by TAYLOR ADAMS
“Medics are God’s foot soldiers.”
James, please be watching.
* * *
Sheriff William Howard Tapp had built a reputation early in his career for being ill-suited to law enforcement work. The newer psychological evaluations and assessments (which he had luckily dodged back in 1979) referred to this as “social competence.” Apparently there was an entire twenty pages to it, crammed full of one-to-five-scale questions he knew he would fail – when stressed or uncomfortable, is your laughter noticeably louder than normal? – to say nothing of the polygraph exam, which would be disastrous without a thumbtack in his boot and some serious prep time. On patrol, he had a hands-in-pockets awkwardness to him, a woodenness, that made interacting with the public excruciating. He avoided pulling motorists over the same way he avoided answering his landline at home (thank God for answering machines). Social anxiety? No. He wasn’t anxious about interacting with people – he was utterly uninterested in them and their tiny problems. People were too much work. That was part of the reason he’d left the New Mexico Highway Patrol and moved to the nation’s second-smallest county.
Fun fact: it only took eighteen votes to be elected sheriff here.
He blinked away rainwater, fighting it back as it trickled down his neck, pooled in the wrinkles of his ghillie fabric, and glazed his rifle in beads. It was everywhere. It would add another ten pounds to his camouflage suit and turn him into a walking towel, reeking like a wet German Shepard. He knew his BlackEye X3S was weatherproof (of course) but that didn’t prevent a nervous twinge from shooting up his spine when he noticed the perimeter of the green lens frosting with moisture. He hated moisture. Moisture is a pernicious little bastard that seeps into the cracks of your guns and cancerously rots them from the inside out. He would never forget the horror and shame of uncasing his .270, flicking the bolt, and discovering the action to be rusted shut. That had just been cold condensation, too – this was honest-to-God rain. Tonight he would need to perform a full breakdown on his rifle and towel-dry every last pin and screw.
Somehow, focusing on the smaller problems made the bigger ones feel manageable. It was progress.
In the BlackEye’s green haze, Deputy Sergei Koal looked like a gremlin with his stunted body and wide-brimmed campaign hat. He was barely taller than the woman, and even handcuffed on her knees she seemed to dwarf him. Ten paces from the darkened Paiute County cruiser, he had peeled something off the woman’s chest – too small to tell at this range, given the optic’s limited six-power magnification – and studied it before tucking it in his pocket for later. Then he crouched beside her, took a handful of her hair, and studied her like a hooked fish. “She’s pretty,” he said on his radio. “As long as I can remember, cousin always liked the brunettes.”
“Play nice, now,” Tapp said.
He let her head drop. “What’s next?”
“You found nothing out here. Just rain and darkness. You’ll spend all night looking. Then after sun-up, you and me, we’ll both check it out so it stays off State Patrol’s radar. We’ll follow the ridgeline, work up some blistering sunburns. We’ll call it teenagers, pranks, bad acid, whatever. No worries about the killer using my name. You can Google me, for Christ’s sake—”
“Runners.”
“Don’t interrupt me.”
“Drug runners could be our angle. We suspect the call was a distraction. To clear the way for . . . you know.”
“Let me see your hands,” Tapp said. “Any tremors?”
Deputy Sergei Koal obediently raised both hands with his fingers splayed, his flesh burning algae green in the night vision. Then he looked down sheepishly because he couldn’t handle eye contact at any distance. Unfortunately, in all the ways that counted, he was the polar opposite of his half-retarded cousin. He spoke fast, thought fast, and flinched hard, like a windup toy on meth.
He’s the speed of light, an African freakin’ swallow, a greased-up cheetah racing down a goddamn laundry chute . . .
At this range Tapp couldn’t discern if the deputy’s hands were shaking, but pretended he could. “You’re doing well,” he said. “Did you check both burn pits like I asked?”
“No coyotes.” Sergei looked ashamed. “No bones dug up.”
“Now, kid, that’s impossible,” Tapp said, rubbing away the caffeine headache already coalescing behind his eyes. “And I’ll explain to you why that’s impossible tomorrow. But right now, we’ve got shit to do.”
Another pulse of lightning exploded neon in his scope, overloading the optic for a split-second. Shadows scorched into his eye. Then came the thunder, a gathering roar crossing the crater, as if the sky were being drawn tight and split open.
Koal looked down at the wife. “She’s . . . uh . . .”
“What now?”
“She’s making a funny noise. Croaking. Like she’s . . . breathing through a straw or something.”
Tapp heard it too; a dry wheeze under Deputy Koal’s voice on the Motorola. It sounded excruciating. His throat knotted up a little, involuntarily. If today had left any patience in him at all, he would have felt that poor woman’s pain and express-delivered some .338 caliber euthanasia. Instead, Tapp calmly contemplated the new dimensions of this chessboard, caught some rainwater in his mouth, squirted it through his teeth in cold jets, and decided: “Hopefully she’s still got a few more breaths left in her. Because as of right now, she’s our ticket. Our hostage.”
Koal tensed. “You mean there’s another one alive?”
