Catfish Charlie

Book 1: Catfish Charlie

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Westerns; Action & Adventure Romance

Synopsis

JOHNSTONE COUNTRY. BACK IN THE SADDLE. AGAIN.

In this rip-roaring Western adventure, a once-famous Texas Ranger who’s given up his badge and gone fishin’ gets back in the saddle to set things straight—with guns blazin’ . . .

As a former Texas Ranger, Charlie “Catfish Charlie” Tuttle spent the good part of his life catching outlaws. Happily retired in Wolfwater, Texas, he’s content just catching fish—namely Bubba, the wily old catfish who lives in the pond near Charlie’s shack and keeps slipping off Charlie’s hook. He also likes hanging out with his trusty tomcat Hooligan Hank and tossing back bottles of mustang berry wine. Sure, his glory days are behind him. There’s no reason for Charlie to even think about coming out of retirement . . .

It starts with a jailbreak. Frank Thorson and his gang ride into Wolfwater to bust Frank’s brother out of the slammer. First, they slaughter the deputy. Then, the town marshal. Finally, they run off with the marshal’s daughter and no one’s sure if she’s dead or alive. The townsfolk are desperate enough to ask that drunken old coot Catfish Charlie to put down his fishing pole and wine bottles, pick up his Colt Army .44, and go after the bloodthirsty gang. Sure, Catfish Charlie may be a bit rusty after all these years. But when it comes to serving up justice, no one is quicker, faster—or deadlier . . .

Once a lawman, always a lawman. Especially a lawman like Catfish Charlie Tuttle.

Release date: February 20, 2024

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

May 2, 1891

“Bushwhack” Wilbur Aimes, Deputy Town Marshal of Wolfwater, in West Texas, looked up from the report he’d been scribbling, sounding out the words semi-aloud as he’d written them and pressing his tongue down hard against his bottom lip in concentration. He knew his letters and numbers well enough, but that didn’t mean he had an easy time stringing them together.

He almost welcomed the sudden, uneasy feeling climbing his spine, stealthy as a brown recluse spider.

He frowned at the brick wall before him, below the flour sack–curtained window, the drawn curtains still bearing the words PIONEER FLOUR MILLS, SAN ANTONIO, TX, though the Texas sun angling through the window every day had badly faded them.

The sound came again—distant hoof thuds, a horse’s whicker.

Silence.

A bridle chain rattled.

Bushwhack, a big, broad-shouldered, rawboned man, and former bushwhacker from Missouri’s backwoods, rose from his chair. The creaky Windsor was mostly Marshal Abel Wilkes’s chair, but Bushwhack got to sit in it when he was on duty—usually night duty as he was on tonight—and the marshal was off, home in bed sleeping within only a few feet of the marshal’s pretty schoolteacher daughter, Miss Bethany.

Bushwhack shook his head as though to rid it of thoughts of the pretty girl. Thinking about her always made his cheeks warm and his throat grow tight. Prettiest girl in Wolfwater, for sure. If only he could work up the courage to ask the marshal if he could . . .

Oh, stop thinking about that, you damn fool! Bushwhack castigated himself. The marshal’s holding off on letting any man step out with his daughter until the right one came along. And that sure as holy blazes wasn’t going to be the big, awkward, bearded, former defender of the ol’ Stars an’ Bars, as well as a horse-breaker-until-a-wild-stallion-had-broken him—his left hip, at least. No, Miss Bethany Wilkes wasn’t for him, Bushwhack thought, half pouting as he grabbed his old Remington and cartridge belt off the wall peg, right of the door, the uneasy feeling staying with him even beneath his forbidden thoughts of the marshal’s daughter.

He glanced at his lone prisoner in the second of the four cells lined up along the office’s back wall.

“Skinny” Thorson was sound asleep on his cot, legs crossed at the ankles, funnel-brimmed, weather-beaten hat pulled down over his eyes.

Skinny was the leader of a local outlaw gang, though he didn’t look like much. Just a kid on the downhill side of twenty, but not by much. Skinny wore his clothes next to rags. His boots were so worn that Bushwhack could see his socks through the soles.

