EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (5 page)

He would kill them all.

5

James heard a metallic ping. “There. That’s how he does it. He just shot the car again.”

“I didn’t hear a gunshot,” Elle whispered beside him.

“No gunshots.” Words stuck in his throat. “There’s no bang because . . . I don’t know.”

“A silencer?”

“Stay down.”

“Could he have a silencer?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s nothing for the shooter to hide behind.” She scooted back against the rear tire and gravel crackled under her like popcorn. “Just miles and miles of open desert.”

“So he’s very, very far away.”

“How far?”

“Very far.” He squinted. “Far enough that we can’t hear the gunshot.”

“That’s impossible.”

He shrugged coldly.

“So . . . he’s that way.” She pointed over the Toyota’s hood, about thirty degrees to the right of Shady Slope Road. That angle, combined with the slight leftward pivot James had parked at, afforded them nearly the entire car-length of the Rav4 for visual cover. “And we know he’s shooting from that direction.”

“Yeah.”

“Great.” She swallowed. “What happens when he moves?”

He sighed. Of course, she was right. A million percent right. Yes, they were protected from the shooter’s firing angle, but he could be flanking in either direction, right now, this very second, and they wouldn’t know about it until someone else literally dropped dead.

“Saray!” the driver screamed. “Saray, how bad is it?”

He heard Saray breathing fast and shallow. She coughed and it sounded wet.

Elle paled. “She’s still alive?”

James dropped to his belly, pressed his cheek to the heated dirt and looked under the Rav4. The girl lay sideways in the center of the road, facing away from them. She had both hands clenched tightly to her abdomen, right at her kidney. Her white tee was now bright red, her skirt glossy black, and he could see more blood pooling beneath her and darkening the sand. Like oil on a beach. She kicked and dug ruts in the soil. She cried out, all vowels.

“Oh, God.” Elle covered her mouth with her hands. “Crap-fuck-ass-
shit
.”

James remembered something. “Where’s Glen?”

She didn’t hear.

“Where’s Glen?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

Then James saw the old man – his brown boots, pacing crookedly downhill past the Acura. The angle was too flat to see any higher than his waist. He could see Glen’s denim-clad legs moving slowly, calmly, oblivious to the dying girl behind him. He turned and walked back uphill, then turned around again. And so on. Like a broken toy, he had defaulted back to his hitchhiker routine.

“Saray,” the uninjured girl – her sister? – cried from behind the Acura. “Saray, crawl to me and Roy. Crawl toward us.”

Saray rolled on her belly. Her back was dark with clods of bloodied dirt. Then the exit wound above her left hip rose into view – a ragged flower of torn flesh the size of a palm, crossed by a pale strip of skin drained of blood, punching through the front legs of what looked like a unicorn tattoo just above her skirt.

“Oh . . .” Elle looked away.

“You’re gonna be okay.” The driver – Roy – sniffed and his voice broke. He was a bad liar, and he couldn’t even see the exit wound from his angle. “I love you. You’re going to be fine. Crawl toward me.”

The girl flopped and splayed her legs on the road. She had ten, maybe fifteen feet to crawl to that Acura. James could see up her short skirt and looked away, embarrassed for her. “I can’t,” the girl whimpered through tears and snot. “I can’t.”

Elle gagged behind him. He heard a warm splash.

“I . . . hang in there, baby.” Roy’s voice changed pitch, like he was rising to a crouch. “I’m going to help you.”

She’s bait
, James realized.
The killer is using her as bait.
They were all behind cover now. They had concealed themselves and created a stalemate; so logically, the killer was doing one of two things. He was either relocating to fire again from a better angle, or he was staying put and watching them through curved glass with his finger on the trigger, waiting for someone to expose themselves. Maybe he’d shot to wound Saray for that very purpose – to lure her family and friends out of hiding with the sound of her screams. The viciousness of it shocked him.

Why would someone do this?

He couldn’t think about that. It was unproductive right now. Saray’s bleeding needed to stop. The human body holds almost six liters of blood and at least two of hers had soaked into Shady Slope Road already. She had to be losing another liter every minute through that gaping hole in her side. He was taken aback by how huge the cavity was – in EMT Basic, he had seen the case photographs from a patrolman peppered with AK-47 fire in a 1994 shooting. The exit wound in his shoulder had been about the size of a golf ball. Saray’s was . . . Jesus, it was at least twice that.

What kind of weapon are we being shot at with?

Again, he stopped his thoughts. Unproductive.

“Saray. Put your right hand on your right hip,” James said. “Your left on your left. Hold both wounds, keep hard pressure on them.”

She did. Her chest rose and fell.

Roy was moving now. A boot scuffed dirt. A hand squealed on the Acura’s hood. “I’m going to run for her,” he said. “I’m going to carry her back—”

“Don’t do it,” James said.

“What?”

“He’s waiting for you to do that. We have to think about this—”

“Fuck you. She’s my fiancée—”

“He’s
using her
,” James shouted louder than he’d intended, and his voice boomed in the congested air. “He’s using her, like he used Glen to get to us. He can’t shoot us right now, so he’s using your fiancée to lure us out into the open. He’s smart. We know he’s smart, because we’re all right in the middle of his trap. If you run for her, you will die.”

Silence.

Roy chuffed. “What are you, a marine?”

“I . . . sell radio ads.”

“For the marines?”

“No.”

“Why should I listen to you?”

“You can do exactly what he expects — and die.” James exhaled, dug his fingers into the red dirt, and calmed his chattering teeth. “Or we can make a plan. A diversion. Something.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe . . . maybe someone can stand up real fast.”

“Great. I volunteer you.”

