EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (23 page)

“Twenty-five seconds.” Tapp exhaled impatiently. “Here . . . hold the radio to . . . We’ll make him talk to her.”

James listened by the door in the silence.

A rustling click on the Motorola. A washing machine roar of tinny rain cycled through, and he was reminded of those fuzzy airplane black box recordings, congested with staticky pops and hisses, in the final seconds of free fall before impact.

“James?” Elle said.

He couldn’t speak. His mouth turned to cotton.

“
James
?”

“I’m here,” he struggled to say.

“Good news,” she said tiredly. “The police are here.”

God, he missed her jokes. He wished he could laugh one more time. He realized this would probably be the last smartass remark she’d ever make to him, just like the greasy steak burritos at the Fairview were their last breakfast together, and their last real argument had occurred by the gas pumps at the Fuel-N-Food with that stupid Roswell sign with five exclamation points. The last movie they’d ever watched together had been a forgettable horror flick with selfish characters that died badly in the end. Their last kiss had been in the wrecked Toyota, under the roar of the Soviet’s engine, with his hands duct-taped to the shifter. Their last child never had a name. Everything was a
last
. He thought about the finite beats of his heart, counting down in his ribs.

“Fifteen seconds,” the sniper said.

“Honey,” Elle whispered. “What’s the plan now?”

His cheeks burned and his throat tightened. “There’s no plan.”

“Yes, there is.” She sounded irritated. His heart plunged when he noticed her voice had that familiar sucking whistle under it again. Her wound had reopened – she would be dead in fifteen minutes anyway, give or take. “You
always
have an idea. I won’t make fun of it this time, I promise—”

“Ten seconds . . .”

“I’m stepping outside,” James said.

“Please, don’t do that.”

“I have to—”

“No, you don’t.”

Violent thunder crashed overhead. The building warped and vibrated as his fingers closed around the doorknob. “I love you, Elle.”

“Shut up.”

“Five seconds . . .”

“I love you.”

“
Shut up
.” She sniffed and he could hear her pulse in her breath, shuddering between gasps. “Don’t you see? I’m with you. I’m ready. We’re going to kill them all with your next crazy plan. Please, I just need you to tell me what to do, and I’ll do it, okay?”

“Grab her arm,” Tapp said. “Hold it . . . hold it out—”

“
Wait
!” James tugged the door – and it didn’t open.

The deputy struggled on the radio. Scuffling movement. A sharp gasp—

Tapp fussed: “Fuckin’
hold her—”

“Wait! I’m
coming out
!” He wrenched the door again, harder. It clanged, clicked. It was catching on something—

“James!” his wife screamed.

He remembered the deadbolt. He snapped the lock open as blood filled his eardrums, and the corroded squeal echoed twice (
too late, already too late, not enough time
) and he grabbed the door with both hands, gasped through his teeth and tugged the thing – scratching the floor, rotating as heavily and ponderously as a bank vault – wide open to reveal the darkness outside.

And the Soviet Cowboy.

He stood in the doorway like a gargoyle. Tall, broad, draped in that duster slick with rain and blood, reeking of French Roast hardened between teeth. His right hand was half-extended, as if he had just been reaching for the doorknob when James opened it. The shop light defined his cheekbones and turned his face ghoulish, eye sockets empty and unblinking, as his lips curled up to grin at James. A double-flash of lightning lit him up and revealed that today’s blood loss had drained his skin into something pale and soggy, like dead oyster meat.

The struggle on the radio fell silent and Elle whispered: “Honey, if you tell me you have a plan to kill him, I’ll believe you.”

Tapp fired.

22

Tapp’s eyelashes fluttered against the lens as he clacked the bolt up, back, forward, down. The wife was moving preternaturally fast, like security footage on accelerated playback. She had jolted upright on her feet, screaming, shocking weak little Deputy Koal, and head-butted the kid right in the front teeth. He reeled with both hands to his mouth while his campaign hat spun away like a hubcap, and the woman whirled, her wrists still cuffed at her stomach, and sprinted for the patrol car.

