by TAYLOR ADAMS
His stomach plunged. “I’ll find out.”
“Not good enough.” Roy rubbed his eyes. “My stepdad carries. I used to play with the holster when I was a kid. A couple different kinds, depending on whether it was the Colt or not. There was one where the gun just rested on it and could be, you know, pulled right out. And another was sheriff-style, a button strap on a little latch—”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying if you’ve never handled a holster, you’ll dick it up. You’ll take longer than a second. It’ll be a new motion for you and it needs to be instinct. I have some muscle memory. Not a lot, but maybe enough.”
“You’re volunteering?”
Roy nodded weakly.
“Your exact words were retarded idea,” James said.
“I stand by it.”
“What changed?”
“Nothing. And nothing will change if we don’t try something.” Roy leaned forward, gravely serious in his I PISS EXCELLENCE t-shirt. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you. I have my reasons, my important reasons, to not catch a bullet out here. So yes, James, I’ll do it. I’ll do it on one condition.”
“Shoot.”
“That’s it, actually.” Roy bit his lip hungrily. “When that bastard comes back to tow your car, I want to be the one to shoot him in the face.”
* * *
William Tapp lay still and listened to the wind change.
He understood, as any decent mind could tell you, that such stillness was illusory. Everything was always moving. He imagined he could feel tectonic plates groan and crack under his belly like sleeping dinosaurs. The earth whirled on its axis with such violence that the planet bulged at the equator. Even the solar system, one of a million shards of an expanding universe, hurtled through space like a handful of thrown gravel. For this reason, shooting at long range ceases to be shooting and becomes something else entirely. For every hundred meters of added distance, a new dimension of subtlety and instinct enters the equation. Even a little guesswork. At a mile and beyond, Tapp finds himself acting as something of a coordinator or an organizer, arranging appointments between target and projectile – two moving objects on a moving world – and ensuring they both arrive at precisely the same place and time. Down to the centimeter and millisecond.
I’m running out of time.
No, he wasn’t.
Yes, I am. Two hours left.
He felt the temperature drop and whiffed the salty stink of coastal air pushed hundreds of miles inland. A low-pressure system brimmed over the western hills, ready to pour, while a billowing wave of cumulus clouds and the anvil shadow of a thunderhead took up positions on the horizon. One by one, his yellow flags quivered. The air churned and thinned. Every constant would need to be reassessed.
“Hurry up,” he told Svatomir.
Two hours of usable daylight left. The storm wasn’t a concern because it would arrive well after nightfall. By then he would be sitting at his reloading bench under the sulfurous glow of his shop light while Svatomir stripped the Acura and Toyota for parts and burned the bodies in a crispy stack. Tapp hated that part, which is why he always delegated it. He never truly felt guilt for the wasted life but he did always feel a strange sort of fatigue afterward. Maybe it was overstimulation, maybe it was the comedown after the high, but he had always compared it to overeating – like he had gorged on a greasy buffet and now had to pop antacids, unbutton his pants, and lie down. Burning flesh always reeked, too. It was a persistent foulness that would cling to your sleeves and gum up in your hair, like fatty beef sizzling in a frying pan. Or maybe severely burnt lamb or pork. Different people produced different flavors, none of them good.
Svatomir’s cousin Sergei would sometimes come to watch the bodies crackle. He was a ratty little teenage mouth-breather who dabbled, via email, in some semi-serious Satanist groups in Wyoming. A fire-and-brimstone organization calling itself the Order of the Black Flame but having a Hotmail account struck Tapp as pretty contradictory, but there you go. Svatomir’s little cousin would scrutinize the flames for hours until only glowing coals and bones remained.
Tapp once asked him what he saw.
Mankind purifying itself, Sergei had said without an ounce of irony.
Ah, Tapp had said.
God wants us to be weak and subservient, the little bastard whispered. He’s the king and He likes the status quo. How do you bring down a king? You go after the peasants, the foundation He’s built on. It’s a ground game, and not one of these bubbling faces was strong enough to survive it. This is how we fight our war with God. Through you. You’re mulching His foot soldiers into paste, bringing mankind closer to His level.
