The star of the instant New York Times bestseller, Catfish Charlie, is back! Out of retirement—and into the crossfire—the former Texas Ranger heads into outlaw territory to find a lost stagecoach, a missing deputy, and a desert full of killers . . .
When he’s not at the local pond trying to catch an uncatchable catfish named Bubba, “Catfish” Charlie Tuttle can usually be found at the Lone Star Outpost with his old pal Deputy Brazos and the post’s lovely owner Julia Claire. Catfish has a sweet spot for Julia, so he’s more than a little worried when she announces she’s taking a stagecoach to Tombstone, Arizona. The stage runs through hostile territory, including a treacherous valley crawling with outlaws. Sure enough, Julia’s stagecoach never makes it to Tombstone . . .
Even though Arizona is outside his jurisdiction, Catfish saddles up with Brazos and heads into outlaw country to find Julia. It’s not long before they run into a gang of renegade soldiers led by a lunatic, Major Boneyard. Turns out Boneyard hid an arsenal of weapons on Julia’s stagecoach, which he plans to sell to the Apache for gold. When their plan’s revealed, the soldiers take Brazos hostage—leaving Catfish alone, outnumbered, and outgunned. Of course, that won’t stop Catfish from trying to rescue his friends. Even if it leads him across the Mexican border—and into a full-blown war with the legendary El Serpiente, a poison-mean revolutionario who has a coiled serpent tattooed under his left eye . . .
Publisher:
Pinnacle Books
Print pages:
304
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“Not quite sure how to break it to you, Brazos,” said Catfish to Brazos three weeks later and far from home, “but I think we’ve come to the end of the ol’ meanderin’ trail.”
“What’re you goin’ on about, Cha’les? How you do go on …”
“To cut it up a little finer, I think we’re gonna die here today.”
“You feelin’ poorly, Cha’les? I’m feelin’ fine. This tequila is going down right well … at ten o’clock in the mornin’.” The handsome Black man, and former buffalo soldier, held his tequila shot up to the window in the cantina called La Pequena Cantina Roja, The Little Red Cantina, outside Carlisle, Texas—part of his and Catfish Charlie’s stomping grounds—and smiled at the pretty color of the liquid in the West Texas sunlight. “All I need is a little carne asada, with four eggs sunny-side up, for breakfast to make this skull pop go down even easier.”
Brazos frowned suddenly, deep lines of consternation cutting across his mahogany forehead. He slid his gaze around the shot glass to the remote saloon’s dirty front window, to the right of the batwing doors. “Now, who’s that?”
He’d just seen what Catfish, town marshal of Wolfwater, twenty miles to the north, had seen. Brazos and Catfish had ridden out here two days ago to hunt down four men who’d been rustling cattle in Catfish and Brazos’s jurisdictions. Having kicked out all four long-loopers with cold shovels, so to speak, and returned the cattle to the two ranchers they’d stolen them from, they’d stopped here at the Little Red Cantina at the base of a steep, craggy ridge, on their way back to Wolfwater, for midmorning bracers. What Catfish had seen and what—or whom—Brazos had now seen were three horseback riders who’d just ridden into the saloon’s dusty, barren yard and were unsaddling their horses by the saloon’s corral.
“I could be wrong,” Catfish said, gazing with a dreadful expression on his broad, fleshy, bearded, sixty-three-year-old face, “and I truly do hope I am, but I think those three might be ‘One-Eyed’ Tom King, Bill Ford, and Luther Madero—‘the Deadly Trinity.’”
“The Deadly Trinity,” Brazos said, slowly lowering his shot glass, his own gaze on the saloon’s front yard beyond the four horses tied to the hitchrack near the batwing doors. “Our luck couldn’t have gone that far south—could it?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Catfish said, suddenly throwing back his own entire shot of tequila, then setting down his glass. “I’ve always considered myself a lucky man. But suddenly I don’t feel so lucky anymore.”
He studied the three men: One was medium tall, dark, and wearing an eye patch. That could very well be, unfortunately, the notorious killer, One-Eyed Tom King. The shorter man, wearing a big red walrus mustache on his pinched-up, sun-seasoned face, could very well, unfortunately, be the notorious Bill Ford, also an infamous killer, usually for hire, and bank and train robber.
