Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [30]
Then she was in a clear patch, steering between obstacles, and behind her Cray dwindled in the rearview mirror, a dusty, staggering figure, all in black, so small now, smaller than she could have imagined, and finally gone in the night.
She kept driving, the accelerator on the floor, the big Lexus careening like a carnival ride.
There was a dirt road somewhere and a paved road beyond it, but she knew she couldn’t find either of them, not now.
She raced through the trackless desert, plowing up clumps of prickly pear, skirting the big saguaros, barely able to see, because her control had shattered at last, and she was crying.
13
Cray walked for two hours through the desert, following the Lexus’ tire tracks. His hands still ached with cold from the liquid nitrogen spray, and he found it difficult to flex his fingers.
Only the black leather gloves had saved him from serious injury. The gloves—and his reflexes. Had he been less quick to react, she would have sprayed him in the face, and he would have been permanently blinded.
As it was, he had shielded his eyes, and the gloves and his long shirtsleeves had absorbed the worst of the spray. The gun, too, of course. The Glock remained frozen, its trigger immovable, the slide locked.
Tonight’s misadventure was his first defeat. In years of deadly sport he had never lost to an adversary, had never known the embarrassment of failure.
Still, he would overcome this setback. He would find a way to win. He would bring Kaylie down.
The task posed challenges, to be sure, but he had faced and surmounted many challenges already. A lifetime of challenges.
What he was now, he had made of himself by a concerted and persistent exertion of will. He was not a born predator—at least no more than any man.
At the beginning, he had been only a precocious little boy, a boy kept soft and sheltered, doted on by his mother and grandmother, his sole caretakers in a household barren of a father.
Johnnie Cray had been told that his daddy was a policeman killed on duty, a story that sustained him in his earliest years, until he learned that it was a well-intentioned lie, and that his father was, in fact, a television repairman who had run off with his mother’s best friend when Johnnie was six months old. He left a note explaining that childbearing had made Johnnie’s mother fat.
As a small boy, Johnnie knew nothing of such unpleasantness. He knew nothing of ugliness or pain. His mommy and grandma did their best to protect him from life’s stronger jolts. They kept him apart from other children, fed him sweets, ruffled his hair, and praised his blossoming intelligence.
You’re special, Johnnie, his mother would tell him. You’re so smart. You’ll do great things with that mind of yours.
And Cray, so small, had puffed with pride at the words and the future that was their promise.
Then, at the age of seven, he started school. And things changed.
School was a different world, a universe of coarse humor and petty tests of manhood for which he was utterly unprepared. He became the goat, the class joke, the universal victim. The pack smelled his weakness. They pounced.
His nemesis was Billy Curtis. Billy hounded him. And Billy was everything Cray had been protected from, everything despicable in human nature. He was unintelligent and crude. He spit food. He made farting sounds. He kicked people. He notched stick-figure graffiti into the bathroom wall.
And he hated Johnnie Cray. Johnnie Cry-baby, he called him. Johnnie, who wears diapers. Johnnie, who's such a good little girl.
Cray was nine years old, a third grader, having endured two years of this torment, when one day at recess Billy Curtis tackled him for no evident reason and threw him helplessly to the ground. It had rained that morning, and the pavement was wet and muddy. Cray fell in the slop and lay there, gasping, as all the other boys and even a few unkind girls gathered in a circle to laugh.
Billy Curtis, performing for his