EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (22 page)

21

Roy’s mysterious slip of paper was a speeding ticket.

It lay flat on the road where she’d dropped it, blotting butterfly wings in the rain. Slanted handwriting in a spidery blue pen: seventy-four miles per hour in a seventy zone at two in the afternoon. Today’s date. The bottom line, the recipient, was signed by one Roy Michael Burke, the man who died to pass it to Elle.

It would have been helpful, if she hadn’t been handcuffed. Her knees sank into the muddied edge of Shady Slope Road. Squinting in the blooming headlights, she recognized Deputy Doogie Howser – small-boned, pockmarked with acne, black crew cut, disturbingly young to carry a gun. He had smiled at them before, while James asked about Glen Floyd’s empty white truck and she buried her face to keep from snickering at his silly campaign hat. He was still wearing it. It still looked absurd.

He wasn’t smiling now. He slammed his trunk shut and reappeared by the driver door with a radio in his hand – another black Motorola, confirming what she already knew – and halted by the headlights while rain bounced off his shoulders in glimmering beads. Wet soil squelched at his feet. He was staring directly up at the horizon as if he knew exactly where to look (he probably did), and after a pause, he squeezed his radio and asked with the small voice of a child disturbing a busy parent, “Do you have a plan for this?”

“I always have a plan,” Tapp said. His voice lacked conviction, too.

Lightning slithered across the sky.

The sonic crash came immediately and the deputy flinched. “I . . . what happened?”

“Focus.”

“Svatomir?

“He’s fine.”

“He said he was hurt—”

“Your cousin is fine. Stop talking. Stop moving. Stop thinking.” Another nervous fork of electricity touched down in the distance and Tapp licked his lips, dry as Velcro. His words came slippery-fast, clipped and snarled: “You wanted in? You’re in. You wanted this. Punch God in the dick, or whatever it is you said. Remember that you wanted this, ever since you were five. So put on your big boy pants and
turn off your goddamn headlights
before I shoot them out.”

Deputy Doogie Howser ducked back inside his car. “Yes, sheriff.”

Sheriff. He’s a sheriff.

The vehicle lights flicked off, reminding Elle of the section in every haunted house tour where the lights cut out and someone screams. Always, like clockwork. Dozens of Halloweens and she was never the girl who screamed. Not even now. Especially not now, with James watching.

James was watching, she reminded herself. Be tough.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw the deputy’s silhouette step outside of his cruiser, his elbow on the door, wiping rainwater from his eyes. “It was a bad call,” he said through a chatter of teeth. “Mindy sounded shaken up. I don’t think she’d ever heard anything like it before. Multiple baddies. A sniper. Shooting from a mile away. He told her everything. The exact location. So I solid-copy back to Mindy and say no – I’m not at the salt flats where I should be – I’m speed-fishing two minutes from that exact location. That sounds bad. And it’s going to look worse on paper tomorrow—”

“Names?”

“What?”

“Did James give . . . names on his call?” Tapp sniffed impatiently. “Any names that might link to a missing persons? James Eversman? Glen Floyd? The Roy Burke you stopped?”

“Just . . .” The deputy fidgeted with the pistol on his hip. “Just yours.”

The sniper said nothing.

Two hot gashes tore into the sky, illuminating a flash of suspended rain. For a microsecond the entire valley fell under an x-ray of stark truth. Then the night came rushing back and in its comfortable hold, Elle quietly rocked forward on her knees and slipped her cuffed hands under her feet. Then she tucked her wrists to her stomach, arched her back, tensed her calves, and shook muddy hair from her eyes—

“What’s this?”

Suddenly the deputy was beside her (how did he move so
fast
?) and crawling his hand up her side as if to grope her chest with his little claw fingers – but he was going for the sandwich bag. Fingernails scraped her skin. Then like a Band-Aid, he tore it off mercilessly (
James is watching, James is watching
). She winced, her next breath came involuntarily, and she felt a rush of frigid air entering her body from an uninvited angle. Her mind was so flooded with panic that she hardly heard Deputy Doogie Howser’s next sentence, delivered with gawking adolescent fascination as he crunched James’ duct-tape and plastic through his fingers and stared at it:

“Medics are God’s foot soldiers.”

