Wicked Prayer

by Norman Partridge

  The man did just that, sauntering toward the Mercury. But though the man was looking at the car, he wasn’t really seeing it at all. What he saw was all surface—a classic lead sled alive with gleaming purple paint, slick and shiny as the gutted flesh of a newly slaughtered lamb. Hellfire flames painted on the hood. Whitewall tires, and vintage fender skirts, and blue-dot taillamps. Tinted windows that reflected the world like a deep black memory. What the man missed was the car’s dark soul—the stink of brimstone that clung to the dual-exhaust lake pipes. The scorching heat of those painted hellfire flames even as the engine, encased in a coffin hood, cooled cold as a grave.

  There were splashes of blood on the whitewall tires, and the blue-dot taillamps glowed eerily under the white light of the moon. And inside, hiding behind tinted glass, was a shriveled thing suspended from the rearview mirror by a knotted hank of its own hair, a thing that rotated on that long black strand like a shish kebab on Satan’s own rotisserie, a thing that watched Dan Cody with stitched-open eyes that never blinked.

  A shrunken head, bewitched and undying, a servant of a woman with a tarnished soul.

  A woman who now waited in the Spirit Song Trading Post.

  A woman with a Walther PPK pistol trained on the back of Dan Cody’s head.

  The Crow wished that the man could see all this and understand, but Dan Cody knew nothing of the supernatural world. He knew nothing of reanimated shrunken heads. What he knew was what he could see. What he could feel. And what he felt right now was envy, pure and simple.

  “Man,” Dan said aloud, admiring the Merc. “What a beaut.”

  He stepped back, staring at the black bird perched on the hood. He brushed his long brown hair back from his face. “You nearly took my head off,” he said. “You tryin’ to tell me I need a haircut?”

  Someone is, the bird replied grimly, feeling Johnny Church’s presence in the trading post. And worse.

  Dan smiled, because he couldn’t hear—let alone understand— the bird’s words. “It’d serve you right if I got my shotgun and separated you from your fine feathers, my friend.”

  Yes, the Crow cawed. Get your shotgun. You’ll need it. But not for me. For those two inside, the two who have your woman. They want her eyes. They want my secrets—

  Still, the man didn’t hear the bird’s warnings. What he heard was a whole lot of cawing, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound.

  “Lucky for you I don’t have much time tonight.” Dan patted the bag of scorpions. “I’ve got to keep a date. But if I were you. I’d find another place to hang out. The owner of that Merc won’t be happy when he sees what you’ve done to the paint job.”

  Dan turned away, headed for the trading post. The Crow screamed, talons raking the Merc’s hood, steely beak chipping paint as purple as the meat of a gutted animal. If only the man would look inside the Mercury, just open his damn human eyes and look. If he would only see the shrunken head, its lips parted in a hellish grin—

  If he would only look.

  He’d see that grin parted over teeth filed to points like razor- sharp bamboo poles. He’d see the shrunken head’s eyes, shining with eldritch hatred. . . .

  The Crow turned a black eye to the black glass. The bird saw clearly. The shrunken head swung on a length of black hair, back and forth, back and forth.

  The Crow screamed at Dan Cody’s back.

  Dan Cody kept walking.

  Walking toward his death.

  “This time we have you. Crow,” said the shrunken head, its voice a whisper driven by a bellows located in hell. “This time, the feathers are going to fly.”

  The Crow slammed its beak against the windshield, spearing nothing but its own frustrated reflection.

  The shrunken head laughed.

  “This time you’re the one who dies,” it said, twisting on its long black hair. “You, and no one else.”

  The steel barrel of the .357 Magnum nudged Leticia’s spine like a solid lump of black ice, and she shuddered.

  One final reminder—that’s what that nudge meant.

  Johnny Church stepped away from the register, positioning himself behind a revolving rack that held southwestern greeting cards. “Remember what I told you,” Church whispered. “You keep your mouth shut and do what I say, and your boyfriend won’t get hurt. It’ll all be over soon.”