The deputy chuffed his distaste as he encircled his waist with the belt and soft leather holster from which his old, walnut-gripped Remington jutted, its butt scratched from all the times it had been used to pulverize coffee beans around remote Texas campfires during the years—a good dozen. Bushwhack had punched cattle around the Red River country and into the Panhandle—when he hadn’t been fighting Injuns or bluebellies and minding his topknot, of course.

You always had to mind your scalp in Comanche country.

Or breaking broncs for Johnny Sturges, until that one particularly nasty blue roan had bucked him off onto the point of his left hip, then rolled on him and gave him a stomp to punctuate the “ride” and to settle finally the argument over who was boss.

That had ended Bushwhack’s punching and breaking days.

Fortunately, Abel Wilkes had needed a deputy and hadn’t minded overmuch that Bushwhack had lost the giddyup in his step. Bushwhack was still sturdy, albeit with a bit of a paunch these days, and he was right handy with a hide-wrapped bung starter, a sawed-off twelve gauge, and his old Remington. Now he grabbed the battered Stetson off the peg to the right of the one his gun had been hanging from, set it on his head, slid the Remington from its holster and, holding the long-barreled popper straight down against his right leg, opened the door and poked his head out, taking a cautious look around.

As he did, he felt his heart quicken. He wasn’t sure why, but he was nervous. He worried the old Remy’s hammer with his right thumb, ready to draw it back to full cock if needed.

Not seeing anything amiss out front of the marshal’s office and the jailhouse, he glanced over his shoulder at Skinny Thorson once more. The outlaw was still sawing logs beneath his hat. Bushwhack swung his scowling gaze back to the street, then stepped out onto the jailhouse’s rickety front stoop to take a better look around.

The night was dark, the sky sprinkled with clear, pointed stars. Around Bushwhack, Wolfwater slouched, quiet and dark in these early-morning hours—one thirty, if the marshal’s banjo clock on the wall over the large, framed map of western Texas could be trusted. The clock seemed to lose about three minutes every week, so Bushwhack or Wilkes or Maggie Cruz, who cleaned the place once a week, had to consult their pocket watches and turn it ahead.

Bushwhack trailed his gaze around the broad, pale street to his left; it was abutted on both sides by mud brick, Spanish-style adobe, or wood frame, false-fronted business buildings, all slouching with age and the relentless Texas heat and hot, dry wind. He continued shuttling his scrutinizing gaze along the broad street to his right, another block of which remained before the sotol-stippled, bone-dry, cactus-carpeted desert continued unabated dang near all the way to the Rawhide Buttes and Wichita Falls beyond.

The relatively recently laid railroad tracks of the Brazos, San Antonio & Rio Grande Line ran right through the middle of the main drag, gleaming faintly now in the starlight. Most businessmen and cattlemen in the area had welcomed the railroad for connecting San Antonio, in the southeast, with El Paso, in the northwest, and parts beyond.

Celebrated by some, maligned by others, including Marshal Abel Wilkes.

The San Antonio & Rio Grande Line might have brought so-called progress and a means for local cattlemen to ship their beef-on-the-hoof out from Wolfwater, but it had also brought trouble in the forms of men and even some women—oh, its share of troublesome women, as well, don’t kid yourself!—in all shapes, sizes, colors, and creeds. However, it being a weeknight, the town was dark and quiet. On weekends, several saloons, hurdy-gurdies, and gambling parlors remained open, as long as they had customers, or until Marshal Wilkes, backed by Bushwhack himself, tired of breaking up fights and even some shootouts right out on the main drag, Wolfwater Street. Marshal and deputy would shut them down and would send the cowboys, vaqueros, sodbusters, and prospectors back to their ranches, haciendas, soddies, and diggings, respectively.

