Wicked Prayer

by Norman Partridge

  Part 1 A Life of Fire

  One

  Part 2 In the Desert

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Part 3 From the Land of the Farther Suns

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Part 4 The Wail of Black Laughter

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Part 5 Little Birds of the Night

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Scorpion Flats, Arizona

  Seventy-five miles south of Tucson

  November 4, 2000

  It started this way, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.

  It started this way, with a man named Dan Cody driving a battered Jeep down a lonely stretch of highway.

  It started this way, with an armload of roses scattered atop a worn canvas bag that lay on the passenger-side floorboard of that Jeep.

  It started this way, with an armload of roses riding shotgun . . . and a worn canvas bag filled with a thousand writhing scorpions.

  To Dan Cody, the roses were frightening. Pooled in bruised shadows and silver-white moonlight, their petals were moist and full as a dozen wet, openmouthed kisses.

  And just as dangerous, too. Cody knew that.

  Beads of sweat gleamed on his upper lip. He wiped the back of his dusty right hand across his mouth and smelled the dirt and dried sweat that smeared his rough, tanned skin. He inhaled deeply, and for the duration of that breath he was transported to the cool midnight canyons and inky desert crevices he’d so recently visited.

  The smell of dirt was to Cody a brief respite from the roses’ cloying perfume.

  He didn’t much like that smell, but he could not escape it tonight.

  He would not escape it.

  Tonight it was his destiny.

  Cody wiped his hand on his black denim-clad thigh, and his hand returned to the steering wheel . . . where it belonged, where it was comfortable. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the roses. They were strange things, born far away from the desert. Valentine hearts from a land that was fresh and cool and green. In this hard and barren place, nothing survived that couldn’t live broken and twisted and ruined by the relentless beatings of sun and wind.

  The desert was a land Dan Cody knew well.

  It was the land where Dan Cody had been born, twenty-five years ago, and had died, twenty-five years ago.

  And perhaps, just perhaps, tonight he would be born again.

  It started this way, thought Dan Cody, as he drove into the deep end of midnight.

  It started this way. . . .

  The old Jeep tore blacktop as Dan drove toward the woman who haunted his thoughts during the day and waited in his dreams every night.

  One busted headlight was dark and blind above the Jeep’s twisted bumper; the other headlight was flared to BRIGHT—a cyclopean eye that spotlighted all the things that hid in the night and just as quickly abandoned them to the darkness—

  First: a rusted road sign pockmarked with shotgun fire.

  Second: a patch of teddy bear cholla and prickly pear cactus.

  Third: a memorial tribute Cody had driven by many, many times.

  Once Dan had stopped by the roadside memorial in the bright light of day, had knelt on the hard-packed dirt stained with motor oil. He wasn’t much on prayers, but he’d said one before the plain white crucifix with its faded wreath of plastic flowers that encircled a fifth-grade photograph of a smiling, dark-haired girl.

  A pretty little girl whose short life had come to an end on this road. A girl who’d never lived to enter junior high with the rest of her class. A girl who’d never had the chance to fulfill her dreams of becoming a doctor or an equestrian, dreams that Dan had read about on a yellowed, plastic-protected newspaper obituary stapled to the crucifix.

  As if you can sum up dreams like that, Dan had thought bitterly as he’d squinted against the sunlight on that far-off day, staring at the faded photograph of a girl whose beautiful blue eyes seemed achingly familiar to him.

  Dan Cody knew he had changed on that day. It was as if he had found a lost part of himself here, on this road, in the gaze of a dead girl whose eyes could have been twins to another’s ... a woman whose eyes were every bit as beautiful and blue and bright.

  The cross was nestled in a patch of cholla where a drunk driver, nodding at the wheel like a downed cork in a bottomless bottle, had swerved off the road and onto the scrub-choked shoulder. The driver—sleeping, lost in a dream—had plowed into the blue-eyed child who was collecting pop bottles on a moonless night.

  There had been no skid marks. None at all. The pavement was dry, and clean. A straight shot into nowhere. The driver, dead himself—metaphorically, if not physically—hadn’t even seen his victim.

