Chapter 11
“Oh, you took great care to cover your tracks, my dear,” Sergei Zhukovsky told his long-estranged wife. “Great care, indeed. It’s not every day a person just drops off the face of the earth. But that’s what you did.”
“How did you find me?”
“I’ve had Pinkerton agents on your trail for the past ten years. I would have gone out looking for you myself but”—Zhukovsky rubbed his right thigh—“travel isn’t as easy as it once was.” He sipped his brandy. “An agent found you purely by accident. He was passing through Wolfwater a month ago and found this beautiful, elegant woman running her own saloon. In Wolfwater. Texas. Suspicious, he asked around about you and found out that no one—not a single person he spoke to in Wolfwater—knew where you’d come from or anything about your previous life. You see, my dear, sometimes mysteries alone attract attention.”
Julia heaved a ragged sigh. She lifted her brandy and swallowed a goodly portion to take the edge off her nerves. When she’d set the glass back down, she scowled across the table at her former husband. Yes, former. She could not, would not, call him her husband. Not after what he, in his savagery and greed, had done to her family. What he’d tried to do to her when in her fury and desperation she’d snuck into his office to rob back the money he’d stolen from her father.
Julia had no doubt that in Zhukovsky’s own rage he would have murdered her after he’d had his way with her. She’d known too well that reckless, killing glint in his eyes.
“What do you want from me?”
“Money,” Zhukovsky said. “Every last dime you stole from me . . . times two.” He grinned coldly.
“What?” Julia scowled. “I don’t have that kind of cash. Most of my money is tied up in my business!”
“Get it. If I don’t have one hundred forty thousand dollars by the end of the month, I will reveal the secret of who you truly are, my dear. Not only that”—again, that wolfish smile—“I’ll have you arrested and imprisoned for common thievery and attempted murder.”
Julia hardened her jaws and slammed her open right hand down on the table. “Damn you, Serg! That money belonged to my family. I had every right to it!”
The smile on the Russian’s mustached face broadened. Again, the monocle glinted in the sheen from the wan overhead lamps. “Prove it. You see, you might have done a good job of covering your tracks, Sylvia, but when I embezzled that money from your father, I did a rather supreme job of covering my own tracks. Neither you nor anyone else could prove that money came from your father’s business.”
Julia stared across the table at the sick, jaded creature before her, who felt supremely self-satisfied with the vise he had her in. She’d never loved him. She’d only married him because her father had wanted that. Howard Jones, suffering from the bad effects of smoking too many cigars, and having had a previous bout with rheumatic fever, had thought the dashing, young foreigner he’d brought in to manage his business dealings would be an ideal mate for his only daughter, Miss Sylvia Jones, fresh out of finishing school.
At the time, Sergei Zhukovsky had been charming and deferring. He’d shown little of the man he really was until after he and Sylvia were married. Then, little by little, the oafish, irritable, self-centered, and greedy man had begun to appear . . . until Sylvia’s father had realized only too late that Zhukovsky had been stealing from him, while pretending to invest with Jones’s best interests in mind.
After her father’s long, painful death, followed closely by that of her mother, Sylvia had decided to take matters into her own hands . . . to take back what rightfully belonged to her, to disappear and start another life for herself in the West.
She’d vowed that never again would she hitch her star to a man. After what Zhukovsky had done, she could never trust another man again.
She looked down at her hands wrapped around the brandy glass. They were shaking so hard that brandy threatened to slop over the sides.
“Oh, come now, my dear,” Zhukovsky said. “Stiff upper lip!”
Julia drew another deep breath and glared across the table at him. “You’re really enjoying this.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, I am. You see, I’ve waited years for this! To see the comeuppance of the slattern that crippled me, almost killed me . . . ruined my health for the rest of my life.”
“You had it coming!”
“Be that as it may . . .”
“I told you—I can’t afford your price, Serg. I don’t have that kind of cash on hand.”
“You have a month. Get a loan. I’m sure you have plenty of collateral in your little establishment. I hear it’s quite the success.” Zhukovsky raked his goatish eyes across her robe. “And I’d also speculate that there is a man or two in or around Wolfwater who might float you a note. For a certain price.”
He cackled out a girlish laugh.
Julia felt hot blood rise in her face.
It was his turn to slap the table . . . in victory. “Oh, this is priceless!” When his raking laughter settled, he sat back in his chair, raised his cane above the table, and poked it at her as though aiming a rifle. “One hundred forty thousand dollars by the end of the month. I’ll send my men for you, as I did this evening. You will bring it to me here, and then you will be free to carry on with your charlatan ways.”
“But—”
“Gentlemen!” Zhukovsky yelled at the door. “Please return my guest to town. Don’t forget the bag!”
He laughed as the men filed into the room and gave the former Sylvia Jones the same brutish treatment they had before. She struggled as futilely as she had before, hearing beneath her own gag-muffled curses the insane laughter of the man she’d been foolish enough to marry.
* * *
Catfish moved out from around a boulder and used the barrel of his Yellowboy to shove a pine bough aside. Here he had a clear view of the cabin’s back wall. The stabled horses were maybe forty yards ahead and off to his right.
The big gray had winded Catfish.
That was all right. He’d expected the horses to wind him. Women, dogs, and horses were the bane of a lawman’s existence. As in poker, you played the cards you were dealt.
Catfish smiled to himself. Here he was, already back seeing himself as a lawman again.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, old son. Like Brazos said, neither one of you is a spring chicken, and you haven’t taken down any outlaw . . . much less an outlaw of Frank Thorson’s desperate caliber . . . in a good many years. Heck, you can’t even catch your arch catfish enemy, Bubba Jones.
