EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (18 page)

A fresh shot of white-hot panic tore through him and he reached for energy drink number five, biting the tab open to protect his bloodied thumb. Nightmares came to him in flashes as he slurped his beverage down like warm medicine – some Google Maps asshole stumbling across Shady Slope Road, or one of his radio exchanges with Svatomir bleeding into a passing trucker’s closed-band frequency, or his cell signal jammer somehow alerting some underpaid Verizon engineer climbing the cell tower ten-odd miles north. All possible. It was, after all, the details that killed you, and details were sneaky little bastards.

Tapp knew this wasn’t a shoot anymore. This was a psychological battle with James. This was kill or die. What was Tapp willing to do to survive?

Anything.

He shot a little girl once to survive.

Yes. Yes, I did.

That had been hard.

This won’t be.

The sore panic was finally receding. He started his final energy drink (six) and wished he had packed more Cheetos, or Swedish Fish, or at least some crackers. Already he could imagine the caffeine kicking in, filling his veins with hot life, unlocking new neural tunnels and wiring shortcuts inside his brain. His fingers were suddenly nimble, his reflexes instant. The energy crash would be brutal after this binge, but by then James would be dead. Long dead. If in five hours, Tapp’s biggest problem was an icepick headache and sludgy memory, well then, he’d be doing just fine.

I’m still doing fine?

He was doing great.

Okay.

Around him the earth was falling into shadow, turning back to an ancient dark that existed before man and would exist long after. Sound carried differently in this air – sharper, cleaner, harder. Echoes vanished. His own gunshots would lose their bass and become whip cracks. The winds were coming now in timid spurts, touching his cheeks and aggravating his yellow flags. The distant storm wasn’t distant anymore, towering over the horizon and shrouding the reddening sun. Everything was changing, morphing, rotating into a darker form.

* * *

James was staring into the sun for some reason.

It was setting, which pleased him, although he couldn’t recall why, so he just grinned dumbly while he watched it dull like a lantern behind fog. He felt the heat touch his face and numbly remembered – eight minutes. It took eight minutes to travel from that distant nuclear fire, through the gulf of space, to this little rock.

“James.”

He recognized her voice and the day exploded back at him – Glen Floyd’s comb-over-in-a-car story, the soda can shriek of automatic gunfire, the way blood hardened into globs in the sand like donut glaze. And the crash. What about the crash? He tried to search his surroundings and decipher what the hell had happened but he couldn’t pull his eyes from the sun. It held him transfixed.

“James, I . . . this is really bad.”

Elle’s tone was grave. No sarcasm, no understatement. An updraft washed through the Rav4, surprisingly cool, and he heard it jingling loose glass and blowing soft tufts of seat foam. He clamped his eyelids and blinked but saw only that damn sun, seared into his retinas in splashes of orange-violet-yellow-green. He felt like he was awakening after a night of dollar beers, and now establishing the basics –
Where am I? Did Elle and I have a fight? Where’s my wallet? Can I taste vomit in the back of my mouth?
Somewhere in the car he sensed Elle moving and something wooden creaked in the back seats. The vehicle rocked a few inches like a teeter-totter, suggesting that they were high-centered. His chin rested against what he figured was the dashboard. He raised his head, turned his shoulders—

His arms didn’t move.

“Yeah.” He heard her shrug. “I was getting to that.”

At least her sense of humor was back.

He blinked away sunspot colors and saw it. Both of his wrists were bound with sloppy loops of duct tape, swooping up, down, over, under, from his knuckles to his forearms, thoroughly sealing him to the Rav4’s shifter. Much of it was stained with dollops of blood, running down folds and seams in hardening rivers, all of it belonging to someone else. He leaned back and tugged, and the shifter wobbled sympathetically in its socket, but he knew the next thing to give would be his shoulder blades. He was stuck.

He exhaled. “Roy?”

“Yep,” Elle said.

“It’s . . . more tape than I would have used.”

“He hit me.”

“What?” James looked at her, certain he’d misheard.

“He was crawling over me, tying you up. I tried to stop him, jabbed his eyes, grabbed his hurt hand, and one of his fingers tore off. And he pushed my face against the door and I think he . . . kicked the back of my head.” She worked her jaw and he saw it, a blue shadow coalescing over her cheekbone. “I must have blacked out, and then he left. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Her eyes glimmered. “I’m
so sorry
.”

“It’s fine.” He was still hazy, like his head was sloshing full of cheap beer. “Find something to cut me out. The . . . multitool—”

“It’s gone.”

He knew that. “The tool bag—”

“A half mile up the road,” she said hollowly. She moved and the sunlight drew her bruise like a Nike swoosh under her eye. Her skin was already puffing up.

