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

that talent doesn’t pay the rent.
    She tried again. “You going to school for anything?”
    “September. I start vet school in Reno.”
    “That’s good. I love pets.”
    “Yeah?” Ash sniffed. “You seem like a dog person.”
    Silence.
    James looked at his wife and stifled a laugh.
    Elle smiled bashfully. “No. Snakes.”
    “ Snakes ?”
    “Yeah. Two snakes and—”
    “Snakes are disgusting,” Ash said. “Not even God likes snakes.”
    “I do. They’re neat pets.” Elle tried not to sound like she had delivered this speech before. “They’re not slimy, although that’s a popular misconception because of the reflective sheen on their scales. They feel . . . cool and dry to the touch, kind of like leather. And lots of species are really docile and never bite, like ball pythons, or corn snakes, or green racers. I think you’d really—”
    James squeezed her shoulder, as if to say easy there .
    Elle bumped the f-stops to let in more light and saw that the image, quivering with her heartbeats, was now magnified to its maximum. Five times. She was zoomed in somewhere on the far wall and saw darkened hillside, glacial talus flows, flash-flood gullies and jutting rock teeth, smudged yuccas and clusters of tangled brush, all drawing tall shadows and hued an unnatural Sesame Street orange. A small, anal-retentive part of her wanted to white-balance the Nikon to correct that.
    “See him?” he whispered into her hair.
    “No.”
    “Anything?”
    “Just desert. An overabundance of desert.”
    “Okay.” Ash sighed. She sounded like she was finally smiling over there. “Okay, Elle, if we get out of here, maybe I’ll touch one of your snakes. But I’m warning you, if it bites me, I’m tying it in a knot.”
    Elle felt a dagger in her gut and exhaled sadly. “I . . . don’t have them.”
    “Why not?”
    Then she saw something in the Nikon viewfinder. A pinprick of white light.
    * * *
    “Oh my God,” James heard her say.
    “What?”
    Then the camera exploded under her hand, into her face, a smoky firecracker of slicing shrapnel. She screamed, thrashed her arm, and twisted hard like a yanked rag doll. The snap of displaced air raced over the desert floor and suddenly she was motionless, low in the dirt, her face covered by her ponytail. He blinked – he had grit in his eyes – and saw dark drops in the dirt, arced in a blotted stream, and it registered late that it was blood.
    “Elle!”
    He couldn’t see her right hand. Just blood. More blood, dribbling in the sand. She clutched it with her left and hissed a mouthful of hot air. His stomach fluttered as he threw himself toward her, tugging her shoulders back against the driver door, trying to pull her vise-tight fingers away so he could see the injury, his mind racing with awful possibilities. Chunks of her Nikon click-clacked around them like hail.
    “Tell me I’m okay,” she gasped.
    “You’re okay.”
    Her ponytail hit his face and she pulled her right hand up into view, clasped between white fingers. She peeled them away one by one to reveal the damage – a thin strip of skin had been peeled from the pad of her thumb, as if it had been caught on the blade of a cheese grater. Maybe she’d partially lost a fingerprint, but that was it. Thank God.
    He kissed the back of her neck. “No more of that.”
    “I loved that camera,” she said blankly, rocking back into a sitting position against the door. Her cheeks were gray, her words clipped, and she was trying to act nonchalant but he saw right through it. She held up trembling fingers: “Three paychecks at the reptile store. Three .”
    “Elle!” Ash screamed from the other car. “Elle, are you okay?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What happened?”
    “I . . .” She shrugged with chattering teeth. “Nothing much. What’s up with you?”
    “I’m glad you’re okay,” Ash said. “I’m starting to like you.”
    Elle smiled – a real smile – showing white teeth.
    James held her shoulders. For