by TAYLOR ADAMS
EYESHOT
Taylor Adams
First published 2014
Joffe Books, London
www.joffebooks.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is American English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this.
©Taylor Adams
Dedication
For Mom, Dad, Riley, and Jaclyn. Thanks for everything.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
1
For a killer, William Tapp looked pretty stupid right now.
He cut a shaggy brown silhouette of twigs and crunchy grass. Like the Swamp Thing, dried out and crispy after a trek in the Mojave sun, half-walking and half-climbing over a current of loose rocks skittering downslope. His raw breaths whistled. His kneecaps squealed and popped. His beleaguered heart struggled to keep blood everywhere it needed to be.
The outfit wasn’t helping. It was a homemade sniper’s ghillie suit – volleyball netting tied with layers of dyed jute threads and desert underbrush for camouflage – but it was like wearing a goddamn greenhouse. Crouching was awkward, running was difficult, and taking a piss had been disastrous the one time he’d tried.
He reached the summit under a hard blue sky, dropped his rucksack (Cheetos, Swedish Fish, a six-pack of grape-flavored energy drinks), and gathered his equipment. From here the view was striking; a vivid panorama of Nevada scrublands and violet mountains that could have scored a Pulitzer. Tapp didn’t notice.
He slipped the ghillie hood over his face, felt the prickle of dead grass on his lips, and like a descending shadow, morphed into the prairie.
Now William Tapp looked like nothing at all.
* * *
“Look out!”
James Eversman stomped the brakes and the Rav4 lurched like a cigarette boat dropping anchor. For a second, the world uncoupled. His seatbelt yanked him and he tasted a hot splash of copper. He couldn’t tell if he’d banged his mouth on the steering wheel or just bitten his tongue.
His wife Elle fared better, as her reflexes were sharpened by three coffees a day. She caught herself on the dashboard with her palms, her chocolate-brown hair covering her face, and hissed something that sounded to James like “crap-ass.” Sometimes her profanity didn’t quite come out right.
It wasn’t a crash but it felt like one. The parked cop car – a brown and white Ford with dusty windows – had materialized in the middle of the road on the last bend of a 70 mph S-curve. The highway was carved into the earth here and granite walls crowded the single-lane road like blinders. Had James been a heartbeat slower on the brake pedal, or distracted, or speeding, or . . . He pushed those thoughts out of his mind because they were unproductive. He knew what highway collisions looked like from EMT Basic, wherein a colleague had once described the human body as ‘curiously tomato-like.’ As the blood returned to his head and the acrid odor of burnt brake pads came sweeping in, James stared at the parked Paiute County patrol car not six paces from his front bumper and allowed himself to quietly marvel: Wow.
“Huh.” Elle flipped her hair from her eyes. “That almost sucked.”
“Indeed.”
“Why’d he stop in the middle of the road?”
“I don’t . . .” James’ throat dried up. “Well, here he comes.”
He was a compact little sheriff’s deputy approaching at a trot with his sidearm wobbling on his hip and one hand raised to steady a comically oversized campaign hat. It was almost a sombrero. He was coming from the road’s beveled gravel shoulder on the right, where James noticed a second vehicle pulled up and parked snugly against the oxidized walls. A newish white truck. It didn’t appear damaged, just empty. James had time to wonder: Where’s the driver?
“I . . .” Elle held in a laugh. “I think Smokey Bear wants his hat back.”
“Don’t stare.”
“Only you can prevent car accidents.”
“Elle, please don’t stare.” He thumbed the power window and it felt like depressurizing an airlock. Thick air poured inside and his voice disappeared under mouthfuls of swallowed heat and alkali dust.
The deputy’s footsteps sounded sticky, like the blacktop was melting under the sun. James took a weak breath and tried not to cough it out – he was nervous and he hated himself for it. Admittedly, this was a new experience. He had never even been pulled over before, which he had always attributed to his remarkably unremarkable driving. Elle had once compared him to one of those little circular vacuuming robots rich people buy. What were they called again?
“Oh, Christ.” The cop caught his breath and rested one palm on the door. “I should’ve had my lightbar on.”
“It’s okay,” James said without really meaning it. He was startled by how young the deputy was. This guy was fresh out of high school, small-framed, acne-encrusted, and apparently trying to grow a mustache. It was going poorly.
“I was just . . . this road gets three cars a day, tops. Shoot. Sorry.” The kid sniffed, straightened, and pointed to the white truck on the roadside. “There’s a . . . this truck is abandoned all the way out here. Doors unlocked. Engine running. Forty bucks in a money clip in the center console. Like some guy stepped out to take a leak and never came back. Just sitting here, abandoned on the shoulder.”
“Parked on the shoulder?” Elle cocked her head. “Maybe he was on to something.”
James inflated his fake smile.