  But Dan Cody had seen her, and he saw her still. Though he tried not to, Dan sometimes imagined her last moments as he drove the solitary highway: the girl kneeling on the shoulder, red dust staining her knees, counting deposit bottles that would supplement her mother’s welfare checks. Her blue eyes reflecting headlights that bleached her skin white as a desert flower. Her last breath, drawn deeply . . . and held. Then a flash of pop bottles exploding like firecrackers against a black backdrop of sky, and death in the form of a half ton of steel smashing through the child as easily as if she were a tumbleweed that had come head to head with a tornado.

  Sometimes, in Cody’s mind, the girl would hear the car as it approached. She would look up, unable to do anything else, and fear would devour her like helpless prey.

  But sometimes, in Cody’s mind, the girl would not hear the car.

  She wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t see death coming for her.

  Tonight—many nights—she did not.

  Dan Cody knew it was better that way.

  The Jeep raced forward, the cyclopean headlight beam washing the darkness, and there was more to see . . .

  A red tangle of roadkill waited just beyond the memorial cross: something bucked from the blacktop by a hungry bumper, something that had come to rest beneath barbed cactus shadows just as the little girl’s corpse had on that night long, long ago. Something that might have been the bloodstained carcass of a coyote ... or a demon ... or an angel blasted out of the sky by shotgun fire.

  Out here, in the desert, it all amounted to the same.

  For a split second, the carcass gleamed in the harsh headlight glow, and in that split second Dan saw a large black bird that might have been a crow ... or something else entirely . . . pecking at the dead carcass.

  Dan Cody paid the Crow no mind. He didn’t have time for thoughts of roadkill or carrion birds. The Jeep raced forward and took Cody with it, his attention solidly on the highway ahead, and the night ahead, and the cloying perfume of roses.

  To Dan Cody, the Crow was nothing more than a momentary infobite that flared in his mind and then was gone: bird.

  Bird. A simple image, a simple definition.

  Because Dan Cody wasn’t much on supernatural portents.

  But the black bird saw things differently. It had seen Cody, and from a long way off,

  For the night, they say, has eyes.

  The Crow swallowed a gobbet of blood-congealed meat as the Jeep raced by, leaving a wake of acrid exhaust.

  Soon the bird’s feathers were painted by the glow of red tail- light fire.

  And soon, it was dark once again.

  But even in the shadow of midnight, the Crow knew Dan Cody.

  The black bird dropped the dark red strand of meat and spread its wings.

/>   Then it took flight, following the man as he drove east through the desert.

  Dan Cody drove on, his eyes fixed on the thin white line that snaked down the center of the highway. An albino snake. That’s what the white line was. Right now, it seemed the controlling force in Cody’s life.

  Where that albino snake was leading him, and what he would do when he got there . . . that remained to be seen. Dan had considered his actions carefully, night after night, as he traveled other dark highways—the highways of the human soul, the human heart.

  One thing was certain, Dan couldn’t put off his journey any longer

  That would mean another night alone, in the dark.

  He closed his eyes briefly, opened them again, and the lids felt like sandpaper scraping the surfaces of his corneas.

  Not another night alone.

  Cody had known fear before, but never like this. Yet something drove him forward, and kept his foot hammered down on the gas, and kept him on this lonely stretch of nothing with an armful of roses and a bag of twisting scorpions at his side.

  Dan knew there was good reason to be afraid. His moment of truth would arrive very soon. It seemed that his entire life had led him to this moment. And when the moment was gone, his life would change forever.

  One way, or another.

  Flying above the Jeep, the Crow knew this to be true.

  The Crow knew everything.

  The desert wind blasted over the windshield and combed the wild tangle of Cody’s black hair. Except for a white slash of scar tissue that tore across one dark eyebrow, his face was a series of sharp angles tanned by the desert sun.

  When Dan was a teenager, strangers had said that his was a handsome face.

  People who knew Dan had said something else.

