The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  * * *

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 Skull Cracker

  Chapter 2 Scratching Gravel

  Chapter 3 Down in His Boots

  Chapter 4 Fireguard

  Chapter 5 Smoke Out

  Chapter 6 Misty Beyond

  Chapter 7 Tarantula Juice

  Chapter 8 Cactus Country

  Chapter 9 Wild Mare’s Milk

  Chapter 10 Hole Up

  Chapter 11 Gun Wise

  Chapter 12 Three-up Outfit

  Chapter 13 Shadow Riders

  Chapter 14 Dream Sack

  Chapter 15 Outside Man

  Chapter 16 Painted for War

  Chapter 17 Short-trigger Man

  Chapter 18 Conversation Fluid

  Chapter 19 Deadfall

  Chapter 20 Grave Patch

  Chapter 21 Throw In

  Chapter 22 Sage Rat

  Chapter 23 Range Boss

  Chapter 24 Snake Blood

  Chapter 25 Outriding

  Chapter 26 Another Jump to Hell

  Chapter 27 Big Augur

  Chapter 28 Riding into His Dust

  Chapter 29 Made Wolf Meat

  Chapter 30 Box Canyon

  Chapter 31 Breaking the Medicine

  Chapter 32 Wallow in Velvet

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Heather,

  who brought water to my desert.

  Skull Cracker

  * * *

  Marzi leaned on the counter and watched, with dread twisting in her belly like a knot of rattlesnakes, as Beej trudged up the stairs. The worst of the morning rush was over and Hendrix was in the back watching his thirteen-inch portable TV, so Marzi would have to wait on Beej herself. He was talking to himself in a dreamily pleasant tone, which was somehow worse than mere ranting, and Marzi heard her own name several times in his otherwise incomprehensible monologue. Beej had always been a slob, but his hygiene and dress sense had deteriorated completely over the past few weeks. His carrot orange hair hung in greasy clumps around his face, and his ever-present black leather jacket—which must have been stifling in this heat—was smeared with mud and bits of grass. Marzi wondered if he’d lost his apartment or something; if he was sleeping outside.

  Beej still came into the café every day, and Lindsay said he was still attending art classes, but clearly something had come catastrophically loose in his life. Marzi had seen heroin addiction in action, and it looked something like this, but she didn’t think drugs were Beej’s problem. Something in his eyes, the way they seemed to roll around loose lately, made her think he was having problems inside his head.

  Beej clumped up to the counter, grinning at her, showing teeth that had gone too long without cleaning. He dropped a handful of coins, a few bottle caps, a beer can pull tab, and several pieces of a shredded photograph onto the counter.

  “Lemon tea, Beej?” she said lightly.

  “No. A mocha.” He gripped the edge of the counter, his hands visibly shaking. “I found the shrine of the earthquake,” he said. “I followed the path that leads to waste and hardpan. The god of the earthquake has accepted my devotions.”

  “Uh-huh,” Marzi said, turning to the espresso machine to start his drink. “How have you been sleeping? You don’t look so good.” He didn’t smell good, either; like mud, and ashes, and old carpets.

  “I don’t need to sleep anymore,” he said. “My god gives me strength. But Marzi . . .” He frowned, then shook his head.

  “What?” she asked, wondering why he’d been saying her name on the steps, if she should be worried. He often flirted with her, awkwardly, and she had a fondness for him despite his social deficiencies—he was always polite, and a talented collage artist and photographer—but she questioned if he was becoming obsessed.

  “Nothing,” he said, not meeting her eyes, taking his drink and heading for the Cloud Room. Beej liked that room the best. He said the castles in the mist—certainly the most soothing of the several room-spanning murals in the café—made him feel peaceful.

  Marzi was about to drop his coins into the register when she noticed there was an Indian head penny and a buffalo nickel in the mix, in addition to a Sacagawea dollar coin. She pocketed those, making up the difference with cash from her own pockets. She didn’t collect coins, but that mix of change had a distinctly Old West feel. She’d never thought much before about the way icons of the West appeared on currency. Maybe there was a story in that—something about counterfeiting, or magically transforming natural resources into cold cash. It seemed like more of an Aaron Burr story than an Outlaw one, but that could be good—she hadn’t done much with Burr in the past few issues of her comic.

