EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  Light, light, light.

  Light was Tapp’s weakness. The cop car’s headlights had interfered with the sniper’s night vision optic, forcing its iris to adjust and readjust like one of Elle’s cameras. Night vision wasn’t a superpower. Like any other tool, there was a time and a place for it, and it either worked or it didn’t.

  He ran for Tapp’s generator.

  I’m going to make light.

  The Soviet jangled the doorknob outside. Locked.

  James thumbed the cap off the first fuel jug and left it twirling at his feet. He raced to the other wall, heaved the container over his head and sloshed gasoline on Tapp’s workbench, his expensive ammunition reloading equipment, his candy wrappers, his scales and casings and reams of scribbled notes, soaking it all. Every inch of it. Bitter waterfalls ran down the drawers and spread black on the floor. He dropped the empty jug, scooped the radio off the floor where he had dropped it, and clipped it to his belt loop. It croaked and he heard Tapp’s voice again, jarringly different now, breathless, vulnerable, nearly begging: “Stop, James. Stop. She’s still alive. We can negotiate.”

  He ignored it, all of it.

  I’m going to make a lot of light.

  A gunshot boomed outside, like a bowling ball hurled into a marble floor, and the door latch exploded. The Soviet must have remembered that he had a shotgun. Shards of brass skittered across the floor and pinged off the far wall. The door sagged in its frame. The deadbolt still somehow held.

  James hefted the second fuel jug to his shoulder and poured a glugging trail as he ran. The roof echoed thunder and the building shivered around him. He reached the center of the room, took a running spin under the yellow shop light, and hurled the container to the dark eastern wall. It tumbled over rows of humanoid targets, bowed like Muslims at prayer, and landed at the welding station where it coughed and quietly leaked between the two acetylene tanks. Flammable, the decal said. Or inflammable. Whatever.

  “Stop,” the sniper said weakly. “Whatever you’re doing in there, please stop.”

  Sheriff William Tapp.

  James grabbed the third jug and scooted it under the ring of light; he had plans for this one. He wiped sweat from his eyes, sucked in a breath, and tasted an overpowering wave of saccharine nastiness. It wrestled his gag reflex. All the gas fumes crowding the air. The world wobbled under his feet and he caught himself with one hand, suddenly light-headed, like five shots on an empty stomach, where you can pinpoint the exact spot you were standing when you transitioned from sober to drunk. James wasn’t stopping. Not now.

  You may own this entire county.

  The Soviet fired into the door again, his multiple shots melting into a single freight train crash. He couldn’t see the deadbolt from the outside so he was spraying the upper right section of the door, hoping to take it out by sheer firepower. He had almost succeeded. The lock warped and twanged, spraying chips under hot smoke. Bladed metal curled into flower petals. Buckshot pellets punched through and ricocheted inside the building, snapping from floor to ceiling. Candy wrappers puffed in the air like feathers after a pillow fight. A solvent bottle exploded near James and he slid to the floor behind the bench, covering his face. Then silence descended and the Soviet reloaded, one shell at a time. Click-click-click . . .

  Even torn to a perforated sliver, the deadbolt still held.

  Matches. James needed matches. He pulled drawers from the dripping workbench one by one, letting them crash to the floor and spew tools. In the deepest one he found something even better – those handheld flares, red as spaghetti sauce, stenciled EMERGENCY SIGNAL with taped seals and pull-wires. They were self-igniting and probably bright as hell. These weren’t ordinary road flares. These were the things you lit up on a sinking boat to call in an airlift. He stuffed one in each of his back pockets.

  You may be untouchable at a distance.

  “James. We can negotiate.”

  The Soviet grunted and kicked the door, buckling it. Bruised metal groaned and the doorknob popped out and twirled on the cement. The man let out a frustrated huff, paced back, and kicked again, and again, and again, caving the doorframe a few inches further with every impact.

