Chapter 32
Catfish saddled Brazos’s mount in the stall stable behind the deputy’s cabin.
As he did, he filled the injured man in on what he’d been through earlier—following Julia out of town as she’d followed the raggedy-heeled regulator, Eldon Ring, who was following the tall, pale, odd-looking gent, who’d turned out to be Julia’s husband, who was here in Wolfwater to blackmail her for former transgressions against him. Zhukovsky had been riding with his three henchmen.
Catfish told Brazos about finding Eldon Ring dead in the wash, about Catfish getting ambushed by none other than Black Taggart, and then Julia getting shot by one of Zhukovsky’s men, just when she and Catfish had thought they were both out of the proverbial woods. Leaning against a stout ceiling support post, Brazos, whose battered face still made Catfish flinch, listened raptly.
When Catfish had told him about his recent conversation with Grant Dragoman in the Lone Star Outpost, both men mounted their horses and rode back into Wolfwater. As they rode, scanning the dusty streets around them for more would-be assassins, Brazos told Catfish about the conversation he’d overheard in the back room of the grocery store.
“So some of Wolfwater’s saloon owners—all lesser lights—are plotting to take someone down, eh?” Catfish said, fingering the two days’ worth of beard stubble on his chin. “I’ll be hanged. Who could they be wantin’ to take down . . . and why?”
“I haven’t a clue, Cha’les.”
“An enemy . . . or someone they see as an enemy. Likely, another saloon owner. Competition.”
Brazos glanced at him. “Miss Claire? She’s about the most powerful saloon owner in town.”
Catfish thought it over. “Nah. She couldn’t be that unlucky, could she? I mean, her husband’s already tryin’ to take her down, an’ so far, he’s done a purty good job.” He shook his head. “Nah . . . can’t be. None of the other saloons see her as competition. She’s too far out of the league of all of ’em! Besides, Julia brings in business for everybody!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Brazos said. “I suppose you’re right.”
They’d just swung their horses down a side street and were nearing the Yellow Rose Saloon, near the street’s far southern edge—a long, low wood-framed building with a brush-roofed front gallery shaded by a dusty cottonwood. The building had once been painted yellow, but most of the paint had been worn away by the West Texas weather, leaving only bits of curling pieces and most of the weathered wood exposed.
The Yellow Rose was a favorite hangout for some of the rowdier card players and drinkers in the area. These were the types of men—mostly grub-line riders and border toughs, Mexicans and whites, and a few half-breeds or mestizos—who slunk off to squalid brothels after the saloons closed and were up at first light, ready to play more poker and drink more whiskey at the Yellow Rose. The squalid den practically defined the term “hole-in-the-wall.” A Mexican named Willie Rodriguez owned the place, and he ran it with his pudgy, but pretty, daughter, Carlotta. She was small, but she kept the often-unruly customers in trim with a quick, south-of-the-border temper and a plump iron fist.
“Brazos?” Catfish said as he pulled his rented mount up to one of the three hitchracks fronting the place. The three rails had a total of maybe eight mounts tied to them. “What’re we doin’ here?”
Brazos was about to respond, but stopped when a man’s agonized cry rose from the saloon’s bunkhouse-style bowels. A woman’s angry shriek followed the man’s wail and then there was the clatter of a chair being scraped across the floor and then quick, heavy footsteps. Again, the man wailed above the thumping of the fast-moving feet and jangling spurs.
The wailing and the thumping grew louder, until a man burst through the batwings, followed by a short, wide, brown-skinned young woman in a low-cut, sleeveless white blouse, flowered skirt, and a red bandanna holding her thick dark brown curls back from her face. Carlotta had the man’s right ear pinched between the thumb and index finger of her left hand, and was regaling the man in a chaotic stream of Spanish, spoken too quickly for Catfish to make out more than a few Spanish epithets, including “pig,” “dirty dog,” and “the spawn of curs.” She ushered him across the dilapidated gallery fronting the doors and into the street. When the man had taken three whimpering steps, Carlotta released his ear suddenly and gave his backside a hard kick with her right foot, clad in a gold-buckled black ankle boot.
Her victim, a frequently out-of-work cowpuncher named J.W. Yates, flew forward and went sprawling in a cloud of dust. As he did, Catfish saw that his left ear was bloody. As the hapless fool lay moaning on his belly, sucking air like a landed fish, Carlotta stood before him, feet spread wide, and pointed a bloody obsidian-handled stiletto at him as she spat in English: “If you ever come around here again, spawn of a trash-eating sow, I will hack off your other ear, dry it, and hang it around my neck!”
She spat wickedly in the dirt between the man’s boots, then leaned down to clean off her nasty-looking pigsticker on the man’s left pant leg. She hiked up her skirt to return the stiletto to a small, slender leather sheath strapped to her comely left calf, then regarded the man again. She furiously said, “Teach you to keep your hands to home, cracker!”
