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“So I’m on house arrest, is that it?”
Lillith Kathryn—“Call me Kat”—Krawczyk sat across from me at a table in the Bannerworth’s dining room. The lunch crowd had drained away, and we had the place to ourselves. The waitress had left a pot of coffee and two cups, along with a plate of biscuits with a jug of honey. I brushed at the crumbs littering the tablecloth, which were all that was left of the biscuits. My hands were sticky. Punching preachers made me hungry, or maybe it was all the healthy outdoor activity.
Riding back from Weeks’s camp, I had reined Misery off the trail and into a stand of willows next to the river. In the cool shade, I watched the river flow and let the breeze blow away my anger. I had to admit to myself how close I had come to planting Weeks under greener pastures. A week’s worth—har-har, fuck you, pun—of frustration, helplessness, and fear of the unknown had built inside me like heat in a nuclear reactor, triggering a meltdown that nearly led to an exploding reverend.
There on the riverbank, I sat and threw myself a grand old pity party, complete with sulky hats and pouty cakes. Of course, I made sure no one was watching—it would have been uncool for a fierce fucker like me to have been seen having a tantrum.
If I had only taken a breath and backed out at the mall, pre-Rancor, and called in some backup, none of this shit would be happening. But no, I let my balls rule my brain and drove on, right into... whatever the hell had happened. And there I was, stuck in 18-fucking-87, in the prehistoric Stone Age of the Old West, where the people stank and the transportation crapped on the road. Simple as that.
How long had it been since I had last failed a task set before me? I executed missions. They didn’t execute me.
And yet, here you are.
Cue the deep sigh. FIDO, as we used to say in the Rangers. Fuck it, drive on.
The strange little Gollum creatures were a distraction, noise I was using to white out my sense of failure. Stamping out an infestation of pygmies—unless they were indeed Birnbaum’s gift to the nineteenth century—was not in my job description. Weeks was a distraction—the man had about as much magic as a pogo stick. The mystery of the open bank door and the dead preachers was not mine to solve. The sooner I got back on mission, the better I would feel. Hanging around Geyser Falls was counterproductive.
Conclusion: un-ass the town and figure out how to get home to help Alizandra.
“Helloooo,” said Kat Krawczyk, waving a hand in front of my face. “Paging Judge Shivers. Please return to Earth, Wandering Spirit.”
“I’m here. Thinking.”
“Don’t hurt yourself.” Krawczyk’s boyish, blue-dyed hair had been washed. The roots had grown out as sandy brown, leaving her with a two-toned look. If she stayed much longer, she would outgrow her blue hair after the next couple of cuts.
“You need a horse,” I said. My coffee had gone cold. I pulled a face and put the cup back on the saucer.
“A horse? Why?”
“Unless you want to walk.”
“Walk?” Krawczyk held her palms up and glanced around. “Where’re we going?”
“The US office of the Administration of the Codex Magica is based in San Francisco. Start there.”
“Do you know when they were formed into a body? Is there such a thing in this time and place?”
“Don’t know.”
“Have you figured out how to do the time-travel trick? Get us back?”
“No.”
“How much magic will it take you to figure it out?”
“Don’t know.”
“By the Goddess, your aura is soooo tight,” Krawczyk said. “Enough negative energy radiates from you, you practically glow dark red.”
I frowned. Aura? What kind of New Age nut is this? “How good are you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Magically. You said you’re a healer. How good a healer are you?”
“I’m good, Judge Shivers. Very good.” Krawczyk’s expression remained grave, much like a mechanic with a balky engine. “And I can see people’s auras. My reading of yours suggests it’s not healthy for you to repress your emotions so strongly. You need to loosen up, Mr. Shivers.” Her grim look changed, and a sly smile curled her lips. “As a healer, I’d suggest maybe... ah... find someone nice and go fuck like bunnies? Sexual intercourse holds great healing power as well as being good aerobic exercise.”
As if cued by the gods, Merilee Soames exited the kitchen and crossed the dining room, throwing us a quick glance and the thinnest of professional smiles before heading into the hotel lobby.
“For example,” Krawczyk said. “Start with her. Boobs like pillows. If you don’t hit that, I will.”
“I’m not her cup of tea.”
“What? Guy like you, with that curly dark hair and that brooding-bad-boy look of yours? You look like some kind of Bedouin prince or something. She ought to be melting in her knickers. Hmm... maybe we can all hop in the sack together?”
“No. Stay focused. I only have a couple of dollars left. Not enough to buy a horse. I need to earn some cash. There’s a faro game at the Broken Wheel, but it’s low stakes. Might take a while to build up enough cash.”
“I’m ashamed of you, Judge Shivers. Cheating like that.”
“Objective two, acquire horses, camping gear, weapons.”
Krawczyk arched a formerly pierced eyebrow. “You know there’s a stagecoach, right?”
“Objective—excuse me, what?”
