EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (16 page)

Roy shuddered.

Elle pressed her hands to her mouth. “How does he
know this
?”

“Kill James Eversman.” Tapp sniffed and spat. “Kill him now.”

Silence.

Roy quietly set the radio down.

“I . . .” James hesitated. What can you possibly say to that?

Roy stared at the radio on the ground for a long moment, broad shoulders sloped, eyelids fluttering, and then he slowly crawled his eyes up to find James. His palms were flat on his knees but his knuckles had subtly tightened. Gears were turning behind his eyes.

“Trust me,” James said unconvincingly. “Just . . . trust me.”

He tried to put himself in Roy’s shoes but couldn’t. A small part of him wondered if maybe this was the preferable outcome. By getting killed here by Roy he could potentially save two lives. Viewed from another angle, wasn’t that the morally correct choice? Sacrifice of self for strangers? Maybe the old James would have bought that. This new James sure didn’t. In fact, new James was just getting pissed off.

“Trust me,” he said again with more force. “I’ll get us out.”

“No,” Roy said airily. “I don’t think you will.”

James realized the screwdriver – the flathead screwdriver from his tool bag – was in Roy’s left hand, tucked in such a way that his wrist almost concealed it. Without question, that was deliberate. The bladed edge caught a gleam of sunlight, looking quite sharp. In twenty-twenty hindsight, it would have been a much more effective weapon against the Soviet than that stupid Korean multitool. And now here it was, in the hands of a man much bigger and stronger than James.

“Kill him,” the radio crackled between them. “Roy, what are you waiting for?”

“Roy, I’m asking you a question.” James looked at him bluntly, feeling Elle’s fingertips digging protectively into his shoulders. “Do you want to kill me? Or him? Because we’re not escaping the sniper anymore. We’re
charging
him. We’re going to trick him, and lure him, and you and I – we’re going to kill the bastard. And I need you on my side to pull it off.”

“You’re a dangerous optimist,” Roy said grimly.

“You’re goddamn right I’m dangerous.”

“Stop it.”

“Are you with me or not?”

But big, tough, tattooed Roy had no fight in his eyes. They were just melancholy pools. “We’re dead. I’m sorry, but we don’t stand a—”

“He’s
coming back
!” Elle pointed hard. “He has his gun and he’s coming back.”

“Help me push the car.” James shoved past Roy, scraping his heels, and braced both palms flat to the hot tailgate, half-expecting to feel a screwdriver plunge into his back. “You’ll just have to kill me later.”

* * *

“Go. Go. Go.”

In the disconnected silence of the scope, Tapp watched Svatomir race back to Shady Slope Road, kicking his knees high in the grass. The Mac-11 was reassembled, back in play on today’s chessboard, and carried now over his head, barrel up, his sausage finger curled stupidly around the trigger like the amateur he was. His free hand clamped to his gut like a runner fending off a hellish side cramp. He was certainly wounded from that earlier scuffle with James, but how badly?

The Toyota bumped a few inches forward.

Tapp blinked –
squish
.

He rolled into his rifle scope and glided his black razor lines over the vehicle, its suspension now rocking back to stillness. He waited for it to happen again and didn’t have to wait long. The yellow car budged again, harder, like an invisible fault line had shifted the ground beneath it. The rear end lifted, the front tires sank and dug into earth, and a wave of accumulated dust slid down the windshield.

Squish-squish.
He didn’t know what to make of this.

Svatomir saw it too and hesitated. He was still fifty meters east with the falling sun in his eyes. Even if he took a knee and a firm two-hand hold, taking them out with his squirmy little .380 was unlikely. More so, given his refusal to pick up even the most basic principles of marksmanship. He was a hip-shooter through and through, preferring to spit lead and fire with his back arched and his teeth bared. He used automatic pistols and automatic shotguns, close-quarters, spray-and-pray, quantity over quality, all of it. He had no respect for the nuance of the rifle, and right now, Tapp was wishing he did.

“Svatomir, hurry.”

The Toyota lurched again and again in rhythmic shocks. Drawn tight across the badlands, three shadows huddled into one. The front tires fought their ruts and pushed, exhumed waves of stubborn earth, and tore fresh gashes in the road. Under a growing cloud of dust he saw flashes of motion, arms and legs and fingers a few inches behind the tailgate, but nothing to fire at. Just images, half-drawn shapes, uncertainties, and teases. Each motion wrested the rubber a few inches from the quicksand soil, and a few more, and suddenly the vehicle was moving. Rolling.

They were pushing the car.

Toward him.

His heart solidified into lead, his nerves tightened, and his rifle discharged without permission.

* * *

“Get inside, Elle.”

“Now?”

“Get inside. We’ll keep pushing.”

