frustrated follow-up shot.

But now Elle Eversman had sprung to her knees and was groping for something in the soupy green beside the deputy’s body, silhouetted in curls of smoke from the destroyed car. Then she thrashed upright with something black in her hands. It was too grainy, too low-resolution to make out in the six-power BlackEye at this range – and then she raised it to her mouth, and he knew at once that it was Deputy Koal’s radio. Suddenly he understood everything.

Radio waves.

A radio wave travels faster than a bullet. The instant his primer struck, the gunshot traveled twenty meters down the hill to James’ stolen radio, passed through the Motorola eight hundred meters away at Deputy Koal’s feet, and reached the woman’s ears three-quarters of a second before the bullet. That’s how she knew. For a sweet moment, he was relieved – overwhelmingly relieved – that he hadn’t actually missed. He was off the hook. James, in a truly impressive final sacrifice, must have died with a stiffening finger wrapped around the Motorola’s PUSH TO TALK button, to secure his wife one last shot (ha-
ha
!) at survival.

Then Elle spoke into the radio and Tapp heard her crackling voice: “James?”

It came from
right behind him
.

He froze.

He took in a half breath and held it, stemming back a wall of nervous pressure in the back of his throat. Then he closed his eyes, willed his heart into a tight rhythm, and methodically scanned his senses, through the gentle patter of the rain and the dripping rocks, the settling flood basins, the flexing grass, the low rush of distant wind, and recognized . . . wait . . . maybe . . . yes, there it is . . . the audio shadow of someone standing behind him, over him, with trickling rainwater tapering and beading on a bladed point.

Tapp had been ready to die before, but suddenly he wasn’t. Suddenly he was terrified, and words burbled in his throat as he started to say, “Please—”

But fingers had already twisted his scalp, his head wrenched back to face the sky and a pierce of reflected starlight, and simple, childish fear was the second-to-last thing to go through William Tapp’s head.

25

Checking the sniper’s pulse was redundant but James did it anyway, and when he was certain it was over, he let the scarecrow wrist drop. There was surprisingly little blood. He wanted to sit down and rest, but he needed to go back to Elle. He had to see her. So without even catching his breath, he turned and began to descend the hill.

What do you remember?

You came on the radio. You said you’d killed him.

He tugged off the yellow road crew jacket and dropped it behind him, rumpling like a tent in the wind. Then he tore off the last snakeskin peel of duct tape and let the steel plate, pockmarked with thousands of old bullet impacts (and one new one), clang down to the rocks at his feet. He didn’t feel any chest pain yet, but he would later learn that the kinetic force of that cigar-sized .338 Lapua Magnum round exploding off his makeshift body armor had liquefied the skin over his sternum into a black blood blister, and beneath, bruised five ribs and cracked two. None of the medical staff would believe him when he told them he hadn’t felt a touch of pain until he was inside the ambulance. All he could think about at that moment was Elle, and her weak electric voice, growing weaker every second.

I don’t even remember what we talked about, James.

Anything. Anything to hear your voice. I didn’t care. I . . . I’m pretty sure I asked you what your favorite tree was.

I think I said maple.

You did.

He passed the remains of the building. Bonfire embers under a collapsed skeleton. The motor pool was scattered like blackened toy cars, and the Soviet’s jeep was parked close enough to the explosion that it was now burning with the bodies of Ash, Glen, and Saray inside. Glass melted out of the windows in ropy brown curls. With the firelight on his back he realized he was still carrying the sniper’s screwdriver in livid knuckles, stained with blood, so he dropped it, too, and although he would later describe exactly where he had done this (at the arroyo’s edge, just left of the trestle), the investigation never found it. One cop would later remark with sagging shoulders that the desert was a vast place, bigger than acreage can measure, and some things just hit the ground, fell through, and kept falling.

Then you stopped talking to me.

“Elle?”

He broke into a sprint. The trestle was behind him now as he followed Shady Slope Road’s long crawl uphill. Somewhere around there he lost a shoe.

I was so afraid. I had to find you. Nothing else mattered.

He came up on the police car, tangled in smoke-swirls and backlit by a strip of naked sky. Although he had crossed over a half mile of Mojave land, for some reason this final fifty yards or so took the longest. He broke into a sprint and it was dreamlike, like running underwater. His hoarse breaths raced out over the plains to vanish into a vast darkness.

He found her curled up near the car while halfhearted flicks of lightning skimmed the horizon. She wasn’t moving. Her muddy hair covered her face. Panic rising now. He remembered very little of this, just rolling her over under camera-flashes of distant light, and holding her small hands and whispering her name like he was waking her from a nap. Another awful moment stretched and cemented into forever.

Then through a crack in her hair, her eye opened, looked up and found him, and he felt her breath on his cheeks. He began to laugh and so did she, stupid giddy laughter, like they were daring the darkness to produce another William Tapp.

What were we laughing about?

I don’t know.

They watched the last lightning and counted seconds until the thunder – but there was no thunder, and finally, nothing but a churning sky and handfuls of gritty sideways rain. Around then the second responder arrived, a state patrolman named Denny Hatcher, who cut through the pass all the way from Highway 93, and his headlights came down the road like white POW camp searchlights. James didn’t believe they existed until he saw their shadows playing across Elle’s face, because she was the only real thing in his world.

