Wicked Prayer (16 page)

Dan looked down at Leticia’s grave.

A single scorpion skittered across the freshly churned earth.

It did not linger

Neither did Dan Cody.

Neither did the Crow.

US Federal Highway 93

Eleven miles northeast of Hondonada, Arizona

Johnny Church tensed behind the wheel of the lamb’s blood-colored ’49 Merc.

Man, his sacro-fuckin’-iliac was killing him.

An' the back bone's connected to the butt-bone,
Johnny hummed, drumming his left fist lightly on the steering wheel. Yeah, well, the pain was no big surprise. Humping a couple of bodies up a trash mountain could do that to a man. Not only that, he was sweating buckets. Perspiration basted Johnny’s back to the cheetah-print seat covers.

He turned up The Blasphemers on the Merc’s stereo. Erik Hearse’s voice screamed through the speakers. The song: “Killer’s Prayer” Johnny was ready to kill, too. The way he felt now, he might as well have been slathered in boiling barbecue sauce.

Sticky. Hot. Chopped on like a hunk of meat.

Yeah. That was how Johnny felt. It was like he had a couple of racks of Texas ribs under his skin, slabs of not-so-succulent cowflesh that some crazy chef had split with a finely honed cleaver and then tossed on a grill, cooking them over hellish coals until the bones blackened and the meat was dry as jerky.

Johnny didn’t know how much more he could take. Kyra was
into covering some serious ground tonight. She wanted to put some significant mileage between her sweet little ass and the dump. They’d made about 175 miles since Yucca Valley, and Johnny had driven every one of them.

First scorching blacktop on Interstate 10. Next a black shadow beneath the city lights of Tucson and Phoenix, finally disappearing into the desert. Then they hit the 93 juncture which, though paved, was in bad need of repair. A few miles of that and Johnny’s teeth were knocking against the top of his skull. Sounded like an old blues dude playing the spoons up in there.

Jesus Christ,
thought Johnny, but he didn’t have much choice in the matter Kyra didn’t like to drive, and Raymondo couldn’t drive. In fact, the shrunken head was the worst backseat driver Johnny had ever had the misfortune of meeting. Sometimes Raymondo swore that he could steer better with his
tongue
than Johnny could with his
hands.

Well, even if the shriveled little turd
could,
do that, he’d never get the chance. Not as long as Johnny was sucking wind. No one— but
no one
—piloted the Merc but the man who presently sat behind the wheel. The custom lead sled was Johnny’s baby, and he’d clocked mucho miles on the odometer since stealing it from an anal-retentive stockbroker in Dallas.

Along with a power tie, Johnny remembered that the man had worn both suspenders
and
a belt. How could you trust a man who couldn’t even trust his own pants? Johnny sure couldn’t give that kind of cat a break. He’d left the stockbroker spitting his bonded teeth in a parking lot outside a sports bar with a threat of more cosmetic dentistry bills to come should classic-car boy be stupid enough to contact the police. That was risk-taking Johnny Church-style, but the risk had paid off So far as Johnny knew, the baby- booming prick was still making the payments on Johnny’s ride.

Since then, Johnny had run up a good fifty grand, mileagewise. Usually he didn’t mind the long drives, but tonight it was as if every one of those 50K were gaining on him. Tonight, even Johnny Church had his limits. After all, he was only human.

Just barely.

And just barely, in this case, was more than enough. Johnny was whupped, and he knew it. Especially after the mayhem in Scorpion Flats. Especially after hauling two dead bodies up a mountain of garbage at the dump. Especially after thinking about charred ribs and sticky- sweet barbecue sauce while he burned blacktop like black tar heroin.

Thinking about his aching ribs, there was only one thing Johnny Church wanted now.

“I’m hungry,” he said. “We gotta get something to eat.”

“There’s a place up ahead,” Raymondo said.

“I want some ribs.”

“They’ve got ribs.”

“You better not be messing with me, Raymondo. I’m hungry, and I don’t mess around when I’m hungry.”

“I wouldn’t mess with you, Johnnyboy.” Raymondo laughed, twisting on his hank of hair “Certainly, I know better than
that.”

Ten miles down the highway, on a back road outside Hondonada, Johnny came to a cemetery.

“What the fuck are we doing here?”

“You
said
you wanted ribs, Johnny,” Raymondo purred. “They’ve got
plenty
of ribs here, if you’re willing to dig for them.”

Johnny was tired of Raymondo’s shit. He pulled his .357 and aimed it at the shrunken head. “I don’t dig long pig,” he said. “I ain’t no cannibal, and I’ve about had it with your sick-ass jokes.”

Kyra’s cool white fingers closed over Johnny’s right hand. “Put the gun away, sweetheart.
I've
got your ribs. They’re in the bottom of the ice chest. I bought them this afternoon in Bisbee when you were in that gun store stocking up on cartridges.”

“She almost forgot the barbecue sauce.” Raymondo smacked his wrinkly black lips. “I sent her back for it.”

Johnny slammed his gun on the dashboard. “You’re both fuckin’ lucky.”

“No,” Raymondo said,
“you're
lucky. Kyra got your favorite: El Diablo Fire Brand. Extra Screamin’ Suicidal Spicy. It’ll put some lead in your pencil.”

Johnny tore Raymondo off the rearview mirror, not bothering to untie the head’s long black hair Raymondo yelped in pain. “Watch the coiffure, gothboy!”