A woman’s blackened arm shifted and loosed a flurry of embers.
Sergei smiled. And rightfully, that terrifies Him.
Tapp had smiled too, through the blue shop towel he held clamped to his mouth, and quietly wished he could see things with such vividness. Although that might require brain damage.
Why? Sergei asked. What do you see?
Tapp shrugged. Just firewood with unhappy faces.
You’re a demon, the kid said. You just don’t know it yet.
That last remark had hung in the air with the rancid smoke. Tapp was never entirely certain how it made him feel. Some days it was inspiring that people could look at him and see such timeless grandeur, demons, and God; all that purple bullshit. Other days it just hung over him like a musty dog blanket; a title he didn’t believe in or want. What is evil, after all? What is being a self-appointed servant of God or Satan? As meaningless as being a Red Sox fan, that’s what.
Movement!
Behind the Toyota.
He leaned into his spotting scope and recognized a second camera scraping timidly forward under the vehicle’s front bumper. It was a little chunkier than the first one, black, an older model perhaps. He clucked his tongue and wondered why these survivors would try the same thing twice. Obviously he would just shoot it again. How many damn cameras did they have back there? Were they testing him? Were they probing his shooting for weakness or inconsistency? This raised the stakes, he realized.
I can’t miss now.
That would be embarrassing.
As sure as the changing wind, somehow this engagement wasn’t on Tapp’s terms anymore. It was on theirs. In some small way, he had lost control. While he considered the ramifications of this, he popped the tab on a second energy drink and took a warm, grape-flavored slurp.
It was definitely a . . . long shot.
* * *
“What’s he waiting for?”
“This better work,” Elle said. “Last camera.”
James feathered the Sony with his fingertips and figured this must be what it’s like to dangle a hand over a screaming meat grinder. He turned away to protect himself from catching an eyeful of shrapnel, but not being able to see his hand made it somehow worse. He had no idea when the shot would come, or where it would hit, or if it was even coming at all. He was starting to wish he had insisted on running for Glen’s gun instead. To his left, Roy dropped to his knees with his palms flat on the baked road in a shaky runner’s crouch. He raised his head and locked his eyes on the old man’s body. His calves bulged spring-tight.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” James asked.
Roy nodded and slipped off his Lakers cap. “After this, after I shoot the bearded guy, how do we get to his jeep? It’ll be twenty feet away, at least, if he parks like he did last time. He has a lot of cable.”
“My husband doesn’t think that far ahead,” Elle said.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.” James gritted his teeth and switched hands on the camera. The odd angle was cramping his wrist and more importantly, if he must lose a hand in the next few seconds, he didn’t want it to be his dominant one. “We’ll make it up as we go. But right here, right now, seconds literally count and we need that gun.”
“If it exists.”
“It d
oes.”
“If I get all the way out there and it’s just a candy bar, I’ll come back and punch you again.”
James shrugged. “If my plan’s as retarded as you say, you won’t make it back.”
Roy smiled. “Asshole.”
James swiveled the Sony another inch to the right to keep the act authentic. This camera didn’t even have an LCD viewfinder like the Nikon – just a rubber movie-camera eyecup, impossible to see through without putting your face behind it. He hoped the sniper wasn’t tech-savvy enough to notice. There was something strangely personal to this, he realized. This long distance bluff had upped the stakes by introducing the human element, and like that eggshell silence when he first approached Glen Floyd, there was no coming back from it.
“If he was going to shoot the camera, he would have done it by now.” Roy rested on his left knee, and James smelled stale chew on his breath. “It’s been what, how many minutes now?”
“He’ll shoot it.”
“Four.” Elle clacked her phone shut. “Almost five minutes.”
“Five minutes and he hasn’t shot it yet.” Roy rubbed his eyes with his thumbs. “I think he’s onto us, James. I think he’s going to call it. So this was Plan A. Do we have a Plan B?”
“Die,” James said.
Elle nodded. “Let’s try to stick to Plan A.”
