Wicked Prayer (9 page)

Kyra wasn’t sure where it would all lead. Anxiety gripped her— perhaps a systemic effect of the scorpion attack, perhaps not.

Perhaps it was only fear she felt.

And perhaps that fear was well-placed.

Kyra’s fingers drifted to her cheeks, drifted over the welts left by the arachnids’ lashing telsons. Their barbed tails had done her damage, spell of protection or not. That damage was not as severe as it might have been, and the lingering reminders that she bore on her flesh would fade soon enough, but it was the venom that burned beneath her wounds that concerned her now.

For the venom, she understood quite suddenly, was of her own making.

She could no more escape it than she could escape the Crow.

Even if she managed to destroy the black messenger, another
might travel the dark highways in its wake, and another . . . the birds might trail her until white daylight was black with wings, relentless as a pack of hellhounds on her tail.

The birds had no choice.

They had to follow.

They were creatures like no others. . . .

Driven by unnamed instincts that pumped through their beating wings like black fire . . . driven by the primitive concept of tribal retribution buried deep in the base of their avian brains . . . driven by the ancient thirst for vengeance.

This drive was inherent to the ancient code, part of the Crow’s lore that had been passed on through the ages as a species-specific memory. Kyra Damon was well-versed in the details. She had to be, if she were to succeed in her mission.

To succeed, she’d have to destroy the entire Corvid clan. She knew how to do that. Knew the avenues to travel, the precautions to take.

For once, near death, Kyra Damon had glimpsed the realm of the Crow.

And, like no one else who had ever walked this earth, she had lived to tell the tale.

Kyra winced, strangling on the memory, her breath trapped in her chest. The Crow had caused her great pain, pain she could never forget. But remembering that pain was just as dangerous, for memory made the pain much too real, and suddenly Kyra’s chrome necklace seemed much too tight, its thirteen loops encircling her throat like a hangman’s noose—

Kyra exhaled sharply, drew a deep breath of clean desert air.

Her hand went to her throat, and the pulse beat she found there was wild and alive.

Johnny, ever attentive, turned his eyes from the road and said: “What’re you thinkin’ about, Ky?”

“Revenge,” Kyra said, staring down the white line that split the midnight highway. And then she reached in the backseat, rifling through the tangle of guns and potions and powders and talismans, and her fingers closed around a black book, its tattered cover ridged
and cracked with tiny fissures like scars ... or the almost imperceptible gaps between a Crow’s feathers.

Kyra closed her eyes. Touching the book was almost like touching the Crow itself.

She was so close now. Closer than she’d ever been.

Kyra didn’t say another word.

Neither did Johnny.

But he laughed, and there was a nasty tone to his laughter that Kyra liked.

She liked it a lot.

Arizona Highway 90

46 miles southeast of Tucson

At the shrunken head’s direction, Johnny Church drove north toward the bright lights of Tucson. More specifically he headed for Interstate 10, which would take them through Tucson to Phoenix. While the Interstate was definitely more risky than the deserted secondary roads they usually traveled, it was a hell of a lot more direct. And Johnny Church liked direct.

Church was riding high on blood and adrenaline and the thrill of the kill. Sure, the main roads were way more cop-intensive, but Johnny wasn’t afraid of the law tonight. Not any man-made law, that is. Besides, the plan was to dump the corpses long before they reached the Interstate.

Get rid of the Crowbait ASAP. Yeah. That was all right with Johnny Church.

Where and when that would happen, Johnny didn’t have a clue. Kyra had said that her instincts were driving her
north
and west, and Johnny trusted Kyra’s instincts. They were strong, and she knew when to listen to them. The signs would come. They always did. And until they did, Johnny was content to put the pedal to the metal.

There wasn’t much to see out here—dark plains and scrub-
covered hills and dry, sandy washes. They passed silently through the sleepy desert communities of Mescalero and El Vado. The residents—mostly Mexican Americans—were nowhere in sight. For all Johnny knew, these might have been ghost towns—the bones of adobes and a few scattered pottery fragments all that remained to mark their place in the sands of time.

Just north of Yucca Valley, Raymondo told Johnny to take the next right. The next right turned out to be an unmarked dirt road. It wasn’t much more than a rutted trail, really. Judging by the potholes, Johnny figured it hadn’t been traveled since the days of Wild West stagecoaches and goddamned stinking mule trains.

The Merc bounced over a wooden bridge spanning a dry arroyo choked with stones. Crumpled beer cans glittered in the starlight. The road wasn’t any better on the other side of the bridge—the whitewalls kicked up clouds of dust that hung behind them like dirty shrouds. Johnny clicked on the high-beams, saw nothing ahead but dirt road and a whole lot of wide, wide lonesome.

He wondered if they were headed for a cemetery or something, maybe even a boot hill from the old days. That would be cool in Johnny's book. They could deep-six the Injun chick and her cow- boyfriend in a patch of unhallowed ground, cover them over with the bones of some
serious
outlaw badasses who would keep them in
line.
Imprisoned beneath jailhouse ribcages that had once contained the hearts of the Clantons and McLowrys and their badass brethren, Johnny figured that Hardin and Cody wouldn’t be escaping their earthly bonds anytime soon.

Not even the Crow could do anything about that. If the black bird so much as
tried
to mess with the grave, those same outlaw badasses would dig their way out of the ground, cut down the fine- feathered fuck with their six-shooters, then eat themselves a little Crow . . .

