The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Big Apple Bandito Meets Tex Turtleback

Three banks associated with the militant pro-fascist group known as the Tridente Cremisi have been knocked over in New York City in less than a week. The papers have dubbed the hunch-backed, cowboy-hatted, bulletproof robber ‘Tex Turtleback.’ As New York’s other terribly-named cowboy-coded gunslinger, the Big Apple Bandito wants to get to bottom of it before he ends up on the militia’s shit list, too.

Eric Reed, who calls himself the Pacifist to spite the newspapers, was last seen in The Case of the Broken Fixers, and has found Tex’s next target, a quiet bank nestled in the heart of the Bronx.

The Big Apple Bandito Meets Tex Turtleback is the third of three short stories from Another Three Cases of Mayhem and Mad Science and will be featured in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Old Dogs Still Got Teeth.

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, body horror, creeps, mild swearing.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, MAY 14, 1943
LICTOR AND HILL BANK AND TRUST, BRONX BRANCH
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

“You even know who I'm robbin', ya freak?” Tex Turtleback howled, his Brooklyn accent coming through. He swung his shotgun around and blasted the marble column that the Pacifist had ducked behind.

One of the bound tellers screamed.

“I was gonna ask you the same thing!” the Pacifist shouted back. He risked a look. Tex had gone back to shoving his shotgun and a second bag in the cowering bank manger's face. The kneeling man was shaking his head. Tex looked like he was about to wallop the guy, so the Pacifist tried to distract him: “You ain't even Texan, are you?”

“I didn't make up that stupid God damn nickname, did I?” Tex replied. The Pacifist could identify with that. Tex kept shouting: “Mind your God damn business and let me finish up here and the both of us might keep our heads.”

“I'm not about to let you walk out of here,” the Pacifist warned.

“Pal, I'm not stealin' a red cent from folks that did a thing to earn it,” Tex countered. He slung his first bag over his shoulder, ripe and bulging with loose bills that went fluttering around him.

“I just want to know why you're pretending to be me,” the Pacifist said. With that, Tex paused.

“You think you're the only guy in this city that thinks this whole get-up is a good way to stay anonymous?” Tex asked. “You got a big head, pal, not everything's about you.”

“It is when half your warrants get slid off onto me.”

The Pacifist could see how they might get confused, but side-by-side they didn't look a lick alike. Tex wore a ragged canvas trench coat compared to the Pacifist's leather duster, a beat-up Gus-style hat that hung low over his eyes instead of a pristine cattleman-style, and for God's sake his bandanna was blue, not red. All that and the man had a hunch in his back that would put Quasimodo to shame.

“Well false accusations are a hazard of the job,” Tex replied. “You wanna shoot up the city, you gotta be ready for the heat.”

Tires squealed outside the bank's front door.

“And there's the fuzz now.”

“No sirens,” the Pacifist noted.

“We don't call the pigs here, you freak,” the kneeling manager scoffed. Tex clocked him in the head with his shotgun, sending him sprawling across the floor. The teller screamed again. The bank manager groaned and sat up. Red dripped onto his coat, the same color as the little trident pin on his lapel.

The Pacifist had known that he'd been walking in a bank that laundered Tridente Cremisi cash when he opened the front door. Still, he was surprised when their goons actually showed. That was on him. He should have figured that the pro-Mussolini group would have something to say when their fourth stash in a week was getting rolled.

They couldn't always be busy with protests and pep rallies.

“You got an escape plan?” the Pacifist called out. Tex zipped up his single full cash bag and stood up from behind the counter.

“Yeah,” he said, “It was 'get in and get out before they get here.' Would've worked like a charm if there wasn't some cowboy distracting me.”

“You still trying to shoot me?” the Pacifist asked. He stepped out from behind the column.

“I haven't decided,” Tex replied. “You gonna shoot me?”

“If I was gonna shoot anyone, I'd start with them,” the Pacifist replied, nodding at the door. They could hear a dozen or more men shouting orders and plans at each other.