James, please be watching.

* * *

Sheriff William Howard Tapp had built a reputation early in his career for being ill-suited to law enforcement work. The newer psychological evaluations and assessments (which he had luckily dodged back in 1979) referred to this as “social competence.” Apparently there was an entire twenty pages to it, crammed full of one-to-five-scale questions he knew he would fail –
when stressed or uncomfortable, is your laughter noticeably louder than normal?
– to say nothing of the polygraph exam, which would be disastrous without a thumbtack in his boot and some serious prep time. On patrol, he had a hands-in-pockets awkwardness to him, a woodenness, that made interacting with the public excruciating. He avoided pulling motorists over the same way he avoided answering his landline at home (thank God for answering machines). Social anxiety? No. He wasn’t anxious about interacting with people – he was utterly uninterested in them and their tiny problems. People were too much work. That was part of the reason he’d left the New Mexico Highway Patrol and moved to the nation’s second-smallest county.

Fun fact: it only took eighteen votes to be elected sheriff here.

He blinked away rainwater, fighting it back as it trickled down his neck, pooled in the wrinkles of his ghillie fabric, and glazed his rifle in beads. It was everywhere. It would add another ten pounds to his camouflage suit and turn him into a walking towel, reeking like a wet German Shepard. He knew his BlackEye X3S was weatherproof (of course) but that didn’t prevent a nervous twinge from shooting up his spine when he noticed the perimeter of the green lens frosting with moisture. He hated moisture. Moisture is a pernicious little bastard that seeps into the cracks of your guns and cancerously rots them from the inside out. He would never forget the horror and shame of uncasing his .270, flicking the bolt, and discovering the action to be rusted shut. That had just been cold condensation, too – this was honest-to-God
rain
. Tonight he would need to perform a full breakdown on his rifle and towel-dry every last pin and screw.

Somehow, focusing on the smaller problems made the bigger ones feel manageable. It was progress.

In the BlackEye’s green haze, Deputy Sergei Koal looked like a gremlin with his stunted body and wide-brimmed campaign hat. He was barely taller than the woman, and even handcuffed on her knees she seemed to dwarf him. Ten paces from the darkened Paiute County cruiser, he had peeled something off the woman’s chest – too small to tell at this range, given the optic’s limited six-power magnification – and studied it before tucking it in his pocket for later. Then he crouched beside her, took a handful of her hair, and studied her like a hooked fish. “She’s pretty,” he said on his radio. “As long as I can remember, cousin always liked the brunettes.”

“Play nice, now,” Tapp said.

He let her head drop. “What’s next?”

“You found nothing out here. Just rain and darkness. You’ll spend all night looking. Then after sun-up, you and me, we’ll both check it out so it stays off State Patrol’s radar. We’ll follow the ridgeline, work up some blistering sunburns. We’ll call it teenagers, pranks, bad acid, whatever. No worries about the killer using my name. You can Google me, for Christ’s sake—”

“Runners.”

“Don’t interrupt me.”

“Drug runners could be our angle. We suspect the call was a distraction. To clear the way for . . . you know.”

“Let me see your hands,” Tapp said. “Any tremors?”

Deputy Sergei Koal obediently raised both hands with his fingers splayed, his flesh burning algae green in the night vision. Then he looked down sheepishly because he couldn’t handle eye contact at any distance. Unfortunately, in all the ways that counted, he was the polar opposite of his half-retarded cousin. He spoke fast, thought fast, and flinched hard, like a windup toy on meth.

He’s the speed of light, an African freakin’ swallow, a greased-up cheetah racing down a goddamn laundry chute . . .

