by TAYLOR ADAMS
I hated it.
He had loved it. Remembered now, it still felt undeniably good. The feedback, the messy feedback that tells the animal part of your brain before your thoughts can even assemble – ding, ding, ding, hit! Even though the impact was soundless he swore he was there inside it. He could taste the metallic blood and feel the bone fragments crackle between his molars. He was ashamed of how good it felt.
Tapp lived for this, his special brand of wet violence, and as clouds gathered in the western sky he decided that was okay. He could stop whenever he wanted. He only did this once or twice a year. He chose his scenarios and victims carefully, like a vampire living in plain sight. That demonstrated real control, unlike the paper cutter killer from Reno or Svatomir’s idiot cousin.
“Let’s do it,” he said firmly. “Tow the car.”
Svatomir nodded in his scope.
Tapp’s mind rubber-banded back to the wife, bolting to the ranger’s body and returning. Her hands had been empty. He had only seen flattened fingers in a slicing runner’s form. She had recovered nothing from the old man. But obviously she had wanted to grab something.
What if she has the ranger’s gun?
She doesn’t.
But what if she does?
It’s not loaded.
What if it is?
* * *
“Kill him,” Elle whispered sleepily. “Kill him.”
James nodded.
“Maybe . . .” Roy tensed. “When he gets close I can take him.”
“I’ll back you up,” James said in his best bar-fight voice.
“Okay.”
Roy was a big guy. Not as tall or as WWF barrel-chested as the Soviet, but James was glad the kid was on his side. If nothing else, his swelling jaw told him that Roy knew how to deliver a punch. That was something.
“He’ll be close,” James whispered. “When he hooks the cable.”
Roy nodded.
“That’s when. No sooner, no later.”
“Okay.”
James didn’t like making the calls. He didn’t even know how the hell it had happened. He, the soft-handed salesman who’d once considered scrubbing his palms with steel wool, was now in charge of a bloody coup against two psychotic killers. And Roy, the burly alpha male from this neck of the woods, was listening and obeying. When had that started happening? And more importantly, when would it stop happening?
The Soviet approached. His shadow crept past the Toyota’s front bumper and grew taller, darker, with sharper edges. James heard the man’s crunching footsteps, the metallic creak of unspooling cable, and the gentle hiss of cowhide packed around a sweaty body and expanding and contracting with every breath. Another sound, too – like skeleton hands clapping. Working his jaw, maybe.
“Wait,” Roy hissed. “We can surprise him with the gun—”
The shadow froze mid-step.
James raised a trembling index finger – For the sake of everything, shut the hell up! He could see the top of the Soviet’s head through the Rav4’s pierced windshield, bisected by two jagged cracks. The man stood ten feet away. His eyes were down and something was inching through his reptilian brain. He was replaying and processing what he’d heard, or thought he’d heard. He hunched a bit, bobbed out of view like a shark slipping underwater, and let out a sticky black cough.
Roy looked at James with panic in his eyes.
It was becoming clear that this empty gun was a massive liability and nothing more. It was a situation escalator. The microsecond the Soviet saw it he would open fire and they, all three of them, would be mulched to bloody ribbons against the Toyota. All done. Roll credits. Audience rises, demands money back.
James grimly decided that they needed to grab him when he attached the winching cable and then pull him down behind the car. And keep him there, out of the sniper’s view, while they (hopefully) overpowered the big man. It might have seemed plausible sixty seconds ago but not anymore. He held the pepper spray in his right hand. Crappy Korean multitool blade in his left. Then he sank to his knees, heels arched, coiled to lunge. Time was moving strangely now, at once too fast and too slow. The Soviet would either walk into the trap or he wouldn’t. It was all out of his hands now, out of Roy’s hands, what that hesitant shadow would decide to do.
Come on.
The shadow stood still.
Come on, you asshole.
The right arm raised with a leathery creak, fingers opened spiderlike on the road, and the winching cable dropped. The hook clattered.
What?
Roy looked at James.
“I don’t know,” he mouthed. “I think—”
Footsteps approaching.
