Wicked Prayer

by Norman Partridge

  Dan saw their faces, felt their stories pour over him like healing waters. He knew they were fellow travelers, for the bitter memory of loneliness pulsed in their veins . . . but they were no longer alone. They had joined with the Crow, and the bird had delivered them from the jaws of death, giving each of them a second chance.

  A chance to set the wrong things right. A chance to escape their loneliness and reclaim their love. A chance to live again, in the righteous fire of vengeance. And to die again ... in peace everlasting.

  A chance to sleep in a place where pain could never wake them.

  I can guide you, the Crow promised. Please believe me, Dan.

  Dan stared at the make-up container nestled in his palm. Vampire—that’s what the manufacturer had named the dead- white color

  Dan swallowed hard. Halloween was in the past, and he wasn’t a monster

  He was a man.

  Dan dropped the makeup container on the ground.

  What are you doing, Dan?

  “What I’ve always done.”

  He turned his back on the bird, and he walked away . . . alone this time.

  He walked to the one place in the world he had to be—Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin’s unhallowed tomb. Dan’s love lay bent on the freezer’s floor, legs twisted beneath her at a tortured angle, long dark hair framing empty eye sockets that seemed to bleed tears.

  “Oh, God,” Dan whispered. “Oh, God—Oh, God ...”

  Nothing could have prepared him for the horror of this sight; the brutal ugliness, the abominable violation. This was the work of monsters. Vengeance forgotten, Dan fell to his knees, sobbing.

  "Why didn’t you let me die?” he cried. “Oh, God, why didn’t you let me die?”

  I can guide you, the Crow promised, dark wings whispering over Dan’s shoulders as it landed on the sepulchre. I can help you find the peace you seek.

  The words hit Dan like a hard slap. He turned on the bird, his anger flaring as he pointed at the freezer “Can you really help me find peace after this?"

  The bird cocked its head and looked at him. Its beak seemed a welded point, like a nail, and the voice that had filled Dan’s head was suddenly nowhere to be found.

  “The truth. Crow,” Dan demanded. “I want the truth from you. Can you help me find peace after this?”

  Still no answer.

  "Talk to me, dammit!”

  The bird cawed—raw, primal, an angry cry needing no translation.

  Dan turned away. “I guess I have my answer.”

  If that is the answer you want, the bird said. I don’t pretend to know everything, Dan. I can’t predict the future. ... I can't chart the course of your immortal soul. But I do know this: Leticia's murderers are strong, and they're alive, and they're out there. Kyra Damon and Johnny Church are out there, when they should be in here. In this box.

  Dan stared into the bird’s eyes for a long, hard moment.

  Then he walked up to the freezer.

  He lifted Leti’s cold body.

  Her hair fell back, and moonlight lit her face.

  Dan Cody started down the trash mountain, the dead woman cradled in his arms.

  “Come on, if you’re coming,” he said over his shoulder

  The bird hesitated only slightly before giving a loud, answering caw.

  Dan didn’t say another word. He just kept walking.

  The Crow followed.

  Like a shadow.

  Near the entrance of the dump stood a trailer of corrugated steel. The door was locked. Dan Cody fixed that with one stout kick.

  The office inside was plain and utilitarian: wood-paneled walls, a desk, a telephone, ashtrays. There was a door behind the desk. It opened onto a lounge area/shower room partitioned by a row of old metal lockers that looked like they’d done duty in a high school gym. There wasn’t much more to the lounge area than a coffee table, a battered portable TV, a sofa, and a couple of vending machines along the wall.

  Gently, Dan lay Leticia’s body on the sofa. Then he turned on the hot water in the shower until it blasted steam, peeled off his filthy, bloodstained jeans and khaki T-shirt, and grimly scoured himself long and hard, until the water—at first tinted pink with his own blood—ran clear

  When Dan was done he tore the padlocks off each of the lockers and scrounged through the contents, coming up with a change of clothes and twenty-three dollars, a scratched pair of sunglasses with very dark lenses (and that was good, for even the moonlight seemed too bright for him now), and a denim jacket.

