Wicked Prayer Read Online Free PDF Page B

were solid. Strong. Right.
    Fifteen feet in front of him, the glass door shattered.
    Leticia’s scream from inside the building: “Dan! Watch out!”
    Before Cody could move, or even think, he saw another woman facing him through the front window. She was stained turquoise and orange in the reflected neon glow of the trading post sign, and she was raising a gun, and as she fired the front window exploded and neon- painted glass rained down in a brittle avalanche and for one perfect moment Dan thought the woman was shattering like a smashed mosaic, silver moonlight and neon flesh splintering in a bloodred rain.
    But that was only an illusion. The woman was a rock-solid reality.
    She lowered her weapon just slightly, smiling at Dan with cruel black lips.
    “I won’t miss again,” she said.
    Her black-nailed fingers squeezed the trigger
    A second bullet sang through the night.
    From above, the Crow screamed as the slug slammed into Dan Cody’s shoulder He was punched backward by the impact, the breath knocked out of him, roses flying from his hand in a scarlet arc like the hot spray of blood that gushed from his wound.
    Cody, still on his feet but just barely, gripped his blasted shoulder with a hand that rapidly filled with blood. The woman came toward him almost leisurely, glass shrapnel crunching under her boots, the smile still writhing on her face. Her pistol dipped lower, and Dan’s eyes traced the next bullet’s trajectory before the woman pulled the trigger:
    Left kneecap, dead center
    Dan tried to move. If he could just get out of the way . . . just run ... if he could get to the Jeep, grab his shotgun . . .
    Overhead, the Crow clawed the air, screamed a warning—
    Dan barely heard it, wouldn’t have understood it if he had.
    The woman fired again, and Dan’s left knee exploded in an agonizing torrent of bone and blood and smashed cartilage.
    The damaged leg buckled instantly, uselessly, beneath him.
    Dan hit the ground hard. The woman kept coming, pistol gripped in her hand. In a fraction of a second Dan saw everything: Leti inside the store, screaming his name over and over until her cries sounded like the caw of the Crow. Dan’s true love struggled in the cold embrace of a muscular man sheathed in black leather Leti’s long black hair whipped the man’s face like the barbed tail of a scorpion as she kicked, bit, tore, fought like a wild animal. . . but her struggles were in vain.
    The man jerked back Leti’s head by a fistful of hair. Then he raised his gun hand and slammed a pistol butt against her skull. Instantly the screaming stopped, and the sudden silence that swelled in its wake was far, far worse.
    Dan watched Leti fall like something dead, her head smacking the hardwood floor with a sickening thud. The big man turned, satisfied with his work, and stepped over the motionless body. Leticia Hardin’s hot blood gleamed wetly on his raised pistol barrel as he walked to the open doorway.
    Dan gasped. Wincing, he tried to get up, but there was no way he could stand. His destroyed knee was a seeping red mess of smashed bone and severed ligaments, and he might as well have tried to climb Mount Everest.
    “Goddamn!” Dan said, because all the sweet words in the world were now gone from his memory. “Goddamn son of a bitch!"
    He’d been shot twice by the woman with the cold green eyes, and now a bullet-headed man with features that might have been carved from tombstone granite was coming to join in the slaughter Dan knew there was no way he could turn the tide. He’d never make it to his feet, let alone get to the Jeep fifty feet behind him, let alone get the shotgun he’d left behind in the backseat for an armful of flowers that now lay scattered across the blacktop like so many drops of blood.
    In a split second, he’d lost everything.
    All the remained was the bag of scorpions, still twisted around his right shoulder
    Maybe, just maybe, that would be enough.
    Dan tried to reach for the bag, but