by TAYLOR ADAMS
James knew where this was headed.
Elle held her breath.
Roy closed a tight fist around the keys.
“He tells me . . . this is amazing. You can’t make up these coincidences. He tells me he saw a coyote.” The killer smacked his lips and his voice settled into a pattern of tonal whiplash, rubber-banding from high to low, tense to relaxed, cordial to vicious. “And this coyote . . . had an arm in its mouth. A little mummified hand severed at the wrist, all black and ropy and burnt up. He tells me he slammed on his brakes, got out, and chased it a little ways, but you know how coyotes are, especially in daylight. So I tell him . . . I’ve got a four-wheel drive here. Let’s track this little bastard to his rout, or at least see if he drops the arm somewhere. He can’t chew on it forever. And Mr. Clements County is a pretty nice guy, and we hit it off while we’re cruising up and over the hardpan, and we share a little male pattern baldness bonding. Young guy like you wouldn’t understand, James. And we spot a little . . . blood trail in the sand, which is good, because he was certain this was a crime scene in progress, and shot his .38 special at the pup but thought he’d missed—”
“You talk too much,” James said.
“You radioed me.”
“I liked you better when you were shooting at us.”
“He fired five shots,” Tapp said with an exaggerated country twang. “You, James, have no leverage, because you are holding my spotter hostage with an empty five-shooter.”
James didn’t have a smartass remark for that. The silence stung.
Elle and Roy exhaled in unison.
Look at us, he thought. We’re already dead.
He clicked PRESS TO TALK again and tried to answer. He worked his jaw, pushed warm air through his teeth, and desperately willed for words to form in his breath, any words, but it was pointless. The sniper had already won. He knew it and now they knew it. He had been destined to win the microsecond James turned off the Plainsway and onto Shady Slope Road. Nothing else mattered.
James thought of the most pitiful of the live feeder mice at Elle’s reptile store – the naked little newborn ‘pinkies’ less than a week old, unable to walk, making mewing sounds with their eyes clammed shut, dropped into a Rubbermaid bin with a fat python coiled and waiting. God, he had always hated snakes. Even Gray and Iris. Sure, the prey can dodge the strike, circle the outskirts, and paw uselessly at the curved walls (Just like what we’ve been doing here with the distractions, the pepper spray, and now this failed bluff) but ultimately those tactics only bought time. The mouse was trapped in a forced scenario where only the snake could win. Maybe there was a certain dignity in accepting that?
Relaxing, the Soviet stepped forward—
“Six.” Roy grabbed the radio from James and groped for the button. “This revolver holds six bullets, asshole.”
The Soviet froze mid-step.
Tapp paused, too. Then he made a dry crackling sound, as if he was sucking on his lower lip thoughtfully, or eating crunchy potato chips. A steady stream of background static hiss (room tone, the techies called it at his old radio building) meaning the sniper was holding the input button. Maybe he was flustered and second-guessing himself. It made sense, too – even at close range, he couldn’t have gotten a good look at the revolver before Glen had holstered it. You couldn’t really see the ringed chambers until the cylinder was open. It could just as easily hold six, like the movies. Right?
Brilliant, Roy.
James grabbed the radio back and forced a cocky grin. “Yeah.”
Tapp sounded deliciously uncertain. “Do you . . . ?”
“Yeah.”
“Prove it.” The sniper coughed. “Prove it and shoot my spotter in the face. Right now.”
Roy looked at James.
“If I . . .” He felt cold fingers on his spine. “If I do that, I can’t use him as a hostage.”
“You already can’t.” Tapp suppressed a wet belch and sighed irritably, like he was explaining something to a child. “This is the second reason you have no leverage, James. You’re operating under the assumption that I care about the man you’re pointing a gun at. You see, I just . . . don’t. Not even a little. So again, I courteously invite you to shoot him. Do it. Don’t overthink it. This one’s on the house.”
James drew a bead between the Soviet’s eyes and tried to read the man’s face for fear, but like a stone, he gave nothing. Truly, he feared death less than he feared Elle’s disapproval of his charcoal drawings. “Your friend . . . or spotter. Does he know that?”