  Dan didn’t know how far he was from Scorpion Flats. He couldn’t chance picking up the Jeep, anyway ... or his guns. The law was probably all over the Spirit Song Trading Post by now. The local sheriff was a real hardass who didn’t much like Leticia Hardin’s desert-rat boyfriend. For all Dan knew, the sheriff could be looking for him after discovering his Jeep at the scene of the crime. The Wyatt Earp wannabe was probably ready to shoot first and ask questions later.

  Dan knew he had to start moving if he was going to catch the couple in the ’49 Merc. But there was something he had to do before he could begin his pursuit.

  A woven Navajo blanket covered the back of the sofa. He wrapped Leti in it, lifted her once more, and carried her outside. A bulldozer was parked near the trailer, and a backhoe. Behind them was a battered Chevy Apache pickup truck. By the looks of it, Dan wasn’t even sure the truck would run.

  But the Crow was sure. It perched on the hood, waiting for Dan.

  Cody opened the passenger door and eased Leti inside. Then he gave the Apache a closer look.

  Color? Primer, coated with a fine layer of dirt and rust, leaving the truck the color of a scab. Tires? About the best that could be said was that there were four of them, each one nearly bald. Bumper stickers? Requisite GOD BLESS AMERICA and NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION placards pasted on the tailgate. Tape deck, cell phone, A/C? Forget it. Those things weren’t important to an ambulating dead man, anyway.

  Keys? In the ignition, which was definitely a plus.

  Dan glanced in the truck bed. A bunch of rusty tools were piled there. Dan tossed most of them out, saving only a shovel and a pick.

  Satisfied with his inspection and not seeing any other options even if he had not been satisfied—Dan got behind the wheel, cranked the ignition, and listened as the rattling engine warmed and the gas gauge needle climbed to a just over half of a tank.

  Leti’s corpse leaned against him, her head on his cold, hard shoulder

  It was almost as if she’d fallen asleep.

  Dan closed his eyes. He wanted nothing more than to join Leti in a deep, anaesthetizing sleep. “Now she sleeps,” he whispered, “and her sleep is sweet, and she sleeps in a place where pain can never wake her”

  Dan opened his eyes. For a long moment, the Crow stared at him through the dirty windshield. Then it rose into the night, dark wings silhouetted against the bone-colored moon.

  Cody slipped on the scratched sunglasses, saw jagged slashes over the Sea of Tranquillity.

  He jammed in the clutch and put the truck in gear.

  He pulled onto the packed dirt trail that exited the dump.

  He followed the Crow.

  It felt better to be moving, to feel the cold night air on his face as he raced down the highway. The Crow led Dan south, then east. Soon he passed a sign—YUCCA VALLEY, POP. 14,300—and he knew instantly where he was.

  Northwest of Scorpion Flats, which meant he was not all that far from the middle of nowhere.

  He hit the gas hard and raced ahead of the bird, the Apache’s engine complaining. The Crow fell in behind, content to let the man take the lead ... for the first part of this journey was the man’s business, not the Crow’s.

  The Crow’s business was with a pair of killers named Kyra Damon and Johnny Church. For his part, Dan Cody did not know where the killers had gone. That didn’t matter to him.

  Not now.

  Not yet.

  Cody had to finish his journey with Leti before
he could begin his journey with the Crow.

  He owed her at least that much.

  The Crow trailed the Chevy truck southeast on Arizona Highway 80, past El Vado and Mescalero and through the Mule Mountains, east of Bisbee, east of Double Adobe, to a secluded canyon of sandstone and mesquite.

  Cuervo Canyon. Crow Canyon, in Spanish. Leti had practically grown up in the place. Her mother had claimed the territory in the name of the entire Crow Nation. Named it, too. That was the story Leti told Dan, anyway, and he was willing to bet that it was true.

  Now the canyon’s name seemed nothing more than a bitter joke. The time when he and Leticia had laughed about it was lost in the past.