The road ranches stippling the desert outside of Abel Wilkes’s jurisdiction stayed open all night, however. There was nothing Wilkes and Bushwhack could do about them. What perditions they were, too! When he’d heard all the trouble that took place out there, Bushwhack was secretly glad his and the marshal’s jurisdiction stopped just outside of Wolfwater. Too many lawmen—deputy U.S. marshals, deputy sheriffs from the county seat over in Heraklion, and even some Texas Rangers and Pinkertons—had ridden into such places, between town and the Rawhide Buttes, to the west, or between town and the Stalwart Mountains, to the south, never to be seen or heard from again.

In fact, only last year, Sheriff Ed Wilcox from Heraklion had sent two deputies out to the road ranch on Jawbone Creek. Only part of them had returned home—their heads in gunnysacks tied to their saddle horns!

As far as Bushwhack knew, no one had ever learned what had become of the rest of their bodies. He didn’t care to know, and he had a suspicion that Sheriff Ed Wilcox didn’t, either. The road ranch on Jawbone Creek continued to this day, unmolested—at least by the law, ha-ha. (That was the joke going around.)

Bushwhack shoved his hat down on his forehead to scratch the back of his head with his left index finger. All was quiet, save the snores sounding from Skinny Thorson’s cell in the office behind him. No sign of anyone out and about. Not even a cat. Not even a coyote, in from the desert, hunting cats.

So, who or what had made the sounds Bushwhack had heard just a minute ago?

He yawned. He was tired. Trouble in town had kept him from getting his nap earlier. His beauty sleep, the marshal liked to joke. Maybe he’d nodded off without realizing it and had only dreamt of the hoof thud and the bridle chain rattle.

Bushwhack yawned again, turned, stepped back inside the office, and closed the door. Just then, he realized that the snores had stopped. He swung his head around to see Skinny Thorson lying as before, only he’d poked his hat brim up on his forehead and was gazing at Bushwhack, grinning, blue eyes twinkling.

“What’s the matter, Bushwhack?” the kid said. “A mite nervous, are we?”

Bushwhack sauntered across the office and stood at the door of Skinny’s cell, scowling beneath the brim of his own Stetson. He poked the Remington’s barrel through the bars and said, “Shut up, you little rat-faced tinhorn, or I’ll pulverize your head.”

Skinny turned his head to one side and a jeeringly warning light came to his eyes. “My big brother, Frank, wouldn’t like that—now, would he?”

“No, the hangman wouldn’t like it, neither. He gets twenty dollars for every neck he stretches. He’s probably halfway between Heraklion an’ here, and he wouldn’t like it if he got here an’ didn’t have a job to do, money to make.” Bushwhack grinned. “Of course, he’d likely get one of Miss Claire’s girls to soothe his disappointment. And every man around knows how good Miss Claire’s girls are at soothing disappointments.”

It was true. Miss Julia Claire’s sporting parlor was one of the best around—some said the best hurdy-gurdy house between El Paso and San Antonio, along the San Antonio, and Rio Grande Line. And Miss Julia Claire herself was quite the lady. A fella could listen to her speak English in that beguiling British accent of hers all day long.

All night long, for that matter.

Only, Miss Claire herself didn’t work the line. That fact—her chasteness and accent and the obscurity of her past, which she’d remained tight-lipped about for all of the five years she’d lived and worked here in Wolfwater—gave her an alluring air of mystery.

Skinny Thorson now pressed his face up close to the bars, squeezing a bar to either side of his face in his hands, until his knuckles turned white, and said, “‘The Reaper’ ain’t gonna have no job to do once he gets here, because by the time he gets here, I won’t be here anymore. You got it, Bushwhack?”

The Reaper was what everyone around called the executioner from the county seat, Lorenzo Snow.

The prisoner widened his eyes and slackened his lower jaws and made a hideous face of mockery, sticking his long tongue out at Bushwhack.

Bushwhack was about to grab that tongue with his fingers and pull it through the bars, pull it all the way out of the kid’s mouth—by God!—but stopped when he heard something out in the street again.

“What was that?” asked Skinny with mock trepidation, cocking an ear to listen. “Think that was Frank, Bushwhack?” He grinned sidelong through the bars once more. “You know what? I think it was!”

