Chapter 30
“Ah, hell . . . er, I mean heck . . . Julia,” Catfish said, inwardly condemning himself for his language once more—had he been raised by wolves?!—“everybody loves you.”
She blinked, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her nose. She shook her head, and, with a glance at Beth, who continued to swab her forehead with the cool cloth, and then at Catfish, said, “But you two are my only friends.” She patted the bed again. “Sit down.”
“Ah, heck,” Catfish said, chuckling, holding his hat over his heart, his big fingers worrying the edges of the brim. “I might break it, send us both tumbling.”
Beth looked up at him, smiling.
Julia chuckled, then frowned again. “Please . . . don’t make me laugh, you lummox.”
“All right, then; all right, then.” Chuckling, Catfish eased his considerable weight down on the edge of the bed. It squawked and sagged deeply, but he didn’t think it would break.
Julia looked seriously up at him and Beth. “I have something important I want to say.”
Catfish shared a curious glance with Beth. Turning back to Julia, he said, “What’s that, honey?”
“I’ve sent for an attorney. I’ve never had a will. Didn’t see much need for one. But now . . .” She looked from Beth to Catfish, her eyes gravely serious. “If I go, and there’s a good chance of that because the doctor wasn’t able to dig the bullet out—”
“Oh, no!” Beth interrupted her. “Julia, no!” Tears glistened in her eyes.
“Please, Beth,” Julia said commandingly.
Beth looked at her, sucking back tears.
“I want you both to have this place.”
“Now, Julia,” Catfish said, still worrying the brim of the hat in his lap.
“Catfish, please,” she said, scowling at him. “Let me finish.”
Catfish pursed his lips and nodded.
“I’m giving you each half. If you don’t want it—I know you both have other lives—Beth, I know you’ll want to get back to teaching soon, then sell it. But it’s yours to do with as you please.”
Beth sobbed and covered her mouth, choking back more cries.
Julia looked at Catfish. She was the one who appeared as the schoolteacher now, lecturing a pair of students who were testing her patience. “Will you do that for me? If I pass—and I’m not saying I will, but I might if that bullet shifts around—it will give me peace knowing that all I built here in Wolfwater will go to my only two friends.”
Again, she looked at Beth before shuttling her gaze back to Catfish. “Two friends I love with all my heart.”
Tears glazed her eyes.
She rested her head back against her pillow. “You haven’t answered me,” she said with that schoolmarm’s crisp impatience.
Catfish was choking back sobs of his own. Staring down at the hat he was giving a workout, he nodded, then said, “Yes . . . of course, Julia. We’ll do good by you, my lady. You deserve that much.”
Beth sobbed again and nodded. “Yes, Julia . . . anything you want.”
“Now, Beth, would you leave Catfish and me alone for a minute?”
Beth nodded. “Yes, of course.” She rose, dropped the cloth in the water, and lifted the basin. Turning toward the door, she said, “I’ll freshen the water.” She stopped at the door and glanced over her shoulder at Julia. “I’m going to bring you some soup.” It was her turn to put some schoolmarm’s command in her voice.
Julia did not respond. She kept her gaze on Catfish. Her eyes were suddenly flat, dark, and stony.
Beth went out and clicked the door shut behind her.
Catfish frowned curiously down at Julia.
“Catfish?” she said.
“Yes, Julia.”
“Kill Sergei for me, will you?” She wrinkled her fine nose with bitter disdain. “And those three henchmen of his. Find them and kill them.”
“Planned to,” Catfish said. “As soon as Brazos is back on the job, I’ll ride out, find those devils’ lair, and kick all three out with a cold shovel.”
“Tell Sergei it’s from me . . .” She quirked a frigid half smile. “Will you?”
Catfish smiled. “Be happy to.” He leaned down and planted a tender kiss on her forehead. “Now I’ll leave and let you get some rest.”
He rose, the bed squawking as it lifted back into place.
He walked to the door.
Behind him, Julia said, “Make sure that shovel is really cold, will you?”