“He understands.”
“Understands what?”
“That there are millions of ways the world could end before you . . . well, before I eat supper tonight. A rogue black hole could pass through our solar system. A radiation burst could microwave our atmosphere. A star could go nova. We could take a meteor. A dormant supervolcano could create a nuclear winter. Or we could even get something called a Verneshot, which is basically when . . . your supervolcano explodes so violently that it blows a chunk of the earth’s crust into space, and then it comes back down like a meteor. Sort of a buy one, get one free—”
James shrugged. “I’ll be dead. Won’t be my problem.”
“Exactly,” Tapp said. “Welcome aboard.”
A dry popping came in over the radio. At first it sounded like signal interference, and then he realized it was the sniper slow-clapping with approval.
Welcome aboard.
James fell back into sales mode. What was life, if not a series of dilemmas to be unfucked? So the client blacklisted a time period. The show under-delivered ratings points. The promo didn’t run because the eggheads in the control room forgot to carry the remainder. Whatever. James could fix it. Let James fix it for you. He always had a second chair in his office to rest his feet on, and he badly missed it now.
“We can negotiate,” he said hollowly, as if William Tapp was a media buyer in an office somewhere hunched over an Excel sheet.
The sniper said nothing.
“What do you want?”
Silence.
“Everyone . . . wants something. So what can I offer you, Tapp?”
Nothing.
“You don’t have to do this.” James shut his eyes and felt himself rolling over in submission to a force he didn’t understand. It was deeply embarrassing. He wished Elle wasn’t there to see him like this. “I’ve . . . I’ve never done anything to you. We don’t know who you are and we don’t wish you any harm. We’re not even from around here. We’re moving from California to Tulsa and the only reason we even crossed the Plainsway is because of an impulsive trip to a crappy Wax Gore Museum. Listen to me, Tapp, there is nothing fair about this.”
No answer came.
He couldn’t believe he was pleading for fairness from a man who shot unarmed strangers from a mile away. In the face of this towering evil he felt small. Worse than small, he felt like he was already dead and his body sinking into the earth, decomposing, becoming dirt.
Drunk one night beside the embers of a beach bonfire, Elle had asked James if he remembered his father’s suicide. He had lied, of course, and claimed he had been deeply asleep. He’d seen a tinge of quiet pain in her eyes, like she sensed there was more to it (much more) and couldn’t help him without him first admitting that.
The gunshot had filled the inlet kitchen, rattled pans, rung off jungle-green tile, cracked windows in their frames, and the echo still lingered somewhere in the back of the house like trapped thunder. The air stank with wet fireworks. A splat of blood powdered the ceiling by the light and the rest was wafting back down like coal dust. Nine-year-old James had watched from the doorway, drawn by the noise and now shivering with his socks half on ceramic tile, half on spotted carpet. He hadn’t known if he should approach or stay put.
His father had stood motionless in the kitchen for a long moment. His posture was so stilted and strange, he didn’t seem to be attached to the floor. Like he was hanging from a hook between the shoulders.
Then he sat down with his legs folded and his back against the dishwasher, and he looked up at James with only his right eye. His left was a black tunnel with a single upper eyelid, hanging white and bloodless like a window shutter. No explanation. No words. No emotion at all, just a cool indifference. This little moment of eye contact lasted a minute or two, and then the right eye turned milky and looked up at the blood on the ceiling.
James stood and watched until he was certain his father was dead. It kept looking like it would happen, and then another lax breath would croak out or another little twitch would squeal his boot against tile. Finally his chest stilled, and James quietly counted to one hundred. When his father still hadn’t moved, he walked to the cigarette-burned sofa in the living room and curled up in a little fetal ball. Had he cried? He couldn’t remember. What he had felt was something worse than grief. Something hollow. Wastefulness.