  James held a roll of duct tape in his teeth, hit his knees, and dragged the smallest target from Tapp’s heap – a steel plate, two feet by one, an inch-and-a-half thick, its bottom edges peeling flakes of rust on the floor. Scraping it into the light and letting it crash down flat, he saw it was blistered with thousands of concave bullet marks. Importantly, no holes were punched clean through. It could stop a bullet at whatever incredible ranges Tapp practiced at, but up close? He didn’t know. He lifted the thing to his chest, forty pounds at least, and drew looping circles of black tape around his torso, tightly bracing it to his body until he had exhausted the last strip. This new center of gravity pitched him forward but he caught himself, and crossed his arms over the plate, over the improvised body armor covering from his collarbone to his belly, and drew in a full breath. It was tight but he could breathe.

  Up close, you’re just a man.

  He grabbed the road crew jacket from the wall – putrid yellow, glowering with reflecting pads – and threw it over his shoulders. It was fitted for the Soviet’s bearlike frame and hung off him like a tent. Snapping buttons with one hand, he took a knee and sifted through clanging tools on the floor, pushing aside pliers, clamps, bolts, for the sharpest and deadliest instrument he could find: a flat-head screwdriver with a canary yellow grip.

  Up close, I can kill you.

  The Soviet rammed the door, rippling the wall. As he chuffed and retreated to make another charge, James palmed the screwdriver and stood up. He ran the slick blade through his fingers and scraped the back of his mind one last time to think of Elle, poor Elle whose time was ticking away right now. He remembered her green apple shampoo, her snorting laugh, a memory, any memory he could grab hold of, and found her on the Santa Monica Pier with her sunglasses dwarfing her face as she played with her hair against a vast gray ocean. I’ll save you, he promised her.

  After running for Glen’s revolver and taking that unlucky ricochet, she had lasted ten, maybe fifteen minutes before losing consciousness.

  I can do this.

  I can kill them in fifteen minutes.

  Whipcracks echoed up the hill. Tapp’s rifle.

  * * *

  Elle scooted to the floor of the police car and covered her head. Pierced metal rang, the hood popped open and slammed shut, and fluids splattered over the windshield. The glass turned into a crystalline version of Starry, Starry Night and finally caved in as dirty white smoke billowed from the engine. She tasted ash and oil. Her eyes watered. She screamed until the gunfire stopped.

  Had she been hit again? She didn’t know. She patted herself down, wincing at the hot knife in her lungs. Arms, legs, body. No worse than they had been thirty seconds ago. Rain came through the empty windshield like cold pinpricks.

  She was safe in there from Tapp, but that meant almost nothing. Her body was already filling with air, her lungs shrinking and tightening with every crackling breath. That familiar someone-is-standing-on-my-chest sensation was back, nicely complimenting the claustrophobia of the dark car. She knew she needed to clamp her hand over the wound to seal it and halt the flow of air. Too bad she was handcuffed. No amount of limb contortions would allow an airtight seal. The best she could do was tuck her right arm over it, half-covering the scabbed gash below her armpit and hopefully slowing the leak. Maybe she could purchase herself a little extra time; she didn’t know. Every breath was accompanied by a persistent wet hiss. Every second, more sand streamed through the hourglass.

  Keys. She needed the deputy’s handcuff keys.

  Too far away to reach, the deputy had died in a sitting position on the road, legs splayed, one hand still clamped to his neck where she’d shot him. His pant leg was still hiked past his sock but she couldn’t see the holster in the darkness.

  Too far. Tapp will kill me.

>   She set the gun on the seat and tried the police radio again. Dead air. One of Tapp’s lucky fragments had taken it out; the LCD screen was fissured with icy cracks. Smoke was filling the car, pushing cloudlike through the windshield and curling through the air vents in wisps. Rainwater pelted her through it, turned dirty and ashen. She tasted charcoal, mesquite, whiskey. The smoke tickled her throat and she hacked a cough into her elbow, and when she looked up again, she saw the corpse of Deputy Doogie Howser had raised its head and was now looking at her.

  She gasped and raised the warm pistol.

  He smiled. She saw black staining his lips, running down his mouth and chin, forming a waterfall down the breast of his uniform. He didn’t say anything – she wondered if he could still speak at all – and just kept grinning at her, like a hellish jack-o-lantern.

  She curled her finger around the trigger.

  “William Howard Tapp,” he said with a full mouth. His voice had a gurgle to it. “William Tapp . . . is a demon in human skin.”

  She squeezed the gun until it rattled.