The Soviet paced a wide circle around the Toyota and the shadow grew taller, taller, moving away . . . until they finally saw the man, all of nearly seven feet of him, a walking silhouette under the fiery sun. He watched them over his shoulder as he closed the loop and halted maybe ten, twelve feet up the road. Hanging loose in his right hand was a stubby machine pistol with a stick magazine, all right angles and cheaply stamped aluminum, scarred with oily discoloration and razor-thin scratches. It looked illegal. Untouchable in the sunlight, the Soviet fixed his eyes on them and slowly lowered to a crouch on the gravel. His other hand disappeared inside his duster, eyes forward, striking an oddly balletic pose of predatory focus.
Ten feet away. Too far to pepper spray.
He knows we have a gun, James thought coldly.
“I can feel his eyes on me,” Elle whispered in dreamy singsong.
James tightened his hands into fists behind his back, feeling that sense of powerlessness reach a frustrating new peak. The pepper spray and multitool were concealed for now. Not that it made a difference – the Soviet had a machine gun. Maybe he could arc the pepper spray a bit, aim high and rain it into the man’s eyes? Wishful thinking.
“What’s he doing?” his wife whispered.
“I don’t know.”
The Soviet pulled a yellowed notebook from an inner pocket of his duster. It was crinkled and ragged. It was the notebook from the Fuel-N-Food on the outskirts of Mosby, forever ago. He tucked the machine pistol under his elbow, thumbed the pages, and chewed a pencil that had materialized in his hand from nowhere. He spat a glob of charcoal on the road and James realized his eyes were on Elle again, only Elle, as if she was the last woman on earth.
“I hate being watched,” she said softly.
“I know.” James desperately wished he had bought her the damn ten-foot pepper spray last Christmas. “Trust me. Just trust me.”
She buried her face in his shoulder.
“Third best,” the Soviet said abruptly.
Silence.
James stared blankly.
“Third best,” the Soviet said again. His voice was toneless, uninflected, like a teenager dryly reciting literature he didn’t care for. He didn’t seem to hear his own words. He layered them with no emotion or subtext. He meant exactly what he said and nothing more.
James realized that the Soviet was holding his notebook up and out, and he didn’t remember seeing it open. Under the man’s black fingernails, flapping just a little in the breeze, hung another drawing. There was an inherent beauty in charcoal art; James had always admired the contrast of dagger-sharp lines meeting the watercolor blur of thumbed shadows, and there was plenty of that to appreciate here. It was too far away to discern, even if he squinted, but it looked like a car, a sedan, hurled on its side with bruised doors and messy divots in the ground where it had tumbled.
“Too far away,” James said, but the Soviet ignored him. He was staring at Elle.
She didn’t speak. Had she passed out again?
“Second best.” The man licked his lips, quickly flipped pages and showed a new one. Again, too far away to tell. It looked like a black and white rendition of . . . a city skyline, maybe? Steep angles and corners shaded in deep darkness, with lots of negative space.
No one spoke.
The big man exhale
d with frustration, tilted the notepad back toward himself, and scanned crackling pages forward and back for a long minute before deciding on another and revealing it with a showman’s flourish. “First best,” he said with a grin. Like a child presenting a glowing report card.
James narrowed his eyes but couldn’t make it out at twelve feet. He didn’t even have the energy to imagine what it might be. It looked like a mushy inkblot test of confused shapes.
“Just tow the car,” Roy said. “Please.”
The Soviet slapped his notebook shut and stuffed the mess back inside his duster. His eyes looked hurt now, and James felt a strange twinge of sympathy. Even psychos felt the sting of a mediocre review. Hell, maybe psychos felt it worse.
“I like that one,” Elle said.
He looked up at her.
She hesitated. “I . . . it’s good.”
He canted his head, skeptical but also, like all artists, eternally hopeful.
She raised a hand, palm out, and lowered her voice: “Bring it closer.”
12
It went beautifully at first.
