The Devil's Bag Man (11 page)

T
he blaze had died down to a smolder when Galvan realized he was being watched. The fire made the night impenetrable, but he could still feel eyes.

Not like that was unexpected, after the entrance he'd made.

“That was quick,” he said into the blackness. “You bring marshmallows?”

They'd come at him hard, and the smart play, the obvious play, would be to stay hidden, and open up on him from where they stood. Except that when their muzzles strobed the night, they'd light up their locations for him.

It wasn't the kind of thing a shooter fretted over, unless the target could dodge automatic motherfucking gunfire.

Luckily for Galvan, he was pretty sure he could.

A sound of footfalls, coming closer, and then into the light stepped a sun-wizened man sporting a John Deere hat and denim overalls. A rifle dangled from his right hand, barrel pointed lazily at the ground.

He toed the edge of the road and looked Galvan square in the eye.

“You ain't who I expected,” Galvan said dumbly, the adrenaline tucking tail and trudging back the way it had come.

“Same to you.”

In the flickering firelight, the topography of the man's face was remarkable. Deep furrows like dry riverbeds lined his cheeks, surrounding two eyes like deep shimmering wells. He might have been eighty and spry, or sixty and not.

He was no cartel fuckboy, though. That much was clear.

“Name's Jess.” He twisted at the waist, jammed a thumb in the direction of the wreckage. “Those guys friends of yours?”

The man narrowed his eyes, reached up and adjusted the brim of his cap. “This is my farm,” he said, sweeping his arm in the direction from which he'd come. “They are no friends of mine.”

“Oh. Well.” Galvan shrugged his shoulders. “Happy to help.”

The man beckoned. “You must come with me. They will return.”

Galvan ran a hand against the grain of his stubble. “That's kinda what I was waiting for,” he said.

The farmer shook his head. “First you need food, and rest.” He extended his hand. “I am Louis. Please. If you have come to help us, then my prayers have been answered. But this is not the way.”

He took Galvan by the elbow, and Jess allowed himself to be led off the road, steered across a broad, wild field, and into a storage building that smelled of motor oil and chicken shit. Before he knew it, he was reclining on a thin mattress, atop a bale of hay. After two days on his feet, it might as well have been the fucking Waldorf Astoria.

“I am sorry it is not more comfortable,” Louis said in a loud whisper. “But you will be safe here. And out of sight. My sons . . .”

He sighed.

“Better they not see you. The men you killed, their friends will offer money for you. And some of our boys here . . . it is seductive to them, this life. They fly toward it like moths to a flame. You understand?”

Galvan nodded. “I do. You're a good man, Louis. Thank you.”

He patted Jess on the arm. “I'll bring you some supper. And tomorrow, we will discuss the trouble you have come to make.”

Galvan nodded groggily and watched him putter off. The new battle was going to be staying awake long enough to eat, and he had a feeling it was a lost cause.

Sure enough.

Head. Pillow. Gone.

And there she was.

It felt like coming home.

If this was Cucuy's dream or memory or fantasy, so be it. Galvan didn't care. He just wanted to touch her. To look into those eyes.

Come for me,
she purred.

I'm here
.

No
.
This is not real
.

She traced a finger down his chest, and Galvan shuddered with pleasure, closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sun, watched the mandalas kaleidoscoping on his inner eyelids.

How can I find you?
he murmured.
What do you want?

I want you to give yourself to me
.

She pushed him to the ground, swung a leg over his torso, straddled him, leaned low.

Heart and mind
.
Body and soul
.

Galvan woke bathed in sweat, the vision dissipating, the feel of her lingering on his fingertips. The barn was pitch-black, but he could smell the food Louis had left, and one form of lust quickly supplanted the other as Galvan tore into a greasy, cold, delicious piece of roast chicken, and a heaping mound of rice and beans.

It was only ten or eleven, but there would be no more sleep tonight—the woman in yellow wasn't coming back, and he would not risk nightmares, and besides, Galvan felt fully recharged. He stood, bent at the waist, and felt a row of vertebrae pop into place.

Time to do some exploring, he decided. Check out the town, get the lay of the land, figure out where his attackers would come from.

What will you do when there are no more animals to kill, Jess Galvan?

“There will always be animals,” Galvan shot back and headed for the door.