The tall, bony man, with long, snow-white hair hanging down from beneath his cream felt sombrero, might very well be, unfortunately, Luther Madero, who’d become infamous three years before for killing three deputy U.S. marshals out of Dallas in a Fort Worth saloon for no other reason than he didn’t like lawmen. He’d just walked up to the three, who’d been drinking and playing cards, minding their own business, and shot them each from point-blank range in their chests, setting their shirts and wool vests on fire.
The three federals were still smoking and shivering out their lives on the saloon floor when Madero had grabbed a Mexican doxie, sobbing at the horrific scene she’d just witnessed, and hauled her upstairs to a crib.
Catfish had never seen the three. But he’d heard the stories and read about them and seen their likenesses on wanted circulars. Each of the three had nearly one-thousand-dollar rewards on their heads, though no lawmen, not even U.S. marshals, not even the most trail-hardened, death-dealing bounty hunters, had the sand to pursue them.
Those who had, had never been seen nor heard from again.
That was enough to curdle the guts of even the toughest lawmen.
Catfish was not too proud to admit it curdled his own innards as well.
Yet here they were—the Deadly Trinity—about to head into the saloon to cut the trail dust and pad out their bellies with the Pequena Cantina Mexican barman’s locally famous carne asada or javelina chili.
Catfish suddenly felt very much aware of the town marshal’s five-pointed star pinned to his shirt and only partly covered by his vest. He looked down at the nickel’s worth of tin and then looked at Brazos, who looked down at his own star pinned to his dark-blue shirt and winced. Both men suddenly felt as though they were wearing bull’s-eyes over their hearts.
“We could take ’em off,” Brazos said under his breath so none of the other eight customers in the saloon, nor the short, swarthy barman—who was just then splashing out two shots of tequila atop his pine plank bar while humming a bittersweet Mexican ballad—would overhear.
“We could,” Catfish opined, absently running his thumb across the object of discussion.
“But we ain’t gonna do that—are we, Cha’les?” Brazos said with a pained expression.
“I think if we did, we’d never be able to look each other in the eye again, Braz. If we did, we’d have to turn in the tin, retire as cowards, an’ live alone, as such, in caves somewhere.”
Brazos sighed and threw back his own shot.
The hum of conversation had died around the two lawmen.
Catfish looked around. The other patrons—mostly cowpunchers and traveling drummers—had seen whom Catfish and Brazos had seen. Recognizing the Deadly Trinity milling around the corral—their reputations had preceded them—the customers were looking a little green around the gills as they stared in hushed awe out the dirty front window. So, too, was the Mexican barman, cook, and proprietor, Louis Gomez, his long mare’s-tail mustaches hanging down both sides of his mouth to nearly his chest, a loosely rolled cigarillo jutting from between his lips.
The three newcomers headed toward the saloon, talking and laughing, beating trail dust from their pants with their hats. As they did, a shaggy dog, who’d been asleep on the saloon’s front porch, ran out to greet the men, not knowing, of course, whom he was greeting, his tail wagging. Luther Madero pulled one of his two silver-chased Colts from its holster tied low on his right thigh, aimed toward the friendly dog, and fired three rounds into the hard-packed dirt around him.
The dog gave a horrified yelp and ran away—a blur of fast, wide-eyed motion, quickly disappearing to calm his nerves out in the desert somewhere.
The killers laughed, throwing their heads back, Madero pouching his fancy hogleg.
“What a heartless son of a buck,” Brazos growled softly.
“Those three federals he killed in Fort Worth could have told you that a long time ago.”
The scrape of chairs sounded around Catfish and Brazos as the other customers, to a man, rose from their tables, donned their hats, and began moving quickly toward the batwings. As they did, one man whom Catfish knew—a middle-aged shotgun rancher named Ralph Stanley—stopped at the two lawmen’s table, leaned down between Catfish and Brazos, and said in a hushed, bleak voice, “Catfish … Brazos … you know who those three are?”
“We got us a feelin’ an’ not a nice one,” Brazos said.
Stanley straightened and said, “I’d vamoose if I was you. That there’s the Deadly Trinity, who, as the Mexicans say, ‘proyectar la sombra de la muerte.’”
“Cast death’s shadow.”
He hurried toward the batwings.
