by TAYLOR ADAMS
“Elle,” James said again with a strange desperation rising in his voice. “Elle, don’t.”
She felt another wave of disorientation. She shook her head and the world shook with her. Her tongue burned with peppers. Her heart pumped angrily, blooming in her eardrums, and she felt as if an invisible hand was crammed invasively inside her chest with fingers wrapped around her right lung and slowly, oh-so-slowly, squeezing. With every breath she heard a crinkle of plastic under her arm and sensed a whisper of moving air. James had engineered . . . something there that seemed to operate on Looney Tunes physics. It didn’t seem real. Am I real? Is this real? She couldn’t remember anything after sprinting back to the safety of the Rav4 and finding her tank top suddenly slick with blood. She felt displaced, as if she had time-traveled through surgical anesthesia or a night of brutal drinking.
The Soviet clasped one hand to his belly where James had stabbed him. She saw a greasy splotch on his duster, as if his blood was part crude oil. His other hand, the one that frightened her, hovered by his flank with his fingers busily kneading air. Like a cowboy in an old movie, fixing to draw. She could read his little mind. Right now the man was considering precisely how fast, in fractions of seconds, he could draw his chunky little weapon and hose them with automatic fire.
Her index finger hadn’t touched the trigger until now. It was one of Eowen’s cardinal rules: Never touch the trigger unless you’re about to fire.
Elle was about to fire.
“No!” James grabbed her wrist but she barely felt it. “Elle, don’t shoot him.”
“His hand is on his gun,” she said.
It was. The Soviet had already parted his duster and the butt of his machine pistol glimmered in the shoulder holster. His eyes were still locked on her but his outstretched fingers were doing that feathery dance just a few inches from the weapon—
“Stop!” she shouted. She didn’t recognize her voice. “Stop or I shoot.”
He touched steel with one index finger.
“Stop. Don’t move.”
One by one, the Soviet extended his other fingers and wrapped them comfortably around the weapon’s grip. His eyes never left her, and she forced herself not to look away. How she hated eye contact . . .
“I said don’t move.” The revolver’s hammer cocked hungrily in her hands, startling her. She hadn’t realized she was unconsciously squeezing the trigger. It was tightening and creaking under her finger, like a bicycle changing gears. There couldn’t be much more to it. An ounce left, maybe? Just another millimeter and the tensed metal would release. It wasn’t something she wanted to do, but the Soviet was making it easier by the second—
“Please.” James crawled his hand up her wrist. Toward the gun. “Please.”
She shoved her husband away. What the hell was he thinking? The Soviet was a half second from killing them both. A single distraction was all it might take. The bastard had his entire hand wrapped around the machine pistol now.
“Let go of your gun,” she commanded.
He didn’t.
“Let go.”
He didn’t blink. He was the only one here who didn’t seem to give a damn. He had been more emotionally invested in his art show than he was here at gunpoint.
“Let go, or I shoot you.”
“Elle.” James was close, his lips to her ear and his hand on the back of her neck. “Think.”
Think?
She hated when he told her to think. It was one of his go-to maneuvers in an argument, guaranteed to push her buttons: Elle, think. Think about how wrong you are, and therefore how right I am. I flipped the bird to this murderer at the gas station and apparently that was okay, but right now I’m lecturing you on thinking.
The Soviet slid the machine pistol an inch out of its holster. He was testing the water, and apparently it felt just fine.
Think.
Her mind shuttered. Against her pride, she admitted to herself that something about this revolver did feel wrong. As she slid back into the world one scattered thought at a time, she wondered why James and Roy would choose to fight the man hand-to-hand when they had a loaded gun. She tried to remember but her memory was slippery; as detailed as an IMAX in places but utterly barren in others. She had been so pleasantly surprised to find Glen’s pistol resting in the dirt beside her. Had it been knocked aside in the scuffle? Maybe. It had felt so cool in her hands, like it had been inside an air-conditioned room this entire time.