  A scream, raw with shock and pain, erupted from the Cloud Room. Marzi came around the counter fast, holding a knife she didn’t even remember picking up, and ran toward the sound, her heart pounding. She raced through the front room, bumping a little table with her hip and almost toppling it, and reached the Cloud Room just in time to see someone dash into the Teatime Room. She only caught a glimpse of him, but he was a striking figure: eagle feathers woven into his black hair, flesh the color of pale sand, the skin on his shirtless back oddly tattooed to resemble cracked earth. She didn’t go after him—there was no other door out of the Teatime Room anyway, and Beej was lying on the floor beside an overturned chair, in need of more immediate attention.

  Marzi knelt by Beej, keeping one eye on the empty doorway to the Teatime Room. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Did that guy hurt you?”

  Beej opened his eyes and looked up at her dreamily. Then he giggled. Marzi flinched. If he’d wept, or whimpered, that would have been all right, something she could deal with, but the giggle was strange and terrible. “He wanted to see my brain,” Beej said. “To compare the wrinkles in my head to a map of the canyons and gullies, to see if my mental terrain matches the texture of his territories. To touch me more deeply, to write his name with a knife in the folds of my mind . . .” He trailed off, then sat up, rubbing his fingers across his hairline, frowning. “Something . . .” He mumbled words she couldn’t understand.

  How could you tell if someone had just had a seizure? Maybe Beej was just having a fit of some kind, and the tattooed guy didn’t have anything to do with it. “Beej—” she began.

  The room shook—more, the world shook, and Marzi fell against a table. Earthquake, she thought, and almost as soon as she thought it, the quake was over. It was a fairly strong quake, nothing like the Loma Prieta disaster of 1989, but no tiny trembler, either. Marzi’s stomach kept lurching even after the quake stopped, some part of her backbrain still insisting the ground beneath her was unsafe. Beej tried to stand up, and Marzi turned her attention to him, grateful to have something to set her attention on after the chaos of the last few moments. “Hold on,” she said. “There might be aftershocks.”

  “No aftershocks,” he said, rising. “That was a foreshock. Just a hint of things to come. I knew the earthquake was coming. The god gives me wisdom.”

  Marzi frowned and, after a moment, rose to her feet. Beej seemed fine—physically, anyway—so she stepped toward the Teatime Room, still holding her knife. She ducked her head inside, and there was no one there, just empty tables watched over by the painted gods on the walls. The man must have slipped out while she was distracted by the quake. “That man, with the tattoos—”

  “No tattoos,” Beej said. “His flesh is broken stone.”

  “What—” she began, but then the day manager, Hendrix, called her from the other room.

  “Marzi! Get in here! That quak
e knocked three bottles of syrup off the shelf! It’s going to smell like Irish Cream in here for years!”

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” she asked.

  “Never better,” Beej said, picking up his overturned chair. “I’m going now. Things to do, people to be. See you later.” He waved cheerfully before leaving.

  He should get some help, Marzi thought, but that was as far as it went. Beej wasn’t her responsibility, after all, but cleaning up the mess in the other room was.

  Later, when the quake clutter was cleared away and things had slowed to the usual late-afternoon lull, Marzi sat staring for a while out the big bay window onto Ash Street, watching bicycles and cars pass by. In Santa Cruz there were only two seasons—rainy winter and sunny summer—and winter was a long way off. The café was nearly deserted, and it looked a little shabby with so few inhabitants: a thread-bare couch, scrounged chairs, mismatched tables, worn and scratched wooden floors. Only Garamond Ray’s enormous murals set Genius Loci apart from all the other cafés in town, and up here in front the only painting was a space-scape, all cold white stars and shadow-occulted planets, not the loveliest of the murals. Still, the air smelled of coffee, there was a good Two Dollar Pistols disc on the stereo, and the morning madness was behind her.