  But Dan wasn’t the kind to care what other people said. He’d been doing hard time since leaving the last in a long series of foster homes at the age of sixteen. Since that time he’d added the scar over his eyebrow—or, more precisely, another man had added it for him.

  Dan had a couple dozen other scars that weren’t so visible.

  Some of those scars had been inflicted by women.

  Some of the scars you couldn’t see at all, unless you knew what you were looking for.

  It was the same way with Dan’s Jeep, which had been doing hard time right along with its driver. It wasn’t much to look at, and it didn’t have a lot of extras. Mostly, what it had was 345,000 miles on the odometer. What it didn’t have was a passenger seat.

  Until recently, Dan Cody had never really seen the need for one. He’d always defined a passenger as nothing more than a liability with a pulse. So where a passenger seat should have been, Dan stored a couple boxes of books—Cormac McCarthy and Elmer Kelton, Jim Thompson and Stephen Crane—and an eclectic collection of cassette tapes that comprised a soundtrack to live by. The Old 97’s and Calexico, Johnny Cash and Ennio Morricone and Curse of Horseflesh.

  There were other things in the Jeep, as well. A duffle filled with Dan’s clothes. A sleeping bag, and a tent designed for a single person. Camping supplies—one knife, one fork, one spoon, one cup. Food . . . enough for one person.

  A Colt Double Eagle Mark II pistol was wedged under the driver’s seat, and a Winchester Model 97 shotgun lay in the rear bed.

  After all, this was the Wild West, and a man alone couldn’t be too careful.

  Another silent mile and the Jeep’s headlight shone on a dented road sign with shotgun blasts for punctuation:

  SCORPION FLATS

  POPULATION: 43

  Hard bricks of tension walled Dan’s body: the back of his neck a twisted spire, his shoulders the warped foundation.

  Keep driving, he told himself Keep driving.

  Bleached light ripped through the holes in the sign and rushed on into the black night, branding the outstretched wings of the Crow as it circled and swooped low.

  In a single wingbeat, the Jeep roared past the road sign and a dozen trickles of illumination were severed in rusted holes, leaving the sign—and the bird—to darkness.

  A sharp blade of fear carved the confidence of both man and bird.

  What lay ahead for both would not be easy.

  But it wasn’t far now.

  A hundred yards, as the Crow flies . . .

  Black-eyed and cloaked in midnight, the bird saw the Jeep’s brakelights flare. The vehicle slowed as it entered a little shitsplat of a town and banged off the highway into a parking lot.

  Set back from the lot were gas pumps and a squat adobe, its tan walls painted turquoise and Indian paintbrush orange by the glowing neon sign above the door:

  SPIRIT SONG TRADING POST

  Below were other signs, hand-painted and posted in the windows: AUTHENTIC NATIVE AMERICAN GIFTS, HANDICRAFTS, ART, SOUVENIRS, FOOD AND GAS.

  A glance at the gas gauge needle told Dan Cody that it hung far south of empty. But maybe he wouldn’t need any gas. The way Cody saw it, he’d reached his destination. This was the end of the road he’d been traveling for a long, long time.

  He had nowhere else to go. He killed the engine before he could change his mind, set the emergency brake, and stepped out of the battered Jeep. He took a few steps, listening to the unexpectedly lonesome sound of crunching gravel beneath his work boots.

  Second thoughts. Dan didn’t usually have them. But he was having them tonight.

  He stopped at the front end of the Jeep and stared at the building. He listened to the subtle little pings of the cooling radiator. The light desert wind whistled off the desert and dried the sweat on his hands, cooled the back of his khaki-colored T-shirt. The wind lifted the edges of the canvas awning that ran around the flat tiled roof of the trading post, and painted eagle feathers soared on the canvas sky as if they were taking flight.

  Suddenly cold, Dan grabbed his coat and slipped it on.

  It was late. No lights on inside the little adobe. The building looked deserted.

  Maybe the woman had closed shop for the night, tired of waiting for one last tourist to gas up.

