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

do it. I have both of them still, in a black case under the clothes, under the crib.”
    “Really?”
    “Really.”
    He kissed her forehead, scorching hot. “I told you not to sell them.”
    “I did it so . . . so I could prove a point to myself. So if I ever came back to it, it would mean something.” Her voice lowered, as if divulging a secret: “The Nikon has a telephoto zoom.”
    “How far?”
    “Far.”
    “Far enough to see him?”
    She smiled cautiously. “I think so—”
    A hollow snap interrupted her, and a pillar of dust billowed from Roy’s Acura and scattered into the prairie. The hiss of falling sand came and went. A few clods of dirt pattered down. James tensed his back against the driver door and shouted to the other car: “Hey! What was that?”
    Silence.
    “Roy, Ash, you still alive?”
    “Bullshit.” It was Roy’s voice.
    “What happened?”
    “Asshole just shot the water bottle.”
    * * *
    Tapp clacked the bolt and the ejected brass pinged off limestone to his right, ringing like a little bell. He couldn’t hear his victims but he liked to imagine their shocked reactions to his power:
    Oh my God.
    Did he really?
    How is that even possible?
    It was an incredible shot. A small bottle swollen with warm water, sideways on the gravel, 1,545 meters away, and behind two sporadic crosswinds. It was barely a dot in his hyper-magnified optic. It could have been a speck of windblown sand on the lens, or an opaque cell inside Tapp’s own eye. It was a minor miracle that every intuition and rounded decimal point had guided his hand-loaded projectile to exactly where he wanted it to go. No other marksman alive, in any army or competition, could hit a target that size, at that range, with any degree of certainty. Simpler men might find the supernatural in Tapp’s work, and he could think of at least one who did.
    Just like how he shot our GPS.
    Could he be military? Ex-Special Forces?
    He has to be.
    He hoped they understood how difficult shooting was. Movies fostered grotesque misconceptions about marksmanship. It’s not point-and-click, even at the shortest ranges. The human body was the shooter’s greatest enemy – a furiously pumping machine full of spasms, aches, and softness. To plot a bullet’s trajectory every environmental force had to be calculated. The parabolic tug of gravity, the elevation and angle, the air pressure, the air temperature, the round’s ballistic coefficient, the rotation of the earth, and of course, the devastating, unpredictable wind.
    Isn’t it windy today? Doesn’t that make it even harder?
    Meanwhile you got these asshole CSI agents on television diving over backwards in slow motion and still shooting the bad guy, like a gunfight is some kind of fucking bullet ballet. Or shooting with a pistol in each hand – who decided that made the faintest lick of sense? It was bullshit. Preposterous. It made Tapp angry. He couldn’t think about it now.
    He must be the best sniper in the world.
    Tapp cracked open his second energy drink (grape-flavored, of course) and replayed the last few seconds in his mind. It wasn’t a headshot but it was close enough to send a rush of pleasure down his favorite neural pathways. After the rifle’s kick, first came the ‘swirl’ in his scope – the bullet’s vapor trail, more visible on a hot day like today. By reading it, he could watch the shot go low and left to burrow under the wind shear, exactly how he’d planned. Then the impact – magnified in his 100x spotting scope because during the projectile’s flight he had time to comfortably lean forward and switch optics – he saw the fountain of mist and dirt. The water itself was vaporized, blown into a fine curtain of fog that blossomed and swept sideways in the low wind. He envisioned this, the lovely payoff, again and again until he was exhausted and felt only the creeping hunger to hit more.
    More, please.
    This was becoming his longest shoot ever. Typically they were