At the last moment, the Soviet Cowboy stuffed his machine pistol into his duster so he could present the drawing to Elle on his outstretched hand. James memorized that spot. Then Roy, from the left, grabbed the man’s wrist and tugged him off-balance. James came up from the right with the pepper spray. The red button depressed easily with a visceral clack, and a jet of grey liquid sprayed across the Soviet’s left shoulder, slapping and splashing off oilcloth – James found his aim as he found his footing – and then arced it up at the man’s beard, pressure-washing his front teeth, shooting up his nose, blowing back a tangle of hair. The Soviet slapped a hand to his face, way too late to stop any of it.
Elle screamed something.
Suddenly pepper spray was everywhere. Everywhere. It was like opening Pandora’s Box, and the box was full of goddamn pepper spray. It filled the air, turned it solid, and James was instantly engulfed. He felt crystalline grains under his eyelids, digging into the soft whites of his eyes. Hot tears on his cheeks. He tasted habanero peppers, wheelbarrows full of habanero peppers, stuffing his mouth and ramming spicy flakes up his nostrils and deep into his sinuses. Head down, world spinning, he heard Roy beside him, somehow fighting through the chemical burn, still going strong, beating the hell out of the Soviet with the soft slap of knuckles pounding flesh, bone, teeth.
James forced his eyes open and saw only silhouettes behind falling water.
The Soviet head-butted Roy with a wet crack, threw his shoulders back, his wrist slipped free of Roy’s grip – “He’s getting away!” – and he staggered out of the Toyota’s safe shadow, grunting and huffing globs of snot and drool, right out into the untouchable open air.
James went after him.
Kill him.
He followed him, multitool in hand, riding a surge of adrenaline, no time to think. He didn’t play contact sports – he hadn’t tackled anyone since grade school – but dammit, he tackled the Soviet at the shoulders and brought him down sideways. It felt thunderous, brain-jarring. Next second they were both on the packed dirt, rolling and kicking, James on top, blinking back waves of incendiary tears. The man’s notepad had burst open. Papers fluttered and scattered around them in a whirlwind.
Stab him.
He fumbled for the blade and it nearly twirled free while the Soviet thrashed under him with clawed hands to his face. His wrists covered his neck, most of his face was protected, but his fingers were pulling his eyelids sideways in a forced squint. His eyes were exposed. The multitool was suddenly so sharp, gleaming with hungry sunlight. It would pierce an eyeball like jelly. It would tunnel right in. It had to happen. It needed to happen. The Soviet would die quickly. It would be easier for both of them. So why hadn’t James done it yet?
The sniper was watching. Crosshairs tingled on the back of his neck.
Stab him in the eye.
But something in him wouldn’t allow it. He couldn’t. Eyes were special to James. Always had been. It didn’t matter who owned them or what evil resided behind them. He flinched and gagged at the thought of hurting them, puncturing their gently distended surfaces with unsympathetic metal, bursting them like grapes between teeth. Eyes were our link to the world. Windows to the soul. The Soviet struggled harder, and a blind swipe jangled his teeth. Windswept yellow papers swirled around them.
Out of time.
He stabbed the Soviet in the stomach. It slid in easily. The man squirmed, kicked, and clamped both hands to the multitool handle flopping in his gut like a gross little flagpole. He made very little noise; just an eerie hiss through crooked teeth.
I did it, he realized. Oh my God, I did it.
More than a second had passed. A bullet could be coming—
Stab him again.
The last of the loose papers fluttered to the road, revealing a cold silence and that pitiful wounded hiss. Time smeared. James tried to focus, tried to cut through the sweaty panic and think—
Pull the multitool out and stab him again.
He fought for the tool’s handle but the Soviet’s knuckles were fastened around it now. The man lay tense, impossibly tense, spine arched, all muscles tightened, quietly biting down on his tongue until red bubbled through his teeth. No anguished cuss or cry of pain. Only that damn inhuman hiss, like the Dumeril ground boa at the reptile store where Elle had once worked – a current of air rushing from cold-blooded lungs. There was fear in it, but that only made it more menacing. The tiny knife had penetrated maybe two inches into his flabby stomach. It wouldn’t kill him; it would only infuriate him. Never wound what you can’t kill.
“James!” Roy shouted. Then something else.