James hadn’t known what the Tip-over was or why it was so important, but he would have pretended to in a heartbeat. He would have loved to be in the living room with the Anti-Weathermen, slurping a beer, bullshitting about the coming revolution with his father and the Tall Man. In the end, he just wanted a dad. Any dad. Even an awful one.
“Why are you doing this?” James asked the sniper.
“Because I can.”
“How long have you done it?”
“Years.”
“How many . . .” Flecks of sand stuck in his throat. “How many have you killed?”
“Fifty-seven,” Tapp said. “Counting you.”
Elle sighed hopelessly.
“That’s impossible,” Roy whispered.
James nodded in tacit agreement. No way. You couldn’t possibly conceal fifty-seven missing people, all last seen traveling down the same rural highway. Not in this age of smartphones and geosynchronous satellites. Local law enforcement would be all over the disappearances in their jurisdiction – no, it would be a federal thing. These were serial killings. Helicopters would come, special agents and criminal profilers. It would be plastered over the news and net. A nation full of ‘gore hounds,’ Elle’s people, would gobble it up, waiting hungrily for the made-for-television docudrama to churn out like cynical clockwork. The media would even brand Tapp with an insipid name, like the Shady Slope Sniper or some crap.
“Oh, no,” his wife whispered.
“What?”
The Soviet had been staring intently down the bore of the revolver and now stiffened as if jolted by an electric current. Something flickered behind his eyes and a leering smile crept up his face, rippling the ash streaks in his beard. It was the grin of a child winning an argument with an adult. He looked south to the distant crater wall, to Tapp, and raised his left hand skyward with all fingers out.
James understood and his heart plunged. Five fingers, for five shots.
“Yep, I knew it,” Tapp said. “The cylinder of a five-shooter is visibly different from that of a six-shooter. You . . . yeah, you really should have covered it up with your hand, James. Big fat mistake.”
The Soviet leaned forward and spat a yellow mouthful in James’ eye. Then he snatched his key ring back from Roy and pivoted hard, kicking a spray of dust to draw ocher shafts of sunlight, and marched off the road. The land took a dip and coarsened so he took high steps. Dead grass crackled under his feet like firewood.
“Good try.” The sniper exhaled. “It was like . . . woo-hoo! Fuckin’ plot twist.”
Elle watched the Soviet leave. “Where’s he going?”
“To rebuild his gun,” James said, wiping warm saliva from his eye.
“Well.” Roy shrugged. “That’s that.”
James nodded brokenly.
“You . . . you three almost survived to nightfall. Just amazing.” Tapp took a hissing breath. His voice fluctuated and rearranged itself again, doubling back into something whimsical and curious. Almost friendly. “James, let me ask you something. How do . . . how do you see today ending?”
“I don’t know.” He raised the revolver again and drew a shaky bead on the Soviet’s back while he clambered through knee-deep brush. He tugged the trigger and a pathetic part of himself hoped that maybe, just maybe, they had all been wrong and there was somehow a single miraculous round of live ammunition left in there.
The hammer dropped. CLICK.
Elle buried her face in her hands.
“Alright.” Tapp audibly smiled. “How do you want it end?”
“With me. Driving to Oklahoma with my wife.” He let the worthless gun drop from his fingers and clatter on the road. “We left good jobs behind. Some friends. Some roots. We left because we didn’t like our lives and, truthfully, maybe we didn’t even like each other anymore. So we rebooted. New place. New home. New everything.” His eyes watered and he took a gulp of salty air. “And we were going to start a family. We had to keep trying. Maybe somewhere else, our luck would be . . . I don’t know.”
Elle squeezed his shoulder. He didn’t want her to see him cry so he turned away into the amber fire of the lowering sun.
“Kids?” the sniper asked softly.
“Yeah.”
“Why couldn’t you?”
“Medical stuff.”
Tapp sighed. “I’m . . . sorry to hear that.”
“No, you’re not,” James said.
“You’re right. I’m not.” The marksman spat under his breath and again his voice morphed. This time it curdled the way room temperature stews milk in the carton, fermenting into something else entirely, cloudy and sour: “It’s a blessing, though. Really. Be glad . . . be glad you two never made any kiddies. Because if you had, I would have shot them last, so that they could first watch Mommy and Daddy die.”