“I'll trust you this time, pal,” Tex said as he fed a fresh shell into his shotgun, “It'd be you or the fascists.”

“Those people out there are pricks, but I'm not gonna let you kill them, either,” the Pacifist noted.

“Who's killing anyone?” Tex asked with a shrug that his huge shoulders and back accentuated.

“Seemed like you had my number a minute ago.”

“That's the idea,” Tex replied. He heaved himself up and over the counter with a grunt and sauntered past the Pacifist. Upon examination, the spot he'd blasted on the column wasn't cratered at all; only a pitted, salty residue marred the marble. He was using rock salt. It'd sting something fierce for a good long while, but whoever got a barrel-full of it would survive.

“I'm a thief, not a murderer,” Tex explained. He hefted the cash-stuffed bag: “This shit ain't worth killing over.”

“Tell that to them,” the Pacifist said, nodding at the milling Tridente soldiers just beyond the front door.

“Will do,” Tex said. His eyes twinkled close up, but the Pacifist nearly jump out of his boots at the sight of what little of the other man's skin was left uncovered.

Tex Turtleback had scales, thick overlapping brownish plates like a crocodile.

“See something you like?” Tex asked. The Pacifist couldn't come up with anything by way of a response. “That's what started all this, you know.”

“How's that?” the Pacifist finally managed.

“I was auditioning to join their club, couple years back,” he pointed at the door, “They had a whole list of hoops to jump, books to read, pledges to recite. I was gonna be a good little goose-stepper. But the last thing on my list was to steal a vial of goop from some college in Jersey and deliver it to this company in the Bronx. I did it, but I guess I got some on me 'cause this stuff’s been growing ever since. Those Tridente clowns wouldn't do anything for me, kicked me right to the curb soon as it started spreading onto my face. Fascists act real tight 'til you check the wrong box. Then you're invisible, or worse.”

“Yeah,” the Pacifist agreed, “Hate's a shitty foundation to build on.”

“Okay, Socrates. Well I held up my end of the deal, I figured the least I could do was solicit some donations from 'em for a treatment.”

“I've never seen anything like what you got before,” the Pacifist said. Even the small glimpse of Tex's condition looked so alien that he could say that without exaggerating.

“Don't feel bad, doctors ain't seen it either,” Tex said with a shrug. “Not that I can go to any sawbones who'd ask how I got it. That's the trouble with being a thief. But it ain't all bad. Watch this.”

Tex tightened the cash bag's strap, readied his shotgun, and made his way to the door.

“I'd ask you not to shoot me in the back,” he said over his shoulder, “But that wouldn't do you any good anyways.”

The Pacifist watched him open the front doors and saunter out.

“Hello, boys - !” Tex said, only to be drowned out by a hail of gunfire. The tellers started screaming again and the Pacifist dropped to the floor, Peacemakers drawn. Bullets slammed against the front of the building like jackhammers. Every window burst inward. The front door shattered, leaving a bright rectangular portal glowing with harsh daylight and strobing muzzle flashes.

A silhouette appeared in the door and Tex came sprinting back inside, trailing tattered fabric and gunsmoke behind him. He dropped into a baseball slide and skidded across the polished floor with a nails-on-a-chalkboard squeal.

His coat hung off him in strips, letting the Pacifist see his bare skin beneath. Every inch of him was coat in thick brown growths, like slabs of mushrooms growing up a tree trunk. Each one moved and shifted with him, rasping against the others. The only substance the Pacifist could think of to compare them to was a ram's knobby horns. Tex must have had them two inches thick on his shoulders, and his back looked twice that.

“They don't got guns,” Tex gasped.

“They sure as Hell do,” the Pacifist countered, shouting over the continuing gunfire.

“No, they don't only have guns,” Tex explained.

“What do they have?” the Pacifist asked. He poked his head around the thick column in time to see a black-coated man with an arm band and a green mask step into the open doorway. He clutched some kind of tube under his arm, pointing its wide, angular head into the bank.

