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

you.”
    “No shit,” Roy called back.
    James pressed his chin to the road but couldn’t improve his viewing angle. “Is he . . . can you see a gun in his hands?”
    “No,” she said.
    “No gun?”
    “No, I can’t see his hands.”
    He watched the Soviet’s dark legs and swishing duster vanish behind the Acura’s rear quarter panel. With dawning panic, he remembered what had happened at the Fuel-N-Food and wondered if the Soviet was here for Elle, looking for her to take her away and—
    “He stopped.” Her voice jumped. “By the . . . behind the trunk of their car. He’s looking at them. They’re looking at him. Oh, God, I think he’s gonna kill them —”
    Another metallic shriek.
    It rotated, deepened, and found new dimensions of awfulness like a screwdriver digging into a chalkboard. It turned into a blackened creature that crawled down James’ spine, and for some reason his mind jumped now to the stagey horrors of the morning’s Wax Gore Museum, to all that mechanical ingenuity used for the sole purpose of causing pain. Humanity hadn’t yet discovered penicillin but knew exactly how to pull a man apart while keeping him conscious for maximum agony. James could feel the hammer-pounded iron, the weathered oak, the drum-tight metal twine, all slick with Karo syrup to approximate blood. They even got the blood right, glazing the fresh splatters bright red and the older stains a dull brown.
    Pacing in the lobby, he had asked Elle: How is this entertaining?
    It’s not . She had smiled grimly. It’s life-affirming.
    The Soviet took a knee behind the Acura and his duster skimmed the ground like a theatre curtain. He reached under the bumper – James still couldn’t see his face – and coiled in big loops in his hand was a spool of metal cable. Winching cable, attached to his jeep.
    Elle grabbed his wrist. “Is he . . .”
    James nodded. “He’s towing their car away.”
    * * *
    Tapp squeezed a fist under his right hand and settled into his cheek rest. As he logged his heartbeats and breaths he slid out of this world and into another one, a better one, where nothing could touch him. Snipers called it their bubble . Every physical distraction bled away. He no longer felt the volcanic gravel crunching under his belly, the beads of sweat on the bridge of his nose, even the wet rhythm of his heart as it fired off blasts of color inside his retinas—
    A voice jolted him.
    “Okay . . . Okay, each of you, Roy and Ash, run to our car—”
    The caffeine in his veins turned to frigid panic. Tapp spilled his energy drink, bucked his rifle off-target and whirled to look over his shoulder before realizing – with a rush of embarrassment – that the voice was artificial, electronic, trickling from his own headset. He recognized the tinny distortion of Svatomir’s radio and remembered that the TALK button on that particular receiver was dirty and occasionally stuck while jostling in his pocket.
    That was it. That was what was happening now.
    Tapp let a breath curl through his teeth and forced himself to relax. His beverage leaked sideways in the dirt beside him – bloop, bloop, bloop – while he listened for more from Svatomir’s radio. He heard only static and the sandpaper scrape of oilcloth. Then footsteps, as his spotter returned to his jeep.
    That voice, though. Tapp already knew that voice. It was the husband. The thinker. The one who’d told the others which sides of their vehicles to crouch behind. The one who’d broken the side view mirror and used the shards to—
    The husband said something else, inaudible.
    What?
    Tapp freed his left hand and thumbed the headset into his earlobe, suddenly engaged and eager for more. The white noise intensified until he could feel it vibrating in his molars.
    Come on.
    He checked his scope (magnified by forty) and saw Svatomir pacing back along the length of the glimmering winch cable, running his fat fingers against it as he returned to his jeep. He didn’t