She broke away from James and Roy and sprinted along the Rav4’s safe side. She went for the driver door, which was hanging open clumsily, framing the far wall of the valley with jagged glass teeth. It was oddly beautiful – distant cliffs shadowed in firelight against a graying sky – and for a sad second her mind darted to her destroyed cameras, her ruined portfolio on the side of the road, her failures.

Molten pain stabbed in her chest. She couldn’t breathe quite right, nor run quite as fast as she knew she could. Her body felt wrong. Her legs were spaghetti and for a sickening moment, she nearly lost balance and fell under the back tire. Wouldn’t that be great?
Here lies Elle Eversman: Ran herself over, somehow.

She reached for the driver door but it was just beyond her fingertips.

The vehicle was rolling fast beside her now, grinding along the beveled edge of the road. It was eerily quiet. No driver, no loping engine, only the rush of wind in her ears and the gentle crumble of packed earth beneath tires. Every sound scattered into the desert without an echo.

“Almost fast enough!” James shouted behind her.

Roy said something else. She didn’t hear what it was.

She was reaching for the driver door a second time when it whipped shut and a hail of glass fragments exploded in her face. She flinched, blocking crunchy shards with her elbow. Something exploded into the ground behind her and pelted her back with rock chips. She lowered her arm and told herself to keep running for that door.

Tapp missed.

I’m okay. Keep running.
She lunged for the door handle (third attempt) but missed again, stumbled, and lost a few paces. Her chest throbbed with every breath, filling her mind with red. God, it hurt. She couldn’t keep up.

“Fast enough!” Roy yelled. “Everyone in.”

“No.” It was James again. “No, not yet.”

“It’s fine—”

“Not fast enough.”

Elle dove for the door handle and caught it. The car seemed plenty fast to her. She swung the door open and hurled herself inside, bruising both shins on the frame and landing directly on the shifter. The metal knob jammed into her breast like a dagger. She gasped.

“It’s off the road!” Roy panted somewhere behind her. “Elle, steer us.”

She slipped her legs inside, tucked her knees to the pedals and grabbed the wheel. No power steering. The familiar contours barely budged. James screamed something behind her, lost in the noise. She knuckled both hands on the steering wheel, braced herself to the floor, and threw her stomach and spine into it until . . . yes, yes, she forced it to give and heard the crunching gravel change pitch. The tires rediscovered Shady Slope Road – first the right, then the left.

“Great!” Roy opened the side door and she felt the Toyota rock as he crashed into the back seats. “Great job, Elle.”

“James!” She lost track of him. “Where is he?”

“I . . .” Roy gasped. “Oh, shit.”

“Did we leave him?”

“Shit.”

Panic rose inside her. “Did
you
leave him?”

“I don’t—”

She pivoted on her knees and raised her head, craned her neck to see over and around the driver headrest, blinking in the amber warmth of the setting sun. Then a hand grabbed a fistful of her hair and slammed her face-down into the seat, her teeth clicking against shards of glass and plastic, and she recognized her husband’s voice, calm but urgent, in her left ear:

“Get down. This is gonna be bad.”

15

James had run along the unprotected side of the Toyota and hurled himself over the passenger seat, his legs dangling out the door. A Fritos bag crackled under his knee. One foot skimmed the road and kicked pinging rocks against the doors. He pressed Elle down into the driver seat, his palm to the back of her neck, crushing her low beneath the dash, low, low, low, as low as they could possibly squeeze.

“James—”

Even injured, the Soviet had closed the distance quickly. He reached Shady Slope Road’s left shoulder and took a firing stance, machine pistol wrapped in beefy hands, his lips curled, trail duster flaring out like a cape. That was the last thing James had seen through the broken windows – a man shaded Rottweiler black and brown, flash-burnt into his mind – before he slammed his head down to the seat beside Elle’s. There was an uneasy silence where he was expecting a gunshot and nothing happened. Then it did.

The subgun screamed a shrill rattle, like a soda can filled with pocket change and violently shaken. Swarms of little impacts peppered the Rav4 above and around them, ripping frothy tunnels in the seats and headrests, punching holes in cardboard and finished wood, and pulverizing the windshield in a crystal shower. The air thickened with splinters and tufts of bright yellow seat foam. It went on and on – like furniture tumbling down endless stairs – as more and more bullets, more than James ever imagined could fit inside a handheld weapon, growled and hissed through the air. Another window imploded. The back passenger door warped and snapped open. The rearview mirror dropped to the seat beside his cheek, fissured with cracks. In all the noise and violence, he held his head close to Elle’s, his scalp against hers, because she was the only thing in this disintegrating world that mattered.

Finally, silence. He smelled burnt plastic, burnt fabric, burnt hair.

“Everyone still alive?”

Elle picked gummy glass shards from her hair. “Alive.”

“I’m okay,” Roy called from the back seat.