Catfish glanced over his shoulder at her. He smiled and set his hat on his head.
He winked, then opened the door and went out.
He took one step forward, and if he would have taken another one, he would have stepped right smack dab into Grant Dragoman. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, there, Catfish!” the rancher said, laughing.
He was dressed in a Western-cut suit, with a high-crowned cream Stetson and a turquoise-studded neckpiece. His double-breasted charcoal-gray wool jacket was lightly powdered with trail dust. His face was large and handsome, despite leaning toward the dissipation of too much drink and living boldly into his sixties. He even seemed to have most of his large yellowing ivory teeth, Catfish noted with some jealousy as the man stretched his lips in a patronizing smile. He chuckled patronizingly, too, and patted Catfish’s shoulders twice.
More artificial fawning that slopped over into open mockery.
“You’re back on the job, I see. Well, well, imagine that! At your age”—he dropped his gaze to Catfish’s rounded belly—“and, uh, girth!” Again, he patted Catfish’s shoulders twice, chuckling. “Good for you. Never give up, I say!”
His features clouded over suddenly. “Good God— I heard about Julia. Uh . . . Miss Claire. I galloped to town with my foreman—got here as fast as I could.” He tried to step around Catfish, reaching for the handle of Julia’s door. “I’m going to look in on her.”
Catfish didn’t move.
Dragoman peevishly frowned at him. “Step aside, man. You heard me.”
“She’s resting.”
The scowl on the rancher’s face turned more severe. “What’s that?”
“She’s resting. Doesn’t want to be disturbed. How ’bout you an’ me go down an’ drown us an egg in a beer? Now, that’s my kind of breakfast.” Catfish smiled and patted his belly. “I’m on a diet, you see.”
“No, no, no. I want to check in on—” Again, he reached for the door.
Again, Catfish blocked his way.
“What on earth’s gotten into you, Catfish?” the man said, wrinkling his nose with scorn.
“We’re gonna go down an’ have us”—Catfish patted the man’s shoulders twice, firmly—“a little palaver.” He grinned, knowing his teeth weren’t as purty as the rancher’s.
Dragoman studied him, deeply incredulous. Then he shook his head and threw his hands up in supplication. “All right, all right. Have it your way, Catfish.” He gave a derisive laugh. “Let’s go drown an egg and have us a palaver!”
The two men strode down the hall and then down the staircases. Catfish led the rancher to a table a good distance from the other few drinkers and breakfasters in the room. They moved away from where he saw Dragoman’s foreman, Lon Caville, laying out a game of solitaire and nursing his own beer, with a glowing orange egg lolling at the bottom of a dimpled schooner. Caville, a tall, slender, sandy-haired man with a handlebar mustache, caught sight of his boss and Catfish, then scowled.
Dragoman gave the man a slight, dismissive wave as Catfish dragged a chair out from the table with his foot and sank into it. The rancher sat rather indignantly into a chair on the other side of the table, then leaned forward on his elbows, entwining his hands.
Catfish signaled the bartender, a scrawny, mannish-looking woman named Maud Cahill, who’d finally tired after twenty years of running a shotgun ranch south of Wolfwater, after her husband took an Apache arrow to the back of his neck, and moved to town. She’d needed a job to support herself, and Julia gave her one without hesitation. The salty little woman, always attired in a men’s wool shirt, denim jeans, and worn stockmen’s boots, and with a tightly rolled quirley always dangling from one side of her mouth, didn’t exactly harmonize with the tony elegance of the Lone Star Outpost. The Lone Star boasted varnished wood, gleaming mirrors, a brass footrail running along the base of the long, elegant, zinc-topped bar, and deep green velveteen drapes. But Julia gave her the job because she needed one.
That was Julia.
Catfish had known Maud for years. He’d known her husband, too.