Deputy Doogie Howser didn’t notice. He had a strange way of speaking; he over-inflected the first word of every sentence to deliver every idea like a PowerPoint bullet. Almost like he was hiding an accent. He apologized again (and again) and asked if they had seen anyone hitchhiking or walking along the roadside. Of course, they hadn’t. The nearest town was Mosby, a shit-splat silver mine burg the deputy estimated to be “eleven clicks” east (Why go by kilometers? James wondered), so leaving a functioning vehicle behind out here in this Mars-like world of rock and sky was fairly strange. And possibly dangerous.
The deputy said another thing that bothered James: “You a cop?”
“No.” The question hit him between the eyes. “Why?”
“Fire? Rescue? Security?” The kid squinted under the brim of that stupid hat with the solemn importance of a gypsy. “I swear, I can pick out an emergency guy from the regular civvies. It’s in the eyes. You have busy eyes.”
James shrugged politely. “Nope.”
“He took a few medic classes,” Elle said. “A long time ago.”
“Nah.” The deputy sighed. “That doesn’t count.”
Says the cop in the sombrero, James thought. He imagined Elle was thinking something wittier but hoped she would keep it to herself. He let the awkward moment pass and asked as sincerely as he could, “How can I help?”
Deputy Doogie Howser’s eyes thinned. “You see anyone walkin’ alone out here, on the side of the road, elderly, conf
used, whatever, you call me. This desert eats people. It’s a big county and we’re a small department.”
“How small?”
“You’re talkin’ to fifty percent of it.”
Then with a polite farewell nod, the cop turned and paced back to his patrol car, his size-eight boots slurping on the molten blacktop.
“And he’s like, thirty percent hat,” Elle whispered.
James nodded absently, watching.
This desert eats people.
The door thumped like a gunshot. Brake lights lit up as the deputy squeezed his car off the road and motioned them through with a circular wave. James rolled up his window and raced on past, again sneaking a sidelong glance at that mysterious white truck. Nothing special about it. Its windows blazed with reflected sunlight, rendering the interior unknown. He caught a flash of a bumper sticker – MPR, stenciled in all caps – and in another flash the truck was behind them, going, going, and gone forever. For a while he idly wondered what MPR stood for – Mexican Public Radio?
As the highway curved through more bends, the granite grew sharper and poked through the earth like bone tearing skin. James made a point to check every shadow and scan every stretch of plains for a humanoid walking figure, just in case. He wasn’t a paramedic – not even close – but he knew just enough to be useful in a crisis, and to wish he hadn’t been a salesman instead.
Elle exhaled. “Good thing you drive like a Roomba, honey.”
He nodded. Roomba. That’s what they’re called.
Uncomfortable silence descended, and the tedium of the road took over again. In another few minutes they would revert to the unhappy people they had been before this little distraction, sharing cold pauses under the hum of tires on pavement. That little jolt of adrenaline had been nice, he realized, and he wished for a little more of it today, if only to appease the elephant in the car awhile longer.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked.
She shook her head.
Good. He didn’t want to talk about it, either.
* * *
It was a long drive to Tulsa and it wasn’t half over.
James and Elle Eversman stopped for gas six miles later at the Mojave Fuel-N-Food – a quiet little place with seventies-era fuel pumps and a roller grill of seventies-era hotdogs. Over a pair of concrete picnic tables and a parked jeep, a bone-white signboard welcomed them to Mosby’s city limits (population: 88) and underneath, in blocky motel font: ALIENS CRASHED IN ROSWELL TRYING TO FIND MOSBY!!!!!
Five exclamation points, James observed. Four wasn’t enough.
He was too easygoing to be a Grammar Nazi but he had the eye for it. Back in California he represented eleven local radio stations as an account executive, although his soft hands made the handshakes awkward. No one trusts a man who doesn’t work with his hands. More than once before a big client meeting, he’d considered callousing his palms with steel wool.
“You think he’s watching us?” Elle asked him furtively as he cranked the gas release and stepped out under the shade of the fueling lane. The heat was more manageable here, but the air was still as thick as gelatin.
“Who?”
“The guy in the jeep.” She pointed with her head. “Black jeep, over there.”
James peered an inch over the Rav4’s roof. It was a lifted rig, powdered with dust, pulled parallel to the Fuel-N-Food with a calm disregard for the chalk parking lines. Sunlight on tinted glass painted silhouettes of two headrests and a bulging, asymmetrical head staring directly at them. It was so oddly misshapen (would a hat even fit on it?) that it took two glances to cross the uncanny valley and register it as human. It didn’t move or breathe.
James shivered.
“I can feel his eyes on the back of my head.” She thumbed the door lock and blocked her face with an elbow. “Crawling up and down. I hate being stared at.”
“Two minutes. Then we’re gone.”
“No wonder they tested A-bombs here. This state blows.”
He nodded. “I have no idea why Mexico wanted it back.”
He put the gas on credit. The old-fashioned fueling nozzle was canted and stuck. As he tugged it free he caught motion in his far periphery – the Black Jeep Man’s head was bobbing behind the sunlit glass now, and the asymmetrical part of the silhouette revealed itself to be a walkie-talkie receiver clamped to his ear with cigar fingers. He lowered the radio and swung his driver door open with a metallic squeal.
Elle sank in her seat.