Wet gravel exploded beside her. She flinched but kept running.

An acceptable miss, Tapp told himself. His BlackEye wasn’t fully zeroed yet. The atmosphere had turned into a maelstrom, his rifle bore had cooled, the hand-loads were a fresh batch from January (new primers), and a whole host of other unknowns had settled in. How could he expect to hit every shot he took in this weather? On a moving target, no less? Shit happened. He hadn’t missed her by more than a meter anyway. Now he knew the windage – three clicks to the left.

She dove like a gymnast through the car’s open driver door and disappeared behind the murky windshield. Deputy Koal pursued her with one elbow clasped to his jaw and his other hand going for the Paiute County-issued Glock 17 on his hip. He had her.

You could say he was going to . . . punch her ticket (
ha, ha, ha!
).

* * *

Elle hit the driver seat on her stomach. The car was dark, the windows blurred with rain, the seats sticky and damp and pungent with bleach. The scent reminded her of a stadium bathroom in that way something can be both filthy and nauseatingly over-cleaned. She elbowed up and saw a police computer – a blue monitor and a dirty keyboard with a missing spacebar on the center console. She checked the ignition for keys. No keys.

“You bitch!” The deputy was coming. “You
fucking bitch
.”

She was certain she would die there, either by gunshot or suffocation, and that was okay. At least she wouldn’t die on her knees. Her head throbbed in waves of migraine pain and a warm line of blood ran down her forehead where his front teeth had cut into her scalp. How did head-butts work in the movies? Had she done something wrong? Because that
hurt
. She groped with her cuffed hands around the steering column, beside the driver seat, under the ancient computer. She needed to find the deputy’s radio. Even out here in the badlands, cops must have radios built into their cars, right? If she could shout into it, someone would hear on the other end. Anyone.

“I’m gonna kill you.” Wet footsteps, coming fast. “You broke my teeth—”

There it was! She found the receiver dangling on a spiral cord, and clasped the clicker and screamed – no feedback. No tinny echo. Was it even on? She saw gummy buttons on the console, indicating preset frequencies. There was an LCD screen above them, but it was the primitive kind you found on a cheap calculator. She couldn’t read it without light. She tried slapping every button, mashing left to right with rising panic, but nothing responded—

“TURN AROUND, BITCH.”

The driver door squealed open and cold water dumped down her back. She gasped and rolled over to see the deputy standing in a curtain of rain, his left palm cupped vise-tight to his jaw, his right hand darting for that sidearm holstered on his hip—

It wasn’t there.

It wasn’t there because Elle had it. A little squared black automatic, clamped in her wet hands, aimed up at him. She had plucked it from his holster fifteen seconds ago after she head-butted him. She had a good sense for holsters now, seared into her muscle memory, and it helped that the deputy’s had been near-identical to Glen Floyd’s.

His eyes widened.

She caught her dwindling breath and steadied the pistol.

The rain intensified.

“Your hat,” she said through bared teeth. “Looks stupid.”

Quickly, he hiked up his pant leg and went for a holdout piece on his ankle. She was quicker and shot Deputy Doogie Howser in the neck.

* * *

James closed the door the same instant the Soviet grabbed for it. He wasn’t sure exactly what happened in the next second, but the second after it involved the door slamming almost-but-not-quite shut with the Soviet’s sausage fingers crushed in the frame. The knuckles tensed like a dying spider curling its legs. The Soviet made that hissing noise again – like when James had stabbed him, that awful cold-blooded sound that summed up everything he hated about Elle’s snakes – and emptied his lungs, sucked in another gasp, and hissed some more through his teeth. James screamed at him through the door, something he wouldn’t remember.

After the second hiss, the Soviet pulled his hand and the door clicked shut.

James relocked the deadbolt and staggered back, his shoes squealing on leaked rainwater. Another crash of thunder shook the walls and crowded out the Soviet’s snarl, and when the report drained away, he had fallen silent too.

Turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out.

He had it now.

Light, light, light.

Light was Tapp’s weakness. The cop car’s headlights had interfered with the sniper’s night vision optic, forcing its iris to adjust and readjust like one of Elle’s cameras. Night vision wasn’t a superpower. Like any other tool, there was a time and a place for it, and it either worked or it didn’t.

He ran for Tapp’s generator.

I’m going to make light.

The Soviet jangled the doorknob outside. Locked.

James thumbed the cap off the first fuel jug and left it twirling at his feet. He raced to the other wall, heaved the container over his head and sloshed gasoline on Tapp’s workbench, his expensive ammunition reloading equipment, his candy wrappers, his scales and casings and reams of scribbled notes, soaking it all. Every inch of it. Bitter waterfalls ran down the drawers and spread black on the floor. He dropped the empty jug, scooped the radio off the floor where he had dropped it, and clipped it to his belt loop. It croaked and he heard Tapp’s voice again, jarringly different now, breathless, vulnerable, nearly begging: “Stop, James. Stop. She’s still alive. We can negotiate.”

He ignored it, all of it.

I’m going to make a lot of light.

A gunshot boomed outside, like a bowling ball hurled into a marble floor, and the door latch exploded. The Soviet must have remembered that he had a shotgun. Shards of brass skittered across the floor and pinged off the far wall. The door sagged in its frame. The deadbolt still somehow held.

James hefted the second fuel jug to his shoulder and poured a glugging trail as he ran. The roof echoed thunder and the building shivered around him. He reached the center of the room, took a running spin under the yellow shop light, and hurled the container to the dark eastern wall. It tumbled over rows of humanoid targets, bowed like Muslims at prayer, and landed at the welding station where it coughed and quietly leaked between the two acetylene tanks. Flammable, the decal said. Or inflammable. Whatever.

“Stop,” the sniper said weakly. “Whatever you’re doing in there, please stop.”

Sheriff William Tapp.

James grabbed the third jug and scooted it under the ring of light; he had plans for this one. He wiped sweat from his eyes, sucked in a breath, and tasted an overpowering wave of saccharine nastiness. It wrestled his gag reflex. All the gas fumes crowding the air. The world wobbled under his feet and he caught himself with one hand, suddenly light-headed, like five shots on an empty stomach, where you can pinpoint the exact spot you were standing when you transitioned from sober to drunk. James wasn’t stopping. Not now.

You may own this entire county.

The Soviet fired into the door again, his multiple shots melting into a single freight train crash. He couldn’t see the deadbolt from the outside so he was spraying the upper right section of the door, hoping to take it out by sheer firepower. He had almost succeeded. The lock warped and twanged, spraying chips under hot smoke. Bladed metal curled into flower petals. Buckshot pellets punched through and ricocheted inside the building, snapping from floor to ceiling. Candy wrappers puffed in the air like feathers after a pillow fight. A solvent bottle exploded near James and he slid to the floor behind the bench, covering his face. Then silence descended and the Soviet reloaded, one shell at a time. Click-click-click . . .

Even torn to a perforated sliver, the deadbolt still held.

Matches. James needed matches. He pulled drawers from the dripping workbench one by one, letting them crash to the floor and spew tools. In the deepest one he found something even better – those handheld flares, red as spaghetti sauce, stenciled EMERGENCY SIGNAL with taped seals and pull-wires. They were self-igniting and probably bright as hell. These weren’t ordinary road flares. These were the things you lit up on a sinking boat to call in an airlift. He stuffed one in each of his back pockets.

You may be untouchable at a distance.

“James. We can negotiate.”

The Soviet grunted and kicked the door, buckling it. Bruised metal groaned and the doorknob popped out and twirled on the cement. The man let out a frustrated huff, paced back, and kicked again, and again, and again, caving the doorframe a few inches further with every impact.