  He killed the engine near a twisted sandstone tower The black bird perched on rocks that had endured the ravages of time, a silent sentinel, and to Dan the bird seemed just as eternal as the stone tower He wondered what ravages the Crow had suffered, and what strengths it called on to endure. He wondered what powers governed it, what forces granted its ability to bestow the gift of resurrection.

  He wondered what the price of that gift would be.

  He got out of the truck, cradled Leticia’s body in his arms.

  Later, he’d come back for the pick and shovel.

  For now he’d walk.

  Walk to the place where he first met Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin in the amber glow of a summer afternoon.

  At the time, Cody was working under contract to an arachnologist with the University of Arizona, a woman who was heading an ongoing research project concerning the medicinal applications of scorpion venom.

  Different from a lot of the jobs Dan had had. Better, because it meant he could work outdoors, alone and undisturbed.

  And that was how Dan Cody liked it best: alone and undisturbed. He’d been alone pretty much all his life, from the time his parents had died—first his dad, from chronic alcoholism, and then his mom, from more of the same. Foster care and group homes being what they were in the state of Arizona, Dan had found himself jerked from one foster home to another, depending on who wanted the DBS check that month.

  Dan passed several years that way. The older he got, the harder it got. A lot of homes didn’t want teenagers, and on the day he turned sixteen Dan decided he’d be better off on his own. He walked out of a Tucson rathole, and he never looked back. For all he knew, the bastards who owned that house might still be collecting a check for his keep.

  He did whatever it took to get by. He clocked time as a ranch hand in several New Mexican outfits, worked for the U.S. Park Service, even busted heads at country and western bars as a bartender/bouncer/whatever-comes-through-the-damn-door-I’ll-deal- with-it troubleshooter

  But none of those jobs ever lasted more than a few months. And that was okay, because Dan Cody didn’t like to linger too long in any one place. Mostly what he liked to do was travel, and he drove the back roads of the American southwest in a battered Jeep he’d bought thirdhand.

  Eventually he found himself settling in southern Arizona, bar- tending at a rough and tumble roadhouse outside the Tucson city limits. That was where he met Dr. Emily Carlisle, just off a five-day dry spell in the desert. She’d been photographing scorpions for a book on the clinical toxicology of the Centruroides sculpturatus, and her arthritis—Devil’s Claw herbal remedies notwithstanding—was killing her

  But Jack Daniel’s seemed to take the edge off the good doctor’s pain, and because it was a slow afternoon in the bar, Emily and Dan Cody got to talking. First about the sunset, which could barely be seen through the dirty window with the buzzing neon sign that read: JOHNNY RINGO'S.

  Then they got to talking about the things that lay under that glowing sunset. The mountains. The deserts. The arroyos. The vast emptiness that was Arizona . . . and how much wonder that emptiness held.

  Dr. Carlisle was a heavily tanned, blue-jeaned widow in her late sixties. Cody figured she might have been Barbara Stanwyck’s stunt double from The Big Valley. Besides being a tenured professor at the University of Arizona, Carlisle conducted research at Desert Station in the Tucson Mountain Park. A tough-minded realist, she shared an intense love of the Sonoran Desert with Dan Cody. And while Dan’s education had, until now, been strictly out of the school-of-hard-knocks tradition, he soon discovered he was interested in Dr. Carlisle and what she had to teach him. There was something about Emily that he identified with. And Dan didn’t identify with many people.

  Turned out Carlisle had been just about everywhere, done just about everything. She’d been involved with Sonoran Arthropod Studies, Inc., the Southwestern Research Station of the American Museum of Natural History, the National Academy of Science. She’d even had a hand in Biosphere 2’s ill-fated desert ecology program. Most of these positions included a heavy load of teaching, but Carlisle didn’t have a lot of patience for grad students trying to brown-nose their way into cushy summer work programs. So she’d accepted a position in the U of A's entomology department, specifically the university’s Desert Station, where she could focus her considerable talents on theoretical and practical research. She’d stuck with the job for three years, and that was a long time for a restless spirit like Emily Carlisle.

  But while Dr Carlisle was more than talkative about her professional life, she was considerably closemouthed about her personal life ... a quality with which Dan Cody had more than a passing acquaintance.