Roy. James felt his cheeks burn and the delayed agony of his concussion headache hit like a wheelbarrow packed with cinder blocks. Goddamn Roy, and the family he neglected, and his stupid I PISS EXCELLENCE shirt. Goddamn him. No,
fuck
him. Fuck him for hitting beautiful, sweet Elle in the back of the head.

Anger is weird, he realized. More than a feeling. It has mass, somehow. It fills you up like hot food. James was ashamed of how good
it felt. He wanted to kill Roy. It was wrong, everything in him said it was wrong, but he couldn’t control it. None of his father’s words came easily to him, but the one about having a plan to kill everyone you met was ringing cautiously true. After all, Roy sure did.

If I see you again, Roy . . .

“Wait.” He hesitated. “Did you . . . did you say you pulled off his finger?”

She looked embarrassed.

“Wow, Elle.”

“It was an accident.”

“How do you accidentally pull off a finger?”

“His hand was shot. You’re making it sound worse than it is.”

“Is it . . . is it still in here?”

She pointed to the middle console, beside his elbow.

He looked and recoiled. “Oh, Jesus. What’s it doing in the cup holder?”

“I had to put it somewhere.”

“But the
cup holder
?”

Elle started giggling.

They both lost it. Exhausted, pitch-black belly laughs. For a few seconds, everything was okay and they were back in the Sacramento fire marshal’s office and that mustached old man was offhandedly comparing the neighbor’s meth lab explosion to Washington state’s iconic 1980 volcanic eruption, and everything was just hilarious. He couldn’t describe it.

“If Roy . . .” She gasped, an ugly dry scrape. “If he survives this, gloves are going to look
so stupid
on him.”

A bellowing roar descended the hill and splashed down both ends of the creekbed. James threw his head back to see (what else?) the Soviet’s jeep, three hundred yards back, framed by the toothed glass of the Rav4’s back window. The rig skidded to face them and revved hungrily.

Elle looked up and sighed.

“Yeah.” James chewed his lip. “We should probably start cutting this tape.”

17

Safety glass turned out to be worthless for cutting duct tape. Who knew? Chunks crumbled in Elle’s hands like ice, so she checked her purse for her car keys (
Oh,
right
), then grabbed a triangular shard from the broken rearview mirror. Every layer of tape she sliced and peeled off exposed another underneath. Her fingers whitened and burned with sweaty friction. The sickly sweet odor of adhesive curdled the air. James’ left wrist tugged free but his right hand was buried much deeper, his knuckles mummified unrecognizably around the shifter like a big lobster claw.

“Shit.”

“I can’t—”

Not fast enough. No time.

Every second, the Soviet’s loping motor grew louder, turning the air into cotton. Glass chattered and debris shifted anxiously. James felt his molars vibrate. Who knew that cars could even sound like that? It deepened against rock walls until it sounded like a monster truck, approaching fast.

No words were needed. They both knew. She tore another crackling strip of tape free and looked up at him apologetically, jaw clenched, eyes wet, cheeks red.

He smiled at her.

A smile had always been the path of least resistance for him and it came naturally, even here. A strange calm was sliding over him and he was somehow certain everything would turn out okay. The sun was setting. Tapp’s scope was dimming. She would make it. It wouldn’t be easy, because the killers would hunt her with whatever gadgets and cruel tricks they had at their disposal, but she was tough and she could do it. She wasn’t that hollow-eyed version of herself from the Fuel-N-Food anymore. She was the fighter he fell in love with, the girl who (probably) wasn’t bluffing when she’d threatened to castrate Roy for punching her husband. She was the girl he’d seen on that USC running track, sophomore year. October, under a milky sky.

There had been a dreamy, soundless second when she’d clipped her shin on the zebra-striped hurdle. Then he watched her pile-drive into the ground and roll once, twice, three times. Not a murmur from the crowd. James had been in motion then, pushing people aside, bolting for the chest-high chain link fence cordoning off the oval track – but she was already back on her feet, standing dizzily, shaking off the blur. Both of her knees were slashed and thin rivers of blood raced down to her running shoes. She wavered once, looked at the crowd, and several hundred people waited in rapt confusion, like an airshow audience stunned by a fireball. Someone had said something about a medic –
Here he is, he’s coming –
but it didn’t matter because Elle DeSilva just dug her heels in and kept running. Three more jumps cleared on the final curve and she finished the hundred-meter hurdle with a gray face and a quart of blood staining the track behind her.
Badass
, James had thought. Badass – and he didn’t even know about her snakes yet.