  Or maybe she was just tired of waiting for Dan Cody. Yeah, maybe that’s the way it was. And maybe Dan should leave now, pretend he’d never come here at all. Drive back down that old highway he knew so well, back to the place where the picture of the dead girl with the blue eyes smiled into the darkness, her smile a firefly spark in the moonlight.

  Forget about the woman with blue eyes like the girl’s.

  Forget about the roses and the scorpions.

  Yeah, and forget about living, he told himself Just go ahead and goddamn die.

  No. The woman was inside the trading post. Dan couldn’t see her through the shadowy glass, but he could feel her presence.

  Somewhere in the distance, the Crow cawed.

  Help me out, Dan thought. Caw once for yes. Twice for no.

  But the Crow didn’t make another sound. It wasn’t giving advice to anyone.

  Not yet.

  Behind the windows of the Spirit Song Trading Post, three people watched Dan Cody as he stood by his Jeep, fifty feet away.

  “That him.” said the man called Johnny Church.

  Statement, not a question.

  “Yes,” Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin said, and it seemed to her that with a single word she had determined Dan Cody’s fate.

  Leticia closed her eyes, tried not to let the heat that pricked behind her sockets become an uncontrolled brush fire of tears. She couldn’t let the strangers see her cry. They would use her tears against her. She did not know how they would do that, but they would.

  And then Dan Cody would die.

  And there’d be no one to blame but Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin.

  “I knew that cowboy was your boyfriend.” Church struck an exultant fist dead center to his left palm. “Fuckin’ knew it, ’cause he looks just like your type—one hundred percent shitkicker.”

  Church talked like he looked; a muscular bullet-headed bastard with a clipped military haircut, a ba
nd T-shirt, and a black leather biker jacket that smelled like he’d slept in it the last two months. To Leticia, the man looked like a Halloween costume come to life—a black leather Frankenstein with brands and tattoos instead of stitches, piercings instead of metal bolts and clamps ... a man cobbled together from personal nightmares.

  “Can I tell ’em or can I tell ’em, babe?” Church called to a darkhaired woman who stood behind a display of beautifully feathered kachina dolls.

  The woman didn’t say anything. Not yet. Above her head, in the half-dark, was a birch bark sign carved with the words: Awanyanka Ina Make. In the Crow language, the words meant: Protect Mother Earth.

  Leticia had carved the sign herself, with a knife very much like the ones that rested on the shelves of the display cabinet behind the counter. Mountain Clan Crow knives in leather sheathes tanned to a dull sheen with willow bark and birch oil. Curved steel blades honed to wicked killing edges that could carve through flesh with the same ease a fish slices through cold mountain water.

  “Asked you a question, Kyra,” the man said. “Can I tell ’em or can I—?”

  “Oh, you can tell ’em, Johnny,” the woman replied in a low, teasing voice that was less a sound than a slither of snakes down Leticia’s spine.

  “Damn straight I can,” Johnny Church said.

  Aged hardwood floorboards groaned in protest as the woman walked the store’s aisles. Her hands brushed through racks of fringed doeskin jackets. Her fingers whispered across braided com husk and sweet grass baskets . . . and glided over porcupine quill boxes . . . and lingered sensuously on the curved secrets of soapstone carvings.

  Her black nails scratched across incised patterns on Hopi clay pottery.

  Leticia’s anger flared. She wanted to tell the goth bitch: Get your deadwhite hands off my people’s art.

  Johnny Church had called the woman Kyra. Leticia hadn’t heard a last name. She didn’t need to. She doubted either intruder went by the name they were born with. They were the kind of people who erected their own personae, barbed wire walls around bloodless hearts.

  Kyra made her way from the back of the trading post to the front window. Of course, she was dressed in black. Black leather jacket, black shirt, black pants. Her face was heroin-chic angular, painted with care, the pale skin drawn too tightly over model-high cheekbones brushed with silver glitter. Her hair was long and luminous, with a crimson-black sheen that looked wet in the moonlight, like a reflection on a puddle of blood. A chain circled her neck— small chromed links, twisted round and round, coiled tightly like a silver snake bent on strangling her.