EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  Now it turned to acid in his stomach. When was anything ever that easy? And of course, he remembered, that hadn’t been all. Tapp had said one more thing on that scratchy signal bleed three hours ago.

  “Black eye,” James said. “What’s that?”

  The Rav4 hit a violent rut and knocked his head against the glove box. That was when he noticed the dry rushing sound – like the wind at Gray beach, or the army of cooling fans in his radio station control room – and realized it was the desert air blowing through the windshield. It tugged hair and flapped bloodstained clothes. The Toyota had picked up speed as the incline steepened.

  “Too fast. No brakes.” Roy winced, choked with pain. “We land in the riverbed like this and we’re crash test dummies.”

  Curiously tomato-like. James remembered nearly rear-ending that dumbass deputy four hours ago and thanking God he hadn’t, because back then, that had been the worst nightmare he could envision. Wasn’t that funny? He and Elle had narrowly avoided a fatal car accident, only to fall into the trap of a psychotic killer, and while trying to escape said killer, were now fixed to die in another fatal car accident.

  He supposed the parking brake was an option, but on this terrain, it could just as easily flip them over. And it wouldn’t get them inside the gully – that was the goal. Getting inside the gully, sheltered from Tapp’s scope, forcing the sniper to move in close. Everything else was secondary.

  “Seatbelts,” he said, groping for the first buckle in the seat behind him. It felt comically futile, like those old photos of Cold War children ducking under their desks to survive a nuclear attack.

  “I lost the mirror,” Elle said. “How close is it?”

  He peeked over the dashboard, into Tapp’s no-man’s-land, and squinted hard into the low sunlight. They were well off the road now, jangling and crashing. The arroyo itself, a winding talus floor following the crease of the valley, loomed three hundred yards downhill and raced closer every second. Flash floods wouldn’t come more than once every few years out here, but he could read the erosive imprint on the land; where the waters had swept away sand and silt but left jutting monoliths of exposed granite and car-sized basalt pillows, oxidizing bright red and choked with huddled plants. He couldn’t tell how deep it was. It might be a shallow creek trail or it might be a cousin of the Grand Canyon. There was no way to tell.

  “Guess we’ll find out if seatbelts really save lives,” Roy said flatly. It might have been a joke or it might have been hopeless resignation. Again, no way to tell.

  James looked at Elle. “Remember how we met?”

  “I like that story.” She smiled and gritted her teeth. “Tell it.”

  A yucca sapling crunched against the Rav4’s grill and branches stabbed through the windshield. Elle gave a muffled cry. Bony fingers grasped over them, slashing exposed skin. A big frond stuck in the passenger headrest and flapped furiously, like a tarpaulin in the wind.

  “Okay. Riverside Apartments.” He collected his thoughts, closed his eyes, and felt the seat vibrating under his chin. “I’m walking to my door. And I see this plate of brownies sitting on the floor with a little red bow, maybe two feet from my front door.”

  “No,” she said. “It was his door.”

  “It was like, fifty-fifty. Between my door . . . my door and the neighbor’s door.” The Toyota took another crashing rise and fall. Rocks pinged like bullets.

  “You should’ve assumed they weren’t for you,” she said.

  “I gave the brownies the benefit of the doubt.”

  “You deserved it—”

  The rear bay door rattled open, caught a rush of air, and slammed shut.

  “I had . . .” He flinched. “I saw you when you visited him. Next door. Always on Thursdays. I thought you were so beautiful. I didn’t dare look you in the eye, even when we passed at the mailbox—”

  “I remember that.” She was crinkling her nose, trying not to cry.

  He checked over the dash again. The arroyo was a hundred meters away now, coming fast.

  “He was an idiot for what he did to you, Elle. And thinking you wouldn’t find out.” He reached over, grabbed the driver seatbelt, and wrapped it around her shoulder. “So of course you’d make him a plate of laxative brownies.”

  She smiled guiltily as he raised her arm and looped the belt under her. The buckles met with a piercing click.

  “Roy,” he gasped. “Hang on back there.” He grabbed the passenger seatbelt and twisted it around his own shoulder, then arched his back, lifted a thigh, and brought the buckles together. Another cold click.

