EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read by TAYLOR ADAMS

as long as he had known her, his wife had maintained a particular uneasiness with people. She might pretend to be in her element, but she wasn’t really. She had a deep grab bag of rehearsed smiles, tension-breaking jokes, fake compliments, and all the other calculated niceties of social interaction. She only had two friends – one was her sister Eowen, and the other had moved back to Boston two years ago. Sometimes he worried for her, because he felt like he was one of only three people on earth who could make her genuinely smile. Four, maybe, counting eighteen-year-old Ash.
    “What did you see?” he asked his wife.
    “A flash.”
    “Like a gun flash?”
    “Yeah,” she said. “Like a kernel of light, in the middle of the hillside—”
    “How much time passed?”
    “What?”
    “Between the flash and impact?”
    She squeezed her bleeding thumb. “Felt like a second.”
    “One second.” He stared into the badlands, letting the syllables drop off his swollen tongue. “It takes his bullet one entire second to get from his gun to us.”
    His mind jumped to a ninth grade science fact; that it took light from the sun eight full minutes to reach the earth. The distance was that unfathomably vast. Something about it had always disturbed him and conjured a mental image of the earth as a lonely grapefruit floating in a Pacific Ocean of nothingness. Nothing out there for us beyond a universe of indifferent stars. He could hear his teacher’s voice now: How humbling it is, to know our smallness.
    Elle was looking at him, waiting for it.
    “We can use that,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    He leaned closer and grinned mischievously. “When he’s aiming at us, and he shoots, he’s not shooting to hit us. He’s shooting to hit where he estimates we’ll be. In one second.”
    “That’s it?”
    “We own that second. Not him.”
    “That’s . . . extremely optimistic.” She opened her hand and studied the way the blood filled the cracks in her skin. “What can we possibly do with one second?”
    “We’ll think of something.”
    “Christ!” It was Roy again, sharp and hoarse. “Why is anyone listening to him? One second. One goddamn second. Really? This is like being trapped on a desert island with goddamn Ned Flanders.”
    “Please,” Ash whispered. “Please stop.”
    “So . . .” Elle sighed and looked at her husband. “We have one hypothetical second of borrowed time. He still has a sniper rifle.”
    “I’m thinking,” James said.
    She kicked a chunk of blue GPS plastic and looked at him sideways. “Honey, just once, can you please drop the optimism and admit that we’re so far up shit creek, we’re actually two miles up shit mountain?”
    “Hey!” Roy shouted, suddenly dead serious. “Hey, hey. Car coming.”
    Elle froze, her eyes turning to wax.
    James leaned forward and peered around the Rav4’s left headlight, down Shady Slope Road’s plunging valley. It was the black jeep. A hundred yards down the road, lifted tires jostling, flanked on both sides by a plume of swirling dust. Coming at them fast. The Soviet Cowboy with his Hello Kitty thermos.
    Elle huffed. “Not him again.”
    “We need to warn him,” Ash said. “We need to signal him to stop, and turn around, and get help—”
    “No,” James said. “We don’t.”
    “Why?”
    “He’s . . . he’s part of it.”
    Roy punched something that banged like a drum. “Even though . . . Christ. I got a speeding ticket two hours ago for going seventy-four in a seventy. So this county is apparently swarming with murderers, but at least the traffic enforcement is fucking immaculate. ”
    James wasn’t listening. He stared down the road and imagined the inside of the Soviet’s jeep, the rotten trail duster pressed warm and clammy to his slashed leather seats, his coffee burbling in the console, his charcoal pencils and yellow paper pressed against his sweaty back, and the man himself, or itself – a bleak silhouette, a human