James held a roll of duct tape in his teeth, hit his knees, and dragged the smallest target from Tapp’s heap – a steel plate, two feet by one, an inch-and-a-half thick, its bottom edges peeling flakes of rust on the floor. Scraping it into the light and letting it crash down flat, he saw it was blistered with thousands of concave bullet marks. Importantly, no holes were punched clean through. It could stop a bullet at whatever incredible ranges Tapp practiced at, but up close? He didn’t know. He lifted the thing to his chest, forty pounds at least, and drew looping circles of black tape around his torso, tightly bracing it to his body until he had exhausted the last strip. This new center of gravity pitched him forward but he caught himself, and crossed his arms over the plate, over the improvised body armor covering from his collarbone to his belly, and drew in a full breath. It was tight but he could breathe.

Up close, you’re just a man.

He grabbed the road crew jacket from the wall – putrid yellow, glowering with reflecting pads – and threw it over his shoulders. It was fitted for the Soviet’s bearlike frame and hung off him like a tent. Snapping buttons with one hand, he took a knee and sifted through clanging tools on the floor, pushing aside pliers, clamps, bolts, for the sharpest and deadliest instrument he could find: a flat-head screwdriver with a canary yellow grip.

Up close, I can kill you.

The Soviet rammed the door, rippling the wall. As he chuffed and retreated to make another charge, James palmed the screwdriver and stood up. He ran the slick blade through his fingers and scraped the back of his mind one last time to think of Elle, poor Elle whose time was ticking away right now. He remembered her green apple shampoo, her snorting laugh, a memory, any memory he could grab hold of, and found her on the Santa Monica Pier with her sunglasses dwarfing her face as she played with her hair against a vast gray ocean.
I’ll save you
, he promised her.

After running for Glen’s revolver and taking that unlucky ricochet, she had lasted ten, maybe fifteen minutes before losing consciousness.

I can do this.

I can kill them in fifteen minutes.

Whipcracks echoed up the hill. Tapp’s rifle.

* * *

Elle scooted to the floor of the police car and covered her head. Pierced metal rang, the hood popped open and slammed shut, and fluids splattered over the windshield. The glass turned into a crystalline version of Starry, Starry Night and finally caved in as dirty white smoke billowed from the engine. She tasted ash and oil. Her eyes watered. She screamed until the gunfire stopped.

Had she been hit again? She didn’t know. She patted herself down, wincing at the hot knife in her lungs. Arms, legs, body. No worse than they had been thirty seconds ago. Rain came through the empty windshield like cold pinpricks.

She was safe in there from Tapp, but that meant almost nothing. Her body was already filling with air, her lungs shrinking and tightening with every crackling breath. That familiar someone-is-standing-on-my-chest sensation was back, nicely complimenting the claustrophobia of the dark car. She knew she needed to clamp her hand over the wound to seal it and halt the flow of air. Too bad she was
handcuffed.
No amount of limb contortions would allow an airtight seal. The best she could do was tuck her right arm over it, half-covering the scabbed gash below her armpit and hopefully slowing the leak. Maybe she could purchase herself a little extra time; she didn’t know. Every breath was accompanied by a persistent wet hiss. Every second, more sand streamed through the hourglass.

Keys. She needed the deputy’s handcuff keys.

Too far away to reach, the deputy had died in a sitting position on the road, legs splayed, one hand still clamped to his neck where she’d shot him. His pant leg was still hiked past his sock but she couldn’t see the holster in the darkness.

Too far. Tapp will kill me.

She set the gun on the seat and tried the police radio again. Dead air. One of Tapp’s lucky fragments had taken it out; the LCD screen was fissured with icy cracks. Smoke was filling the car, pushing cloudlike through the windshield and curling through the air vents in wisps. Rainwater pelted her through it, turned dirty and ashen. She tasted charcoal, mesquite, whiskey. The smoke tickled her throat and she hacked a cough into her elbow, and when she looked up again, she saw the corpse of Deputy Doogie Howser had raised its head and was now looking at her.