She gave a punctuating, satisfied grunt, glanced at Catfish and Brazos sitting their mounts, eyeing her uncertainly, then smiled broadly and said, “Welcome, amigos! Come in and cut the trail dust!”
She swung around and flounced across the gallery and back through the batwings, which shuddered into place behind her.
Catfish returned his gaze to the sobbing J.W. Yates, who clamped his left hand over his left ear.
“Ouch,” Catfish said, turning to Brazos. “That had to hurt!”
“You’re tellin’ me,” Brazos said. “I thought I was in pain. At least I still have both ears.”
“That makes you one up on J.W.”
The two men laughed; then Brazos sobered suddenly, removed his deputy town marshal’s star from his shirt behind his duster, and held it out to Catfish. “Hold that for me, will you, boss?”
Catfish glowered at him. “Who you callin’ ‘boss’?”
“You’re my boss, whether it makes sense or not. You know that, Cha’les. Hold on to that for me.”
Catfish uncertainly plucked the star from the man’s gloved hand.
“For the next minute or so, I’m off the clock,” Brazos said, and swung down from his saddle.
“What in tarnation . . . ?” Catfish eased his own battered bulk out of his own saddle, then tied the reins to a hitchrack and followed Brazos up onto the gallery.
He stopped when, four feet ahead of him, Brazos stopped to peer over the batwings into the Yellow Rose’s thick shadows. From here, Catfish could smell the fetor of tobacco smoke, cheap perfume, and unwashed bodies emanating over the louvered doors. Brazos stood staring over the doors, his back straight. Catfish could see a tight muscle twitch in his neck, just beneath his left ear.
“Oh, oh . . .” Catfish had seen that twitch before.
What had followed hadn’t been no square dance, either . . .
“Now, partner,” Catfish said, squeezing the man’s star in his left hand, leaving his right one free in case he found himself needing to back his partner’s play.
Brazos raised his hands up before him, palms out, and thrust the doors wide. He stepped through them, taking several long strides inside. As he did, Catfish followed him in and then took several steps to the left, toward the bar that ran along the wall on that side of the rough-hewn shack, his right hand on the grips of his .44 . . . just in case.
Brazos strode slowly straight into the room.
At the room’s far end was the faro layout. The faro dealer was the thuggish Duke Scallion—a big, lantern-jawed man, with a dark brown patch beard and a broad nose lumpy at the bridge, where it had been busted several times. The part-time mine guard was clad in a cheap three-piece suit, complete with a faded red ribbon tie and frayed-brimmed bowler hat. Two Mexicans in dusty trail garb and low-crowned straw sombreros stood before Scallion’s table, staring down as Scallion turned over a card on his faro layout.
Scallion smiled up at the two Mexicans and chuckled jeeringly through his teeth, saying, “Sorry, Pancho, my boy. Better luck next . . .”
Scallion let his voice trail off when he slid his gaze around the two Mexicans to see Brazos striding toward him, stiff-backed, the deputy’s hands clenched at his sides. Scallion studied Brazos for about three seconds, his jaws slowly unhinging, until fear glinted in his eyes, and he rose awkwardly from his chair, stumbling backward and knocking the chair over with a loud bang.
The two Mexicans turned to Brazos then, likely seeing the killing fury in the Black man’s eyes, and sidled quickly away and around Brazos, then hurried outside through the batwings. As Brazos stopped ten feet from the faro table, Scallion raised an arm and pointing finger and said, “Now . . . you just hold on. You hold on now, blast you. You got no call . . .”
“I got no call to fill you so full of lead you’ll rattle when you walk?” Brazos asked as Catfish raked his cautious gaze around the room, making sure none of the other customers were about to shoot him in the back. “Was it not you who led me into that trap last night?”
“What?” the faro dealer said, his voice cracking on his exasperation and fear. “Trap? What’re you talkin’ about? Trap!” He glanced around the room at the other customers, all watching intently. “I don’t know what this boy’s even talkin’ about. Why, he’s crazy. Look at him—he musta got drunk an’ fell down. You know how they are!”
He gave a nervous chuckle and then went silent.
The rest of the room was silent, save for the ticking of a clock behind the bar, where Willie Rodriguez and Carlotta stood, regarding Brazos and the faro dealer intently. Carlotta broke the silence to bark out commandingly, “No trouble in here, gring—”
Her father, who couldn’t have stood much over five feet six inches, a slump-shouldered fellow who wore his long hair in a queue down his back, and had a large wart protruding from the side of his nose, nudged her with an elbow. Carlotta looked at him, frowning, then returned her gaze to Brazos and the faro dealer. Likely seeing the direness of the situation and noting that Brazos’s anger was even out of her control, Carlotta held her tongue.
Good idea. Brazos was wound up tighter than a coiled diamondback . . .