Outside, a horse whinnied shrilly.

Outside, men spoke, but it was too soft for Bushwhack to make out what they were saying.

The hooves of several horses thudded and then the thuds dwindled away to silence.

Bushwhack turned to face the door, scowling angrily. “What in holy blazes is going on out there?”

“It’s Frank, Bushwhack. My big brother, Frank, is here, just like I knew he would be! He got the word I sent him!” Skinny tipped his head back and whooped loudly. Squeezing the cell bars, he yelled, “I’m here, Frank. Come an’ fetch me out of here, big brother!”

Bushwhack had holstered the Remington, but he had not snapped the keeper thong home over the hammer. He grabbed his sawed-off twelve gauge off a peg in the wall to his left and looped the lanyard over his head and right shoulder. He broke open the gun to make sure it was loaded, then snapped it closed and whipped around to Skinny and said tightly, “One more peep out of you, you little scoundrel, an’ I’ll blast you all over that wall behind you. If Frank came to fetch you, he’d best’ve brought a bucket an’ a mop!”

Skinny narrowed his eyes in warning and returned in his own tight voice, “Frank won’t like it, Bushwhack. You know Frank. Everybody around the whole county knows Frank. You an’ they know how Frank can be when he’s riled!”

Bushwhack strode quickly up to the cell, clicking the twelve gauge’s hammers back to full cock. “You don’t hear too good, Skinny. Liable to get you killed. Best dig the dirt out’n your ears.”

Skinny looked down at the heavy, cocked hammers of the savage-looking gut shredder. He took two halting steps back away from the cell door, raising his hands, palms out, in supplication. “All . . . all right, now, Bushwhack,” he trilled. “Calm down. Just funnin’ you’s all.” He smiled suddenly with mock equanimity. “Prob’ly not Frank out there at all. Nah. Prob’ly just some thirty-a-month-and-found cow nurses lookin’ fer some coffin varnish to cut the day’s dust with. Yeah, that’s prob’ly who it is.”

His smile turned wolfish.

Grimacing, anger burning through him, Bushwhack swung around to the door. Holding the twelve gauge straight out from his right side, right index finger curled over both eyelash triggers, he pulled the door open wide.

His big frame filled the doorway as he stared out into the night.

Again, the dark street was empty.

“All right—who’s there?” he said, trying to ignore the insistent beating of his heart against his breastbone.

Silence, save for crickets and the distant cry of a wildcat on the hunt out in the desert in the direction of the Stalwarts.

He called again, louder: “Who’s there?” A pause. “That you, Frank?”

Bushwhack and Marshal Wilkes had known there was the possibility that Skinny’s older brother, Frank, might journey to Wolfwater to bust his brother out. But they’d heard Frank had been last seen up in the Indian Nations, and they didn’t think that even if Frank got word that Wilkes and Bushwhack had jailed his younger brother for killing a half-breed whore in one of the lesser parlor houses in Wolfwater, he’d make it here before the hangman would.

There were a total of six houses of ill repute in Wolfwater—not bad for a population of sixty-five hundred, though that didn’t include all of the cowboys, vaqueros, miners, and sodbusters who frequented the town nearly every night and on weekends, and the mostly unseemly visitors, including gamblers, confidence men and women, which the railroad brought to town. It was in one of these lesser houses, only identified as GIRLS by the big gaudy sign over its front door, that Skinny had gone loco on busthead and thrown the girl out a second-story window.

The girl, a half-Comanche known as “Raven,” had lived a few days before succumbing to her injuries caused when she’d landed on a hitchrack, which had busted all her ribs and cracked her spine. Infection had been the final cause of death, as reported by the lone local medico, Doc Overholser.

Anger at being toyed with was growing in Bushwhack. Fear, too, he had to admit. He stepped out onto the stoop, swinging his gaze from right to left, and back again, and yelled, “Who’s out there? If it’s you, Frank—show yourself, now!”

Bushwhack heard the sudden thud of hooves to his right and his left.