Could she do it? She honestly didn’t know at this point. She suspected this new version of herself – talking coldly, holding a gun, squeezing the trigger without realizing it – wasn’t really working and the Soviet wasn’t buying any of it. Maybe Eowen could have filled these shoes better, and maybe she could have delivered the action-movie dialogue with more zest. Elle, the quieter sister with the less interesting name, didn’t have any of that right now. She didn’t want to kill this childlike man, even if he was a muscle-twitch from killing James, Roy, and her.
That was when the Soviet’s machine pistol came up and out.
* * *
James exhaled and sagged with relief.
Elle hadn’t fired. She’d come within maybe a millimeter, maybe less, but thank God she hadn’t fired and given away the whole bluff.
The Soviet held his boxy weapon with two fingers and dropped it. The evil little Venezuelan-drug-lord automatic clacked on the road with its barrel pointed at James. Hands half-raised, the greasy man glowered up at Elle again, only Elle. As far as he seemed to be concerned, Elle was the only thing here worth listening to or possibly saving. Had James or Roy aimed the revolver at him, he likely would have just grunted and shot back.
“Okay,” James said. “Do you have any other guns?”
The Soviet shook his head.
Of course, he could be lying. Why would he tell the truth?
“Kick the gun to us.” James widened his stance. Once that weapon was in his hands, he knew he would need to execute the Soviet with it. Any other course of action would be irresponsible; the man was too dangerous to remain alive and in play on this long-distance chessboard. James dreaded that part and hoped Roy was still up for shooting the bastard in the face, to use his exact words. He wasn’t judging him for that. Hell, if he’d been asked five minutes ago he would have given the same answer.
The man hesitated, like a cautious child in the company of a parent.
“Kick it,” James said again. “Kick it toward—”
“Throw it,” said a disembodied voice floating in shallow static.
Silence.
The Soviet glanced to his radio unit, resting in the dirt by James’ left knee. So did James.
“Throw it, Svatomir. Right now.” The weedy voice clipped under electronic garble and James recognized it from earlier today. The signal bleed on 92.7 FM! Of course. He tried to recall what the two mystery phrases had been, but then the ghost of Abraham Lincoln spoke again: “Field-strip the Mac-11 and throw every piece out into the desert.”
Roy gasped. “No, no, no.”
Elle squeezed the revolver, but what could she do?
The Soviet, caught between two guns, obediently scooped up his machine pistol. In a flash, the weapon was in two parts, then three, and then he extracted a long, oily spring and made four. Wincing with pain, he wound up and hurled each piece deep into the sky, and they touched down soundlessly somewhere in the distant scrub grass to the east.
James saw only one of them land, and even then he didn’t see the actual piece landing – just a quiver of disturbed brush. He relaxed, but only a little. At least now all of the guns had been removed from the equation (excluding one very important one a mile away). He reached for the radio, a gnarled Motorola two-way unit wrapped in electrical tape. It was hot and damp with a malty odor that reminded him of wet paint. He turned it over and found a rectangular button on the top-right, built into the contour, stenciled PUSH TO TALK. He thumbed it and heard feedback static.
Elle and Roy looked
at him. So did the Soviet, grudgingly, as he rubbed his irritated eyes at gunpoint.
“Who . . .” James fumbled words, but only for a second. He pulled the radio closer to his teeth and found his voice:
“Who am I speaking to?”
* * *
Tapp hesitated.
The husband’s voice, timid but gathering conviction, reached across the gulf and touched him like an ice cube between the shoulder blades. He felt a shade of panic, as if he was suddenly under close assault, and flattened his body to feel strands of dead grass and jute threads pool at his sides. He wanted to liquefy and sink into the earth like something molten, to quietly morph into it and not exist at all.
Say something.
Even in the real world Tapp hated conversation. When you got down to it, it was fundamentally false. When someone asked you how your day had been, they weren’t really asking if you’d passed a kidney stone that morning (quick hint – don’t talk about the kidney stone). And every barber, clerk, and waitress just had to share all the tedious details and small dramas of their lives, as if someone’s boyfriend’s father’s new Buick with a bad muffler was supposed to leave William Tapp starry-eyed. Sometimes he felt like a man with a fork trapped in a world of soup.
