Free Wicked Prayer by Norman Partridge Page A

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.
    That kind of deal called for Kyra Damon’s peculiar talents.
    And—Johnny grudgingly admitted—Raymondo’s.
    “Park it here,” Raymondo said.
    Johnny did. “Man,” he said, “this sure ain’t no Garden of Everlastin’ Fuckin’ Peace. This place is pretty putrid.”
    Raymondo chuckled. “Maybe so, but it’s the perfect location for our needs. Now, untie me. I’ve