Catfish gave a shudder and shuttled his gaze to the bar. Louis Gomez stood there, alone now, staring toward Catfish and Brazos, looking as though he’d just eaten some javelina chili that he hadn’t cooked long enough. His brown eyes were wide with dread, cigarillo still smoldering between his lips, a long gray ash ready to drop.
Outside, Ralph Stanley gave the three killers a wide berth as he moved to the hitchrack and untied the reins of the only horse that remained there. The dust of the other customers sifted in the yard, a yellowish tan in the sunlight. As Stanley mounted his gray gelding, the three killers crossed the boardwalk fronting the saloon and then Luther Madero stopped just outside the batwings, staring into the cantina with the bluest eyes Catfish had ever seen. The killer was pale, save for his long, beaklike nose, which was sunburned and peeling.
He had the air of a deadly snake standing there, cold eyes casting his evilly mesmerizing gaze into the saloon and stopping when they found the only two customers, Catfish Charlie himself and his tall, rangy Black partner, Brazos McQueen. Those eyes bored into the two lawmen, who stared down into their drinks, feeling as though their badges were branding irons sizzling against their chests.
Out of the corner of his left eye, Catfish Charlie saw Madero blink slowly, like a wildcat sizing up a meal. The killer pushed through the batwings and stepped into the saloon. He was followed by Bill Ford and One-Eyed Tom King.
Following Madero to the bar, both Ford and King cast Catfish and Brazos lingering stares, their faces cool and expressionless, save for their eyes—or in the case of King, his one eye—flat with understated menace. Catfish Charlie watched all three belly up to the bar, behind which Louis Gomez had suddenly turned as pale as an Irishman after a Celtic winter. Catfish watched them only in the periphery of his vision, for he was still staring down into his shot glass. He was reluctant to glance directly at the Deadly Trinity, for he worried they might take umbrage and, using their badges for targets, shoot him and Brazos deader than the javelina in Gomez’s stew.
“Are they facing the bar?” Brazos asked quietly to Catfish’s right.
“Yep.”
“We still alive?”
“Not shakin’ hands with the Devil just yet.”
Brazos sighed in relief, then straightened in his chair and poured both himself and his partner out fresh shots of tequila. They threw them back, and Charlie splashed out two more.
He glanced at Brazos. “I was hopin’ for some chili.”
“I was hopin’ for that carne asada.”
“Do we dare order?”
“You mean walk up to the bar?”
“Reckon we’d have to. I got a feelin’ Gomez is too scared to walk out from around the bar. Got a feelin’ he’s havin’ trouble movin’ a muscle right now, though I have got me a feelin’ somethin’ else is puckerin’ up purty good.”
Catfish looked toward the bar, where Gomez was just then pouring out tequila for the newcomers. The Mexican barkeep looked as though he were holding his breath, his fleshy face pale in stark contrast to his dark-brown mustaches and his eyes of the same color.
“Nah,” Catfish said, and took another sip of his hooch. He swallowed, smacked his lips, and added under his breath, “I do believe I plumb just lost my hunger. I think I’ll just sit here and go over my life, take stock, and prepare to meet my Maker.”
“Oh, you don’t want to meet your Maker, Cha’les,” Brazos said, and tossed back the rest of the tequila in his shot glass. “Because when you do, he’s gonna hand you a shovel.”
Catfish had just taken another sip of his tequila. For whatever reason—maybe because of the direness of his and Brazos’s situation and the anxiety that was singing through every nerve in his too-well-fed and liquored-up body, he found that comment about the shovel particularly funny. So funny, in fact, that instead of being able to swallow that last sip of tequila, he blew it straight out over the table.
He slapped the table and covered his mouth with a fleshy hand and snorted into it, stomping one foot while desperately trying to squelch his mirth. Brazos laughed then, too, letting out a honking roar before he, too, snorted into his hand. The two men laughed together and, for the life of them—literally, possibly, for the life of them—the more they tried to stop laughing, the harder it made them laugh. They hunkered low over their table, snorting into their palms.
Suddenly, looking up and seeing the cold eyes of the three killers staring at him and Brazos in the backbar mirror, the mirth in Catfish died like a blown lamp. Brazos looked at Catfish, then followed his gaze to the backbar mirror, and Brazos’s humor sputtered and died as well. The two men lowered their hands from their mouths and drew deep breaths, both suddenly feeling as self-conscious as two schoolboys caught by the schoolmaster wielding his long, hard oak ruler and glaring at them from over his tiny, round pince-nez.