At this range Tapp couldn’t discern if the deputy’s hands were shaking, but pretended he could. “You’re doing well,” he said. “Did you check both burn pits like I asked?”

“No coyotes.” Sergei looked ashamed. “No bones dug up.”

“Now, kid, that’s impossible,” Tapp said, rubbing away the caffeine headache already coalescing behind his eyes. “And I’ll explain to you
why
that’s impossible tomorrow. But right now, we’ve got shit to do.”

Another pulse of lightning exploded neon in his scope, overloading the optic for a split-second. Shadows scorched into his eye. Then came the thunder, a gathering roar crossing the crater, as if the sky were being drawn tight and split open.

Koal looked down at the wife. “She’s . . . uh . . .”

“What now?”

“She’s making a funny noise. Croaking. Like she’s . . . breathing through a straw or something.”

Tapp heard it too; a dry wheeze under Deputy Koal’s voice on the Motorola. It sounded excruciating. His throat knotted up a little, involuntarily. If today had left any patience in him at all, he would have felt that poor woman’s pain and express-delivered some .338 caliber euthanasia. Instead, Tapp calmly contemplated the new dimensions of this chessboard, caught some rainwater in his mouth, squirted it through his teeth in cold jets, and decided: “Hopefully she’s still got a few more breaths left in her. Because as of right now, she’s our ticket. Our hostage.”

Koal tensed. “You mean there’s
another one
alive?”

Tapp choked on a childish little smile, bubbling up from somewhere dark. He was winning again. He scooted forward on his elbows and levered his rifle down on the sandbag to focus the green lens on his ramshackle little bungalow, where the source of all of today’s problems cowered inside.

“James Eversman. I know you heard everything in there. Step outside of my building so I can kill you. If you don’t, I will . . .
butcher
Mrs. Eversman with my rifle in such a way that the Gore Museum staff could spend all day trying to reconstruct what happened, and still only get it half right. Piece by piece, limb by limb, I will shoot her into . . . little fleshy bits of firewood while my deputy applies tourniquets to every stump, to keep her alive and aware to experience every terrible second, while you listen. Your choice.”

* * *

James felt dead already.

He sat cross-legged on the floor with the radio clasped in both hands under his chin. Rain drummed metal overhead and trickled through in waterfalls, slapping the cement and splashing him. Water sizzled off the hot light. The building had become a cave – cold, dark dripping. It took on a pungent wet odor, as if calcium deposits were forming dripstones around him. He was numb, utterly still. He couldn’t even locate his own heartbeat.

He had listened to enough of Tapp’s indulgent little monologue to know that Elle was going to die, and that he was going to die, and all hope was lost, but somehow, a strange little fragment from before snagged in his mind:

Turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out.

He couldn’t get it out of his head. He needed to think about how to handle this final ultimatum, how to surrender Elle’s life and his own to Tapp in the most painless and humane way, but like a scratched CD, the stupid phrase repeated itself over and over.

Turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out.

What did it mean? What was Tapp talking about? He scrutinized the tiny nuances of the killer’s speech as it came around each time – the way the sniper clipped the last syllable of some words as if he was in a hurry, the way he drawled the first syllable of others as if he wasn’t, the folksy way his tongue navigated the word
goddamn
.

Turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out.

Finally he confronted the notion that he was picking up breadcrumbs dropped by his own imagination. His memory was imperfect. Every looped echo was just a corrupted copy, each one further from the real thing. This was procrastination, busywork, distracting him from what needed to be done.

Tapp’s voice: “Thirty seconds, James. Then I shoot off her right arm.”

He stood up and approached the door. It wasn’t even a choice. He pressed one palm to the metal – still warm from the day, but chilling fast. It vibrated faintly with the outside rain, almost like electricity.

“Don’t worry, James. She’s tough. She’ll keep . . .
shouldering
on.”

The echo resurfaced, crowding out every other thought:
Turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out, turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out, turn off your goddamn headlights before I—