The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl Read Online Free PDF Page B

he could assume the windows hadn’t been broken by the mudslide. She wasn’t suffocated, or crushed, just . . . entombed.
    If she’d gotten into the car with my clothes, she’d be doomed,
he thought.
I wouldn’t have my cell phone.
    Denis thought about that for a long while. Her screams went on, more quietly, with longer pauses in between bursts.
    Jane was . . . messy. She would be trouble in his life, he knew, even if he took steps to save her. She would not be grateful; being saved by Denis would infuriate and offend her. She would spread stories about him to her friends, ruin his reputation, become a nuisance. Jane was opinionated and loud. He didn’t know what he’d ever seen in her, truly, apart from her modest physical charms.
    She stopped screaming.
Must have gotten tired,
Denis thought. She still had a fair bit of air, probably.
    Denis remembered his fantasy of stabbing Jane, gouging her out of his life with swift penetrations. That was no good. That was
messy
.
    This was better. Seamless. Clean, in its way, despite the mud.
    Besides, it wasn’t
his
fault. She’d tried to steal his clothes, his phone. If she had succeeded, she would have been doomed just the same. “Far be it from me to interfere with your choices,” he said aloud. “I won’t impose my patriarchal paradigm on you. A man rescuing a woman is such an antiquated notion anyway, isn’t it?” He dressed methodically, brushed dirt from his jeans, and began the long walk back down the hill to town. She’d told him to walk back, hadn’t she? He was only doing what she wanted.
    Two days after leaving his lover to die, Denis sat down on the tile of his kitchen floor, leaning back against the white refrigerator. He wondered if Jane was dead. He wondered how he could have done such a thing to her—but in a way, he didn’t regret it. He hadn’t taken the knife, after all, hadn’t stabbed her in the back, hadn’t given in to his homicidal urges. If he was guilty of anything, he told himself, it was simple negligence.
    His cell phone probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. Wireless service was spotty in the hills. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t tried to make the call, did it? Not really.
    Denis got up from the floor and went into his living room. He looked at his reproduction of Rauschenberg’s famous 1951
White Painting,
the triptych of blank white panels. Rauschenberg had been making a statement about content in art, but Denis just liked the idea that something so clean and simple and unadorned—indeed,
anti
-adorned—could hang in museums, be reproduced in art books, be talked about by critics for decades. He disliked most of Rauschenberg’s other work, especially the horrendous goat-with-a-tire sculpture, but this one . . . this was something special.
    Normally, looking at the triptych soothed him, as much as counting to nine did.
    Not tonight. It reminded him, in a melodramatic way, of Jane’s pale skin.
    He suddenly remembered that he’d left the knife, the blanket, and their trash in the hills, so close to Jane’s tomb. What if the police found those things, and suspected foul play, and somehow traced it back to him? He couldn’t let a loose end like that dangle.
    Denis sighed. He would have to go back. Take his car up into the hills, to the site of the mudslide, the site of Jane’s burial alive. Not just to get the things he’d left behind, but to stand by the mud and think. That might provide closure for him. It was such a painful cliché, returning to the scene of a crime—but he hadn’t actually committed a crime, he reminded himself, not in any
real
way. So it would be more like . . . visiting a grave.
    And he could try his cell phone, just to prove to himself that it wouldn’t have worked anyway, even if he’d tried.
    Denis got his coat, put on his muddy boots, and headed for the hills.

Fireguard
----
    Marzi sat at her drafting table and worked on inking the next issue of her comic. She was winding up a major story