  She spotted Denis, the most regular of the café’s regulars, looking dour as always on the couch, leafing through a book about modern art. His muddy boots were propped on the battle-scarred coffee table, making a mess, but Marzi didn’t have the energy to tell him to put his feet down. An older woman Marzi didn’t know sat drinking orange spice tea in the Ocean Room, tapping her pen rhythmically against the table, looking down at a spiral-bound notebook. A few tourists were talking loudly out on the deck, the usual background noise to Marzi’s workdays. Hendrix, pale and improbably dreadlocked, sat on a stool in the kitchen, watching his tiny black-and-white television. He was the only person who’d been working at Genius Loci longer than Marzi had, and the only employee who’d been personally hired by the mysterious owners.

  Marzi was on the verge of striking up a conversation with Denis, in the vague hope that his condescension and affected world-weariness would annoy her enough to keep her awake, when Lindsay came through the door like a glittering whirlwind. “Marzipan!” she said. “To what do we owe this honor? Shouldn’t you be sleeping, or hunched over the drawing board?”

  Marzi grinned. “Tina called in sick, so Hendrix asked me to cover her shift. I’ve got to work during the day tomorrow, too, but then I’ll be back to my usual nocturnal ways.” Marzi was normally the night manager—which was good, since that way she almost never had to see Hendrix, who managed during the day.

  Lindsay leaned on the counter, looked around, and whispered conspiratorially: “Have you met the new boy yet? The one who moved into the Pigeonhole?”

  “What’s it to you?” Marzi said, taking down a pint glass to draw Lindsay her usual Guinness. “I thought you’d sworn off boys.”

  “Not for me,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m interested for you. So you haven’t met him?”

  “Nope. He’s still a man of mystery.”

  “Well, I’ve met him,” Lindsay said. “Yesterday.”

  “Oh? What’s the verdict?”

  “Yummy. Speaking from a strictly consulting position, of course, since I’ve sworn off boys.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Sort of an art-house Kafka-reader type, non-smoker but if he smoked they’d be black Czech cigarettes, makes jeans and a black shirt look like a black trenchcoat and dark glasses, butter-wouldn’t-melt kind of cool. You know?”

  It was actually a fairly succinct and comprehensible description, for Lindsay. At least she hadn’t compared the new boy to some long-dead German artist, or worse yet, a figure from an obscure painting.

  “He have a name?” Marzi asked, not sure if she was interested, or even interested in being interested.

  “Jonathan. He’s getting his master’s in art history from some school in North Carolina. He’s out here for the summer doing research.”

  Another academic artsy type. Ah, well. He’d come to the right place, with Lindsay, Beej, and Denis already in more or less continuous residence. “What’s he here to study?”

  Lindsay spread her arms wide. “This.”

  Marzi frowned. “This what?”

  “The murals. The last works of Garamond Ray.”

  “Ahhh,” Marzi said. “That explains why he agreed to live in the Pigeonhole.”

  “It’s about the only thing that would explain it,” Lindsay agreed. “I’m sure he’ll be around. He lives right upstairs. Where else would he go for coffee?”

  “I’ll wait with bated breath,” Marzi said.

  “Speaking of you and the men who love you,” Lindsay said, “I hear Beej flipped out this morning.”

  Marzi nodded, though the details were fuzzy in her memory—the little quake loomed larger in her mind than anything else. “He was acting really weird when he came in,” she said.

  “How could you tell?” Denis interrupted from his place on the couch. “Beej is always weird.”

  “Yeah, so what’s his deal?” Lindsay said. “He still comes to classes, but it’s like having a wild animal in the studio, he’s always wandering around and knocking stuff over, talking to himself. Is he okay?”

  “How should I know?” Denis said. “I’m not his keeper.” Beej and Denis had a strange relationship—like Pigpen meets the Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing His Hands, Marzi sometimes thought. They argued about art and metaphysics, conversations that Marzi could barely follow, and which usually ended with Denis storming off and Beej looking sheepish. What if Beej was having a nervous breakdown or something? But what could Marzi do? She wasn’t his keeper, either—just the barista who served him coffee, the woman he had a crush on, maybe. He wasn’t her responsibility.