  Leticia stared back at him, eyes hard. Liar, she wanted to say. You’re a damned liar. A person didn’t walk into a place with a pair of loaded guns and no expectations. These two maniacs had expectations, all right. What they might be, Leticia didn’t know. But she knew one thing: those expectations were about to be met. One way or another.

  If only Dan had arrived before the intruders. He would have known what to do as soon as the couple entered the trading post. He would have grabbed the sawed-off shotgun Leticia kept tucked away under the counter and—

  The woman named Kyra turned from the front window. In the glow of glass-filtered moonlight, her hair spilled down her slim shoulders like crimson-black streams of blood. “Looks like luck is with us tonight," she said. “The cowboy’s not interested in the car. He’s heading this way.”

  “All right,” Church said. “Now we’ll get down to business.”

  Leticia glanced through the window. It was just as the darkhaired woman had said. Dan had turned away from the vintage Mercury and was coming toward the trading post.

  A few more ticks of the clock and his hand would be on the door. He would push it open without bothering to knock, and the wind chimes tied to the handrail would clink musically as Dan entered the trading post. He wouldn’t even notice Johnny Church standing there behind the greeting cards, wouldn’t pay any attention to the woman standing in the shadows. He wouldn’t notice either of them, not with a dozen roses in his hand.

  Roses, Leticia knew, that were for her.

  Roses, Leticia knew, that could only mean one thing to a man like Dan Cody.

  Leticia felt sick. She knew exactly what the roses meant. The same way she knew what the bag of scorpions meant. But it wouldn’t make a difference. Not tonight. None of it would matter at all. By the time Dan noticed the terror shining in Leticia’s eyes it would be too late—

  “C’mon,” Kyra coaxed. “Hurry up, cowboy.”

  Leticia swallowed hard. Maybe she should try for the shotgun. She could try to take out both intruders. But they were on opposite sides of the store. If she missed Johnny Church, which she probably would— given her sweaty hands and raw nerves—Kyra would splatter her brains all over the woven Navajo tapestry that hung behind her head.

  Wait.

  The scorpions—

  Leticia let her glance fall on the display box that stood behind the cash register. Twenty scorpions lurked there, each one with its stinging barb raised and ready to strike, each one encased in plastic resin.

  The scorpion paperweights were Leticia’s most popular item. Tourists loved them. Leticia’s dad, despite his arthritic fingers, kept himself busy casting the critters, but he was too old to collect them anymore.

  Dan Cody played scorpion wrangler when he had the chance, scouring the salt wash plains and yawning canyons on cool, dark nights with little more than a black light, a pair of long-tipped stainless steel forceps, a canvas bag, and a whole lot of persistence. Dan had presented Leticia with a thousand of the wriggling creatures the first time he’d asked her out—two hundred and twenty-five dollars’ worth in a glass jar, all wrapped up with a fat red ribbon. Without the scorpions to back him up, he probably never would have summoned the courage to ask her out at all.

  Sure, roses would have been a lot more romantic than a thousand venomous arthropods—red ribbon or no red ribbon. But as Leticia Hardin had learned, roses meant something special to Dan Cody—

  But Leticia didn’t have time for memories. Not now. If she spent too much time in the past, her future would turn to dust. What she had to do was warn Dan. Before he came any closer, before his strong, tanned hands touched the handrail and he push
ed the door open, before those wind chimes rang out like tiny screams in the night.

  There was only one way to do that.

  Leticia’s right hand moved toward the display cabinet by the cash register.

  This time, her hand didn’t shake.

  This time, her hand was steady.

  Leticia’s fingers closed over a large, heavy paperweight. She held the paperweight tight, tighter, until the scorpion trapped within it would—had it not been frozen between five hand-cast layers of rock-hard crystalline resin—surely have been crushed to death in a woman’s fist.

  Dan couldn’t wait to see the glimmer in Leti’s eyes when he handed her the roses.

  He wouldn’t have to say a word. She’d know what they meant.

  Maybe she’d say something, maybe she wouldn’t. It wouldn’t matter.