  Dan respected Emily’s privacy. He let her say what she wanted to say, and nothing more. She respected his reticence and reciprocated in kind. And on that sleepy afternoon in a quiet bar, a friendship was built over shots of bourbon that could have taken the sting out of any scorpion’s tail.

  After that, Dan found himself inventing excuses to visit Saguaro National Park, where Dr Carlisle spent most of her weekends. More often than not he’d find the tough old silver-haired scientist in her dusty jeans and mountain boots, hiking trails with her backpack and water bottles and notebooks, blending into the desert horizon as if she were a part of it.

  As it turned out. Dr Carlisle’s progressively worsening arthritis—not to mention a backbreaking stack of unsorted research material—was catching up with her When she told Cody she needed someone to help out not only around the lab but particularly with the time-consuming task of collecting specimens, Dan didn't have to say a thing.

  A woman of few words, Emily Carlisle took one hard look at him and said bluntly; “You'll do, if you want the job.”

  And just like that, Dan Cody found himself transformed from dead-end drifter to scientific research assistant. Usually, he'd set out in his Jeep to hunt scorpions in the early evening, mainly visiting the research and educational field sites and desert stations reserved for the University of Arizona faculty and students.

  Sometimes Dr. Carlisle would send him to other areas in search of more exotic fauna. Dan preferred these assignments, for they usually took him places he’d never seen. Places where bloody cliffs met turquoise sky and the air smelled of sunwarmed sandstone and desert scrub, where the trails were more often traveled by lizards than men and the silence stretched past forever, like a lost echo.

  And then one morning Dr Carlisle said, “I want you to drive out to Cuervo Canyon, Dan.”

  “Never heard of it.” Dan studied the detailed map Emily handed him. “Looks like it's pretty far south of Tucson. Anything you're looking for in particular?”

  “You’ve got a good eye, Cody. Just bring back anything interesting.”

  “Anything?"

  “Anything interesting,” Emily repeated. “Now, you’d better get started. You’ve got a long drive ahead, and I’ve got a meeting with my department chair”

  “When?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago.”

  Emily shooed Dan out of her cluttered office without another word. He reached the secluded canyon by late afternoon, parked his Jeep at the entrance, and hiked a good long way through scrub and creosote bush with his backpack and equipment. At one point he unexpectedly came face to face with a d
esert mule deer as he rounded a stark canyon wall. The animal, no more than ten feet away, stared at him boldly, velvet eyes unblinking, while Dan stood stock still and held his breath.

  Damn thing’s probably never seen a human before, Dan decided.

  Then the creature bounded away through the rocks, swallowed up by the turns in the canyon, and the moment was gone. For his part, Dan figured he’d found as good a place as any to wait for nightfall.

  He dropped his backpack. Soon twilight would arrive, clawing the sky with ragged streaks of indigo and yellow. Dan sat down, drank from his canteen, and thought about the deer. And he thought about the sky. And that was all he needed to think about while he waited for nightfall, when the scorpions would emerge to claim their territory.

  He got out his gear: the ultraviolet light and the collection equipment he used to hunt creatures whose evolutionary fate had been set hundreds of millions of years ago by the stinging tips of their tails.

  Fate. That was a word that stuck in Dan’s thoughts like a barbed cactus spear He got to thinking that maybe his own fate had been set years before like pictographs etched on a cave wall, that maybe the trail he’d walked was the only trail he would ever walk, and the way he’d walked it was the only way he could ever walk it, in the same way that scorpions could only come out at night when the rest of the world was asleep. It was how they were built. How he was built.

  Fate, and that was that.

  And then Dan saw the woman, in the last amber light of the afternoon. At first he thought he’d imagined her. She was picking her way through the far edge of the canyon with a pack slung over her back, wearing faded jeans and a white shirt and heavy hiking boots like the ones Dan wore. The sunlight washed her glowing skin, and her long dark hair blew back from her face in the hot afternoon breeze.

  She came toward Dan, unaware of his presence there in the lonely canyon. He found himself standing still, so still, holding his breath the same way he’d held it when he saw the mule deer