Catfish averted his gaze and reached for the bottle. Before he could lift it from the table, Luther Madero said, staring with cool, menacing flatness at Catfish and Brazos in the backbar mirror, “Hey, fat man, what’s so damn funny?”
The other two-thirds of the Deadly Trinity laughed.
Anger rose in Catfish as suddenly as the humor had.
He and Brazos shared a hard, indignant look, and then they both turned to the ugly, pale-haired, blue-eyed devil staring at them in the backbar mirror. Tired of feeling under the three killers’ thumbs—tired of feeling the palpable threat in the room … tired of feeling as though his badge was burning a hole clear through him—Catfish, who’d always had trouble controlling his emotions, said, “We were laughin’ at you, you ugly damn albino monkey!”
“Cha’les!” Brazos admonished.
All three of the Deadly Trinity stared at Catfish in the backbar mirror.
Catfish felt the shadow of death they cast. But his anger remained, burning through every cell in his body.
Madero turned slowly around to face Catfish, his back to the bar. His two fancy, silver-chased .45s glinted in the West Texas sunlight angling through the dirty window. It shone in his evil blue eyes as well.
His eyes remained as cold and flat as a rattler’s.
One-Eyed Tom King and then Bill Ford turned to him, too.
The threatening looks they gave Catfish only made the town marshal of Wolfwater angrier. The Deadly Trinity said nothing. They let the silence speak for itself.
Behind the bar, Louis Gomez gazed darkly at Catfish and crossed himself. He mouthed to Catfish, “Rest in peace, my friend.”
When the silence had become funereal—and after a good minute of it—rage boiled over in Charlie, and he slid his chair back and rose and yelled, “Shoot or cut bait, you ugly devils!”
“Cha’les!”
As one, the Deadly Trinity smiled at Catfish. As one, they slapped leather, hauling out their hoglegs. To Catfish’s right, Brazos leaped up out of his chair, reaching for his own .45, yelling, “Hope you like it hot, Cha’les!”
Somehow—and Catfish was as surprised by this as anyone else in the room—he managed to raise his bone-gripped .44 a hair sooner than King, Ford, or Madero. He got off the first shot, plinking Madero in the belly and causing the killer’s own shot to fly wild, drilling into Catfish and Brazos’s table, shattering their tequila bottle. His howl startled the others, whose own shots caromed a hair wide of their targets just as Brazos’s first shot drilled One-Eyed Tom King low on the outlaw devil’s right side.
Brazos threw himself out away from the table, hitting the floor, rolling, coming up on his chest and belly and drilling two more rounds at the Deadly Trinity. Catfish did the same thing despite his age and the sensitivity of his old bones and joints. He struck the floor on the left side of the table as Ford’s next bullet curled the air off his right ear. Catfish aimed quickly.
His .44 roared.
Ford yelped and slammed back against the bar, looking at the hole in his chest geysering dark blood. Brazos’s .45 spoke next; his bullet punched a puckered hole in Tom King’s forehead, just above his eye patch. The man’s lone eye rolled back in its socket as the back of his head struck the bar top. He fired his Remington .44 into his own right foot, then slid down off the bar to collapse in a quivering heap at the base of it.
The pops of the gunfire died.
Now the only sounds in the smoky room were the screeching wails of Luther Madero, who had turned to the bar and slumped facedown against it, one hand cupped over the agonizing hole Catfish had drilled in his guts. Madero flailed desperately at the bar top, trying to keep himself upright, to no avail. That hand slid down, down, down, to the edge of the bar and then he flew straight back to strike on the saloon’s sawdusted floor with the back of his head.
He lay there like a turtle on his back, writhing, one hand over his guts, the other sliding across the floor as though he were trying to tread water.
“Oh!” he cried. “You sons of Satan … the fat man done … killed me!”
Louis Gomez’s head slid up from behind the bar. The barman continued to straighten and then he slid a slow, incredulous peek over the top of the bar to the killer dying hard on the floor on the other side of it. His shocked gaze then slid to Catfish, where the lawman still lay on the floor, peering through the wafting powder smoke at the two dead killers and the other one about to expire.