  Because she’d slip her hand into his, and he’d put his arm around her shoulders, and together they’d go to the work room. Dan would dump the scorpions into the terrarium. Then Leti, arms full of the moist, fragrant red flowers, would look down into the writhing mass of arachnids and spot a little something extra gleaming there.

  A wedding ring.

  By the time she turned to him, forgotten roses falling from her arms in a perfumed red rain, he’d have his answer. He wouldn’t need to hear it from her lips. He’d see it there, shining in her blue eyes.

  And then . . .

  Then he didn’t know what. He hadn’t been able to finish the dream.

  Alone all his life, he’d never been one for words. But he imagined that he should think of something to say. Think of it now, while he could think.

  He’d tell Leti what she meant to him. Tell her how much he loved her.

  Love. The word made Dan’s mouth as dry as a dead riverbed. He parted his lips, tried to add a few words to that most dangerous of words. Two more words. Just three words, all together, but they were all the words anyone ever needed.

  I love you.

  Dan said the words, whispered them under his breath, and they sounded small and strange and inadequate in that empty desert place with the cold light of the moon overhead and the night wrapping around him like the big black wings of that rasping bird. Dan wanted to laugh at himself; at the fear that welled up in his heart when the words spilled through his lips like thick red blood drawn by rose thorns:

  I love you.

  “I love you,” Dan said aloud, and overhead he heard the circling black bird caw back.

  “Not you, shithead,” he called up to it, and this time he did laugh. But though the laugh brought him relief from the tension, it was a false relief Because his heart was full of old wounds and scars, and painful longings and long nights, and strange new thoughts and strange new emotions, and plain disbelief that anyone, anyone, could have gotten to him like this, when everyone—everyone— knew that Dan Cody walked alone.

  She’s just a woman, Dan, he reminded himself He paused, staring at the dark windows of the Spirit Song Trading Post. It’s not like you’ve never had women before.

  And then a smaller, deeper voice rang through him like a blade on solid stone: But you’ve never loved one, have you?

  The truth was, Dan Cody had never loved anyone. Not in twenty-five years spent walking a world of barren, sun-scalded plains. A world where the only voices he heard were the wail of the wind and the howl of the coyote, where his only companions were the hollow echoes of his solitary footsteps, where the only language he knew and understood was the language of self-preservation.

  He saw himself as kin to those tortured trees that grew out in the desert, roots eternally thirsty, backs beaten down to desolate stumps by endless years in the driving sun.

  For twenty-five years Dan had learned the lessons of that desert sun. He learned from hard experience that the sun took, and took, and took, and never gave back. It warped and twisted everything it touched with its hard white eye, and it claimed everything for its own.

  But it never gave back.

  Until now.

  For it had been in the desert that Dan Cody had found Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin. And it had been in the desert, under the heat of that hard, white eye, that Dan Cody had discovered love.

  “I love you,” he whispered, and the wind took his breath with the scent of lush red roses and carried the words into the deepening night.

  “I love you, Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin,” Dan said, and this time the words were solid. Strong. Right.

  Fifteen feet in front of him, the glass door shattered.

  Leticia’s scream from inside the building: “Dan! Watch out!”

  Before Cody could move, or even think, he saw another woman facing him through the front window. She was stained turquoise and orange in the reflected neon glow of the trading post sign, and she was raising a gun, and as she fired the front window exploded and neon- painted glass rained down in a brittle avalanche and for one perfect moment Dan thought the woman was shattering like a smashed mosaic, silver moonlight and neon flesh splintering in a bloodred rain.

  But that was only an illusion. The woman was a rock-solid reality.

  She lowered her weapon just slightly, smiling at Dan with cruel black lips.

  “I won’t miss again,” she said.

  Her black-nailed fingers squeezed the trigger

  A second bullet sang through the night.

  From above, the Crow screamed as the slug slammed into Dan Cody’s shoulder He was punched backward by the impact, the breath knocked out of him, roses flying from his hand in a scarlet arc like the hot spray of blood that gushed from his wound.