  “I used the whole box of laxatives, too.” Elle sniffed. “Like, twenty-four doses. I only expected him to eat one or two—”

  “I love brownies, Elle.”

  “He didn’t like chocolate.”

  “I ate eleven.”

  She laughed and he felt her breath on his face.

  He squeezed her fingers. “Worst forty-eight hours of my life.”

  Somehow all the noise and glass and metal and wind drained away, and it was just them, their small voices, and the scent of her green apple shampoo.

  “It was worth it.” He closed his eyes and braced. “Because it gave me something to talk about when—”

  * * *

  Tapp couldn’t see the vehicle crash down into the arroyo (his view was obscured by the rising land) but the hollow crack reached him in just over a second. It sounded like a femur breaking. The flashflood crevasse was only four hundred meters downhill from his roost. Just over four football fields. By a sniper’s measure, that was pissing distance.

  He worked a jittery chill out of his spine and darted his scope to Svatomir, five hundred meters back up the hill, right where James’ tire tracks left the road. The big man now stood at the lip of a ditch where his jeep rested brokenly, one tire canted hard. He was bending low and circling a crusty basalt boulder – in his hands was that loop of ever-useful winching cable – and he tucked the hook, planted his boot to the lava rock, and drew the cable tight. He would be out of that rut in a minute. Two, tops. Then he would descend the slope and corner James Eversman and his gang of moving targets inside the riverbed and hose them down with his Mac-11.

  Unless, of course, James somehow managed again to—

  Stop.

  He could maybe—

  Nope. He can’t. He won’t.

  Tapp needed another energy drink. Without caffeine his mind unraveled like mummy bandages. Questions fluttered. How badly is Svatomir injured? Is there enough sunlight for my objective lens? Do I have to pee again? And lesser thoughts, half-formed, coming faster than he could handle them – that coyote with a black skeleton arm in its jaws, credit card interest, drool crusted on his pillow, variable winds. Too many things to catch at once, all emergencies. His body was curling into a defensive fetal pose, his thighs creeping to his elbows. He felt his heartbeat revving up like railroad ties under a locomotive. He hated himself. He never could have been a real sniper, and this was why.

  He grabbed his third energy drink, popped the tab, and swigged half the thing. His hyperactive mind – what an unbecoming trait for a marksman, to be cursed with a brain like a bag of cats – leapt now to his homemade camouflage suit. His familiar coat of threads and crispy grass, rank with sweat and gun smoke. His costume, his masterpiece, his ghillie suit.

  He tipped his beverage. Empty. He hurled it and grabbed another.

  Ghillie suit. Noun. Derived from ‘gille.’ Scottish Gaelic word for ‘lad’ or ‘servant.’ In feudal times, gille gamekeepers under the employ of their lords would don this shaggy mesh of netting, scrub their skin with dirt and moss, and melt into the trees. There these men would lay concealed in plain view, waiting weaponless for their prey to—

  Shit! He slashed his thumb on the drink tab. Hot blood all over the sipping edge. He didn’t care. He drank anyway.

  After hours or days, the buck would draw near. It’d be a wraith in the trees; a magnificent huffing beast made of rip
pling muscles and tightened nerves. And the invisible, scentless gille crawls and creeps – sometimes taking an hour to move a single meter – to within whisper-distance and ambushes the animal with his bare hands. Pins it, binds its legs. Then he drags his quarry back into town, into his lord’s fenced arena, which is adorned with planted ferns and ringside audience seating, and cuts the buck loose. So some faggot Scottish prince can stroll in, dust off a bow, nock an arrow between clean fingernails, and kill the animal in a staged hunt. Cue polite applause – but everyone knows who the real badass is.

  Which one am I?

  He crunched another empty can on his forehead (four) and dropped it. He needed to focus. The stakes here and now were incredible. If James, or any of them, escaped his valley and reached the local authorities, it’d be over. Done. Fin. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. He’d be strung up like the Unabomber, crucified and mainlining barbiturate.

