EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (4 page)

4

He saw it. A red Acura, maybe. Something low and sporty, burning with sunlight and chugging up toward them from the darkened center of the valley. Behind the approaching vehicle rose a rooster tail of dust.

James knew this was either very good – or very,
very
bad. No middle ground existed here.

Glen sat cross-legged with his head limp, staring between his knees. He had fallen into an uneasy trance, neither awake nor asleep. A crimson inkblot about the size of a fist had formed on the makeshift bandage. Worried for a moment that Glen had quietly slipped away, James squeezed his collarbone and the man grunted painfully.

He looked back up at Elle. “Someone did this. Gunshot or not, someone did this.”

“And there’s no one for miles.”

“Except that car.” He pulled his multitool from his back pocket – a junky Korean Leatherman clone that had come free with his climbing shoes last year – and retracted the blade between his thumb and finger. It was a slim, two-inch paring knife. It was probably the closest thing to a weapon that James the pacifist had ever owned. He tested the point against his thumb, with increasing pressure, and failed to break the skin. He exhaled, feeling unprepared and useless.

“I thought you were an optimist,” she said.

“I am.”

She forced a smile. He wanted to kiss her but didn’t.

The Acura closed to two hundred yards and hit the slope with everything it had. The engine roared. Fiery sunlight danced on its tinted windshield and James could make out the silhouette of a crowded interior against rising dust. At least two, maybe three, or even four heads. His stomach turned.

“The Soviet Cowboy.” Elle brushed her hair for the fiftieth time.

“That’s not his car.”

“He was on the radio with someone—”

Something snapped beside them, like a towel whipping a tile floor. Elle jumped and gave a yelp. He looked to the low brush beside the road and saw a small, yellow flag quivering on a twelve-inch wire post.

“What’s that?” he asked her.

Dumbstruck, she pointed down Shady Slope Road. Every fifty yards or so was marked with a little yellow flag. Some hissed and snapped in updrafts and others hung motionless. Like golf flags. He hadn’t noticed them before. Again, he felt like he was on a stage, blinded by God’s million-watt key light. The entire world suddenly felt alien to him and he wondered with a squirt of acidic panic –
what the hell did we just drive into?

She shrugged. “The flags follow the road, both directions, as far as I can see.”

“Why?”

She shrugged again.

The Acura pulled up close and growled. The gears changed. Now he could discern three heads, bobbing in soundless conversation. He supposed three was better than four. The brakes whined, the tires stuck and cut ruts in the earth, and the dust cloud caught up and swept past.

“Get behind me,” he told her, as if that would make a difference.

She moved behind him and squeezed his hand. “I love you,” she whispered behind his ear, as faint as the grass creaking in the breeze.

“I love you, too.”

“
So many
affairs, James . . .”

The last rocks crunched as the vehicle came to a full stop in front of them, canted a little east, half-on Shady Slope Road, half-off. The side windows were opaque but the windshield revealed furious movement – the driver was shouting something now, and pointing.

Again James’ stomach turned, this time a full somersault. “I think they’re fighting about us.”

Elle said nothing.

He took another dry breath and his mind fluttered. Maybe these people had killed Glen – shot him in the head – and left him for dead, only to return hours later to find the guy inexplicably up and walking. With a dumbass husband and wife who stopped to help. So now they had two extra witnesses to murder, and they were pissed off and bickering about it. He began to feel personally responsible for all this; he had dragged Elle into a situation he wasn’t equipped to handle. He heard his dad’s voice again:
Be polite, be kind, but have a plan to kill everyone you—

The driver door banged open. Thrash metal blared for a half second before the driver punched his CD player. He lurched out and stood, hands at his sides, stringy hair lifting and curling under a frayed LA Lakers cap. He was broad, barrel-chested, with the squinty gaze of a fighter and a black t-shirt that read I PISS EXCELLENCE.

Silence.

“Thanks for stopping.” James choked on basalt dust, figuring that if this excellence-pissing stranger were here to kill them he would have started killing them by now. “So we . . . we have a hurt guy here who needs—”

“I didn’t stop for you,” the driver said.

“What?”

The passenger door screeched open, and a twenty-something girl with ponied hair the color of bottled honey pushed out and staggered to her feet. She slung on her shoulder a purse large enough to hold a car battery. She wasn’t wearing much.

“Stay in the fuckin’ car,” the driver said.

“I need to stretch my legs.”

“I said stay in the car with your sister, Saray.” The driver wiped his nose and revealed a lion tattoo under his bicep. “We don’t know these people—”

“Why’d you stop?” James asked.

The driver reached inside his car and cranked the hood release—

“
Hey
. Why’d you stop?”

“Right when I saw you three—” The driver licked his chapped lips and paced to the Acura’s front bumper. He had a way of talking, maybe a country accent – too fast and too slow, at once, like he was trying to channel Clint Eastwood. “Right when I came up the hill and got within a hundred feet of you, I lost steering and ran hot. Like a belt went out.” As if on cue, the Acura farted a cloud of white smoke.

Elle looked at James, her eyes wide.

What are the odds?

James looked past her, over her shoulder at their own Rav4, at something he hadn’t noticed in the fuss before. Ten minutes ago when he was gawking at the dripping engine he had been standing with his shins to the bumper. Now with a few yards of distance, he could discern two off-color marks on the caged grill. Two dime-sized holes concealed under shadow. And a third skimming the bottom edge of the bumper, peeling the aluminum into cracked ridges. Like three little—

Oh, no.

“We’re being shot at,” James said. It came out deadpan, like a joke.

The driver blinked.

The girl, Saray, looked like she was about to say something. Then her cheeks chipmunked, and through her teeth she sprayed a mouthful of hot blood.