James bounced upright and clicked the passenger door shut. It had two blistered holes punched through the handhold. With his nose to the dashboard, careful to keep his scalp below Tapp’s sight, he spotted the Soviet in the side view mirror. He had turned and was running back to his jeep. He flicked his subgun sharply to the right, throwing a spent magazine, and plucked a new one from his left.

The Rav4 hit a dirt bank and jolted. The mirror flashed sunlight.

“We almost lost the road.”

“I got it.” Elle twisted her body and raised one eye over the dashboard, correcting the wheel with gritted teeth.

He pressed the rearview mirror into her hand. “Use this to see.”

“I am
so
tired of being shot at today.”

“Don’t touch the brakes. Don’t slow down. We can’t lose our momentum,” James said. The chassis banged against another pothole and something tore loose and dragged underneath with a vibrating metal scream. The rest of the glass fell out of the rear passenger window. The car was rattling apart, one piece at a time.

And worse, it was definitely slowing. Then what?

“Not fast enough,” Elle said. “We’re stopping.”

Roy contributed his obligatory bitch: “I could get out and run faster.”

“Feel free.” James brushed a pool of glass off the speedometer but the needle hung at zero. He estimated they were rolling five, six miles an hour at the very most. And bleeding more precious momentum every second on the mucky road, which might as well have been made of sand.

“The road steepens.” Elle braced the rearview mirror against the curve of the dashboard like a periscope. “I can see it gets steeper, going down into the valley. We’ll pick up more speed, if we can just get to it.”

James nodded hopefully.

“Then what?” she asked. “We crash into the gully?”

“Crash isn’t the best word.”

“It hasn’t been the best day.”

He leaned forward and kissed her, because now seemed like an appropriate time to do so – in a powerless car guided only by a mirror, with one murderer somewhere behind them and another concealed a mile ahead. He had no plan. He wouldn’t dare think more than thirty seconds ahead. Every idea and every move was an improvised reaction to a world under Tapp’s command and closing on all sides. James whispered a little prayer somewhere in the back of his mind. He wasn’t even sure he believed in a higher power but here it was, a simple, modest plea:
God, please keep me thirty seconds ahead of the curve.

The Toyota spent its last gasp of momentum and scraped to a halt. Everyone gasped. The trailing dust cloud caught up, swept past, and settled.

James punched the glove box. “Shit.”

Elle sighed. “So . . . we relocated ourselves a hundred feet
closer
to the sniper.”

“Basically, yeah.”

“Goddamnit.”

“We have to . . .” James felt words gunk up in his throat, thick as peanut butter. “We need to get out and push the car again.”

Roy moaned. “Aw, hell.”

James almost asked what it was, and then he recognized the familiar throaty roar of the Soviet’s jeep, pounding pistons and spurting hot oil, rumbling up on them from behind. He wasn’t far back up the road, and rapidly gaining.

“Push us,” Elle whispered. “Push us now.”

Something pinged off the hood, like a small rock thrown impossibly fast.

* * *

Tapp threw the bolt and ejected a twirling .338 casing. That was his final shot in this magazine, harmlessly stopped somewhere in the Toyota’s engine block. He didn’t have an angle on them. Even though they were rolling directly toward him, surging on a breathless wave of nuthouse adrenaline, he had no shot on them. James had turned the vehicle into a moving shield because of the
goddamn fucking engine block
—

No matter.

Breathe.

The Toyota had groaned to a halt again, ragged and peppered with dark holes. He guessed that James and the other two were still alive in there, since most of Svatomir’s piss-poor shooting had gravitated over the vehicle’s roof under the Mac-11’s notoriously wild recoil. His jeep was racing up behind the Toyota right now to finish them off, smoothly gliding through glass and prairie like a black shark fin.

See?

It’s fine.

Breathe.

Tapp forced a good ol’ boy chuckle as he peeked through his rangefinder and squirted off an invisible laser at the Toyota’s grill. It bounced back at the speed of light and the digital readout pulsed: 1,402 meters. They had rolled over a hundred meters closer, enough to wreck his presets for elevation and bullet drop. He click-click-clicked his scope and adjusted for eighteen meters of vertical rise. The incline made it trickier because his rangefinder only tracked distance as a straight line, not in relation to the parabolic tug of gravity—

Breathe.

This is what you do.

Let’s not be . . . gun-shy.

He changed magazines without looking; a reptilian muscle memory that lived somewhere low in his brain stem. He knew that with Svatomir bearing down on them, James and the others would need to step outside and push their car again, and this time they would need to push from the sides, not the tailgate. Further, their angle of approach had straightened to follow the road into something damn near perpendicular, giving him a clean shot at both the driver and passenger sides. He didn’t have to wait long. To his delight, the shadows unfurled like twin jack-in-the-boxes, two doors swung open, and in the delicious hot panic that followed, Tapp fired at the first human shape he saw.