Scallion seemed to see that as well. He stumbled back against the plank wall behind him and raised both hands to his shoulders, palms out. “Now, see here . . . now, see here . . . I don’t want no trouble.”
“You bought yourself a whole pack o’ trouble last night, Scallion. Now you can either claw iron or die like the worthless, cowering dog you are!” Brazos raised his hand to his chest, apparently showing his lack of a badge. “See there? I’m taking an hour off. Personal business to attend to, if you get my understandin’?”
Scallion pointed at Brazos again, narrowing one fear-bright eye. “You can’t do this! You can’t do this!” He slid his gaze to Catfish. “Tell him he can’t do this!”
“Still got your badge, Brazos,” Catfish said. “You can have it back when you want it. In the meantime, I got somethin’ in my eye. Got somethin’ in both eyes, it seems. Can’t see a thing!”
To Scallion, Brazos said, “You gonna defend yourself, you gutless cur? Or you gonna die like the cowardly dog you are? Your choice!”
Scallion lowered his hands slowly, stretching his lips back from his teeth and groaning in deep frustration. Suddenly he gave an animal-like wail that sounded like a mother calf giving birth, and it filled the entire room. He thrust his right hand toward the Remington .44 slung low on his right hip. He got the hogleg out of its holster and half raised before Brazos’s Colt bucked and roared, smoke and orange flames lapping from the barrel.
The bullet drilled a puckered blue hole in the dead center of the faro dealer’s forehead, three inches above the bridge of that wedge-shaped, crooked nose. The man fired his own pistol into the floor and began to slide down the wall behind him, when Catfish, who’d been raking his cautious, protective gaze around the room, held that careful gaze on a man sitting at a table near the saloon’s right wall, his back to it. Catfish had seen him when the lawman had first walked into the saloon, saw that he’d been laying out what appeared a game of solitaire. He hadn’t seen the man’s face, however, for he’d held his chin down so that his eyes and nose were hidden behind the broad black brim of his low-crowned hat.
The man had raised his chin now, however.
The black brim had come up to reveal the demonic amber eyes set too close together on either side of a pitted hatchet nose. Thin pink lips were stretched back from long, slender, crooked yellow teeth as the man grinned across the room at Catfish, eyes glinting like red stones at the bottom of a shallow, sunlit stream.
Black Taggart!
The man leaped to his feet as though he had springs in his ankles. He swept both flaps of his black Prince Albert coat back behind the handles of twin pearl-gripped Colts. His hands dropped in a blur of fast motion for both smoke wagons.
He had Catfish dead to rights.
Catfish threw his big, unwieldy body straight forward onto a table just as Black Taggart’s hoglegs roared, making the whole room jump. Taggart’s bullets cut through the air just over Catfish an eye blink before the lawman slid forward off the table, hit the floor on his left shoulder, and clawed his .44 from its holster.
He aimed hastily up and at a slant at Taggart, who was just then cocking his twin poppers.
Taggart saw Catfish’s pistol aimed dead center on him and, knowing now that it was his opponent who had the upper hand, gave a girlish scream, opening his mouth with all those long, narrow, catlike teeth wide as Catfish’s .44 spoke the language of sudden death.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Boom!
Taggart stumbled back against the wall, teeth still clenched, amber eyes dropping in horror toward the four bullet holes leaking blood through his white shirt and paisley vest.
The man’s spidery hands opened.
His pistols dropped with one thud and then another to the floor.
“Ach!” he wailed, and then dropped down to the floor and sat there, back against the wall, glaring down at Catfish still on the floor by the table he’d slid off of, smoking .44 still extended.
Catfish glanced toward Brazos, who stood in a crouch, his own Colt extended toward the fast-dying killer. Brazos glanced at Catfish and frowned his incredulity.
Catfish climbed heavily to his feet, ignoring the fresh aches and pains in every joint, not to mention his left shoulder. Brazos slid his pistol to cover the room, while Catfish limped over to the table behind which Black Taggart sat, back against the wall.
The dying killer’s eyes rose to Catfish.
His lips stretched back once more from his catlike teeth.
Catfish frowned. The man seemed to be making a noise. It was sort of like a hiccupping sound.
Then he realized the man was laughing deep in his throat.
Taggart grinned up at Catfish, eyes bright with mockery.
“You’re too late,” the dying killer said in an ominously soft, raspy voice. He blinked. “You’re too late . . . to save her!”
He opened his mouth and threw his head back, laughing.
Then his mouth and eyes closed, and he slid sideways down the wall to lay on one shoulder with a heavy sigh, dead.
Catfish’s heart turned a somersault in his chest. He turned to Brazos.
“It’s Julia, after all, partner!” he yelled. “Here, catch!”
He flung the badge at his deputy, who caught it out of the air with one hand.
Then Catfish ran as fast as a much younger man through the batwings, Brazos hot on his heels.