“Don’t worry,” Johnny said brutally. “I’ll fix you up with an extra helping of barbecue sauce. It’ll grow long and luscious hair on your little ol’ noggin’, believe you me.”

For once, Raymondo kept his mouth shut. Johnny stepped out of the Merc with the shrunken head gripped tightly in his fist. “All I have to do is squeeze,” he whispered. “Make that python handshake you had down in the Amazon seem downright limp-wristed.”

“It wasn’t a python, Johnny. As I’ve told you a thousand times, piranhas got me. Then the cannibals got hold of what was left, and they tossed me in a pot with those missionaries, and by the time I ended up in the witch doctor’s talented hands there wasn’t enough left of me to fill a shoebox—”

“Whatever,” Johnny said. “Let’s get moving. I’ll pick out some kindling for the campfire. Those wooden crosses over there are probably dry as a padre’s fart.”

Johnny got the cooler out of the backseat, carried it and the head to a sandstone slab about ten feet from the car. Then he pinned Raymondo to the spine of a barrel cactus and searched for a makeshift barbecue.

A couple of stout urns sat on either side of the sandstone slab. Johnny dumped a cake of dry dirt from one, then half-filled it with charcoal, adding a little graveyard mesquite for flavor He squirted lighter fluid over all, tossed a lit match.

"Flame on,"
Raymondo said.

Orange fingers of fire leaped from the briquettes. Johnny got his grate and set it over the top of the urn. A little dried blood had leaked off the plastic drop cloth onto the grate, but Johnny figured it’d burn off.

Another ten minutes and the big carnivore had a couple slabs of meaty ribs on the grill.

Fragrant smoke rose in the desert night.

“Damn, those ribs smell good,” Johnny said.

“They’d smell better with some El Diablo,” Raymondo pointed out.

“Who’s cookin’ these ribs, you or me?”

“I’m just saying . . .”

“Yeah, and I’m just
tellin'.”

Five minutes passed in sullen silence.

Finally Johnny stalked past Raymondo, stomped over to the car

He came back with the bottle of barbecue sauce.

Raymondo grinned as Johnny slathered the ribs with El Diablo. Church was as predictable as Budweiser at a ball game. The way Raymondo saw it, Johnny cared about exactly three things, in descending order. When he was hungry, he cared about his stomach. When he was full, he cared about the snake that hung slightly south of his stomach. And when that white reptile had spit its venom and was sated, Johnny cared about the stolen Mercury, which he fretted over the way a prom queen frets over her complexion.

But the fretting never went on long, because soon enough Johnny would be hungry again. Like now. And that was pretty much all there was to Johnny Church.

Raymondo’s lips split into a leathery sneer. Kyra Damon, though . . . now there was another set of cares altogether In some respects, Kyra’s cares were just as basic as Johnny Church’s . . . and at the same time a lot more complicated.

Because the things Kyra Damon
didn’t
care about greatly outnumbered the things she
did
care about.

She didn’t care about Raymondo. And she didn’t care about Johnny Church—not really, no matter what she might tell him when she wanted something from him. She didn’t care about heaven, or hell, or God and his angels, or Satan and his devils. And she definitely didn’t care about anything or anyone who stood in her way.

As far as Raymondo could see, there were only two things Kyra
did
care about.

She cared about herself

And she cared about the Crow.

And that was it.

Kyra Damon leaned against the sandstone mausoleum. The stone still held the warmth of a desert sun that had set hours ago. A stack of
Dia de los Muertos
sugar skulls sat piled at her feet—remnants from the past week’s Feast of All Souls—their surfaces fused to a glittering, crystalline hardness.

Kyra smiled down at the little skulls. The heady scent of orange and yellow
cempasuchil
—flowers of the dead—wafted from a withered bouquet set in a vase on the wall. Kyra smelled the flowers, noticing an inscription on the door of the mausoleum, an ancient verse for the dead. Kyra traced it with her hands as she read it by the light of the Lux Perpetua candles that burned in little red glass lanterns hanging from the eaves of the mausoleum:

We only come to dream, we only come to sleep.

It is not true, it is not true

That we come to live on Earth.

Where are we to go from here?

We came here only to he born,

As our home is beyond,

Where the fleshless abide.

Perchance, does anyone really live on Earth?

The Earth is not forever, but just to remain for a short while.

MARIA ELENA RAMIREZ

BUENAS NOCHES

QUERIDA ESPOSA, MADRE, Y ABUELA

1929-1996

ELLA DUERME CON DIOS

Fate,
Kyra thought, and the land of the Crow suddenly seemed less than a wingbeat away.
Fate brought me here tonight.

She reached down and scooped up one of the candy skulls. Little grains of sugar stuck to her fingers like sweet, sweet sand. Her
teeth scraped against those of the skull. Hard candy dissolved on her hot, probing tongue. Then she bit down, and the sugar jaw crumbled, and pure white heaven filled her mouth.

A little taste of the land of the dead,
Kyra told herself
, smiling secretly.

Suddenly she felt stronger, completely alive. But it wasn’t just the sugar high. The true strength came from the things she and Johnny had done tonight. Namely, stealing the Crow woman’s eyes. It was a single step, but Kyra had taken it, just as she’d taken other steps in the past—trusting in the dark secrets she found in the grimoire, trusting in the power those secrets gave her, even trusting in the man and the severed head that the bewitched book had led her to. Each of those steps had made a difference. Already, Kyra had damaged the hateful black bird, weakening the blood that coursed through its veins.