* * *

Tapp threw the bolt and ejected a golden casing. Up, back, forward, down, driving another bullet into the chamber and sealing the door behind it. It was a smooth action, made smoother by frictionless mechanical perfection and decades of muscle memory. Sometimes he cranked imaginary bolt-actions in his sleep.

He ran his tongue over his molars and rationed himself another breath. Every lungful was catalogued somewhere in the back of his mind while his heart contributed a steady twelve beats per breath. He knew his own clockwork well – between heartbeats, and within his natural respiratory pause, was a golden stillness, and inside those microseconds, the superhuman gift of William Tapp was to will the trigger to break with a power beyond nerve or muscle. To use the words of an awestruck witness at a gravel pit in Wyoming, he simply
made the bullet go
.

He’s a demon, this William Tapp.

His rifle was a Finnish design chambered for the internationally acclaimed .338 Lapua Magnum. Olive green composite stock. Black bolt and receiver, cold-forged. Sixty degrees of bolt rotation and a glassy smooth throw. Free-floating chrome barrel. Two-stage trigger, customized for length and vertical pitch. Ten-capacity box magazine brimming with his personal homemade ammunition, cigar-sized and gleaming like missiles in the sun. A bulbous scope towered over all of it; an oily black optic that could belong in a NASA observatory somewhere.

His gear was carefully spaced around him. To his right, a tripod-mounted spotting scope, a handheld ballistic computer and weather meter, and a notepad with a clipped mechanical pencil. To his left, a laser rangefinder, two ribbed magazines loaded and neatly stacked, and six additional boxes of hand-loads stored in skeletal plastic bands. And behind him he kept a half-buried emergency box stashed with a backup optic, a sleek handgun chambered in .17HMR, and various other goodies. And his snacks and energy drinks, of course.

At first, he didn’t think he’d hit the girl.

Slut McGee wavered in his scope, rocking on her heels ever-so-slightly as if a sharp burst of wind had disturbed her skirt. She looked one way, then the other, in mute confusion as the others hushed their conversation and turned to face her. To her, the miniature sonic boom might have sounded like a hornet whizzing past and harmlessly plunking into the dirt twenty meters up the road.

I missed.

His heart squeezed. He sagged his head, deflated and let the air hiss through the two gaps in his front teeth. He couldn’t blame wind or a change of target velocity. It was a miss, plain as iron sights on a clear day, and an ugly, embarrassing one because she had been standing perfectly still.
Most competition-legal x-rings are smaller than this dumb bitch. He should have been able to hit her blindfolded, with just a piece of gravel and a goddamn rubber band. Figures. It was the first easy (by his standards) shot he’d taken today, and he’d biffed it—

Slut McGee toppled, and Tapp sighed with relief.

She hit the ground and tucked into the fetal position. Now she lay in the precise center of the dirt road between the yellow Toyota and the red Acura, and he saw a tongue of darkness creeping out from under her. It was her blood turning the packed earth black. Judging by where she’d clamped her hands –
Why do they always do that?
– he tallied a low stomach hit, a little to the right. Devastating to the internals and circulatory system. One could call it a . . .
gut-wrenching
shot (ha!). Who says puns are the lowest form of humor?

I got her?

He’d got her.

The others stared with gaping horror – soundless panic, numb steps backward, their hands clenched to fists and pressed to their mouths to hold back screams. The intricate mechanisms of the human body ripped inside out and splattered, quivering and dripping and drying up, all over the ground. The usual reactions Tapp counted on, giving him time to prep his next shot.

Four targets. Four and a half, counting the Montana park ranger.

Which one?

He chose the brunette wife from the Toyota and quartered her in his crosshairs. She was standing by her husband with her hand hooked on his elbow, a few paces from the vehicle’s engine block, and he figured if he could hit her center-mass he might spray a big red sheet of her all over the Rav4’s hood and grill. That was always satisfying. Nothing is better than the bold splash of John F. Kennedy viscera when you shoot a person against a backdrop—

They’re running.

No biggie. He swiveled his crosshairs to follow—

No, not just running
. Everyone runs. Everyone eventually runs. But not like these people – they scattered with coordination and clarity of purpose. The husband and wife turned and went for the yellow Toyota, the wife vaulting the hood like a runner clearing a hurdle, then pivoting and disappearing behind it. They were both covered now, tucked tight against the car under a billow of cream-colored dust. Tapp swung left and saw the Lakers fan had already reached the nose of his Acura and was now staggering and pulling the second uninjured girl, who was already climbing from the back seat, around the driver door and out of view.

All four survivors were now hidden, crouched behind their two vehicles.

The dust thinned.

They know where I’m shooting from.
He blinked and his eyelashes scraped the scope’s rubber eyecup. He felt another surge of shame but consoled himself. He had done everything right, after all. One of them had simply paid enough attention to Slut McGee’s entry and exit wounds to deduce the direction his shots were coming from. Not an impressive trick. Anyone could do it.

I’m okay?

He was okay. Better keep shooting.

I’m doing great,
he told himself.
It’s been a good day. Good shots.

He curled his tongue back and probed the far reaches of his tonsils, where bitter globs of old food sometimes accumulated in tasty crystals. Today’s special was the morning’s peppered omelet, rounded out with Cheetos leftovers. The first time he’d discovered these little treats the bacterial taste had been shockingly foul, but if you do anything enough, you develop a taste for it, and eventually, a hunger.

He dug back into his firing stance, found that sacred golden stillness befitting a marksman of his
caliber
(ha!), and like a breath exhaled from the earth, plunked a second .338 into the Acura’s engine block. Just to be sure.

Yessir, I’m doing great.