“There’s a stagecoach that runs right through Geyser Falls. It’s packed with prospectors on the way down, and it runs from the railhead in... can’t think of the town name. Somewhere north of here. You can buy tickets there and take a train direct to San Francisco. Cheaper than horses. Faster too.” She waved a hand in the air. “Although I’m not pleased by the size of the carbon footprint. Have you seen how much smoke those trains put out?”
I sipped from my coffee, remembering too late that it had gone cold.
“But it’s a good plan,” Krawczyk said. “All those objectives and everything? Very well-organized. We can still totally do that, if you want.”
“How do you know this? About the stage?”
“You’re not the only one who knows where the Admins hang out. Hung out. Will hang out. I checked it out last week, but then I got framed for all the hoodoo in town. End of exploration. Go directly to jail. Don’t pass Go.” Krawczyk made a noise like a game show buzzer.
The sound of banging pots rang from the kitchen. The desk bell dinged, followed shortly by the sound of Merilee’s voice, raised in query. On the street outside, two miners started a shove fight, upsetting their mule, who brayed and kicked the air.
Krawczyk watched me choke down my pride, her head cocked to the side like a spaniel.
“We’ll take the stage.” I forced the words out past my ego.
“What was that? Couldn’t hear you.”
“Stage,” I said, louder.
“That’s a great idea! But we still need a bankroll, oh Brooding One.” Krawczyk winked. “I think you should go rip off the faro dealer. Objective one and all that shit.”
#
Intermission
Billy Minor and the Canyon
Billy Minor led his pack animals, Junior Mule and Dorothy Mule, along a narrow trail. Steep, rugged hills rose to either side, dotted with tough, prickly bushes clinging to the rocky soil. He had no particular destination in mind. He trusted his nose to find a good spot to set up camp, somewhere with water, shelter from the wind, and a ripe place to start digging.
Forty years, he’d traipsed the Madres, the Inyos, the Gabriels, the San Jacintos, and others with names only an Indian could pronounce. Strikes had been rare, good veins even rarer. The money, when he had it, had pissed through his fingers and soaked into the pockets of card sharks, faro dealers, whores, and con men. Didn’t stop him from digging in the mountains for more, hiking deep into the lonely places, risking his scalp, braving mountain storms, freezing his keister off, melting it in hinges-of-hell heat, hunting for scarce water and scarcer riches.
It was what he knew. It was what he did.
Even had the right name for it. Minor. Miner. He’d been born for it, one might say.
Right now, his nose led him higher into the Inyo Mountains, along a dry wash canyon trail. Ahead, his nose said. Keep on going this’a’way.
The sun walloped him like a ten-pound hammer. The giant, burning ball had always felt so much closer the higher Billy ventured into the mountains, the air so thin and hot, it was like breathing from a fire. At night, the temperature would plummet so low, he’d lie under three blankets and still not feel warm enough.
Clumps of yellow rabbitbrush and thick stands of creosote hemmed the trail he followed. Grasshoppers fizzed away at his approach, and dragonflies darted about.
Billy paused at a narrow gap in the vegetation to his left, promising either a cut into a new canyon or a dead end. His nose was saying to take the cut and see where it led. His gut was telling him to stay the hell out. He never understood where such feelings came from—God, or the Devil, or gas from a sloppy plate of beans and tortillas—but he’d never gone wrong in trusting either his nose or his gut. When they disagreed... well, he couldn’t recall the last time that happened.
“That old Paiute’s got you spooked,” he told Junior Mule. The young bluenose rotated an ear in his direction and reserved comment.
Two days before, Billy had come upon a Paiute family trekking out of the mountains with all their worldly goods packed on their backs. They all stopped, and Billy had commenced to palavering with the old man of the family, a dried-up geezer with more wrinkles than teeth and a better command of the English language than most of the Injuns he knew—better than many a white man. Billy had shared his salt pork and coffee, whereas the Paiutes offered up some cornmeal and wild onions. Mama Paiute had cooked up a meal while Billy and Papa Paiute squatted for a smoke and a talk.
“Where y’all headed?” Billy asked.
“Away. Far away.”
“Better hunting grounds?”
The old man’s lips thinned, and he shook his head like a doctor pronouncing the patient dead. “Mountains bad. Always bad, now many bad.”
“Bad?”
“Inyo angry. Many angry. Nimerigar many.”
Billy knocked the dead wattle out of his pipe and fished for another pinch of tobacco from the pouch at his waist. “The mountains are angry?” he asked, thinking, Earthquakes? Rockslides? And what the hell’s a nimmereggar? Another word for colored folk?
“Inyo angry. Inyo is Paiute word.” Papa touched his chest. “Inyo is spirit. Long time spirit live in mountain near Paiute. Bad spirit. Paiute... ah... peace with spirit. Peace with Nimerigar. Paiute stay away deep mountain. Nimerigar stay away Paiute.”
“He don’t mess with you, and you don’t mess with him.”