She brought the schooners, each with an egg at the bottom, and set one on the table before Dragoman. As she set the other in front of Catfish, she gave him a vaguely questioning look, then shrugged both her skinny shoulders beneath her dark blue wool shirt and, sucking the quirley and blowing the smoke out of her Indian-dark nostrils, headed back to the bar.
“Now, then,” Dragoman said impatiently.
Catfish sat back in his chair, one hand wrapped around his schooner on the table, and thumbed his hat up on his forehead. “Why’d you hire a no-account shooter like Eldon Ring to kill Julia’s husband?”
The man stared across the table at Catfish, with his eyes suddenly bewildered, his jaws loosening until Catfish thought his chin would strike his chest.
“I know all about it,” Catfish said.
“How . . . ? How . . . ?”
“Never mind how. I found Ring dead in a wash after he followed Sergei Zhukovsky and his three henchmen out of Wolfwater. Everybody knows Ring lost his nerve up in Wyoming an’ hasn’t been worth a wrinkled buck bill in years, though he continued playing like he was a stone-cold killer for hire. Dumb as a plug, most likely, to boot.” Catfish took a sip of his beer, licked the foam from his mustached upper lip. “Why’d you hire him?”
Suddenly nervous, Dragoman stared into his schooner, his red face turning even redder, until it was the deep purple of a West Texas sunset just before dark. The skin around his eyes was yellow. The man’s reaction told Catfish he’d guessed right about the man’s ploy.
“I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said to the inch-thick foam at the top of his glass.
“You didn’t want him to be successful, that’s why,” Catfish said, slowly turning his own schooner on the table before him. “You wanted Julia to know you’d hired her husband’s killer, but you didn’t really want him killed.”
The rancher lifted his chin and bunched his purple cheeks until his eyes were slits. “Are you mad?”
“Boilin’ mad. You wanted that crazy Russian to ruin Julia. Why, Dragoman?”
“That’s absolutely insane. You know that, don’t you?” Dragoman sagged back in his chair and slapped one big hand down on the table. “You’re too old for the job, Catfish. Too old. Too much drink!”
“Everyone knows you asked for her hand many times. Just as many times, you offered to buy her out. She didn’t want to marry you and she didn’t want to sell to you. You’re not a man who takes no for an answer. Especially not from a woman. She humiliated you. It’s been eating at you. Finally, when she rode out to your ranch asking for help with her husband, who wants to ruin her, you saw your chance of getting her back. If Zhukovsky ruined her, you could easily buy her out. Maybe even marry her. Her name wouldn’t be worth squat in town if the town found out about her past. She’d need you then, wouldn’t she, Dragoman?”
Catfish grinned then. “The joke’s on you, Dragoman. Julia doesn’t need any man. Least of all, one like you.” He shook his head slowly, his shrewd grin in place. “Doesn’t matter how desperate she got, she’d never marry you. She wouldn’t sell to you, either. No chance!”
Catfish slapped his own hand down on the table, causing the foam to wash up against the sides of his glass. “Oh, and there’s one more joke. This one really puts the pie on your face, Dragoman. It was one of Zhukovsky’s tinhorn henchmen who shot Julia.”
“You’re a fool,” the rancher bit out, flaring his nostrils, miniature bayonets of raw fury hurling from his eyes.
“Maybe,” Catfish said, leaning forward in his chair. “Just know this, Dragoman. If she dies”—he lifted his gaze to the ceiling above the table—“I’m gonna kill you. No amount of men will save you. I will hunt you down, get you alone, and drive a pill right here!”
He touched his right index finger to the middle of his forehead.
A muscle in the rancher’s right cheek twitched.
“I won’t listen to any more nonsense coming from a senile old man. Rest assured, I’ll be having a chat with Mayor Booth about your future. I think he’ll agree you need to spend your remaining years at your catfish hole!”
He thrust his schooner, which he hadn’t taken a single sip from, away from him distastefully, rose from his chair, beckoned his foreman, and stomped toward the door.
Caville gave Catfish a threatening look as he walked past him, hurrying to catch up to his boss.
Catfish pinched his hat brim to him.