Wicked Prayer (14 page)

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 desert 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

Not wanting to frighten her away.

She was the most beautiful woman Dan had ever seen, and she kept on coming.

She’d see him any second. She had to. She’d see him and the—

“Oh, shit!” she said, nearly jumping out of her skin.

Dan had to laugh. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Actually, I was trying really hard not to.”

They made small talk. The woman looked Dan over without being overly obvious about it, and Dan tried to do the same. She was of Native American descent. But there was a little something else in the mix, because she had blue eyes. And she looked about Dan’s age—in her twenties, anyway. She smiled at him, and the smile was a little uneven, and the skin around her eyes and mouth was finely lined, as if she’d spent a lot of time outdoors.

And there were those eyes. A deep, deep blue, like a cool drink of water to a thirsty man.

Pretty soon, she saw the black light.

Pretty soon, she said, “Scorpion wrangler, huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tough way to make a living.”

“There are tougher ways.”

“Yeah, I know. . . .” She hung on to her smile, shifted the canvas bag attached to her backpack. “But when it comes to scorpions, the competition can be fierce.”

Dan eyed the bag. “That so?”

“Don’t know how you see it. But if you ask me, these canyons are kind of like fishing holes. And I fished this sucker dry last night.” She had him and she knew it. But she didn’t just walk away, and that was just as well, because Dan Cody suddenly found himself wanting to hold on to her.

She tilted her head to one side. Long dark hair fell from her face in glossy ribbons. “You don’t look like one of those university boys,” she said.

“I don’t?”

“No, you don’t.”

Dan smiled, but she’d hit a nerve he didn’t know he had. “I don’t look smart enough ... is that it?”

“You said it, not me,” the woman replied lightly. “So what are you up to, gringo?”

Dan’s expression turned somber. “Actually, I work for a pharmaceutical company,” he lied. “We’re doing some preliminary clinical trials with scorpion venom. We’re hoping to find a cure.”

“A cure for what?”

“Smart-asses.” Dan paused for effect. “They say even serious cases like yours seem to respond to treatment.”

The woman stared at him for a long, deadpan moment.

Then she burst out laughing.

Dan did, too.

“All right, all right,” she said. “You got me, gringo. I’m sorry. I just meant to say that you don’t look like the typical dork entomology student with the brand-new pair of hiking boots and the brand- new specimen cup and the brand-new bottle of SPF 45 sunblock. Trust me. I’ve seen enough of them to know the look. And you look. . .”

She stopped, considering Dan.

“You look like you belong here,” she said finally.

Dan realized he’d been holding his breath again. “So do you,” he said, not drawing another until he got the words out.

A moment passed between them. Dan couldn’t take it—he looked away.

“So,” she said. “Gringo. What
are
you doing out here?”

“I have a contract with one of the professors at the University of Arizona. Emily Carlisle. I round up scorpions, bring ’em in, and she uses the little suckers in her research.”

The woman raised one coal-black eyebrow. “Don’t tell me— Dr Carlisle’s the one working on a cure for smart-asses.”

“Actually, Emily’s kind of a smart-ass herself”

“Uh-huh . . . and she’s the one who sent you out here tonight?”

“That’s right.”

“Off your usual beaten path, is it?”

“Yeah. . . . How’d you know?”

“Well, all I’m saying is that Cuervo Canyon’s a long drive from the U.”

“Yeah. In fact, that’s just what Emily said.”

“Then in this case your friend the doctor knows what she’s talking about.” The woman stretched and reshouldered her pack. “It was nice talking to you, but I really have to get going. Happy hunting.”

She turned and started walking. Dan watched her go. He could see strongly defined shoulder muscles through that white cotton shirt, the hem of it flapping in the hot wind, and he liked the way the woman’s hair fell over her back in a long black curtain like a bird’s wing. She was smart, and funny, and just a little mysterious—

And she was leaving.

Dan shouted after her, and she turned.

"What about you?” he asked. “What’s your story?”

“My story?”

“I mean the scorpions. You make house pets of the things?”

“No.” She patted the canvas bag. “Paperweights.”

Instantly, Dan thought she must be kidding. She was way too smart to be bug wrangler for some tourist trap. A woman like this, she
could
have worked for a pharmaceutical company or a university, minus the pocket protector

Dan had to know the real answer, but the woman turned again. Just like the mule deer he’d seen earlier.

She was leaving. Definitely—

“Adios, gringo,” she called over her shoulder.

Dan left his stuff and hurried after the woman, who had started down a different trail than the one Dan had used to enter the canyon.

That meant that there was another entrance somewhere.

The woman was heading for her vehicle. Maybe it wasn’t too far off.

She was heading out of Dan’s life. Maybe forever.

“Wait a second,” he called. “Where are you from? What’s your name?”

The woman didn’t even turn. “If you really want answers, you’ll find a way to get them. After all, we’re in the same business. It’s a small pond. . . . Didn’t I tell you sometimes the holes run dry?”