“Die,” Roy said thoughtfully, rolling his tongue over it. “I . . . I lied when I said Saray was my fiancée. If I’m going to die, it feels wrong to take that with me. So . . . Saray wasn’t my fiancée.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told her we’d get married eventually. But I have a wife right now. And a daughter, named Emma, out in Prim. She’s two. She’s . . . the sweetest little mistake ever.” His throat clogged and he forced a laugh. “She’s not supposed to exist, she shouldn’t be, but we had her, and now that’s . . . wonderful. Right?”
“Right.”
“So I drive a lot. I pick a direction and I just go. And I pretend that I can keep driving and I don’t ever have to turn around. The desert is great for that. Infinity in all directions. Simplifies things. Makes you feel small, and I like feeling small, and feeling like what I do to people doesn’t matter, because of the sheer bigness of the world.” He exhaled, motored his lips and looked up at James tiredly. “I lie to people. I lied to Saray and her sister. We went to the amphitheater. It was a fun night. Ash threw up in someone’s hair, I think. And now I’m here. And I think about Emma and I wonder if God is punishing me. Like I deserve this.”
Noticing the rainclouds stacking on the horizon, James decided what the hell and offered him a sip of water. “Nobody deserves this.”
Roy refused. “Maybe I do.”
“You don’t.”
“What was your life before this?”
James shrugged. He was having trouble keeping a serious conversation going with a man in an I PISS EXCELLENCE shirt.
“I work on cars,” Roy said. “You said you sold stuff?”
He nodded but said nothing. It’s strange how you can go to work every day for five years and lose everything only five days after quitting. He retained the memories but they felt second-hand, like they belonged to someone else. He had already forgotten what the coffee machines sounded like. He tried to picture his office and remember if his scanner was parallel to the cabinet or beside it. Between spells of productivity he used to stare up at the radio group logo on the wall – Your Advertising Dollars at Just Under the Speed of Light! – and try to fathom how anyone with a business degree could think up something so asinine. He’d made some good friends there. Most left to work in television, web startups, or retire. A good one, Keith, had been killed by a drunk driver on Christmas Eve. James remembered being one of the last people to see him alive as he left the holiday party, and couldn’t even remember what final things they’d talked about. Did it matter?
In that life, in that city, he and Elle had discovered a fate worse than misery. Comfortable mediocrity. Things were never truly bad, but they were never truly good, either. Every miscarriage seemed to pull Elle closer to an unknown precipice. Some days they felt like sad shadows of themselves, sleeping like siblings in a shared bed. He could recall entire days where they didn’t speak, and didn’t care to. Just incompatible strangers sharing a house; an insufferable optimist and an insufferable pessimist. The fire was just an excuse, really. James and Elle had decided to reshuffle the deck, head to Tulsa, and take a mulligan on life.
They could have stayed, of course. Even after the fire. They could have found another home in Sacramento, maybe up on the fancier East Ridge (known to the locals as Douchebag Ridge) since his client list had bumped him up an income bracket. He could have continued to play kiss-ass with media buyers and sell invisible, weightless airtime to pawn shops, assisted living facilities, and car lots. She could sell reptiles at the pet store by day and do contract work by night – a wedding here, a brochure there, maybe an independent film credit or two. They’d keep the same restaurants, the same traffic escape routes, the same tired faces and fallbacks.
That life wasn’t theirs anymore, he realized. Even if he and Elle somehow survived today, that comfortably mediocre life in Sacramento was gone forever.
He noticed tears in his wife’s eyes.
“Elle?”
“I deserve this,” she said.
“Why?”
“I had an abortion. When I was sixteen.”
He held her arm and squeezed. “I . . . I know.”
“James, I’ve never told you that before.”
He nodded. “You told me when you were drunk. Once.”
“That wasn’t official.” She smiled bashfully and a spurt of wind caught her ponytail. “Now it’s official because we’re both sober. And because of that, because of that one stupid choice I made forever ago, I wonder if something changed and it’s my fault.”
The wind drew silent.