Say anything.
In his scope he could only see Svatomir’s upper half, a few paces from the Toyota, standing dumbly at gunpoint. Hopefully this would be a learning experience for him. He had been warned about the (possible) revolver, but he hadn’t been able to resist showing off his personal art gallery.
Svatomir was like that. He had always been a sensitive fortysomething prone to inexplicable, white-hot tantrums – breaking car windows with rocks, shooting armadillos on the road, spitting on the Fuel-N-Food hot dogs after the old man asked him to leave for bringing porn into their bathroom – and one day he’d taken an odd stumble off a dirt berm, concussed himself, and somehow got even weirder. His drawings got worse. He spoke less. He stopped picking up new English words. He got a little tougher to handle every year, too, like a baby gorilla transforming into dangerous adulthood.
Maybe they’ll kill him for me, Tapp thought. That’d be nice.
He freed his right hand from the rifle’s grip and it made a Velcro hiss. Sweat and pressure had formed a fierce suction between his fingers, transforming the cozy polymer into a sticky bed on a summer night. He cracked his knuckles one-handed, a five-shot salvo of wet blasts, then resumed his firing stance.
Really, nothing much had changed. He knew that even with this unexpected wrinkle, all possible outcomes remained the same. They kill Svatomir – they’re still trapped. They run for Svatomir’s jeep – I kill them. They remain behind the Toyota – I relocate and kill them. The only question was how many extra minutes these three would buy themselves. This engagement was deliciously thrilling but in a manageable, safety-netted way because he still knew how it would end. It was like munching candy and enjoying a rousing summer blockbuster while knowing that no matter how hairy it gets, the dinosaurs won’t eat the kids.
The husband tried again. “Hello?”
Tapp considered pretending to not be there. He didn’t want to respond and make it personal, because there was absolutely nothing personal about any of this. They had nothing to discuss.
I kill people. So do car accidents. I am a neutral force. Just like car accidents. What would a car accident say if it could speak?
Clouds gathered and reached over the sky like gray tentacles. The storm was pushing in from the west a little sooner than the forecast had suggested. The air loosened and shifted over his crater and he imagined he could feel tectonic plates groaning and creaking in anticipation. This moment felt huge, somehow, even though it shouldn’t have.
What would a brain tumor say if you asked it who it was? Or why it killed its host?
* * *
“William Tapp.”
James couldn’t imagine such evil owning a mundane name like William, or Will, or Willie, or Bill. It didn’t seem possible that the eyes behind the scope could turn their attention from severing a nineteen-year-old girl’s leg to mortal business like eating a burger, filling out a change of address form, or taking a leak. This William Tapp had to have a social security number, a driver’s license, and a day job. Friends, family, holiday plans. He paid taxes, probably.
The invisible killer was just a man, James reminded himself. A man could make errors. A man could be reasoned with. And if need be, a man could be killed.
“James Eversman,” he said meekly into the radio receiver. This fumbling connection between worlds felt so fragile and tenuous that anything louder than a whisper would crush it. He hadn’t been asked for his name but his polite sales instincts told him to offer it.
The sniper said nothing.
Elle adjusted her grip on the revolver and it wobbled in her hands. The Soviet studied it intently. The skin above and below his eyes had swollen beet red, either from fierce rubbing or contact irritation.
“Here . . . here’s the deal, William.” James scooted against the Rav4’s driver door and almost poked his eye on the rubbery Motorola antenna. No one saw except the Soviet, who smirked. “We have a gun on your smelly Lone Ranger friend here. If he moves, he dies.”
He gave the sniper a moment to answer.
Still nothing.