* * *

“Fast enough. Get back in!” James shouted with grit in his throat. They had given the passenger doorframe two heaving pushes on the inclined road and (thank God) that was all it needed. They were rolling again. Roy fell back into his seat screaming. Something guttural, howling, deep in his throat. The car bounced off another pothole. Elle cracked her cheekbone on the steering wheel and cursed.

“Roy!” James tucked the door shut behind him. The sun visor dropped on him and he swatted it away. “Roy, did he get you?”

The back seat was silent.

“Roy!”

Nothing.

“Roy, talk to me—”

“James.” Elle’s voice was low, all business. “Where’s the jeep? How close?”

He checked the side view mirror and saw the evil black thing bank hard and hungrily accelerate behind them, rapidly closing the distance to ten yards. Then closer, and closer still, the bruised silver slats of its grill becoming teeth in the sunlight. “He’s . . . he’s right on us. Coming up.”

“We’re not going to outrun him,” she said with icy calmness. “We can’t.”

“I know.”

She swerved to dodge another hole but hit it anyway. The Rav4 nosed skyward, glass shards snow-globed everywhere, and furniture groaned and shifted. Roy gasped something muffled back there, meaning he was fortunately still alive, or at least not quite dead yet. James watched the Soviet’s jeep draw closer and hit the same dip, smoothly rising and falling on titanic shocks like a speedboat on choppy water. The unpainted bumper touched down with a fireworks splash of sparks. The tinted windshield stuttered flashes of mottled sunlight – just like at the Fuel-N-Food, it afforded only a silhouette of the man inside.

“Roy.” Elle looked back but couldn’t see past the blossomed driver seat. “Are you okay?”

Through the gap over the center console, James could see Roy’s scalp buried under debris and shifting shadows. He was shaking his head, eyes clenched to slits. “My hand,” he said hoarsely. “It’s messed up.”

“How bad?”

“
Bad
.”

James checked the side mirror for the jeep but the Soviet was too close. The hulking vehicle pulled up alongside them, matching their speed, as if preparing for a drive-by shooting. He chewed his lip thoughtfully. “We’re . . .”

Elle looked at him. “What?”

He had an idea. “We’re going to pit him.”

“Pit him?”

“Yeah. The P.I.T. maneuver.” James leaned back against the bullet-riddled dashboard, head hunched, watching the roof of the Soviet’s jeep over a window frame lined with glass daggers. “I . . . I saw it on an episode of Cops once.”

“What do the letters stand for?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

Beside him, just a few feet away, passenger door to driver door, the Soviet was pulling closer to make his kill. The motor gave another cycling roar and James felt it vibrating the fillings in his molars. “Basically,” he shouted over the noise, “we’ll bash his car at just the right point on the back end, so he loses traction with his back two wheels and spins. He’ll fishtail.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll tell you when.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Okay?”

She nodded fast.

The cars were perfectly side-to-side now. If she missed, or hit the jeep at the wrong spot, they would stall and lose their momentum. Or worse, pivot and spin like a stunt car, leaving them disoriented and defenseless from Tapp’s scope. This would need to be precise. Impossibly precise. Like performing brain surgery while riding a jet ski.

“Alright.” He steadied himself. “Lose some speed, Elle.”

She pressed the brake with her knee.

Nothing happened.

“Huh.” She pumped the pedal with her hand. “So, there’s that.”

James cursed under his breath.

“This’ll work, too.” She swerved onto the left shoulder. The driver side tires dug into coarse dirt and fought the passenger side, throwing the SUV into an indecisive skid. More boxes crashed around Roy and he moaned again. The television stand dumped a shelf into the console, where it sliced down an inch from James’ knuckles like a guillotine blade. Elle cranked the wheel hard to the other side, overcompensated, and the rear passenger door swung open and slammed shut like a gunshot. Had Roy not been holding on back there, he could have been thrown out the side like a ragdoll.

“You got it?” James asked, breathless.

“Yeah.”

It worked. The jeep crept a few feet ahead. Through thick glass, James saw the Soviet’s unmistakable profile, head down, fumbling busily with something in his lap. What else? That wicked little subgun.

“Ram him?” Elle asked.

James shook his head. It didn’t feel right yet.

Over the passenger window frame he watched the jeep inch further ahead. The Soviet reached for the window crank (of course he would have those dinosaur hand-powered windows) and scraped the glass down. It cried as it lowered, a brittle squeal, and the man’s bloodshot eyes came into view. The rest of him was still shrouded in shadow except for those wet eyes. It was absurd, but James would have sworn that the Soviet was still somehow looking at Elle, only Elle, forever Elle, like she was a campfire in a dark forest and all the creeping things were drawn to her.

She tensed. “Ram him?”

“Do it!” Roy shouted. “He’s going to shoot us—”

“Don’t.” James dug his fingernails into the door. “Wait a second more.”