“Now . . .” Her voice broke. “I wonder if it’s my fault we can’t have kids.”
James exhaled. He tried to find something comforting to say but he was too exhausted, his nerves drawn too tight.
WRACK!
The Sony exploded beneath his fingers and he felt a bite on his knuckle. He kicked backwards, clutching his hand, hoping everything was still there and intact, and he screamed hoarsely at Roy beside him. Now was his moment. The moment. Everything hinged on what happened in the next few seconds.
“Roy, go!”
Roy didn’t go.
* * *
A mile away, Tapp threw the bolt sixty degrees and ejected a golden .338 brass casing. He was relieved to see such a decisive hit. The streak continued! Nothing ruined a day like a single blown shot – much like shooting paper targets, you wing a hole at ten o’clock and it’s there forever. You can’t unshoot it. But if this day was to be dashed by such a failure, it hadn’t happened yet.
Not yet.
I’m still good.
Like butter, I’m on a roll—
Mid-throw with his eye half on scope, he caught a rabbit-dart of motion in his curved glass world. He snapped back in, bruising his cheekbone, pounding the rifle’s action forward with the palm of his hand and locking a fresh round in the chamber. Through the magnification he drew on a figure breaking into a dead sprint from the rear of the Toyota Rav4. Dashing north, directly away from Tapp and directly up the road, in a perfect straight vector that almost eliminated the need for any lateral holdover at all.
The wife.
9
“Elle!”
She heard her husband screaming somewhere far behind her but there was no time to listen. She exploded into the open ground, flattened her hands into blades and dug her feet deep into powdery earth, every muscle in her body focused forward. Only forward. The microsecond she broke free of the Rav4’s safe shadow she felt an overwhelming vulnerability, a nakedness, as if treading the surface of Mars without a spacesuit. She punched through the fresh air, so frigidly cold by
comparison, so hard and so fast that her hair tugged and her ears whooshed.
One second elapsed.
Glen’s body came up fast. Three yards. Close enough that she needed to slow down, to lose momentum, or she would tumble over and past him. She dropped both shoulders, kicked up the toes of her Converse and skidded hard, hitting the road on her back with her left elbow scraping gravel in a flash of searing pain. Her feet, turned sideways, threw dust and jangling rocks.
Two seconds.
She landed on her ass beside Glen. Perfect. She rolled once, sucking in a hard breath, and was on top of the body. Straddling the man’s stomach. The scope was on her now. She felt a gathering tingle on her spine and knew it was the killer’s crosshairs hungrily forming a crucifix. She threw open Glen’s MPR jacket with her left hand, slashing her mouth on the corner. With her right hand she searched, grasped for the holster above his hip, under his belt, behind his clammy back. She found nothing. Nothing at all.
Three seconds.
Cold panic. Her stomach sank and her heartbeats thumped like machinegun fire. The gun, the holster, was on Glen’s left side. James had said so. His left? Or hers? She pivoted, hurled open the jacket’s other side with a crackle of hardened blood, and her fingers hit treated leather. Milled metal. Something solid and heavy.
Four seconds.
Too late . . . already too late . . .
She found the wooden butt of the gun and a thin strap. She thumbed it and felt a button click free like a single popcorn kernel. She pulled the gun but it stayed. Didn’t budge an inch. Was there a second strap? Somewhere lower, maybe, deeper inside, where she couldn’t see? She brought in her left hand, fumbled, couldn’t find it under his tucked shirt.
Five seconds.
The air drained away and turned cold. She tried again to pull the whole thing with brute force, the entire damn holster with the gun, but it was firmly attached to Glen’s belt, and her fingers were too slimy with sweat to grip it – then a blast of pressurized air exploded in her face. Her eyes stung, her sunburnt cheeks felt slapped, and she heard the buzz louder in her right ear. Not unlike a jacket zipper, only much harder and faster. She fell backward, sprawling on her shoulders, hitting the back of her head on the road hard enough to spark flashbulbs, and all she saw was blue sky and a shower of gritty earth sprinkling back down around her.