Papa Paiute inclined his head and accepted the lit pipe. He sucked in a lungful of smoke and let it dribble from his nostrils.
“What’s this spirit look like?” Billy asked. “In case I run into him.”
“No go deep mountain, Bill-ee. Spirit many angry. Bill-ee go deep mountain, Bill-ee die.”
Mama Paiute shrieked. A six-foot rattler swirled out from under a brush near where she’d been rooting around for firewood. It came right at her like it had a personal grudge. When she ran, the snake chased her across the camp. At least that was what it looked like at the time. Billy surmised that the snake was more likely trying to get away and picked the clearest path to freedom. Billy blew it in half with his single-barrel twelve gauge, ending its snaky plans, whatever they may have been.
He offered to skin it and fry up the meat, but the Paiutes were having none of it.
“Inyo angry, Inyo angry,” they kept saying.
The family wolfed down their bacon and corn cakes, packed up, and vanished quicker than fried chicken at a church social. Billy grilled chunks of rattlesnake over the open fire, but it tasted funny, so he threw it out. The next day, he ignored their advice and continued his journey deeper into the mountains.
“And now look at us,” Billy said to his mules as he studied the cleft in the trail. “Spooked by an ignorant savage and an addle-pated snake. Well, come on, then. Let’s go see what’s up this’a’way.”
He tugged the lead, and Junior Mule followed, pulling Dorothy behind. Billy sidled between the bushes, scraping and scratching through dry limbs and prickly thorns that caught on his clothes and seemed to pull him back. He forged ahead, ripping away from the brush and fighting his way through the vegetation. And he was rewarded, by God, with a split in the canyon wall, revealing a trail into a deep-walled cut. In his experience, such hidden cuts led to higher elevations and remote, untouched valleys with water and good spots for digging up silver or copper, sometimes even gold. A pessimist would have said they led to a blank wall and a long trip back to where he started.
Billy was an optimist at heart.
However, night was coming on, so he pitched camp.
“Come tomorrow, Junior,” he told his lead mule, “we’ll go see if Mr. Inyo’s got some gold he wants to share.”
Feeling restless, Billy broke camp at first light, loaded his mules, and resumed the narrow canyon trail he’d been following the previous night. As he walked, he caught glimpses of a pocket canyon, just like he’d figured there’d be, whenever the trail topped out on a rise. By midmorning, the mockingbirds competed with the jays for who could tell the best story.
Billy felt it was close. What it was remained to be seen, but Billy had a good feeling that morning. His gut had ceased its moaning about unseen problems and seemed to be in agreement with his nose. Somewhere up this trail would be a strike. He knew it all the way down to his bones.
That high up, the air held a chill long into the morning, and breathing came harder. He forced himself to pause now and again to let both him and the mules blow a little and catch their breaths. Jagged, red cliffs of sandstone rose to each side of the trail, which was choked in places by sage and thorny little wait-a-minute bushes. Sand burrs dotted the hems of his trousers, and one had somehow snuck its way into his boot, causing Billy to have to stop and pick it out. A tiny waterfall of sand poured out with it.
After a dogleg right and a push through a twisted maze of cholla cactus, he found it. Like the neck of a bottle, the trail opened without warning, and the sight was enough to give Billy a pause. He’d seen some things wandering the mountains for four decades, but this sight took his breath away.
Far from where he’d abandoned the main trail, what first appeared as a spot of green in the distance had emerged as a full-fledged oasis in the arid landscape. Aspens and elms and pine trees all backed up against a ridgeline, from which a stream of water streaked a white line down a sheer cliff. He’d found a miraculous little pocket canyon buried deep in the Inyos, as rich and fertile as the surrounding mountains were arid and harsh. It was like the tales of Shangri-la.
“We made it,” he told his mules.
Junior dragged back against the lead rope. He’d been acting balky and foolish all day, and Dorothy wasn’t much better. Normally the more placid of the two, Dorothy had brayed and danced around in eye-rolling nonsense at every bottle fly and yellow jacket that passed her nose.
Didn’t matter how stupid the critters were being. The enticement of water meant no turning back. Both skins and all three of his canteens were dry. With nothing but sand and shed snake skins behind him and a waterfall directly ahead, Billy had one choice of direction. It was sultry and hot down in the narrow canyon, and his throat was parched. The sight of free-flowing water was enough to make him a little cranky.
“Come on, dammit,” he snapped.
When he looked again, something registered that he hadn’t noticed at first. Thin trails of smoke arose from several spots in the dense forest growth—the kind of smoke that only came from campfires. Several of them.
“Dad-gummit!” Billy stomped his foot. “Somebody beat me to it.”
A sense of motion to his right startled him. The lead rope jerked out of his hand as Junior brayed in fear and Dorothy bucked and kicked. Billy whirled—or at least he tried to. Turned out his whirling days were far behind him. He stumbled, off-balance.
A blow thudded on the back of Billy’s head, and the lights went out.