  “Anyway,” Marzi said. “He seemed kind of out of it, and a few minutes after he sat down, he started screaming. I ran in to see if he was okay, and he was on the floor babbling, basically, about gods and stuff. Then the earthquake hit, and he left shortly after. He did say he could sense the earthquake coming, though.” She didn’t bother to mention the tattooed man. He probably didn’t have anything to do with it anyway. Still, thinking about him made her weirdly anxious.

  “Wonderful,” Denis said. “Beej thinks he’s a Richter scale, now. As if he weren’t delusional enough.”

  Lindsay turned and made a great show of looking Denis up and down. “Apparently you’re under the delusion that you’re part of this conversation.” Lindsay was normally sweetness and light, but she seldom bothered to be civil to Denis; it was wasted effort, as he took kindness and scorn with equal disinterest.

  “I’m crushed by your rejection,” Denis said. He packed up his things and walked out, leaving muddy bootprints on the floor.

  “See, it’s guys like him that made me swear off boys,” Lindsay said.

  Marzi laughed. “He does give the gender a bad name.”

  Lindsay leaned over and kissed her cheek. “I’ve got to go study, Marzipan. Say bye-bye when you leave—I’m in for the long haul tonight. If you’re working tomorrow, I’ll see you then. And if the new boy is around, I’ll introduce you.”

  “My heart goes pitter-pat. But I’m not sure I want to date anyone right now, you know?”

  “You just say that because your years in the service industry have made you misanthropic,” Lindsay said. “They’re not all like Denis.”

  “If they were all like Denis, there’d be no trouble with overpopulation in the world,” Marzi said.

  “Stop being witty,” Lindsay said, picking up her beer. “I’ve got work to do.” She winked and went toward the Ocean Room.

  Faced with further hours of relative boredom, Marzi went to the little shelf of secondhand books they kept for customers and picked up a copy of Louis L’Amour’s Hondo. She’d read it before—she’d read all L’Amour’s Westerns—but not for years. L�
��Amour—Love. Maybe she could have L’Amour, or a thinly disguised version of him, appear as a character in the next issue of The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. Maybe he could be Rangergirl’s love interest. She’d never done a love story before.

  Scratching Gravel

  * * *

  The next day, Marzi met Jonathan.

  She was busing tables in the Circus Room, whistling along to “Daboo Dabay” by Lutch Crawford and His Gone Geese, from a good old jazz disc she’d been playing during a lot of her shifts lately. Marzi carried her bus tray past a pale, dark-haired young man sitting at a small table under Harlequin’s gaze. He whistled “Daboo Dabay” too, and for a moment their whistles synched perfectly. A sketchbook lay on the table before him, and he held a pen in his hand. He nodded to her and said, “Great music.” He was cute, in a too-thin kind of way, but Marzi wasn’t in a flirting mood. She’d had nightmares about a sand-colored Indian in a feathered headdress the night before, and the lingering aftereffects had bothered her all day.

  “Sure is,” Marzi said, glancing at his sketchbook as she passed. The page was covered with harsh cross-hatching, as if he’d scratched out every drawing he’d begun, and she wondered what he was trying to create. She went to the kitchen with the bus tray, took her disc out of the stereo, and said good night to Bobby-O. It was two o’clock, and she was done for the day, having come in at five a.m. to open. She had the night off—a rarity—and since she didn’t have to work tomorrow, it was practically a vacation, given her usual work schedule. The guy with the sketchbook was bent over his work, drawing furiously, and she paused, thinking of talking to him—she suspected he might be interesting. But no. If he turned out to be a regular, she could be friendly later. Right now she just wanted to get to her drafting table and sketch the sandstone savage, get him out of her head and into the pages of her comic. He could be a minor villain in the next issue, or maybe a mysterious figure with an undisclosed agenda of his own—her comic was full of such shadowy characters, some of them with intentions so ambiguous even Marzi could not have said with certainty whether they were villains, heroes, or something else entirely. Marzi walked out the front door.