“What the - !” the Pacifist started, but the Tridente man squeezed the trigger to send a warhead shooting overhead. It exploded against the back of the bank, filling the whole lobby with a trail of acrid rocket smoke. If the Pacifist had thought the screaming was bad before, the building igniting and starting to collapse brought it to a crescendo. The shooter tossed the spent tube aside and disappeared back out the door.

“Hell was that?” the Pacifist shouted over the ringing in his ears.

“I don't know, but they brought a whole truckload of 'em!” Tex shouted back.

“Then we got to be fast!” the Pacifist said, watching a wide crack travel across the ceiling, “You cover me?”

“No, I am the cover,” Tex replied. He loaded a couple more rounds into his shotgun and pushed himself up. “Don't dawdle.”

Tex rushed the door with the Pacifist close behind.

The Tridente Cremisi goons were not ready. They'd thought their toys were loud enough to deter any reprisal. They brought their guns up, but Tex Turtleback was already firing.

Round after round of rock salt hit them like haymakers.

The Pacifist stayed up close behind Tex, using him like a walking shield. Under his shredded coat, the afflicted man's skin was like a hedgehog made of pine bark. Bullets thunked off of him and he hardly noticed.

There were over a dozen fascists that had pulled up onto the sidewalk. Tex had already dispatched a handful of them. They were pulling another rocket out of the trunk of a double-parked Packard when he nailed each one with rock salt. They fell away, dropping the launcher back into the car in a puff of packing straw.

The Pacifist's Peacemaker found its own targets and roared over and over.

He blew out their tires. His lead smashed their guns to scrap while they were holding them. He punched holes in their radiators to scald them with jets of steaming coolant. One round blasted the cap off a fire hydrant, sweeping three or four men off their feet to hit the pavement, hard.

He holstered his first pistol when it went dry and drew its twin, but found no targets. The militia soldiers had been reduced to a briny, sodden mess, laid out on the sidewalk and moaning as they grasped at their broken weapons.

“Pretty damn efficient,” Tex said.

A gout of smoke rolled over their heads. The bank was burning and he didn’t hear any sirens.

“We got to get them, too,” the Pacifist said, nodding at the mauled building.

The Tridente had reduced their own cover business to Swiss cheese. It looked like a parade of termites had come through and gnawed its facade to the bone.

No sirens meant two things: first, that the Pacifist might get a clean getaway, and second, that the Tridente had enough pull at the local precinct to have their run of the streets. If the fuzz didn’t come running when someone shot a rocket inside a bank, they weren’t coming at all.

That would be something for him to check into later, at his day job.

“We got to get those people out,” he said. No one else was coming to do it. Whatever someone’s political affiliation was, it didn’t make the Pacifist was to see them burn alive. That was their thing, not his. Never his.

“Come on then,” Tex grunted. The Pacifist followed and he followed.

They ducked beneath the smoke and made their way behind the counter. When they emerged, they came through leading the sobbing tellers and carrying the likely concussed manager between them.

“Anyone else?” Tex asked. He propped the delirious manager against a trash can and held him up and out of the flowing hydrant water.

“I'll check,” the Pacifist replied. He went back inside. The heat was getting intense. He stayed low, under the roiling black cloud. There wasn't anyone else behind the counter, living or otherwise. The rocket had damn-near blown out the back of the bank, but no one had been killed. Their ears would be ringing for a while, but they'd be okay.

He did one last sweep and got the Hell out of there as the ceiling started buckling.

The flooded sidewalk with its crying tellers, bleeding manager, and wiped-out Tridente men seemed downright peaceful comparatively.

Among them, Tex Turtleback was nowhere to be found. Neither was the bag of cash, and, when the Pacifist walked around to check the Packard's open trunk, it was conspicuously devoid of any rocket launchers. Only open crates and loose straw remained.

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.