Catfish was as surprised by the turn of events as Gomez was.
He turned to Brazos. His friend and deputy lay on the floor on the other side of the table, his Colt still extended, the butt resting on the floor. Brazos’s lower jaw hung in shock; his eyes were wide and bright with incredulity. He turned to Catfish.
“What in holy blazes, Cha’les?” he said.
Catfish released what he realized was a held breath. He chuckled his amazement and said, “They wasn’t nearly as fast as their reputations. And they couldn’t shoot straight, neither! Ha!”
He planted his forehead against the floor and roared.
He rose heavily, walked a little creakily—his old knees weren’t made for maneuvers such as throwing himself to the floor, as he’d done routinely during lead swaps when he was in his twenties—to stare down at the grunting, crying Madero. The man stared up at him through his blue, blue eyes. They hardened in exasperation and rage as he said, “How could I be killed by someone so old and fat?”
“Not sure.” Catfish lowered his Colt at an angle, ratcheted the hammer back, and blew a hole through Madero’s forehead. “But you were.”
Catfish holstered the still-smoking hogleg and turned to Louis Gomez, who looked at him as though he were the Second Coming. “You know, Louis?” He patted his bulging belly. “I could do with a bowl of that javelina chili you’re so famous for.” He glanced at his partner just then, who was rising slowly to his feet. “Outfit Brazos here with some o’ that carne asada, will you? He’s been squawkin’ about that all mornin’!”
When they’d finished their delectable javelina chili and carne asada, and washed it down with more tequila, Catfish Charlie and Brazos McQueen loaded the Deadly Trinity onto their horses and tied them wrist to ankle beneath their mounts’ bellies.
They led their grisly but valuable cargo—given the bounties on the notorious killers’ heads—north through the West Texas desert toward “their” town of Wolfwater, along the shore of Wolfwater Creek, and between the jog of rocky buttes known as the Wolfwater Rocks in the east and the Stalwart Mountains in the west. The burgeoning town was cut right down the middle by the “damnable”—in Catfish’s opinion, anyway—Brazos, San Antonio & Rio Grande Railroad Line.
The railroad was why the town was burgeoning.
“Burgeoning” to the town boosters meant prosperity.
“Burgeoning” to Catfish and Brazos meant crime. It was getting so that the two lawmen couldn’t get a full night’s sleep without being awakened by a gunshot or two or three, a man’s agonized wail, a girl’s terrified scream … usually followed by the low roar of a drunken crowd and the manic barking of a shaken dog … and having to grab their shell belts and rifles and take off running to investigate. This was still true, even though Catfish and Brazos, who despite their official titles saw themselves as equal partners in their roles as Wolfwater lawmen, had hired a deputy—a former army horse breaker named Rex Green. While Green was the affable sort, and more or less got along with everybody, he was impressively adept with a sawed-off Greener and a hide-wrapped bung starter. It helped that he was nearly six-four and bore shoulders as stout and broad as an oxen yoke.
It also helped that he was almost pathologically friendly.
Everyone in town—at least those who mattered—liked him. He could often cool the hot heads of drunken miners, railroad men, or cowpunchers, stomping with their tails up on a Saturday night, with little more than a toothy smile and gentle but firm reasoning. When those tools didn’t work, however, the drunken fighters usually ended up in the basement cellblock of the town lockup with cracked skulls or dislocated shoulders.
As they climbed a sotol- and greasewood-studded knoll in the subtly rolling, hot, dry, rocky, and more or less featureless stretch of West Texas desert, riding along the “damnable tracks” of the Brazos, San Antonio & Rio Grande Line, Brazos said, “Cha’les, I think we need to have us a conversation.”
Riding his broad-chested steeldust named Jasper, alongside Brazos and the deputy’s sleek, long-legged chestnut gelding called Abe, named after the man who’d freed Brazos’s people, including the deputy’s own family, Catfish looked at his partner, one brow arched. He was always quick to note the gravity in Brazos’s deep, resonant voice. Brazos’s overall demeanor was customarily dignified and grave, so when his voice betrayed an even deeper level of severity, Catfish knew something was really weighing on the man’s mind.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
Brazos stitched his black brows over his deep-set, ink-black eyes. “What?”
“I’m in trouble.”
“You need to be taken to th. . .
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