* * *

It started with a modest printout of a half dozen names safety-pinned to a bulletin board in the Las Vegas department’s second-floor lobby. The list grew by two or three names a day as dental records returned with matches to decades-old missing persons’ reports – mostly late-night abductions from homes and accident scenes. Idaho. Washington. Louisiana. Texas. A great many from Nevada and New Mexico, where travelers were funneled to Shady Slope Road via false detours. Every time the spool of wasted life looked to be finally waning, another DNA test would net a match and another cluster of names would appear – most recently, an entire family slain last year, including a little girl aged ten. Overnight it became an unofficial shrine of sorts that the local affiliate cameras would never see, the bench underneath stacked with candles and chalky flowers strung in bouquets. Some days the detectives lit the wicks on their way in and wax pooled rainbow patterns on the linoleum. The janitors didn’t dare touch it. The list was appended from the top, so the first-identified victims, bodies most intact, were at the bottom of the paper, now three pages and unfurling like a calculator receipt:

SARAY HARRIS

ASHLEY HARRIS

LEROY BURKE

GLEN FLOYD

Here James stood, and every time he glanced back at the paper, he swore he would see JAMES EVERSMAN and EILEEN EVERSMAN in their designated places. He couldn’t imagine being the one who broke this chain of violence, and it was much easier to simply believe he hadn’t.

Fifty-seven. Counting you.

The identified number had reached thirty-nine, as of new results that morning – but a sergeant James had met for coffee the day before supposed it would never reach fifty-five confirmed victims. The swathe of murders was too vast, spanned too many jurisdictions, and pierced too deep into the past. Too many partial remains, pulverized by fire and time, would never be identified. Others would never be discovered at all; lives and faces and dreams sealed under shoveled sand. And for what?

Sheriff Tapp was, by all accounts, a screw-up. Mosby regulars described him as a fussy little potbellied man – something like Friar Tuck in uniform – deeply uncomfortable with human interaction, and apparently that worked both ways (
Christ, he was like the social equivalent of tear gas,
said one highway patrolman from Prim). He had been elected two years ago with a whopping haul of eighteen votes. His two-man department was an inefficient, unchecked mess. He had amassed over sixty thousand dollars in credit card debt, mostly from online purchases of shooting gizmos with long, technical names and five-star customer reviews. Never married, rejected from the armed forces for medical infirmity back in the seventies. His single-unit under the Mosby water tower had the look of a college dorm in September, all scrubbed for the incoming freshmen – his walls bleached, his floor bare, his fridge stocked with apple juice and energy drinks, his twin bed dutifully folded and pressed with a tucked pillow awaiting his return.

Tapp wasn’t a demon, but he wasn’t quite human, either. He was something. No wonder the Koals – two dim and childlike men – were drawn into his orbit.

He was
something.

Elle took James’ hand and her breath tickled the back of his neck as she whispered: “Let’s get gone.”

It was five past seven. The building hummed with gurgling coffee machines and unlocking doors. The city outside was still pewters and grays but the sun would bring color. She tugged his hand again, impatiently now, and as he gave in and left the shrine behind him, he resolved to do that sheriff a final and ultimate insult: to forget him completely.

* * *

The horizon unfurled a roll of blacktop.

Elle sang along with every song in a fearless way, and when the last radio station crackled away she sang a few from memory. Some James had never heard. Some were from her best friend’s band in college. One, in particular, he recognized because it was the song she had described from her prom, her favorite – something about
finding you in the dark
– the one they never got to dance to. It somehow had never even played at their wedding, even though it was on the playlist. She sang it twice, and he pitched in on the final chorus, and then she fell into a warm silence with her head on his shoulder.

The road hummed. He was waiting for her to say something – something to confirm a strange little hunch he had nurtured ever since leaving Las Vegas.

She didn’t. By the end of the first day I-40 had led them to Flagstaff, Arizona, where they stopped in a dive bar with a stuffed rattlesnake in the window (“Eastern Diamondback,” she had whispered as they passed it). Dollar beers, shrill karaoke and greasy fries. They laughed about things from college, her old boss at the reptile store, and of course, the laxative brownies to which they owed their adventure together. As the night blurred they talked about Glen Floyd and whether they had done right by him in his final hour, and the last thing Elle had told Roy after he came back for her –
you’re not an asshole.
She swallowed tears and wished she had said something different, something sweeter or more profound, but James reckoned that in this world not being an asshole was somehow good enough. The crowd was thinning out now, and he drank while Elle restricted herself to Diet Coke, which he noticed. They made love in the rental Audi and slept in the back seats. Dawn broke through the windshield and their necks ached.

The next day went fast – Winsbrow, Gallup, Albuquerque. Hours rushed by and the desert swept away like a tugged blanket. The ridges flattened as the rocks retreated back into the land and the world turned over to reveal soft sheets of something they hadn’t seen in weeks – the color green. He clicked off the air conditioning and unrolled his window. It felt momentous, as if they were re-pressurizing a space shuttle returning from the edge of the universe. He expected her to say it then, but she didn’t.

So he held his tongue as the blue markers ticked and the day faded. A state line passed without ceremony, and then another. The sun lowered behind flattening agricultural basins and flashed mottled orange behind rising deciduous trees. Shadows grew and deepened until they were silhouettes against sunlit wheat, racing past at seventy miles an hour. Finally, she said it.

“Names.” She cradled her stomach. “Let’s name this one.”

THE END

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