And then it was time. The black bird circled high overhead, calling to him, and Dan knew that he had to leave Leticia. Gently, he placed the bundled blanket inside the grave. And then he took up the shovel and buried the only woman he had ever loved.
When he finished, he dropped the shovel, and it rang against the stones.
Dan remembered another sound, one heard in the parking lot of the Spirit Song Trading Post. The subtle chime of a wedding ring landing on blacktop, a wedding ring that would never touch its intended’s skin.
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 pointe
d 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.
She felt a new strength.
The same way she felt the power of the Indian bitch’s severed eyes.
Kyra had taken the eyes from Johnny’s ice chest. Now they waited cool and pretty in her pocket. Her fingers found them both, and she knew that there was no more time to waste. She had to follow the forces that had guided her to this place, the same ones that had led her to Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin. She had to trust those forces, and the sacrifices they demanded.
Kyra’s tongue snaked across her full lips.
The taste of sugar lingered like a sticky-sweet memory.
Kyra raised a severed blue eyeball, stared at it long and hard.
A little taste of the land of the dead . . .
Raymondo watched Johnny turn the ribs, then slather them with more barbecue sauce. The meat hadn’t been cooking that long, but it was just about done.
Blood rare was how Johnny liked his butchered bovine. Just cripple it and drag it across the fire, he liked to say.
Soon enough, Johnny knifed the first rack of beef off the grill, dumped it on a paper plate, and tore into it. Raymondo eyed the meat, licking his tiny lips. “Times like this make me wish I still had a stomach.”
“All the more for me,” Johnny said indifferently, hucking the first clean bone at Raymondo’s head. He dug into a second, and pretty soon his chin was painted with rusty sauce. He chugged half a can of Bud, and what didn’t make his mouth washed his chin clean.
“Man,” Johnny said. “I love my meat.”
In the mausoleum, Kyra waited.
Guidance would come to her She knew it would. A message. A secret. A command . . . The dark forces she had chosen to follow always provided her with direction when she did as they demanded.
But this time it was different.
This time the only thing that came was pain.
It bloomed behind Kyra’s green eyes, like black roses heavy with blood. The imaginary petals spread, touching nerves never meant to be touched, and the soft velvet brush of each petal was a new agony. Kyra bit back a whimper as blood seemed to well in her sockets, pooling there, filling every recess with red tears that could never be shed. And then the flowers were fully open and they filled her skull, and the smell of them was like sweet rot, and the pain was nearly unbearable, as if their perfume drew scorpions not born of this world, scorpions that had traveled with Leticia Hardin from the land of the dead, scorpions that crawled over Kyra’s eyes, stinging angrily, hunting for the black perfume locked inside her skull, perfume that was forever prisoner in the secret chambers of Kyra’s imagination.
But Kyra was not afraid of the pain.
For pain, she knew, was transformative.
Kyra closed her eyes and joined with it. She bit her lip, but she did not cry out. The taste of sugar was long gone from her tongue, and Leticia Hardin’s scorpions were loose in her brain, and the pain was like no other she had ever endured—
Kyra dropped to her knees.
Her eyes flashed open.
One moment her irises were green . . . and then they were quite suddenly blue. . . .
And then the flowers in Kyra’s head seemed to wither, and the blood tears dried to nothing, and the scorpions crawled away . . . When she rose, she was stronger than she’d been before.
And she was hungry.
Kyra walked toward the funereal barbecue pit, not saying a word.
Still, Raymondo couldn’t help but notice the way she stared at Church’s muscular shoulders, his bulging biceps.
Modem women, the head thought. They've grown as dull as men. All they care about is a man’s body.
Of course, Raymondo didn’t have a body. Right now, he would have given every scrap of his intellect for one of those ninety-eight- pound-weakling “before” physiques pictured in the old
Charles Atlas ads, if only Kyra would turn her gaze upon him.
Only ninety-eight pounds, he’d tell her. “But every ounce is pure lovin’.”
But that was only a dream. At the moment, and forevermore, Raymondo weighed more like 9.8 ounces, soaking wet. He cursed every piranha that ever swam the black waters of the Amazon. He cursed every heathen savage who had ever dined upon human flesh. He even cursed the missionaries, whose reckless disregard for native culture had earned Raymondo a place in a cannibal’s stew pot. And most of all he cursed the aged witch doctor who had raised him from death’s quiet slumber with feathered fetishes and dead man’s dust and a rattling necklace of demon bones. The doctor hadn’t been much more than a dwarf himself, but that hadn’t stopped him from shrinking Raymondo down from six-foot-two with a slice of the knife and some particularly bad juju. Raymondo’s days of being a big man were over The only part of him that grew anymore was his hair, and that was a curse as well. If Kyra wasn’t combing it or braiding it like the hair of some outre Ken doll, then Johnny Church was yanking it out by the roots.
Johnny went after another rib, and then another, oblivious to all other concerns, including Raymondo’s. When the first rack was nothing but a pile of pinkish bones charred black in the fire, he started in on the second. When he was halfway through the second, he took a third rack from the ice chest and tossed it over the coals.
And all the while Kyra watched, her pale cheeks flushed to the color of roses, black-nailed fingers toying with that tight chain choker that circled her neck.
She looked as hungry as Johnny Church.
Something about her eyes, Raymondo thought. And then he saw what that something was, clearly, in the flickering light cast by the barbecue’s flames.
Kyra’s eyes were blue.
“You want some ribs, Ky?” Johnny asked, still oblivious.
“I’m not in a food mood, Johnny. I’ve already eaten.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Neither do you,” Kyra said slyly, toying with her necklace. “And you’re missing a lot.”
Wicked Prayer Page 11
