EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read (7 page)

Isn’t it windy today? Doesn’t that make it even harder?

Meanwhile you got these asshole CSI agents on television diving over backwards in slow motion and still shooting the bad guy, like a gunfight is some kind of fucking bullet ballet. Or shooting with a pistol in each hand – who decided that made the faintest lick of sense? It was bullshit. Preposterous. It made Tapp angry. He couldn’t think about it now.

He must be the best sniper in the world.

Tapp cracked open his second energy drink (grape-flavored, of course) and replayed the last few seconds in his mind. It wasn’t a headshot but it was close enough to send a rush of pleasure down his favorite neural pathways. After the rifle’s kick, first came the ‘swirl’ in his scope – the bullet’s vapor trail, more visible on a hot day like today. By reading it, he could watch the shot go low and left to burrow under the wind shear, exactly how he’d planned. Then the impact – magnified in his 100x spotting scope because during the projectile’s flight he had time to comfortably lean forward and switch optics – he saw the fountain of mist and dirt. The water itself was vaporized, blown into a fine curtain of fog that blossomed and swept sideways in the low wind. He envisioned this, the lovely payoff, again and again until he was exhausted and felt only the creeping hunger to hit more.

More, please.

This was becoming his longest shoot ever. Typically they were thirty-minute affairs; heavenly little bursts of excitement after months of work and buildup. He would kill one, two, three, a runner here, a crawler there, and then he would shed his ghillie suit, grab his target pistol, hike a mile across the crater, and study the stiffening bodies where they lay. He would close his eyes and reconstruct the shoot as a play-by-play, imagining each second from their ground-level viewpoints, sketching mental lines suspended in the air like lasers to mark each move, counter-move, and kill shot.

This shoot was different. These four were intelligent enough to immediately take cover behind their cars at a perfectly observed angle. No one had lost it. No one had hit the dirt like the sissified modern human is trained to. No one had chanced a run for the hills (yet). As it stood, this engagement was becoming a stalemate, which Tapp did not want. Not this late into the afternoon with dwindling sunlight. No, sir. No thanks.

“Move their cars for me,” he said into his headset radio. “Now.”

As he spoke he spotted a flash of movement under the Toyota’s front bumper. The wife – it appeared – was doing something there. Her shadow bobbed against wiry grass, then shortened and lengthened. Something small and silver scooted slowly into view under the bumper, feathered by mere fingertips.

He blinked and his eyelashes scraped the lens.

What’s this?

* * *

Elle steadied her Nikon digital camera on the soft earth. She gently swiveled it to face downhill across the crater and then another thirty degrees to the right as James had instructed. The reflex viewfinder allowed her to see the image without exposing her head. She hoped. At this obtuse angle beside the Toyota’s front tire, she wasn’t sure how far, exactly, was too far to lean out.

She could hear the girl – Ash? – sobbing by the other car. What an awful thing. She couldn’t imagine losing her own sister, let alone in such a graphic way, in full view and unflinching sunlight. She had to say something.

“Hey. Hey, your name is Ash, right?” she shouted. “Like Ashley?”

Silence.

“Yeah,” the girl said.

“I’m Elle.”

No response.

She could barely see the viewfinder at this angle. The aperture was still set for indoors and let in far too much sunlight, registering a blizzard whiteout. Carefully exposing one finger at a time (she doubted the sniper, for all his godlike powers, could possibly target individual fingers, right?) she dialed the f-stops back to four, then eight, then eleven. Finally the horizon traced itself on the screen.

“How . . . how old are you, Ash?” She licked her lips and lowered the camera, dipping the two center hash marks below the craggy skyline.

“Eighteen,” the girl sniffed.

“Tell me about yourself. What do you like to do?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

To see the viewfinder, Elle contorted her back into an s-curve – shoulders forward, head twisted back. She couldn’t possibly know where the invisible line between life and death was, but she imagined her cheeks were just touching it, her eyelashes fluttering against it, her heaving breaths and arched spine holding her back and upright and just barely out of the killer’s scope. Maybe she was teasing him.

“Why is your hair blue?” she asked. Stupid question.

Ash huffed. “Why not?”

Swing and a miss
, she thought. She thumbed the optical zoom and watched the far valley wall slowly enlarge and darken. Good Lord, she loved that telephoto lens. She loved the compressing effect it had on buildings, how entire city blocks of steel, glass, and brick would flatten into a single wall of crushed depth. Downtown had always been an amazing place for her, full of verticality. Some of her favorite shots were on the roof of the Quigley building looking down on the rooftops of Wallace, with those parapets and utility boxes and gargoyles suffering Big Apple envy. She had a hell of an eye for compositions, but she quickly learned that talent doesn’t pay the rent.

She tried again. “You going to school for anything?”

“September. I start vet school in Reno.”

“That’s good. I love pets.”

“Yeah?” Ash sniffed. “You seem like a dog person.”

Silence.

James looked at his wife and stifled a laugh.

Elle smiled bashfully. “No. Snakes.”

“
Snakes
?”

“Yeah. Two snakes and—”

“Snakes are disgusting,” Ash said. “Not even God likes snakes.”

“I do. They’re neat pets.” Elle tried not to sound like she had delivered this speech before. “They’re not slimy, although that’s a popular misconception because of the reflective sheen on their scales. They feel . . . cool and dry to the touch, kind of like leather. And lots of species are really docile and never bite, like ball pythons, or corn snakes, or green racers. I think you’d really—”

James squeezed her shoulder, as if to say
easy there
.

