Wicked Prayer
Part
3
From
the
Land
of
the
Farther
Suns
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