  “Break that skin and he’ll . . . drip out and pool and reform himself.” His grin widened and dumped another dark mouthful of blood down his shirt. It splashed in his lap. “He hangs in the air and condenses inside people—”

  “Give me your keys,” Elle ordered.

  The deputy reached for his belt and produced a small key ring. He looked back up at her with it jingling in his palm, and she saw the gears turning inside his little insect brain (shoot him, shoot him, shoot him) but it was too late. With a flick of his wrist, the keys hurtled into Tapp’s dark prairie.

  The last gasp of hope left Elle’s chest, replaced by chilled air.

  So close.

  “He can’t . . . die because he’s a concept,” the deputy said with increasing strain. Rising blood bubbled in his voice. “He’s . . . a contagious idea.”

  Then the kid slackened into shadow and dropped his hand from his neck, and she heard his blood jetting into the gravel like a water spigot. His final bit of damage done, he was dead for good now.

  His radio, forgotten on the road by his ankle, buzzed feedback as someone activated the connection. She held the pistol to her body, hunched tight, and waited to hear the sniper’s ugly, weedy voice again. Instead, she heard James, punching through the rain, as sharp and focused as a searchlight:

  “Elle, honey, I have a plan to kill him.”

  She smiled a forbidden, guilty smile.

  Get him, James.

  * * *

  “Fine. Great. Fantastic.” Tapp snapped the rifle bolt shut and wiped his chin with his wrist. “Let’s see this plan.”

  Downhill in dripping green, Svatomir took ten paces from the bungalow. Then he slung his Saiga 12 over his shoulder, whipped water from his ponytail, and charged the door again. The crash came to Tapp a half second later.

  “You’re not cut out for this, James.” He indexed the trigger and fought the heartbeat behind his ribs. It was violent, uneven, like a drum set tumbling down stairs. He forced himself to laugh and made sure the radio heard. “You listening? I . . . I said we can negotiate. What you wanted all along. Your bread and butter. I’m offering you the closest thing you’ll see to an olive branch for the rest of your very short life, so don’t . . . don’t oversell yourself. For everything that’s happened here, you’re still a salesman. You still please people for a living. You’re still that little kid watching his father beat the shit out of his mother with a—”

  “I didn’t finish.”

  “What?”

  “I was interrupted,” James said. “And I didn’t finish.”

  “F . . .” Tapp missed a breath. “Finish, then.”

  “There was a gun my dad kept loaded by the door,” James said. The radio connection filtered itself and became oddly perfect. All static, feedback echo, and background tone bled away until there was only James: “I grabbed it.”

  “And?”

  “And I ran to the kitchen, to the scream, where he had her with her left hand flattened to the counter now, to break her other hand.” He lowered his voice to a dry whisper, his words cleanly spaced: “And I shot him. In the eye. He didn’t fall over. He just kind of sat down by the dishwasher. And I watched him die, for two full minutes, and we stared at each other and said nothing.”

  The connection clicked off.

  Down the hill, Svatomir heeled back, lowered his shoulders like a linebacker, and charged the door again.

  * * *

  James opened the door.

  The big man came barreling through the now-empty doorway over a rush of displaced air, wheezing with shock. Their shoulders brushed briefly as they passed – the Soviet going in, James going out.

  And James was going fast. He ran three paces into the night with the third fuel jug in his right hand, glugging a trail at his feet. Then he took another running spin and hurled the container at the graveyard of broken cars, catching droplets in his eyes. Behind him he heard the Soviet’s boots squealing, the man falling on the fuel-slick floor, his shotgun clattering on cement like kitchen pans. He’d be back up in another second, turning to face James and shouldering his weapon for the kill.

  James didn’t look back. He kept running, ten yards from the building now. He heard the fuel jug land and splash by the front of the motor pool where Roy’s Acura (and its full tank of gas) had been parked. He didn’t turn to look at that, either; he was out of the building’s safe shadow now. He was inside Tapp’s scope. Right now, those hungry crosshairs were finding him, intercepting him like white blood cells zeroing in on a virus. He imagined the half second of delight Tapp was feeling right then – there you are! – and hoped it would dull the sniper’s reflexes for another half second as he wrenched the first emergency flare from his left pocket and groped for the pull-wire with slippery fingers. Missing a step, losing momentum, he tugged once, twice, three times, until the world turned red.