“So . . . here’s what’s going to happen in the next two minutes.” He unpeeled Elle’s hands from the revolver and took it himself. She didn’t protest. He trained it on the greasy man with his index finger pointed forward, off the trigger, in an attempt to treat the pistol as though it were actually loaded. Aiming a gun felt awkward and made him vaguely self-conscious, like he was posing tough with a prop. James Eversman: full-time account executive, part-time badass.
The Soviet’s clammy eyes had followed the weapon while it changed hands.
“I’m . . .” He felt his voice waver and steadied. “I’m going to stay right here behind my car with your friend. My wife and Roy will walk to his jeep and drive away. If I even suspect you’re about to take a shot at either of them, I will blow this son of a bitch’s face all over your stupidly-named Sesame Street road.”
“James, no.” Elle took a scraping breath. “We can think of something else—”
Roy glared at the Soviet. “Keys. Now.”
The big man’s jaw curled into another smirk and he plucked a jingling ring lined with many keys, many brands – Honda, Lexus, Ford, Chevrolet, dozens of bronze and silver home and apartment keys – and underhanded them to the ground at Roy’s feet.
“There has to be another way,” Elle hissed. “We can stall, buy time—”
“Every second we wait, we’re giving him time to move. Then he shoots whoever is holding the gun and it’s all over.” He made sure the PUSH TO TALK button wasn’t still depressed. “We’ll do this now, and someone has to stay behind. I’m volunteering.”
Roy pretended not to hear.
She pouted. “It’s a stupid plan, James.”
“I’m all out of smart ones.” He looked her in the eye. “Also, you have a hole in your chest.”
“Yeah, but a small one.”
He laughed, a bitter tired thing. She pressed her forehead to his. He smelled green apple shampoo from the motel that morning, the floral tang of her antiperspirant, and her salty sweat. Somehow this, the smell of her hair and body, made it sink in – the gravity of what he was doing. It wasn’t even a choice; it was a reflex. It might get him killed just the same.
“I want to stay with you,” she said quietly. Stupidly.
He remembered something and handed the revolver to Roy, who took guard.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He lifted her arm by the elbow and grabbed the duct tape from beside the tool bag. The one-way valve – three sides of the plastic taped and one flapping freely – seemed to be holding up. It just needed one final adjustment. He tore off a snarling piece and securely taped off the fourth side.
“James?”<
br />
“I’m sealing it.”
“I don’t—”
“The bag pumped the extra air out of your chest. Now I’m sealing it so it can’t leak back inside.” He stuck a long diagonal stretch of tape across the bag, and then another, pressing all corners flat against her warm skin. He pressed hard and she wobbled under his hands, exhaling.
“I’m not leaving you,” she said.
“Yes, you are. Don’t lose this, whatever you do, or you’ll suffocate in minutes. You still have a little chunk of a bullet lodged inside you somewhere. I have no idea how bad it is, or how bad it could be getting. Consider it a ticking clock. You need to be in a hospital five minutes ago.” He slapped on a final piece and she lowered her arm.
Her eyes brimmed with tears. “You can do that but you can’t fix the bathroom sink?”
“Jaaaaaames.” The sniper’s voice crackled. “You’re bluffing.”
The Soviet smirked his biggest one yet, revealing yellow horse teeth.
James snatched the pistol from Roy, scooped up the radio receiver and gathered his confidence. “Yeah? Try and prove—”
“Shut your fuckin’ mouth.” Tapp’s words came unevenly, like coiled rope unwinding in lumps. “So your friend over there. Mr. Glen Floyd, Clements County, MPR. Strolling down the road, probably . . . feeling a little more wind in his hair than usual. Making good . . . headway, you could say. Did he tell you anything?”
James tasted stomach acid.
Roy twirled the keys nervously.
“Because he told me lots.” The sniper’s voice was wavering, oddly unstable. “But let me back up. So it’s noon. I’m driving up here on the Plainsway – that’s what locals call the highway that skims through town, the Plainsway – and then I see this truck pulled off on the shoulder. And . . . then here comes Mr. Clements County, all wheezy and red, with a compact wheel gun in his hand. The one you’re holding right now, James.”
