Chapter 28
The Black Cat was hopping even now after five in the morning, with the dawn showing a pale wash between the peaks of the Rawhide Buttes, east of Wolfwater.
The reason the humble, deep, narrow, mud brick hovel was still open was simple. Customers from the Black Cat had had the “discussion” with Brazos. Likely jumped him in the dark, had him outnumbered.
That was the only way to have a “discussion” with Brazos McQueen. Guilt raked Catfish. He should have been here to back his partner’s play. On the other hand, they were both spread thin. Too thin. They needed an additional man or two. They needed two or three in addition to the two old former cowpunchers holding down the jailhouse after regular business hours.
Catfish would like to know just who the men who’d jumped his deputy were. Some were likely to still be in the Black Cat.
He stepped up to the batwing doors, peered over them and into the light and shadows cast by a dozen ceiling and bracket lamps. The mechanical piano was still getting a workout. Two drunk doxies and three drunk cowboys were dancing near the piano, which abutted the watering hole’s rear wall. Another dozen were sitting at tables, drinking and playing cards or bellied up to the bar. A conversational roar echoed around the room.
There was a particularly lighthearted, jovial air about the place. Sort of like the inside of a schoolhouse when the teacher was out back fetching firewood, say.
When the cat was away. Or a maligned curfew was lifted . . .
Two more doxies were just then coming down the stairs running up the middle of the building’s rear wall. They were holding up a drunk cowpoke between them. The man’s eyes were glassy, and he was having a hard time keeping his chin from drooping down against his chest. His hat hung down his back by a chin thong. He was dragging his heels across the risers, stumbling. The doxies regarded him and each other with concern, giving starts each time the man stumbled.
When the doxies—both very scantily clad, indeed, their hair in disarray after what had obviously been a long night of toil—and the cowboy reached the bottom of the stairs, they ushered him across the room, weaving around tables. The other customers laughed and made jokes as the pair headed for the batwings. As they did, the others followed them with their smiling countenances. One by one, and two by two, the other customers’ gazes found Catfish staring in at them, a hard angry expression on his fleshy mug.
When the girls saw Catfish, their eyes widened. They slowed their pace, exchanged skeptical glances, then continued to the batwings. Catfish stepped to one side, giving them and the half-conscious cowpoke passage. Once outside, they set the man down on the bench. He promptly fell to one side and drew his legs up, raising his knees to his chest. He closed his eyes and immediately began snoring.
“Long night, ladies?” Catfish said.
They both regarded him sheepishly, then pushed through the batwings and hurried back across the room and up the stairs at the rear, casting cautious gazes back over their shoulders.
Catfish shouldered the Yellowboy as he pushed through the batwings, took one step into the saloon, and stopped two feet in front of the louvered doors clattering back into place behind him. He quickly surveyed the smoky den of iniquity. As he did, the dancers stopped dancing, one of the girls stumbling on a too-high heel and saying, “Ouch!” Catfish had heard her above the piano’s maniacal, tinny, automatic playing. The conversational hush in the room had died, however.
Now all the customers stared at Catfish, their smiles and grins gone, replaced by stony, vaguely guilty expressions.
Catfish was glad when the piano wound down to a halt at the end of “Little Brown Jug.”
He saw a hand move furtively beneath a tabletop roughly fifteen feet ahead, and to his right. The ringed hand of an obvious card sharp—a dandy with a pencil-thin mustache with curled and waxed ends—he brought the Yellowboy down quickly, drew the hammer back to full cock, and drilled a round into the table before the sharpie could, shattering a shot glass and causing pasteboards, coins, and greenbacks to fly.
The man gave a yelp and jerked back in his chair. He turned to glare, red-faced, at Catfish.
“Hands above the table, friends!” Catfish barked out as the echoes of the Winchester’s report dwindled to silence.
Catfish looked at the beefy bartender Burt Whitaker, who also owned the place. The man was leaning forward, ham-sized, red fists clenched atop his plankboard bar. Catfish narrowed one eye as he said, “What’re you doin’ open, Burt? You was supposed to close hours ago.”
“Now, look here, Catfish!”
“No, you look here, you walleyed son of Satan!” Catfish barked. “Friends of yours might have had a conversation with my deputy, but that don’t change the rules! Who are they?” He turned to the fifteen or twenty men standing or sitting around the room. He narrowed his eye again with menace. “They still here?”
“No, they ain’t still here!”
“Names!”
“You know I can’t give you names!” Whitaker barked back at Catfish, glancing cautiously around the room where his customers sat or stood, resembling wax statues. The only movement in the room was the tobacco smoke webbing under the gas lamps hanging from the ceiling, some attached to wagon wheels.
“Don’t doubt it a bit,” Catfish said. He had a feeling he knew who the culprits were. Likely, a couple of men known as the Logan brothers, who, along with their father, R.J. Logan, owned and operated the Logan Box L–Tumbling 8 Ranch, several miles south of Wolfwater, in butte and brush country. The other culprits were likely several men who rode with them and a couple of townsmen—no-accounts, all. All Black Cat regulars. The Logans and a few men came to town two or three times a week to gamble, carouse with the working girls, and get puking drunk. Catfish had had several in his lockup more times than he could count on both hands. They’d usually slept off their drunks, paid their fines for drunk and disorderly, fetched their horses from a livery barn, and galloped back to their ranch, casting sour looks over their shoulders at Catfish.
They were trouble.