  Cody, still on his feet but just barely, gripped his blasted shoulder with a hand that rapidly filled with blood. The woman came toward him almost leisurely, glass shrapnel crunching under her boots, the smile still writhing on her face. Her pistol dipped lower, and Dan’s eyes traced the next bullet’s trajectory before the woman pulled the trigger:

  Left kneecap, dead center

  Dan tried to move. If he could just get out of the way . . . just run ... if he could get to the Jeep, grab his shotgun . . .

  Overhead, the Crow clawed the air, screamed a warning—

  Dan barely heard it, wouldn’t have understood it if he had.

  The woman fired again, and Dan’s left knee exploded in an agonizing torrent of bone and blood and smashed cartilage.

  The damaged leg buckled instantly, uselessly, beneath him.

  Dan hit the ground hard. The woman kept coming, pistol gripped in her hand. In a fraction of a second Dan saw everything: Leti inside the store, screaming his name over and over until her cries sounded like the caw of the Crow. Dan’s true love struggled in the cold embrace of a muscular man sheathed in black leather Leti’s long black hair whipped the man’s face like the barbed tail of a scorpion as she kicked, bit, tore, fought like a wild animal. . . but her struggles were in vain.

  The man jerked back Leti’s head by a fistful of hair. Then he raised his gun hand and slammed a pistol butt against her skull. Instantly the screaming stopped, and the sudden silence that swelled in its wake was far, far worse.

  Dan watched Leti fall like something dead, her head smacking the hardwood floor with a sickening thud. The big man turned, satisfied with his work, and stepped over the motionless body. Leticia Hardin’s hot blood gleamed wetly on his raised pistol barrel as he walked to the open doorway.

  Dan gasped. Wincing, he tried to get up, but there was no way he could stand. His destroyed knee was a seeping red mess of smashed bone and severed ligaments, and he might as well have tried to climb Mount Everest.

  “Goddamn!” Dan said, because all the sweet words in the world were now gone from his memory. “Goddamn son of a bitch!"

  He’d been shot twice by the woman with the cold green eyes, and now a bullet-headed man with features that might have been carved from tombstone granite was coming to join in the slaughter Dan knew there was no way he could turn the tide. He’d never make it to his feet, let alone get to the Jeep fif
ty feet behind him, let alone get the shotgun he’d left behind in the backseat for an armful of flowers that now lay scattered across the blacktop like so many drops of blood.

  In a split second, he’d lost everything.

  All the remained was the bag of scorpions, still twisted around his right shoulder

  Maybe, just maybe, that would be enough.

  Dan tried to reach for the bag, but his shoulder was a mess. He couldn’t get his arm to work.

  The woman came toward him. Her boots crunched over broken glass, the sound like footsteps on the wings of hard-shelled beetles. “Take it easy, cowboy,” she said as she passed him by. “I’m way past done with you.”

  She stopped short, about five feet from the spot where Dan lay. She raised her gun and aimed at the Crow.

  Circling above, the bird saw her, cawed in anger “Lookit the black bastard, Kyra!” the bullet-headed man shouted from the doorway. “He doesn’t even know what to do! He’s scared of you!”

  The woman opened fire.

  “Get out of here, you bastard!” she screamed. “No one here is going to die!”

  Dan stared at the two strangers, one on either side of him, both watching the black bird. This was his chance. He reached for the drawstring that sealed the scorpion bag. Willed his wounded arm to work, even though it felt like a block of lead—

  Come on, Cody, he told himself Come on, come on...

  Dan held his breath, working the knotted drawstring with numb fingers. Then he bit at it, loosening the knot with his teeth, pulling at the snakelike length of rope that squirmed free of his mouth as if it had a will of its own.

  The woman called Kyra screamed at the bird, which was circling high above the trading post. “We’re playing the game my way tonight, and there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it!”

  One careful tug and the knot uncoiled, and Dan tore the drawstring free.

  A black mouth opened up in the canvas.

  The gunman wasn’t looking at Dan. Neither was the woman. She was only five feet away. If he could get her to drop her gun . . . and if he could manage to grab it. . .

  It was a long shot, but it was Dan’s only chance.