James pressed the receiver to his teeth and felt his own hot breath curling back at him. He surprised himself by saying it, and by meaning it:
“Before today is over, William Tapp, I will kill you.”
14
A mile away, the sniper bristled. White-hot emotions and half-thoughts fluttered through his mind like trapped birds but he wasn’t articulate enough to make them real, so he tried them out inside the safe echo chamber of his own mind.
Alright, James. Okay. Fine. Let’s examine your options here.
You run . . . You die.
You stay behind the car . . . You die.
Even if you somehow achieve the impossible, something no one else has ever done, and walk across hundreds of meters of descending open prairie, cross the arroyo, climb another four hundred meters up my perch of shorn rock, and somehow reach up toward me with bloody, desperate hands grasping to touch the face of God . . . God is dug in, ghillied up, and armed.
You still die.
With feline reflexes he clicked open the bolt and caught the ejected cartridge mid-spin. He thumbed three handloads into the dark breech, topping off his ten-count magazine, and inserted an eleventh directly into the chamber. He stared at that final bullet for a long moment – a gleaming gold missile, curved to a perfect aerodynamic point – before sliding it into battery and closing the bolt behind it, and reminded himself that this James Eversman, for all his frightening unpredictability, was still 1,545 meters away.
* * *
“We’re kicking the car into neutral,” James told them. “And we’re rolling it at him.”
Elle gasped. “You’re serious?”
“Roy. You said you worked on cars?”
He nodded.
“Good. Okay. I can’t change gears because we don’t have the keys.” James drummed the door with his knuckles. This plan was pure, hot-blooded inspiration, coming to him while he spoke it. “Can you change gears without the engine, and without using the shifter?”
“Yeah,” Roy said. “If I get under it.”
“Fast?”
He unzipped the tool bag. “No promises.”
“We have a minute. Maybe two.” James squinted and saw the Soviet clambering thirty yards out in the ocher brush, scanning in methodical sweeps. One hand packed tightly to
his bleeding gut, the other holding a recovered piece of his subgun – the stout barrel. “Until he finds all the pieces of his gun. And he comes back and he . . . you know, kills us.”
“Anywhere but here,” Elle whispered, giving him a jolt of déjà vu.
“Amen. Anywhere but here.”
Roy twirled a screwdriver. “There’s more to this idea, right?”
“Yeah.” James blinked grit from his eyes and pointed around the headlights, downhill. “We push the car until it rolls and jump inside. We ride it downhill, to the gully down there. See it? At the bottom of this big valley. That dark area.”
Elle squinted. “Right at the sniper’s front door? That dark area?”
“That’s the point.” He fought a grin. “Since he’s up there on that big rise, he might not have an angle to see down into the little channel. He might not be able to see us in there, and if so, he’ll—”
“Might not?”
“Fifty-fifty.”
She smiled weakly. “Those are the best odds we’ve had all day.”
“Great,” Roy said. “Another plan.”
“The last one worked,” James said.
“Your wife got shot.”
“Other than that, it worked.”
“Sniper-guy. Tapp. He’ll shoot us.” Roy rolled on his back and scooted under the Rav4, mumbling with a screwdriver in his mouth. “While we’re in the rolling car. Through the windows.”
“He’ll try. But we’ll duck low to the floor, heads down, bodies flattened under the seats. The engine block will shield us from the front. And all this crap will help.” He pointed at the detritus of their old life – the television stand, the bookshelf, the sandwiched boxes in the back seats. He couldn’t fight it anymore and let it wash over his face, a shit-eating grin of stupid excitement. Reckless hope. He knew it was crazy but that somehow made it even better. Every second was a celebration because it was a second Tapp had failed to take from them.
“The angle will change.” Roy’s voice was a flat echo under the car. “It’ll steepen. He’ll see up, over the engine. And he’s thirty degrees off the road. That angle will widen as we get closer, and he could put a bullet through a door—”