  A fresh shot of white-hot panic tore through him and he reached for energy drink number five, biting the tab open to protect his bloodied thumb. Nightmares came to him in flashes as he slurped his beverage down like warm medicine – some Google Maps asshole stumbling across Shady Slope Road, or one of his radio exchanges with Svatomir bleeding into a passing trucker’s closed-band frequency, or his cell signal jammer somehow alerting some underpaid Verizon engineer climbing the cell tower ten-odd miles north. All possible. It was, after all, the details that killed you, and details were sneaky little bastards.

  Tapp knew this wasn’t a shoot anymore. This was a psychological battle with James. This was kill or die. What was Tapp willing to do to survive?

  Anything.

  He shot a little girl once to survive.

  Yes. Yes, I did.

  That had been hard.

  This won’t be.

  The sore panic was finally receding. He started his final energy drink (six) and wished he had packed more Cheetos, or Swedish Fish, or at least some crackers. Already he could imagine the caffeine kicking in, filling his veins with hot life, unlocking new neural tunnels and wiring shortcuts inside his brain. His fingers were suddenly nimble, his reflexes instant. The energy crash would be brutal after this binge, but by then James would be dead. Long dead. If in five hours, Tapp’s biggest problem was an icepick headache and sludgy memory, well then, he’d be doing just fine.

  I’m still doing fine?

  He was doing great.

  Okay.

  Around him the earth was falling into shadow, turning back to an ancient dark that existed before man and would exist long after. Sound carried differently in this air – sharper, cleaner, harder. Echoes vanished. His own gunshots would lose their bass and become whip cracks. The winds were coming now in timid spurts, touching his cheeks and aggravating his yellow flags. The distant storm wasn’t distant anymore, towering over the horizon and shrouding the reddening sun. Everything was changing, morphing, rotating into a darker form.

  * * *

  James was staring into the sun for some reason.

  It was setting, which pleased him, although he couldn’t recall why, so he just grinned dumbly while he watched it dull like a lantern behind fog. He felt the heat touch his face and numbly remembered – eight minutes. It took eight minutes to travel from that distant nuclear fire, through the gulf of space, to this little rock.

  “James.”

  He recognized her voice and the day exploded back at him – Glen Floyd’s comb-over-in-a-car story, the soda can shriek of automatic gunfire, the way blood hardened into globs in the sand like donut glaze. And the crash. What about the crash? He tried to search his surroundings and decipher what the hell had happened but he couldn’t pull his eyes from the sun. It held him transfixed.

  “James, I . . . this is really bad.”

  Elle’s tone was grave. No sarcasm, no understatement. An updraft washed through the Rav4, surprisingly cool, and he heard it jingling loose glass and blowing soft tufts of seat foam. He clamped his eyelids and blinked but saw only that damn sun, seared into his retinas in splashes of orange-violet-yellow-green. He felt like he was awakening after a night of dollar beers, and now establishing the basics – Where am I? Did Elle and I have a fight? Where’s my wallet? Can I taste vomit in the back of my mouth? Somewhere in the car he sensed Elle moving and something wooden creaked in the back seats. The vehicle rocked a few inches like a teeter-totter, suggesting that they were high-centered. His chin rested against what he figured was the dashboard. He raised his head, turned his shoulders—

  His arms didn’t move.

  “Yeah.” He heard her shrug. “I was getting to that.”

  At least her sense of humor was back.

  He blinked away sunspot colors and saw it. Both of his wrists were bound with sloppy loops of duct tape, swooping up, down, over, under, from his knuckles to his forearms, thoroughly sealing him to the Rav4’s shifter. Much of it was stained with dollops of blood, running down folds and seams in hardening rivers, all of it belonging to someone else. He leaned back and tugged, and the shifter wobbled sympathetically in its socket, but he knew the next thing to give would be his shoulder blades. He was stuck.

  He exhaled. “Roy?”

  “Yep,” Elle said.

  “It’s . . . more tape than I would have used.”

  “He hit me.”

  “What?” James looked at her, certain he’d misheard.