Elle bumped the f-stops to let in more light and saw that the image, quivering with her heartbeats, was now magnified to its maximum. Five times. She was zoomed in somewhere on the far wall and saw darkened hillside, glacial talus flows, flash-flood gullies and jutting rock teeth, smudged yuccas and clusters of tangled brush, all drawing tall shadows and hued an unnatural Sesame Street orange. A small, anal-retentive part of her wanted to white-balance the Nikon to correct that.

“See him?” he whispered into her hair.

“No.”

“Anything?”

“Just desert. An overabundance of desert.”

“Okay.” Ash sighed. She sounded like she was finally smiling over there. “Okay, Elle, if we get out of here, maybe I’ll touch one of your snakes. But I’m warning you, if it bites me, I’m tying it in a knot.”

Elle felt a dagger in her gut and exhaled sadly. “I . . . don’t have them.”

“Why not?”

Then she saw something in the Nikon viewfinder. A pinprick of white light.

* * *

“Oh my God,” James heard her say.

“What?”

Then the camera exploded under her hand, into her face, a smoky firecracker of slicing shrapnel. She screamed, thrashed her arm, and twisted hard like a yanked rag doll. The snap of displaced air raced over the desert floor and suddenly she was motionless, low in the dirt, her face covered by her ponytail. He blinked – he had grit in his eyes – and saw dark drops in the dirt, arced in a blotted stream, and it registered late that it was blood.

“Elle!”

He couldn’t see her right hand. Just blood. More blood, dribbling in the sand. She clutched it with her left and hissed a mouthful of hot air. His stomach fluttered as he threw himself toward her, tugging her shoulders back against the driver door, trying to pull her vise-tight fingers away so he could see the injury, his mind racing with awful possibilities. Chunks of her Nikon click-clacked around them like hail.

“Tell me I’m okay,” she gasped.

“You’re okay.”

Her ponytail hit his face and she pulled her right hand up into view, clasped between white fingers. She peeled them away one by one to reveal the damage – a thin strip of skin had been peeled from the pad of her thumb, as if it had been caught on the blade of a cheese grater. Maybe she’d partially lost a fingerprint, but that was it. Thank God.

He kissed the back of her neck. “No more of that.”

“I loved that camera,” she said blankly, rocking back into a sitting position against the door. Her cheeks were gray, her words clipped, and she was trying to act nonchalant but he saw right through it. She held up trembling fingers: “Three paychecks at the reptile store.
Three
.”

“Elle!” Ash screamed from the other car. “Elle, are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“I . . .” She shrugged with chattering teeth. “Nothing much. What’s up with you?”

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Ash said. “I’m starting to like you.”

Elle smiled – a real smile – showing white teeth.

James held her shoulders. For as long as he had known her, his wife had maintained a particular uneasiness with people. She might pretend to be in her element, but she wasn’t really. She had a deep grab bag of rehearsed smiles, tension-breaking jokes, fake compliments, and all the other calculated niceties of social interaction. She only had two friends – one was her sister Eowen, and the other had moved back to Boston two years ago. Sometimes he worried for her, because he felt like he was one of only three people on earth who could make her genuinely smile. Four, maybe, counting eighteen-year-old Ash.

“What did you see?” he asked his wife.

“A flash.”

“Like a gun flash?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Like a kernel of light, in the middle of the hillside—”

“How much time passed?”

“What?”

“Between the flash and impact?”

She squeezed her bleeding thumb. “Felt like a second.”

“One second.” He stared into the badlands, letting the syllables drop off his swollen tongue. “It takes his bullet one entire second to get from his gun to us.”

His mind jumped to a ninth grade science fact; that it took light from the sun eight full minutes to reach the earth. The distance was that unfathomably vast. Something about it had always disturbed him and conjured a mental image of the earth as a lonely grapefruit floating in a Pacific Ocean of nothingness. Nothing out there for us beyond a universe of indifferent stars. He could hear his teacher’s voice now:
How humbling it is, to know our smallness.

Elle was looking at him, waiting for it.

“We can use that,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He leaned closer and grinned mischievously. “When he’s aiming at us, and he shoots, he’s not shooting to hit us. He’s shooting to hit where he estimates we’ll be. In one second.”

“That’s it?”

“We own that second. Not him.”

“That’s . . . extremely optimistic.” She opened her hand and studied the way the blood filled the cracks in her skin. “What can we possibly do with one second?”

“We’ll think of something.”

“Christ!” It was Roy again, sharp and hoarse. “Why is anyone listening to him? One second. One goddamn second.
Really?
This is like being trapped on a desert island with goddamn Ned Flanders.”

“Please,” Ash whispered. “Please stop.”

“So . . .” Elle sighed and looked at her husband. “We have one hypothetical second of borrowed time. He still has a sniper rifle.”

“I’m thinking,” James said.

She kicked a chunk of blue GPS plastic and looked at him sideways. “Honey, just once, can you please drop the optimism and admit that we’re so far up shit creek, we’re actually two miles up shit mountain?”

“Hey!” Roy shouted, suddenly dead serious. “Hey, hey. Car coming.”

Elle froze, her eyes turning to wax.

James leaned forward and peered around the Rav4’s left headlight, down Shady Slope Road’s plunging valley. It was the black jeep. A hundred yards down the road, lifted tires jostling, flanked on both sides by a plume of swirling dust. Coming at them fast. The Soviet Cowboy with his Hello Kitty thermos.

Elle huffed. “Not him again.”

“We need to warn him,” Ash said. “We need to signal him to stop, and turn around, and get help—”

“No,” James said. “We don’t.”

“Why?”

“He’s . . . he’s part of it.”

Roy punched something that banged like a drum. “Even though . . . Christ. I got a speeding ticket two hours ago for going seventy-four in a seventy. So this county is apparently swarming with murderers, but at least the traffic enforcement is fucking
immaculate.
”