Riders were moving up around him now, booting their horses ahead at slow, casual walks, coming out from around the two front corners of the jailhouse flanking him on his right and left. They were ominous silhouettes in the starlight. As Bushwhack turned to his left, where three riders were just then swinging their horses around the right front corner of the jailhouse stoop and into the street in front of it, a gun flashed.

At the same time the gun’s loud bark slammed against Bushwhack’s ears, the bullet plundered his left leg, just above the knee. The bullet burned like a branding iron laid against his flesh.

Bushwhack yelped and shuffled to his right, clutching the bloody wound in misery. He released the twelve gauge to hang free against his belly and struck the porch floor in a grunting, agonized heap.

He cursed through gritted teeth, feeling warm blood ooze out of his leg from beneath his fingers. As he did, slow hoof clomps sounded ahead of him. He peered up to see a tall, rangy man in a black vest, black hat, and black denim trousers ride out of the street’s darkness on a tall gray horse and into the light from the window and the open door behind Bushwhack.

The guttering lamplight shone in cold gray eyes above a long, slender nose and thick blond mustache. The lips beneath the mustache quirked a wry grin as Frank Thorson said, “Hello, there, Bushwhack. Been a while. You miss me?”

The smile grew. But the gray eyes remained flat and hard and filled with malicious portent.

Marshal Abel Wilkes snapped his eyes open, instantly awake.

“Oh, fer Pete’s sake!”

Almost as quickly, though not as quickly as it used to be, the Colt hanging from the bedpost to his right was in his hand. Aiming the barrel up at the ceiling, Abel clicked the hammer back and lay his head back against his pillow, listening.

What he’d heard before, he heard again. A man outside breathing hard. Running in a shambling fashion. The sounds were growing louder as Wilkes—fifty-six years old, bald but with a strap of steel-gray hair running in a band around his large head, above his ears, and with a poorly trimmed, soup-strainer gray mustache—lay there listening.

What in blazes . . . ?

Abel tossed his covers back and dropped his pajama-clad legs over the side of the bed. He’d grabbed his ratty, old plaid robe off a wall peg and shrugged into it and was sliding his feet into his wool-lined slippers, as ratty as the robe, when his daughter’s voice rose from the lower story. “Dad? Dad? You’d better come down he—”

She stopped abruptly when Abel heard muffled thuds on the floor of the porch beneath his room, here in the second story of the house he owned and in which he lived with his daughter, Bethany. The muffled thuds were followed by a loud hammering on the house’s front door.

“Marshal Wilkes!” a man yelled.

More thundering knocks, then Bushwhack Aimes’s plaintive wail: “Marshal Wilkes!”

What in tarnation is going on now? Wilkes wondered.

Probably had to do with the railroad. That damned railroad . . . bringin’ vermin of every stripe into—

“Dad, do you hear that?” Beth’s voice came again from the first story.

“Coming, honey!” Abel said as he opened his bedroom door and strode quickly into the hall, a little breathless and dizzy from rising so fast. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, and he had to admit his gut wasn’t as flat as it used to be, either. Too many roast beef platters at Grace Hasting’s café for noon lunch, followed up by steak and potatoes cooked by Beth for supper.

Holding the Colt down low against his right leg, Abel hurried as quickly as he could, without stumbling down the stairs, just as Beth opened the front door at the bottom of the stairs and slightly right, in the parlor part of the house. The willowy brunette was as pretty as her mother had been, but she was on the borderline of being considered an old maid, since she was not yet married at twenty-four. The young woman gasped and stepped back quickly as a big man tumbled inside the Wilkes parlor, striking the floor with a loud bang.

Not normally a screaming girl, Beth stepped back quickly, shrieked, and closed her hands over her mouth as she stared down in horror at her father’s deputy, who lay just inside the front door, gasping like a landed fish.

Abel knew it was Bushwhack Aimes because he’d recognized his deputy’s voice. The face of the man, however, only vaguely resembled Bushwhack. He’d been beaten bad, mouth smashed, both eyes swelling, various sundry scrapes and bruises further disfiguring the big man’s face. He wore only long-handles, and the top hung from his nearly bare shoulders in tattered rags.