  “He was crawling over me, tying you up. I tried to stop him, jabbed his eyes, grabbed his hurt hand, and one of his fingers tore off. And he pushed my face against the door and I think he . . . kicked the back of my head.” She worked her jaw and he saw it, a blue shadow coalescing over her cheekbone. “I must have blacked out, and then he left. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Her eyes glimmered. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s fine.” He was still hazy, like his head was sloshing full of cheap beer. “Find something to cut me out. The . . . multitool—”

  “It’s gone.”

  He knew that. “The tool bag—”

  “A half mile up the road,” she said hollowly. She moved and the sunlight drew her bruise like a Nike swoosh under her eye. Her skin was already puffing up.

  Roy. James felt his cheeks burn and the delayed agony of his concussion headache hit like a wheelbarrow packed with cinder blocks. Goddamn Roy, and the family he neglected, and his stupid I PISS EXCELLENCE shirt. Goddamn him. No, fuck him. Fuck him for hitting beautiful, sweet Elle in the back of the head.

  Anger is weird, he realized. More than a feeling. It has mass, somehow. It fills you up like hot food. James was ashamed of how good it felt. He wanted to kill Roy. It was wrong, everything in him said it was wrong, but he couldn’t control it. None of his father’s words came easily to him, but the one about having a plan to kill everyone you met was ringing cautiously true. After all, Roy sure did.

  If I see you again, Roy . . .

  “Wait.” He hesitated. “Did you . . . did you say you pulled off his finger?”

  She looked embarrassed.

  “Wow, Elle.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “How do you accidentally pull off a finger?”

  “His hand was shot. You’re making it sound worse than it is.”

  “Is it . . . is it still in here?”

  She pointed to the middle console, beside his elbow.

  He looked and recoiled. “Oh, Jesus. What’s it doing in the cup holder?”

  “I had to put it somewhere.”

  “But the cup holder?”

  Elle started giggling.

  They both lost it. Exhausted, pitch-black belly laughs. For a few seconds, everything was okay and they were back in the Sacramento fire marshal’s office and that mustached old man was offhandedly comparing the neighbor’s meth lab explosion to Washington state’s iconic 1980 volcanic eruption, and everything was just hilarious. He couldn’t describe it.

  “If Roy . . .” She gasped, an ugly dry scrape. “If he survi
ves this, gloves are going to look so stupid on him.”

  A bellowing roar descended the hill and splashed down both ends of the creekbed. James threw his head back to see (what else?) the Soviet’s jeep, three hundred yards back, framed by the toothed glass of the Rav4’s back window. The rig skidded to face them and revved hungrily.

  Elle looked up and sighed.

  “Yeah.” James chewed his lip. “We should probably start cutting this tape.”

  17

  Safety glass turned out to be worthless for cutting duct tape. Who knew? Chunks crumbled in Elle’s hands like ice, so she checked her purse for her car keys (Oh, right), then grabbed a triangular shard from the broken rearview mirror. Every layer of tape she sliced and peeled off exposed another underneath. Her fingers whitened and burned with sweaty friction. The sickly sweet odor of adhesive curdled the air. James’ left wrist tugged free but his right hand was buried much deeper, his knuckles mummified unrecognizably around the shifter like a big lobster claw.

  “Shit.”

  “I can’t—”

  Not fast enough. No time.

  Every second, the Soviet’s loping motor grew louder, turning the air into cotton. Glass chattered and debris shifted anxiously. James felt his molars vibrate. Who knew that cars could even sound like that? It deepened against rock walls until it sounded like a monster truck, approaching fast.

  No words were needed. They both knew. She tore another crackling strip of tape free and looked up at him apologetically, jaw clenched, eyes wet, cheeks red.

  He smiled at her.

  A smile had always been the path of least resistance for him and it came naturally, even here. A strange calm was sliding over him and he was somehow certain everything would turn out okay. The sun was setting. Tapp’s scope was dimming. She would make it. It wouldn’t be easy, because the killers would hunt her with whatever gadgets and cruel tricks they had at their disposal, but she was tough and she could do it. She wasn’t that hollow-eyed version of herself from the Fuel-N-Food anymore. She was the fighter he fell in love with, the girl who (probably) wasn’t bluffing when she’d threatened to castrate Roy for punching her husband. She was the girl he’d seen on that USC running track, sophomore year. October, under a milky sky.