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

thirty-minute affairs; heavenly little bursts of excitement after months of work and buildup. He would kill one, two, three, a runner here, a crawler there, and then he would shed his ghillie suit, grab his target pistol, hike a mile across the crater, and study the stiffening bodies where they lay. He would close his eyes and reconstruct the shoot as a play-by-play, imagining each second from their ground-level viewpoints, sketching mental lines suspended in the air like lasers to mark each move, counter-move, and kill shot.
    This shoot was different. These four were intelligent enough to immediately take cover behind their cars at a perfectly observed angle. No one had lost it. No one had hit the dirt like the sissified modern human is trained to. No one had chanced a run for the hills (yet). As it stood, this engagement was becoming a stalemate, which Tapp did not want. Not this late into the afternoon with dwindling sunlight. No, sir. No thanks.
    “Move their cars for me,” he said into his headset radio. “Now.”
    As he spoke he spotted a flash of movement under the Toyota’s front bumper. The wife – it appeared – was doing something there. Her shadow bobbed against wiry grass, then shortened and lengthened. Something small and silver scooted slowly into view under the bumper, feathered by mere fingertips.
    He blinked and his eyelashes scraped the lens.
    What’s this?
    * * *
    Elle steadied her Nikon digital camera on the soft earth. She gently swiveled it to face downhill across the crater and then another thirty degrees to the right as James had instructed. The reflex viewfinder allowed her to see the image without exposing her head. She hoped. At this obtuse angle beside the Toyota’s front tire, she wasn’t sure how far, exactly, was too far to lean out.
    She could hear the girl – Ash? – sobbing by the other car. What an awful thing. She couldn’t imagine losing her own sister, let alone in such a graphic way, in full view and unflinching sunlight. She had to say something.
    “Hey. Hey, your name is Ash, right?” she shouted. “Like Ashley?”
    Silence.
    “Yeah,” the girl said.
    “I’m Elle.”
    No response.
    She could barely see the viewfinder at this angle. The aperture was still set for indoors and let in far too much sunlight, registering a blizzard whiteout. Carefully exposing one finger at a time (she doubted the sniper, for all his godlike powers, could possibly target individual fingers, right?) she dialed the f-stops back to four, then eight, then eleven. Finally the horizon traced itself on the screen.
    “How . . . how old are you, Ash?” She licked her lips and lowered the camera, dipping the two center hash marks below the craggy skyline.
    “Eighteen,” the girl sniffed.
    “Tell me about yourself. What do you like to do?”
    “I . . . I don’t know.”
    To see the viewfinder, Elle contorted her back into an s-curve – shoulders forward, head twisted back. She couldn’t possibly know where the invisible line between life and death was, but she imagined her cheeks were just touching it, her eyelashes fluttering against it, her heaving breaths and arched spine holding her back and upright and just barely out of the killer’s scope. Maybe she was teasing him.
    “Why is your hair blue?” she asked. Stupid question.
    Ash huffed. “Why not?”
    Swing and a miss , she thought. She thumbed the optical zoom and watched the far valley wall slowly enlarge and darken. Good Lord, she loved that telephoto lens. She loved the compressing effect it had on buildings, how entire city blocks of steel, glass, and brick would flatten into a single wall of crushed depth. Downtown had always been an amazing place for her, full of verticality. Some of her favorite shots were on the roof of the Quigley building looking down on the rooftops of Wallace, with those parapets and utility boxes and gargoyles suffering Big Apple envy. She had a hell of an eye for compositions, but she quickly learned