“Oh, my God!” Beth exclaimed, turning to her father as Abel brushed past her.

Like Abel, she was clad in a robe and slippers. Lamps burned in the parlor, as well as in the kitchen, indicating she’d been up late grading papers again or preparing lessons for tomorrow.

“Good God,” Abel said, dropping to a knee beside his bloody deputy, who lay clutching his left leg with both hands and groaning loudly against the pain that must be hammering all through him. “What the hell happened, Bushwhack? Who did this to you?”

He couldn’t imagine the tenacity it had taken for Bushwhack in his condition to have made it here from the jailhouse—a good four-block trek, blood pouring out of him. The man already had a bum hip, to boot!

“Marshal!” Aimes grated out, spitting blood from his lips.

Abel turned to his daughter, who stood crouched forward over Aimes, looking horrified. “Beth, heat some water and fetch some cloths, will you?”

As Beth wheeled and hurried across the parlor and into the kitchen, Abel placed a placating hand on his deputy’s right shoulder. “Easy, Bushwhack. Easy. I’ll fetch the sawbones in a minute. What happened? Who did this to you?”

Aimes shifted his gaze from his bloody leg to the marshal. “Thor . . . Thorson. Frank Thorson . . . an’ his men! Shot me. Beat me. Stripped me. Left me in the street . . . laughin’ at me!” The deputy sucked a sharp breath through gritted teeth and added, “They busted Skinny out of jail!”

“Are they still in town?”

“They broke into one of the saloons—the Wolfwater Inn! Still . . . still there, far as I know . . . Oh . . . oh, Lordy!” Bushwhack reached up and wrapped both of his own bloody hands around one of Abel’s. “They’re killers, Marshal! Don’t go after ’em alone.” He wagged his head and showed his teeth between stretched-back lips. “Or . . . you’ll . . .” He was weakening fast, eyelids growing heavy, barely able to get the words out. “. . . you’ll end up like me—dead!”

With that, Bushwhack’s hands fell away from Abel’s. His head fell back against the floor with a loud thump. He rolled onto his back and his head sort of wobbled back and forth, until it and the rest of the man’s big body fell still. The eyes slightly crossed and halfway closed as they stared up at Abel Wilkes, glassy with death.

Footsteps sounded behind Abel, and he turned to see Beth striding through the parlor behind him. “I have water heating, Pa! Want I should fetch the doc . . . ?” She stopped suddenly as she gazed down at Bushwhack. Again, she raised her hands to her mouth, her brown eyes widening in shock.

“No need for the doc, honey,” Abel said, slowly straightening, gazing down at his deputy. Anger burned in him. “I reckon he’s done for, Bushwhack is.”

Beth moved slowly forward, dropped to her knees, and gently set her hand on the deputy’s head, smoothing his thick, curly, salt-and-pepper hair back from his forehead. “I’m so sorry, Bushwhack,” she said in a voice hushed with sorrow.

“Stay with him, take care of him as best you can, honey,” Abel said, reaching down to squeeze his daughter’s shoulder comfortingly. “On my way into town, I’ll send for the undertaker.”

Beth looked up at her father, tears of sorrow and anger in her eyes. “Who did this to Bushwhack, Pa?”

“Frank Thorson.”

Beth sort of winced and grimaced at the same time. Most people did that when they heard the name. “Oh, God,” she said.

“Don’t you worry, honey,” Abel said, squeezing her shoulder once more. “Thorson will pay for what he did here tonight.”

Abel gave a reassuring dip of his chin, then turned to start back up the stairs to get dressed.

“Pa!” Beth cried.

Abel stopped and turned back to his daughter, on her knees now and leaning back against the slipper-clad heels of her feet. Beth gazed up at him with deep concern. “You’re not thinking about confronting Frank Thorson alone—are you?”

Abel didn’t like the lack of confidence he saw in his daughter’s eyes. “I don’t have any choice, honey.”

Aimes was his only deputy, and there was little time to deput. . .