He heard whooshing air as he went for the Soviet’s gun. He had to. He had no choice now. It was kill or die. He threw open the man’s duster, drawing the oilcloth tight to the multitool handle and ripping it out of the man’s gut. It made a sound like smacking lips and skipped across the gravel, dark with blood. James searched for that gun, feathered his fingertips over something metal, or at least hard polymer, buried in—
The Soviet punched him in the neck.
White flared behind his eyes. His windpipe stung with a gasp of air rushing down a vacuum – having the wind knocked out of you was even more painful in an arid atmosphere – and suddenly he was on the ground, on his ass, staring dumbly at Windex-blue sky and Elle was screaming behind him. Everything’s okay, he would have consoled her if he’d had the air to speak, I have his gun. He had the Soviet’s machine pistol in his hand. He knew it. It was heavy, dense, block-like.
How many seconds had it been?
“James!” Elle screamed. Terror in her voice. “Come back!”
He threw himself back and somersaulted into the Rav4’s safe shadow, slamming into the driver door, and he sucked in a second helping of bone-dry air, whirled around, and wrenched the stolen weapon forward with two knuckled hands to aim it at the Soviet. The shape immediately registered wrong – rectangular. He realized it was a radio. He was holding a radio.
Really?
A radio. The man’s trail duster was probably bulging with guns and James had reached in and grabbed the one goddamn walkie-talkie in it.
The Soviet Cowboy was doubled over on his knees now. He held his right hand stiffly to his flank, high under his left arm, where his gun actually was. His watery eyes slid open and fixed on the three of them. James wondered why he hadn’t shot them to hell yet. Shouldn’t they all be dead by now? Then he recognized something he had never expected to find in the man’s eyes, not in a million years – the frozen fear of an animal facing danger and recalculating its options.
The Soviet wasn’t even looking at James. He was looking behind James.
“Alright,” Elle said, calmer now. “I have him.”
He turned and saw her sitting with her white fingers wrapped around Glen’s stubby revolver, her eyes set, her teeth bared.
James realized no one had told her
the gun was empty.
13
Elle didn’t want to shoot him but feared she would have to.
She aligned the blocky sights, mating the u-shaped rear to the squared front just as her sister had taught her. Although this was a wheel gun and not one of Eowen’s smooth automatics, the fundamentals seemed to be the same. The sights snapped together like Legos and she pulled the interlocking steel up and over the man’s face to obscure all but his glistening forehead. She was still half-out, a little dizzy, and desperately willed her body and mind to pull together.
Her wrist trembled a little. Only a little. She had it under control.
The trick, Eowen had told her over a skunkish porter homebrewed in a giant glass carboy, is to allow your target to blur. Let your eyes just . . . fall out of focus on the target, and the rear sight as well, while your front sight remains absolutely clear, hard as quartz.
She did that now.
“Elle,” James whispered beside her. “Don’t shoot him.”
She blinked sunlight from her eyes, saw the reds of her eyelids, and steadied her aim with a second hand. She made sure not to do the movie hold – the cup and saucer hold, Eowen had called it with a crinkled nose, wherein the actor clearly has no firearm experience and is merely cradling the weapon like a teacup. She squeezed the thing too, because that’s what you’re supposed to do – squeeze it until your palms are checkered white. Her fingers were strangely dry, as if coated in chalk dust or that stuff James used to put on his hands while rock climbing. Back on the gun range in Oklahoma, her hands had dripped with nervous sweat. Her sister had teased her for that, too – I’m sorry. Is this offending your liberal Californian sensibilities?
That had always been a gulf in their relationship. Eowen didn’t not like James – or at least, she never fessed up to it – but whatever playful criticisms she had for Elle’s blue state life had always seemed to come back to her husband. His embarrassingly well-paying office job, his unassertive presence, his self-deprecating jokes. As if she expected Elle to marry a cowboy? The last time they had visited her in the wheat field outskirts of Tulsa, Eowen’s on-again, off-again boyfriend had tried to talk cars with James. When that hadn’t worked, he’d tried baseball. Finally, they’d discussed beer, of which James drank only Bud Light. Worst guy-talk ever. It had been excruciating.