She was that woman again now, and she could do it. Collapsed lung or not.

“Elle, go.” He pushed her away with his free hand, hanging tatters of tape.

She shook her head.

The Soviet’s motor change pitch and cycled lower, rougher. He was slowing down at the rim of the gully, preparing to get out and descend on foot. His brakes whined. Rocks crunched under tires. A dry stick broke.

There were so many things James wanted to tell her but there was no time:
Run. He’s lost a lot of blood because of me, so he’ll be slow and easy to outrun. Keep moving, don’t stop, follow the riverbed where Tapp can’t see you. Keep putting boulders between yourself and the Soviet. When it gets dark enough – thirty more minutes, tops – you run out of here, up one of the valley walls, and race for Mosby. Tapp’s gun will be useless, but he’ll still search for you on foot. They’ll need to get in close to find you, though, and they never will because you’re fast. You’ll make it.

Or
I love you.
There was always that.

The Soviet cut his motor, not twenty yards up the hill behind them, filling the air with expectant silence. The last breath before the plunge, held with swollen lungs.

Elle was smiling now. She had an idea.

“What?”

She kissed him. Then she passed the shard of glass to his right hand like it was a prison shiv and whispered in his ear, shivering with adrenaline: “I’ll buy you as much time as I can.”

He felt her fingertips brush his one last time, and then she was out the swinging door and running, a desperate silhouette against a graying sky, going, going, gone.

* * *

Elle estimated the arroyo to be twenty yards wide and ten deep. A calcified creek bed wove between limestone faces and patches of prickly pear, all dulling blue in the twilight. She wanted to look back, to know where the jeep was relative to the wrecked Rav4, if the Soviet was out of it yet, if his subgun was in his hand or under his duster or in the process of being reloaded—

Just run. Don’t stop.

Prickly pear everywhere. Dense clusters of the paddle-shaped cacti rising in bunny-ear patterns, most a yard deep but some approaching neck-height. The lowest reaches of the arroyo were filled with a rushing tide of green, cascading from one bank to the other and speckled with pink fruits like an alien garden. She couldn’t see the thin barbs but she felt them piercing her jeans, slashing her ankles, sticking to her Converse in messy clumps.

She heard a door slam, up the hill.

The air chilled. She knew the Soviet had to see her by now, had to be drawing on her, seconds from pulling the trigger and stitching a bloody line down her back. She veered left and right over the floor of chipped shale, taking a running leap over a thorny patch and crashing down hard on her left ankle. Every breath was punctuated by a stabbing pain, like a molten dagger buried in her chest.

Chase me. Chase me, you son of a—

The subgun barked. A line of splashing dirt, right to left, crossed the desert floor at her feet. She stumbled through the flying grit, missed a step but caught herself. She stole a glimpse over her shoulder at the Soviet, descending the lip of the arroyo. He was skidding on both feet for traction, slowing, and she knew it was so he could hold the little weapon with two hands, brace the stubby thing to his shoulder, and squirt off an accurate burst. Next time, he wouldn’t miss.

She stumbled, lungs burning. Ahead and to the right came a shadow of prickly pear. It was incredible, a towering pillar of outgrowths gashed with the whitened scars of a thousand frosts. Hundreds of paddles – some olive drab, some neon green, some standing rigidly, some sagging in tired pillows – all splintered with thorns. A cactus metropolis. If cacti had a nation, this would be its capital. Cactus legislation would be passed here, with cactus crowds lobbying outside for various cactus interests.

I’m
not
jumping into that. Nope.

But she was already running for it. She willed herself to enjoy this final half second of cool air on her cheeks. She didn’t give herself time to think. There was no time anyway. She forced another breath into her broken lungs and dove. Again the subgun rattled behind her, and at this distance she could hear the individual shots pumping down the barrel in a rhythmic BRAP-BRAP-BRAP-BRAP. As her feet left the earth she was vaguely aware of barbs sticking and breaking off in her palms, her stomach, her ankles, the back of her neck. Then the rock floor came rushing up to meet her and she let her knees bend in a controlled runner’s fall, tucked her shoulders, and rolled once, twice, to land on her back in a rippling sea of little bites. It didn’t hurt yet – too much adrenaline – but it would. Oh yes, it would.