Saray was looking at James now. He wished she wouldn’t. Her eyes brimmed with tears. Her lips opened and shut like a goldfish out of water, blowing blood bubbles. He was relieved to see that she had a good grip on both wounds, although a thin line trickled between her fingers. She would certainly stay conscious for a few more minutes – long enough to think of a way to get to her, or get her to them.

Then what?

James didn’t want to think that far ahead. “Stay where you are,” he told her. “I’ll help you. I promise I’ll help you.”

She nodded and a heavy glop of blood rolled down her cheek. “If I go . . .” She spat a mouthful and it hung off her mouth in dark strings. “I can’t go because that would make all the things I said to my mom our last words. I can’t make it final. I called her . . . I called her horrible things.”

James wished he hadn’t promised. “Before we do anything else . . .” His throat lumped and he raised his voice for everyone to hear. He wasn’t a public speaker. He hated being listened to. He was uncomfortable with the way his voice rang in the open air. Everyone was waiting for him to speak and fill the silence. He wished there was someone else there, someone smarter and tougher and steadier, who could make the calls instead. A lot of things had already terrified him today, and being in charge of this little survival team was definitely in the top three.

No one spoke.

A low gust of wind came and went.

He exhaled and went for it. “Before we do anything else, we need to figure out where the shooter is. And how far away he is.”

Elle wiped her mouth and looked up at him.

Roy spat loudly. “How?”

* * *

Tapp saw a hand swoop over the Toyota’s hood and bash the driver side mirror with a tile of rock. Two soundless hits bent it and dumped a glittering shower, and then the hand disappeared.

Mirror shards. To peek over the car.
Tapp ran his tongue over his bristled upper lip and tasted Cheetos.

That’s just adorable.

He was locked into his spotting scope; a tripod-mounted telescope dialed in to 100x magnification and capable of reading a newspaper at a hundred meters. Incredible image, just incredible. Right now he could
feel
the dusty hood of the Toyota, warmed stove-hot by the sun, and the porous texture of volcanic rock. He could smell the panic-sweat, the coppery odor of dribbling and drying blood, and he could hear all the gasping profanities, the sobbing, the futile arguing, fussing, and dick-measuring. With this powerful optic he was inside it all, holding his breath and dunking his head and immersing himself in every tiny detail. Like a video game, the entire experience waited obediently on Tapp and his input. Inside his glass world, where things were carefully posed and arranged for his pleasure, William Tapp was God. He sucked a seventy-fourth Cheeto from the bag with just his lips.

And God
(crunch, crunch)
needs to shoot something again.

So he rolled back to his rifle, poured himself around it, wrapped his right hand around the cozy polymer and squeezed a fist underneath with his left, and swiveled his needle-thin crosshairs to the Montana park ranger. The man was still up, still somehow half lucid after taking a glancing .338 to the skull, pacing a drunken figure-eight several meters north of the two dead cars. A walking ghost.

Years ago, Tapp had shot a transient from Portland in the temple with a jacketed 5.56 NATO. The hobo’s driver’s license had read Malton Chango or some such bullshit (generally, the weirder a person’s name, the weirder their death throes) and damn if that wasn’t in full effect. The man died – by one definition of the term – more or less instantly but his nervous system exploded into overdrive. He ran a few paces backward and somersaulted twice before collapsing in the brush, kicking up a storm of prairie dust, flopping like a retard for fifteen full minutes. The Funky Chicken, performed by a corpse. In the hot shock of the moment, Tapp had laughed giddily until his throat knotted up and he was choking out piggish little schoolgirl squeals. But in retrospect the sight had disturbed him. He didn’t know why. It was like he had crossed some line he wasn’t aware of.

This undead park ranger also made him uncomfortable.

Why?

He didn’t know. Sometimes a shot just turned icky and that was that. The human body was, after all, an endless supply of anecdotes to be crushed, splattered, inverted, or vaporized. Not all of them sat well.

Did you hear about the guy whose left side was blown off?

Yeah. He’s all right now.

He ran the pad of his index finger over the curve of the trigger, a motion he had performed perhaps a hundred million times in his fifty-six years on this earth. Trigger control, basically smooth rearward pressure, is the foundation upon which all marksmanship is built. Doesn’t matter who you ask. Squeeze the trigger – don’t you dare pull it. Apply your squeeze so gradually, in fact, that the shot actually
surprises
you when it comes out. Otherwise your body will anticipate the kick and unconsciously flinch, and in those crucial microseconds while the projectile races down the bore at thousands of feet per second, even the slightest twanged muscle in your forearm will blow a shot to hell. The marksman understood that a properly executed shot should strike like lightning from a clear sky, surprising the target and the shooter alike.

I do it for my shooting, not their pain.

I don’t enjoy their pain.

Their pain is just necessary for my shooting.

Nothing more. As Tapp settled into his millpond stillness and applied his trigger squeeze, he realized that in his dialogue of faraway violence, this mercy shot on Mr. Floyd was possibly the most sincere gesture of goodwill he could offer another human being. It made him feel good.

The trigger broke cleanly, and that felt even better.

* * *

Elle heard a wet slap, like a beef flank slamming against a tile wall, and saw Glen Floyd’s jacket quiver just above his tailbone. Then he folded to the earth as if invisible scissors had snipped his spinal cord. No blood, no apparent pain, very little sound, only merciful relief from this waking nightmare. His troubles were finally over, and she envied him a little for that.

She sat on her hands with her back to the Rav4’s rear panel and her feet tucked inside the vehicle’s safe shadow. She was thirsty. Her contacts burned with sand that stuck under her eyelids and scratched with every blink. Her throat was raw from inhaling the baked air, as if she had been leaning into a wood stove and breathing heavily. Her stomach still hadn’t settled and the odor of vomit lingered in the still air. It smelled like salty Chinese food.