  He imagined Tapp’s mild surprise: Oh? What’s this?

  Heat on his cheeks. Hissing sparks. The stench of damp fireworks. Around him splashed a twenty-foot radius of crimson light, of jagged shadows scattering and re-gathering with every step. He dug his feet in and whirled, slicing a fiery gash through the night, and threw the flare thirty feet toward the building’s open doorway. Where the Soviet stood.

  The Soviet was just bringing his shotgun up to fire at James when the flare came twirling at him, skimmed off the doorframe and flew past his left ear. He turned to watch the burning projectile bounce off Tapp’s workbench and splash on the wet floor behind him.

  He looked back at James.

  James wasn’t looking. He fell to one knee and covered his face.

  The air ignited. Raindrops boiled away. Every molecule turned hostile to life. A wall of pressurized air (Mount St. Helens-esque, James managed to think) whipped his road jacket taut, and when he caught himself with an outstretched hand in the mud, his ears rang in answer to a blast he never heard.

  * * *

  White.

  So much white. An instant nuclear flash.

  Tapp’s BlackEye X3S, which had a suggested retail price of $2,899, became a sheet of blank paper. He leaned back, his brow suctioned free from the eyecup, and he saw what the gadget couldn’t. The explosion burned as bright as the sun for a moment, and then shapes took form and through seared retinal shadows he saw the bungalow’s walls had disintegrated into a hail of sheet metal, thrown by a fountain of fire.

  Think, he told himself. Think.

  Instead he watched dumbly, slack-jawed, as the heat wave came rushing to him. He felt it on his cheeks and exposed knuckles, hot as a hearth oven even in the downpour. The report filled the air and blended into the next thunderclap. The fireball melted from orange to red before swallowing itself in a mushroom cloud, building to a hundred meters of cauliflower smoke. Flames leapt from the structure’s black ribs, coiling in the suction of returning air to form a surreal tornado, a storm of swirling fire aching to meet the s
ky.

  Think.

  He eyeballed back to his scope. Still a white-out. Arctic white. Not the faintest hint of green. In the corner, flashing urgently: OVRLD. He hadn’t opened the manual in months, but he suspected it stood for overload. Too much light. The image intensifier tube was burning out, photocathodes popping, two grand worth of circuitry in there sizzling like toast—

  Think—

  He couldn’t. He felt like that little blinking OVRLD icon. His thoughts lost their bones and jellied into mush. He didn’t even know where to start; everything had changed in a microsecond. So many plates had been hurled in the air and were now falling, and he only had two hands to catch them with – Paiute County’s Deputy Sergei Koal slain by his own sidearm, the pillar of fire visible for miles like Mosby’s jealous rendition of the Roswell crash, Svatomir burning alive right now, the emergency call to Mindy that personally named him. It overwhelmed him, but his mind stuck on that particular image – a dumb woman full of smart questions, her cow-like eyes as wide as dinner plates. There was no damage control for this. No cover-up would be elaborate enough. Tomorrow’s light would reveal Sheriff William Tapp, the most reviled lawman in national history.

  So, he had a head start on the manhunt by at least . . . what, four hours? More, if seventeen years here taught him anything about small-county emergency coordination. He considered the logistics of fleeing the law – eating, sleeping, scratching out a secret nomadic life in a world where every dumb bitch in a Dairy Queen could pull up his face on a smartphone – and that’s where things fell apart. It sounded like a lot of work, and frankly, made him feel tired and old. He would much rather just take a dirt nap out there. To quote James Eversman in a moment of sensibility: I’ll be dead. Won’t be my problem.

  He couldn’t quite reach the long-barreled rifle to his head without sacrificing his grip on the trigger, but he could certainly brain himself here and now with his little target pistol. Of course, the .17HMR was an iffy kill caliber; small, high-velocity, zipping through meat like a laser beam with minimal deformation or trauma. What if he accidentally pulled a park ranger job on himself – a Glen Floyd, you might call it – and merely blew his ability to read and write out of the top of his skull? Or sentenced himself to a coma? That would be embarrassing.