Tapp choked on a childish little smile, bubbling up from somewhere dark. He was winning again. He scooted forward on his elbows and levered his rifle down on the sandbag to focus the green lens on his ramshackle little bungalow, where the source of all of today’s problems cowered inside.
“James Eversman. I know you heard everything in there. Step outside of my building so I can kill you. If you don’t, I will . . . butcher Mrs. Eversman with my rifle in such a way that the Gore Museum staff could spend all day trying to reconstruct what happened, and still only get it half right. Piece by piece, limb by limb, I will shoot her into . . . little fleshy bits of firewood while my deputy applies tourniquets to every stump, to keep her alive and aware to experience every terrible second, while you listen. Your choice.”
* * *
James felt dead already.
He sat cross-legged on the floor with the radio clasped in both hands under his chin. Rain drummed metal overhead and trickled through in waterfalls, slapping the cement and splashing him. Water sizzled off the hot light. The building had become a cave – cold, dark dripping. It took on a pungent wet odor, as if calcium deposits were forming dripstones around him. He was numb, utterly still. He couldn’t even locate his own heartbeat.
He had listened to enough of Tapp’s indulgent little monologue to know that Elle was going to die, and that he was going to die, and all hope was lost, but somehow, a strange little fragment from before snagged in his mind:
Turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out.
He couldn’t get it out of his head. He needed to think about how to handle this final ultimatum, how to surrender Elle’s life and his own to Tapp in the most painless and humane way, but like a scratched CD, the stupid phrase repeated itself over and over.
Turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out.
What did it mean? What was Tapp talking about? He scrutinized the tiny nuances of the killer’s speech as it came around each time – the way the sniper clipped the last syllable of some words as if he was in a hurry, the way he drawled the first syllable of others as if he wasn’t, the folksy way his tongue navigated the word goddamn.
Turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out.
Finally he confronted the notion that he was picking up breadcrumbs dropped by his own imagination. His memory was imperfect. Every looped echo was just a corrupted copy, each one further from the real thing. This was procrastination, busywork, distracting him from w
hat needed to be done.
Tapp’s voice: “Thirty seconds, James. Then I shoot off her right arm.”
He stood up and approached the door. It wasn’t even a choice. He pressed one palm to the metal – still warm from the day, but chilling fast. It vibrated faintly with the outside rain, almost like electricity.
“Don’t worry, James. She’s tough. She’ll keep . . . shouldering on.”
The echo resurfaced, crowding out every other thought: Turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out, turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out, turn off your goddamn headlights before I—
“Twenty-five seconds.” Tapp exhaled impatiently. “Here . . . hold the radio to . . . We’ll make him talk to her.”
James listened by the door in the silence.
A rustling click on the Motorola. A washing machine roar of tinny rain cycled through, and he was reminded of those fuzzy airplane black box recordings, congested with staticky pops and hisses, in the final seconds of free fall before impact.
“James?” Elle said.
He couldn’t speak. His mouth turned to cotton.
“James?”
“I’m here,” he struggled to say.
“Good news,” she said tiredly. “The police are here.”
God, he missed her jokes. He wished he could laugh one more time. He realized this would probably be the last smartass remark she’d ever make to him, just like the greasy steak burritos at the Fairview were their last breakfast together, and their last real argument had occurred by the gas pumps at the Fuel-N-Food with that stupid Roswell sign with five exclamation points. The last movie they’d ever watched together had been a forgettable horror flick with selfish characters that died badly in the end. Their last kiss had been in the wrecked Toyota, under the roar of the Soviet’s engine, with his hands duct-taped to the shifter. Their last child never had a name. Everything was a last. He thought about the finite beats of his heart, counting down in his ribs.
“Fifteen seconds,” the sniper said.
“Honey,” Elle whispered. “What’s the plan now?”
His cheeks burned and his throat tightened. “There’s no plan.”
“Yes, there is.” She sounded irritated. His heart plunged when he noticed her voice had that familiar sucking whistle under it again. Her wound had reopened – she would be dead in fifteen minutes anyway, give or take. “You always have an idea. I won’t make fun of it this time, I promise—”
“Ten seconds . . .”
“I’m stepping outside,” James said.
“Please, don’t do that.”
“I have to—”
“No, you don’t.”
Violent thunder crashed overhead. The building warped and vibrated as his fingers closed around the doorknob. “I love you, Elle.”
“Shut up.”
“Five seconds . . .”
“I love you.”
“Shut up.” She sniffed and he could hear her pulse in her breath, shuddering between gasps. “Don’t you see? I’m with you. I’m ready. We’re going to kill them all with your next crazy plan. Please, I just need you to tell me what to do, and I’ll do it, okay?”
“Grab her arm,” Tapp said. “Hold it . . . hold it out—”
“Wait!” James tugged the door – and it didn’t open.
The deputy struggled on the radio. Scuffling movement. A sharp gasp—
Tapp fussed: “Fuckin’ hold her—”
“Wait! I’m coming out!” He wrenched the door again, harder. It clanged, clicked. It was catching on something—
“James!” his wife screamed.
He remembered the deadbolt. He snapped the lock open as blood filled his eardrums, and the corroded squeal echoed twice (too late, already too late, not enough time) and he grabbed the door with both hands, gasped through his teeth and tugged the thing – scratching the floor, rotating as heavily and ponderously as a bank vault – wide open to reveal the darkness outside.