They’d likely gotten drunk here, seen Brazos making his rounds, and decided to set a trap for him.
Catfish should have been here.
He clenched his teeth, barely controlling his rage. He felt like drilling a round through the jowly Whitaker’s fat, red face. Barring that, however, he decided to do the next best thing.
“I know I can’t make you give up their names,” Catfish said, ejecting the spent round from the Yellowboy’s breech. It pinged and rolled around on the floor near his boots as he stood with his feet spread a little more than a shoulder’s width apart. “But I sure can blow off steam!”
“No—wait, now!” Whitaker said, his jaws suddenly hanging, eyes widening in fear. He straightened and, holding both big hands up, palms out, took one step back, saying, “Don’t you do it, Catfish!”
As Catfish levered a fresh round into the Winchester’s action, grinning devilishly, Whitaker squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head to one side, believing the next round fired here tonight would be through his head. Catfish raised the Yellowboy to his shoulder, aimed toward the bar, and squeezed the trigger.
Whitaker yelped as the .44 round went caroming over his thick, left shoulder to smash into the back bar mirror behind him. Shattered glass rained down over the shelves beneath the mirror, screeching like schoolgirls finding a snake in the privy.
Whitaker turned to gape at the first shattered panel of his beloved mirror. It was the only thing worth a crap in the otherwise rough-hewn establishment. He constantly polished all three wood-framed panels lovingly. BC for “Black Cat” was stenciled in gold leaf into the center of each panel.
Still grinning in ominous delight, Catfish racked a fresh round into the Yellowboy’s action and raised the rifle to his shoulder.
“Oh, God, no!” Whitaker bellowed, throwing both hands up again toward Catfish, his dung-brown eyes cast in terror. “Don’t you—not again!”
His plea was punctuated by the Yellowboy’s roar, sending another round into the polished mirror’s second panel, to the right of the terrified barman, whose thin, greasy gray-brown hair hung to his shoulders. The slug drilled into the stenciled monogram. More glass rained until there were only a few shards left in the panel.
Again, Catfish racked a fresh round.
Whitaker screamed girlishly, almost sobbing, as yet another round took out the third and final panel of his beloved mirror.
“Oh, you devil!” Whitaker howled into his beefy left forearm, which he held over his mouth, tears dribbling down his fleshy cheeks from his bereaved eyes. “Oh, you devil!”
As Catfish racked yet another round into the Winchester and turned the gun on the room, making sure none of the customers was taking advantage of his distraction with the mirror to drill one of their own rounds into his back, he said, “Thank you, Whitaker. Comin’ from you, you copper-riveted spawn of a back-alley cur, I’ll take that as a compliment. Now,” he added, raising his voice, “everyone out!”
Everyone in the room scrambled to his feet or jerked into motion. While the remaining two girls in the room went running up the stairs, holding their skirts above their bare ankles, the men stampeded toward the batwings. Only a couple took the time to throw back the last of their drinks or to take finishing drags off their quirleys or cigars.
The gambler who’d been reaching for his pistol cast a flared-nostril glare at the lawman as he, too, headed for the doors.
“Hold on,” Catfish said, grabbing the man’s arm and turning him around to face him. He was tall and thin with the pale, washed-out pallor of a man who rarely saw the sun. He’d taken the time from his gambling, however, to buy himself a tailored checked suit and red foulard tie pierced by a diamond pin. He probably thought the tony duds impressed his opponents, and that the ladies liked the cut.
Catfish said, “I’ll take that.” He pulled the man’s pistol from its holster. It was a brass-plated, cartridge-firing. 38 LeMat, with a twenty-gauge barrel under the smaller one piggybacking it. The pearl grips shone in the gaslight that was now competing with the light of the rising sun. “Hmm,” Catfish said. “That’s right impressive. I’ll hold on to it for you . . . for safekeeping.”
“For how long?” the sharpie snapped.
“Till you’re dead! Now, get your raggedy behind out of town an’ don’t you ever step foot in Wolfwater again!”
The gambler’s mouth opened to give a retort. Apparently giving it further consideration, however, he closed his mouth, swung around, and hurried through the batwings. Gone.
Catfish turned to the last man left in the place. Whitaker stood behind his bar, hands to his face as he stared in grief and shock at his ruined mirror. “Staying open was a costly mistake. Second only to you letting those jackals rough up Brazos.”
Catfish rested the Yellowboy on his shoulder and turned to the batwings. He knew he’d never get the names of the assailants out of the man.
“Who’s going to pay for my bar?” Whitaker demanded.
“You are,” Catfish growled, and went out.
He slid the Yellowboy into his saddle scabbard, mounted Jasper, and put the tired mount into a slow walk in the direction of the jailhouse. There was a little wagon traffic on the street, but not much. The sun still hadn’t cleared the Rawhides. A few shopkeepers were sweeping their stoops and setting goods out on their boardwalks for display. Several nodded to Catfish; Catfish nodded back. He knew most of them, though in the years since he’d turned in his badge and holed up in his old shack with Hooligan Hank, there were several he didn’t recognize.
As he and Jasper drew within a few yards of the jailhouse, he reined in sharply. He’d just seen a man draw his head suddenly back from the adobe brick building’s far front corner. Catfish had glimpsed a red shirt and the gleam of a gun in the man’s hand as well.
“Giddyup, boy,” Catfish said, and clucked Jasper ahead.
He drew his bone-gripped .44 from its holster and clicked the hammer back with a weary sigh.
Would the trouble never end?