Oh, yeah. Johnny pictured the scene as the car bucked over the dirt road. He didn’t have a hard time doing that, because there were only two things in the world at which Johnny Church excelled.

Killing . . . and dreaming. Mrs. Church’s only child had always dreamed to hit the sky, but most of the time reality had an ugly way
o
f shooting those dreams down . . . just like those imaginary gunslingers slaughtering the Crow.

Just like now. Because even though Johnny couldn’t
see
his destination through the Merc’s dusty windshield—he could smell it.

And no boot hill cemetery smelled
this
bad. Johnny wrinkled his nose. “Jesus, Raymondo, where the hell are we going?”

“We’re going to get rid of some trash.”

Johnny grimaced. Man, the dead head’s creepy-crawly voice always got to him. Part cheesy sci-fi theremin, part all-too-real seance . . .

“You know about trash . . . don’t you, Johnny?”

“Yeah, I
know
about trash, ya dumb little—”

“And you know where you take trash, don’t you, Johnny?”

What a stupid question,
Johnny thought.
Shit, everyone knows where you take trash.

Johnny was about to tell Raymondo where to get off when he caught the smug look on the shrunken head’s face. Instantly, he knew that the head was going to make him look like a moron again. It wasn’t exactly a rare event, and the most perplexing thing about it was that Johnny could never seem to
do
anything that would stop it from happening. He could never fucking win: no matter what he said, Raymondo would figure a way to make him look like a moron.

So, really, there was only one thing Johnny could do.

He raised the middle finger of his right hand, and thrust it in Raymondo’s face.

“Johnny Church’s patented postmodern peace sign,” Raymondo said. “I’ve seen it before and I’ll see it again . . . but it doesn’t answer my question.”

Johnny kept his mouth shut. This time he wouldn’t say a word. He wouldn’t get mad, he wouldn’t—

“Maybe you
don't
know where you take trash, Johnnyboy,” Raymondo said. “Maybe your kinfolk never learned you. Maybe Ma and Pa Church
liked
their trash.”

Johnny wanted to slap the little bastard, knock his head against the windshield like an egg, see his brains running down the glass like yolk—

Raymondo charged on: “Maybe around the Church hacienda, trash was something that wore a see-through nightie and high- heeled slippers and answered to the name of
Ma.
That the way of it, amigo?”

“Raymondo,
that’s
enough,”
Kyra said sharply . . . but she didn’t mean it. Johnny could see that. Ky was choking back laughter, and that infuriated Johnny, made him all the more determined that somehow, someday, he’d crack Raymondo’s shrunken skull. He hated this low-man-on-the-totem-pole shit, hated Kyra and Raymondo treating him like some distant number three who was just along for chauffeur duty. Once they got through this, once things really changed and he got himself some power of his own that didn’t come from the barrel of a gun—

“Sorry, Kyra,” Raymondo said, derailing Johnny’s train of thought. “I was just trying to teach young Mr. Church a thing or two about modern hygienic practices—”

“You take the trash to the goddamned dump,” Johnny said, because now he couldn’t help himself. “That’s what my mom did. And she didn’t wear no see-through nightie or no high-heeled slippers while she did it, you fuckin’ perv—”

“Thirteen points!” Raymondo interrupted, his voice low and sonorous, as if he were channeling the spirit of some netherworld game show host. “Give that boy a personalized tombstone!”

“I’d rather have a fuckin’ gas mask.” Johnny cranked up the window. “This place stinks.”

Johnny followed a ripe midnight trail, through piles of plastic garbage bags that gleamed like fat black beetles.

Mountains of waste towered here. Wooden chairs bristled with broken spines that scratched at the sides of Johnny’s ’49 Merc. A Barbie doll lay facedown in a dogshit sandwich. The windows of a battered Victorian dollhouse framed a rat orgy writhing within. Bloated, toadlike footstools swam in fungus seas. A stained, reeking mattress from a Mexican bordello lay like a raft in a sluice of liquefied garbage and putrefaction. And the flies . . . they were every
where, their fat, blue-black bodies eagerly spreading filth and disease.

Man, Johnny wanted to do a job on this place. Take some of the black market grenades he'd bought from that white supremacist up in Idaho and light up the whole dump.

Of course, Johnny wouldn’t do that. To say the grenades had cost him an arm and a leg was an understatement. Hey, he wasn’t going to waste them on entertainment. He’d save his precious little pineapples until he ran into a situation where he really needed ’em . . . some situation where he wanted to cost some other motherfucker an arm and a leg,
literally.

Still, the dump freaked him good. The place was like the flipside of last year—the corrupt result of a million magazine ads and hardsell sales pitches that suckered people into the malls and onto the Internet with promises of the American Dream. Money leveraged out of credit card accounts, heavily mortgaged dream homes crammed with junk . . . and all of it ended up here while Bob and Betty Suburbs continued to pay interest on a decent—or not so decent—burial for the fruits of disposable income.

The All-American dumping ground. Christ, the Dead Kennedys said it best:
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.

Naturally, the dump was starting to give Johnny the creeps.

“Looks like my kind of place,” Raymondo said.

“Yeah, this is sweet,” Kyra agreed, hardcore to the end. “Real sweet.”

Sweet
was not a word Johnny Church would have used to describe this place. But hey, he was the hired hand on this little side trip, not the head honcho. Guns, ammo, and action were one thing; a mondo juju roadshow in the town dump was quite another.