And the Soviet Cowboy.
He stood in the doorway like a gargoyle. Tall, broad, draped in that duster slick with rain and blood, reeking of French Roast hardened between teeth. His right hand was half-extended, as if he had just been reaching for the doorknob when James opened it. The shop light defined his cheekbones and turned his face ghoulish, eye sockets empty and unblinking, as his lips curled up to grin at James. A double-flash of lightning lit him up and revealed that today’s blood loss had drained his skin into something pale and soggy, like dead oyster meat.
The struggle on the radio fell silent and Elle whispered: “Honey, if you tell me you have a plan to kill him, I’ll believe you.”
Tapp fired.
22
Tapp’s eyelashes fluttered against the lens as he clacked the bolt up, back, forward, down. The wife was moving preternaturally fast, like security footage on accelerated playback. She had jolted upright on her feet, screaming, shocking weak little Deputy Koal, and head-butted the kid right in the front teeth. He reeled with both hands to his mouth while his campaign hat spun away like a hubcap, and the woman whirled, her wrists still cuffed at her stomach, and sprinted for the patrol car.
Wet gravel exploded beside her. She flinched but kept running.
An acceptable miss, Tapp told himself. His BlackEye wasn’t fully zeroed yet. The atmosphere had turned into a maelstrom, his rifle bore had cooled, the hand-loads were a fresh batch from January (new primers), and a whole host of other unknowns had settled in. How could he expect to hit every shot he took in this weather? On a moving target, no less? Shit happened. He hadn’t missed her by more than a meter anyway. Now he knew the windage – three clicks to the left.
She dove like a gymnast through the car’s open driver door and disappeared behind the murky windshield. Deputy Koal pursued her with one elbow clasped to his jaw and his other hand going for the Paiute County-issued Glock 17 on his hip. He had her.
You could say he was going to . . . punch her ticket (ha, ha, ha!).
* * *
Elle hit the driver seat on her stomach. The car was dark, the windows blurred with rain, the seats sticky and damp and pungent with bleach. The scent reminded her of a stadium bathroom in that way something can be both filthy and nauseatingly over-cleaned. She elbowed up and saw a police computer – a blue monitor and a dirty keyboard with a missing spacebar on the center console. She checked the ignition for keys. No keys.
“You bitch!” The deputy was coming. “You fucking bitch.”
She was certain she would die there, either by gunshot or suffocation, and that was okay. At least she wouldn’t die on her knees. Her head throbbed in waves of migraine pain and a warm line of blood ran down her forehead where his front teeth had cut into her scalp. How did head-butts work in the movies? Had she done something wrong? Because that hurt. She groped with her cuffed hands around the steering column, beside the driver seat, under the ancient computer. She needed to find the deputy’s radio. Even out here in the badlands, cops must have radios built into their cars, right? If she could shout into it, someone would hear on the other end. Anyone.
“I’m gonna kill you.” Wet footsteps, coming fast. “You broke my teeth—”
There it was! She found the receiver dangling on a spiral cord, and clasped the clicker and screamed – no feedback. No tinny echo. Was it even on? She saw gummy buttons on the console, indicating preset frequencies. There was an LCD screen above them, but it was the primitive kind you found on a cheap calculator. She couldn’t read it without light. She tried slapping every button, mashing left to right with rising panic, but nothing responded—
“TURN AROUND, BITCH.”
The driver door squealed open and cold water dumped down her back. She gasped and rolled over to see the deputy standing in a curtain of rain, his left palm cupped vise-tight to his jaw, his right hand darting for that sidearm holstered on his hip—
It wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there because Elle had it. A little squared black autom
atic, clamped in her wet hands, aimed up at him. She had plucked it from his holster fifteen seconds ago after she head-butted him. She had a good sense for holsters now, seared into her muscle memory, and it helped that the deputy’s had been near-identical to Glen Floyd’s.
His eyes widened.
She caught her dwindling breath and steadied the pistol.
The rain intensified.
“Your hat,” she said through bared teeth. “Looks stupid.”
Quickly, he hiked up his pant leg and went for a holdout piece on his ankle. She was quicker and shot Deputy Doogie Howser in the neck.
* * *
James closed the door the same instant the Soviet grabbed for it. He wasn’t sure exactly what happened in the next second, but the second after it involved the door slamming almost-but-not-quite shut with the Soviet’s sausage fingers crushed in the frame. The knuckles tensed like a dying spider curling its legs. The Soviet made that hissing noise again – like when James had stabbed him, that awful cold-blooded sound that summed up everything he hated about Elle’s snakes – and emptied his lungs, sucked in another gasp, and hissed some more through his teeth. James screamed at him through the door, something he wouldn’t remember.
After the second hiss, the Soviet pulled his hand and the door clicked shut.
James relocked the deadbolt and staggered back, his shoes squealing on leaked rainwater. Another crash of thunder shook the walls and crowded out the Soviet’s snarl, and when the report drained away, he had fallen silent too.
Turn off your goddamn headlights before I shoot them out.
He had it now.