Still, he’d be hanged if he didn’t feel the excitement. That urge for vengeance was a good feeling, too. He hadn’t felt that for a while. Now he was here, and he was going to avenge Abel and do what he could to pry Bethany away from these desperadoes.”
He released the pine bough, turned to his right, and strode as quietly as he could toward the stable and corral. Several of the other horses had winded him now and were moving uneasily toward the near fence, lifting their snouts high, working their noses. Likely, Thorson and whoever else was in the cabin with him had not posted pickets. If they had, Catfish would have known it by now.
They were confident in the cabin’s isolation . . . and in their own cunning . . . to believe they’d not been trailed. They’d shot both lawmen in Wolfwater, and most of the good citizens had obviously been too afraid of Thorson’s reputation to form or join a posse.
Good, good. Let the scoundrels rest easy . . .
Catfish stepped up beside another pine and looked at the horses again. They were about twenty feet between him and the gate. He brushed his fist across his nose and grinned.
Catfish, you old son of a devil.
What’re you gonna do?
He knew exactly what he was going to do. He’d done it before, and it had confused his quarry enough before that they’d been fairly easy pickin’s. Of course, they hadn’t been Frank Thorson, but . . .
Catfish, you old devil . . .
He just hoped Brazos was still patient enough to follow his lead, as he had in years gone by.
Keeping a cautious eye skinned on the cabin’s two rear windows, Catfish moved slowly up to the corral gate. Quickly but quietly, he slid the wire loop up over the corral’s end post, then kicked the gate open wide. The horses were milling around edgily.
Stepping back from the gate opening, Catfish removed his hat and waved it. “Come on, you cayuses—get movin’!” he whispered.
Frank Thorson’s big gray put his head down and shook it, then gave a shrill whinny and bounded forward and out the open gate. The others, whickering and prancing and lifting dust, followed suit, keeping a wary eye on Catfish, who kept waving his hat.
The thunder of the horses rose.
Men’s incredulous voices sounded inside the cabin. Catfish dropped to a knee, raised the Yellowboy to his shoulder, and clicked the hammer back. He gazed down the Winchester’s barrel through the dust wafting around him.
Boots pounded inside the cabin, and just as the last two horses galloped past him, heading into the tall-and-uncut east end of the shack, the back door opened. A man stuck his hatless head out, then turned to yell into the cabin behind him, “The horses are out an’ on the run!”
He grabbed a hat and rifle, then ran out into the yard and into the dust kicked up by the horses. Catfish recognized him as the outlaw Wade Cormorant—longtime horse-and-cattle rustler, when he wasn’t jumping mine claims.
“Hold it, Wade!” Catfish bellowed, tracking the man with the Yellowboy. “It’s your old pal Catfish Charlie Tuttle!”
The man stopped suddenly, boots skidding in the sand and dirt. He hadn’t seen Catfish yet, but he saw him now. As three others ran out of the cabin, some with holsters and shell belts hooked over their shoulders, Cormorant shouted, “It’s Catfish Charlie! Kill him!”
Catfish dropped the man instantly, then dropped one of the others, while the third man fell to a knee and raised an old Spencer repeater to his shoulder. Catfish recognized the man as another bottom-feeder—Henry Winterthorn, a fellow owlhoot of the recently departed Cormorant.
More shouts rose from the cabin.
There was a loud crash and then Brazos shouted, “Put ’em down, fellas—it’s Brazos McQueen and I got one helluva chip on my shoulder for the Thorson brothers!”
More loud stomping from inside the cabin, as well as cursing and shouting.
Then a veritable fusillade arose and two more men ran out of the cabin, crouching and shooting six-shooters toward Catfish, lips stretched back from their teeth. The one on the right was Frank Thorson. Catfish would have recognized the tall blond man anywhere. Just as one of Thorson’s bullets screeched through the air, two inches off Catfish’s right cheek, before plunking into a corral post behind the old lawdog, Catfish drilled one into Frank’s left knee.
Frank screamed, fell, and rolled, clutching the ruined limb.
Catfish dropped the man Frank had run out of the cabin with, sending him stumbling backward and into the cabin’s rear wall, triggering both six-shooters in his hands straight above his head. Meanwhile, another man ran out, clutching his arm and swinging around to shoot his lone hogleg back into the cabin.
Catfish saw a flash inside the cabin, heard the roar of Brazos’s Henry. His target stumbled straight backward. Catfish shot him between the shoulder blades. The man stumbled forward and dropped to his knees before twisting around and rolling onto his right shoulder and hip, shaking as he expired.
“No!” came a cry from inside the cabin. “Don’t shoot me! Ah, hell—don’t shoot me!”
The thunder of footsteps grew louder until Catfish saw Skinny Thorson come running out of the cabin and into the yard. He took three long running strides, then fell to his knees, dropping the gun in his right hand and raising both hands high above his head.
“Don’t shoot me, Catfish!” Skinny cried, his ferret face twisted grotesquely with fear. “I’m too young to die!”
Slow footsteps sounded behind the cowardly kid.
Then Brazos stood in the doorway behind him, his Henry repeater now resting on his shoulder. Gray smoke curled from the barrel. He stared over the kid’s head at Catfish.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Have you seen Beth?”
Brazos nodded, inclined his head back and to one side.
“How is she?”
“Not good.”
Catfish turned to Frank. Frank looked up at him, wide-eyed. “Now you just wait, Catfish. You just wai—”
The thunder of Catfish’s Yellowboy cut him off. He flopped over on his back, a neat round hole in the middle of his forehead.