James pumped gas and tried to look nonchalant. It wasn’t working.
Out climbed a bearlike man draped in a trail duster that swished a curtain of oilcloth with each step. He could have been the Marlboro man, except there was also something oddly foreign about him; he looked like the kind of asshole James Bond would garrote on his way into a secret Soviet base. His hair was knotted into a black ponytail and his six-inch beard was streaked with pewter. He kicked his door shut and paced to the Fuel-N-Food, carrying a silver coffee thermos with a bright circular marking on it, too far away for James to discern.
“Hello Kitty,” Elle whispered.
“What?”
“It’s a Hello Kitty sticker. On his thermos.”
“Oh.” James’ gut squirmed. “Oh, good.”
The Soviet Cowboy passed the building’s double doors without entering and instead took a seat at a concrete table under the Mosby signpost, facing them directly. He was less than twenty feet away now with the barren land canvassed behind him, quietly sipping his stupid thermos. His eyes were locked on Elle again.
She peered over the dashboard and sighed.
The fuel pump ticked like a metronome. Something rattled brokenly inside it, so James checked the gray digital screen – only a gallon had gone in. He jostled the pump impatiently. He was waiting for Elle to say something, something like: Don’t try to confront him, James. Just let it go. Don’t be a hero. It’ll only escalate things. He waited a few long seconds with his hand on the pump before realizing it wasn’t coming. She knew that he was a pacifist. He couldn’t even ask a waitress to take a burnt steak back to the kitchen without blushing. He hoped she would say it anyway, to be sweet, as she sometimes did.
“I’ve decided,” she said.
He did a double take. She sat on her hands in the passenger seat, eyes down, lips pursed. He knew the topic had boomeranged back to it again, and this time there was no avoiding it. “Decided what?” he asked her with one eye on the Soviet.
“I don’t want to get pregnant again.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
James felt his lip burst warmth in his mouth. It hadn’t been bleeding much before, but suddenly it reminded him of those candies that squirted fruit juice when you chewed them. The metallic taste turned his stomach, but he welcomed the distraction because anything was better than this conversation, right now, about it. Hell, he’d punch the Soviet Cowboy in the mouth right now just to buy another few minutes.
“I’m sorry, James.” Her jaw quivered. “I can’t do it anymore.”
He spat in the dirt. Bright red.
The Soviet took a swig from his Hello Kitty thermos, threw open his duster, and slapped a sheet of yellowed paper on the table. He carefully spaced three stubby pencils, feathered a hand over each, and selected the middle one.
“What’s he doing?” Elle asked.
“Doesn’t matter.” He leaned inside to face her with his palms on the Rav4’s hot roof. “We’re almost back on the road.”
A scratching sound underscored his voice. Like snakes coiling in dry brush. It was charcoal on paper, a Morse code rap of long and short scrapes. The Soviet was sketching in big strokes, with his veined tongue hanging over his beard. He’s drawing a picture of us, James realized. Or maybe just Elle.
“It’s the hope that’s killing me,” she said quietly. “I think.”
“How?”
She sighed.
“How, Elle?”
“I dread seeing
the test come up positive. I loathe those two pink lines. Because to be devastated, you have to be happy first, and all I see is another miscarriage in three months. And unlike you, James, I’m having a hell of a hard time seeing every one of them as a human soul.”
He ran his hands through his sandy hair, already dulling as his thirties approached. He had made a point of naming every one of their children and he could recite their names, starting three Januaries ago after they married – first Darby, then Jason, then Adelaide (who almost finished the second trimester and poisoned Elle with hope), then Carrie, then Ross, then . . . well, they’d named almost all of them. The last one, six weeks ago, seemed to be the final straw. That was when an exhausted Elle had decided she wanted to start reusing names, which offended James. It felt unconscionably cold. If there’s even an outside chance of a human life existing, the least you can do is give it a name. And not reuse it.
“We’ll make it happen,” he said.
“You don’t know that.”
He imitated her doctor’s Swahili accent: “Eet’s not impossible. Eet’s just unlikely.”
“Yes. Having a baby is unlikely.” She rolled her eyes but managed a small smile. “Unlikely is our car transforming into a talking robot. Even though it’s a Japanese car, I’m not holding my breath for that.”
“No. That’s impossible,” James said. “Unlikely is winning the lottery.”
“Not holding my breath for that, either.”
“People win all the time.”
“Then prove it. Buy a million tickets.”
“Sure.” James paused. “Are we talking about the lottery or sex?”
She didn’t laugh. The joke hung in the air unacknowledged. Her face was downturned so he kissed her forehead and smelled green apple from whatever bargain bin shampoo she had used back at the motel in Fairview. He saw constellations of freckles by her eyes, and tears perched on her eyelashes like little raindrops.
The fuel pump ticked – ten gallons.
The Soviet switched pencils, twirled one across his knuckles, and his strokes became shorter. He must have been on the fine details now. Every few seconds he paused to rub delicate shadows with the pad of his thumb. Then he looked up at James with a dark glower, as if to say: Get out of the way.