She remembered when she was five and her mother had taken her to Fred Meyer’s, where she discovered potted cacti in the gardening department. Most were gnarly but some of them had no thorns at all, just little patches of yellow fur dotting the domed surfaces like pepperoni on a pizza.
Nice cactuses
, she called them, petting them like her aunt’s cats. Only when they reached the car did she realize what those little monsters were – their thorns were microscopic, leaving millions of hooked barbs in her fingertips. They hadn’t stung until then, but they
really
stung. Her mother had laughed, which made her cry harder, because the tweezers were at home and it was a long drive. She remembered sitting in the backseat with hot tears on her cheeks, unable to wipe them away because her hands had been transformed into itchy red claws, pin-cushioned with tiny quills.
Nice cactuses
, her mother had chuckled as she drove, making petting motions against the steering wheel.
Nice cactuses, nice cactuses, nice
—

The Soviet fired again.

She rolled on her side, her cheek against the cool rocks, her hands over her face. Bullets slapped around and above her, quivering cactus paddles, punching out fleshy gouges, showering gooey chunks, thorns, and warm juices. A tower of prickly pear broke and fell, letting in a burst of daylight. Finally the world stopped shaking and the rattling echo of the subgun raced from one end of the valley to the other. That, too, faded until there was only the distant wind.

She couldn’t see him. He hadn’t used his whole magazine, either – he had at least five seconds of sustained fire in that thing and that had only been three. He might be advancing on her again. She rolled over and elbowed up, pushed a shredded paddle aside with her fingertips, and scanned the riverbed. Just rocks and brush. No Soviet.

She rose further. Her hair was matted with sticky cactus blood. It had drenched her. It was in her mouth, coating her teeth like wax, bitter enough to make your throat seal up tight like Eowen’s disastrous attempt at an India Pale Ale—

There he was.

The Soviet was still at the edge of the riverbed – why hadn’t he chased her further? He was standing oddly, like a statue, duster stirring in the wind, his left leg slick with glossy black. Blood. Even with a two-inch butter knife, James had managed to inflict some damage. The man hobbled a bit, lowered his subgun, and scraped out the stick-shaped magazine. He made a sour face and palmed it back in.

Bullets, she realized. Thank God. He was almost out of—

The Soviet turned around and walked a few paces back to the crashed Rav4. Where James was, duct-taped to the shifter. Helpless.

She screamed but the Soviet ignored her.

“No! Come back!”

He approached the Toyota where it had destroyed itself against lava boulders, headlights facing each other, windows blown out, tires bowed. The car didn’t look totaled (which it certainly was) so much as corrupted,
twisted
, like something out of Wonderland. The Soviet grabbed the bruised passenger door handle, subgun up and at his hip in a practiced close-quarters entry maneuver. Instead of the sterile professionalism of a SWAT team, he had a relaxed confidence that was a thousand times more frightening.

“Hey. Your drawings
suck
!”

The Soviet wasn’t listening. She wanted to stand, or throw something, or maybe futilely race up behind him to catch a machine gun spray in the chest, anything but nothing – and then it was too late. Life moves too fast, your window for the perfect comeback closes. The Soviet threw the door open, aimed inside, and she knew James didn’t stand a chance –
This is my fault, I ran too fast and he lost interest—

Nothing happened.

She watched in dumb silence. The Soviet leaned inside the mangled car, checked the back seats, and leaned out. He paused, placed his hands to his hips like a disapproving mother, and spat in the dirt. She could hear the glob land from fifty yards.

Her heart pounded. She saw rotten blasts of color in her vision.
James is alive. He’s okay. He wasn’t inside the Toyota, he ripped free of Roy’s duct tape while the Hello Kitty Man chased me. My plan worked. I was a decoy. An excellent, five-star decoy. James is fine. He’s somewhere else—

Where?

The Soviet kicked the passenger door shut. He misjudged and stumbled instead, slapping a hand to the Toyota’s yellow quarter panel and leaving a print of sticky red. He had to be hurting by now. He’d lost a lot of blood. That made Elle happy; happier than she ever thought she could be about blood loss.

She prairie-dogged further up and scanned both ends of the arroyo for James. She couldn’t see him. Or Roy. There was a lot of winding terrain, though, and an exceptional amount of visual cover. You could play hide and seek down here. Which, to be fair, was the goal right now.

The Soviet tucked a hand under his duster and paced back up to his jeep, and then he threw open the black door and climbed inside, disturbing a handful of rolling rocks. He closed the door and sat there for a long moment, barely visible in the dimming red sunlight. Then he kicked the engine into gear and . . . skidded back up the rise.

He was leaving.

Like the evil birds in that old movie she had watched once with James –
They’re flying south? Really?
– the villain was swiping a timecard and leaving because, well, that’s the end. Why now, in real life?

He’d lost a lot of blood, she figured. He was probably seizing the opportunity to bandage his wound while Tapp’s still-functioning scope kept them safely corralled in the arroyo. After all, when darkness fell, all bets would be off. Best to resupply now.