Fifteen minutes of walking brought him to the silent center of town. A church, a bar, a market, and a café eyed one another across a wide
plaza. All of them looked, even in the moonlight, like they could use a fresh coat of paint. Or maybe a wrecking ball.

He sat on the cold stone steps of the church, his will to explore suddenly drained. Louis was right; if he was going to be of any use to this town, he had to have a plan. A strategy.

The old catch-22.

Can't act without thinking.

Can't think without acting.

Let me tell you about freedom,
Cucuy whispered, apropos of nothing, the words slithery, the monster in seduction mode.
Freedom from fear
.
From death
.
From judgment
.
Once you have tasted its sweetness, all else is like ash upon your tongue
.

“You're a real fuckin' poet, you know that?”

The hum of an engine in low gear commanded Galvan's attention. He looked up to see a dust-covered sedan motoring toward him, headlights doused, at about five miles an hour.

The car came to a stop in the exact middle of the plaza, and two guys stepped out: midtwenties, buzz cuts, rhinestone-bedecked T-shirts over black jeans. The trunk yawed open and they stepped to it and bent low, precise and perfunctory in their movements, like men working on an assembly line.

When they straightened, they were holding a dead man at the knees and armpits. His arms lolled loose; there was a dark gash across his neck and a dried gush of blood painted across the chest of his work shirt.

And affixed to that shirt, duct-taped in place, was a square of cardboard, with words scrawled on it in black marker. Galvan couldn't read it from his vantage, didn't want to risk moving and be seen.

Not just yet, anyway.

They laid him on the ground delicately—a perverse mockery of the way a parent lays a sleeping child in her bed, Galvan's heart panging suddenly for Sherry, remembering better times and sweeter nights.

The men arranged the corpse: spread his arms and his legs until he resembled that Da Vinci drawing, Vesuvius Man or whatever, and then tilted his head back until the wound gaped open: a pair of macabre chefs, plating a grisly entrée.

They backed away slowly, as if afraid to disturb his rest, and examined him from a distance. Decided they were satisfied and turned toward the car.

Galvan waited until their asses rested on upholstery and they were reaching for the doors before making himself known.

“Hey, there. What's that say?”

They were on their feet in a flash, the driver crooking his arm toward the handgun at the small of his back. Galvan paid him no mind, strolled toward the body with an exaggerated, arm-swinging jauntiness he figured would read as absurd gringo obliviousness or outright insanity, throw them off balance a bit.

The driver's gun was trained on him now, both hands wrapped around the barrel, knees bent, advancing slowly—a textbook approach, no flashy gangster-movie flex to him. Galvan feigned tunnel vision, bent at the waist, furrowed his brow.

“‘Fuck with Sinaloa and die,'” he read, sounding out the words like a first grader, then straightened. “Who's Sinaloa? You? Or you?” He pointed at the corpse and continued spouting rapid-fire inanity.

“Who's he? Looks like a farmer to me. Was he a farmer? Or a fisherman? Heck, everybody around here's pretty much a farmer or a fisherman, am I right? How 'bout you guys? You like to fish?”

The driver lowered his gun a quarter inch. “You got three seconds to get your crazy gringo ass the fuck out of here.”

Galvan grinned, spread his arms, and sauntered toward him.

Playing the maniac was surprisingly fun. And disturbingly easy.

“Leave? Hell, I just got here.” He looked from one to the other. “So which one of you is Sinaloa?”

The dude cocked back the hammer. “Federacíon Sinaloa, pendejo. We own this town.” His raised the pistol to Galvan's temple—which brought his arm well above his own head, given the six inches Jess had on him.

“You don't own shit,” Galvan said. “Pull the trigger. See what happens.”

Dude didn't need any more convincing. He got the shot off, but not before Galvan's arm shot out, corralled his wrist, snapped it backward like a twig, and slammed him to the ground. The pistol's report echoed through the empty square, overlaid with the sound of the shooter's bellow. The pistol clattered across the flagstone, came to a rest against the dead man's leg.

Galvan glanced up at the other man, saw the sweat on his brow and
the trajectory of his gaze. He was clocking a run for the weapon, wondering if he could skirt Galvan, reach it, spin and take him down.

“Jump, if you're feeling froggy,” Galvan said, stepping back. “But one of you is gonna die, and the other's gonna drive me to your little Sinaloa clubhouse. You're in the lead for chauffeur right now, but it makes no difference to me.” He turned toward the gun, made a show of appraising the distance.

“Matter fact,” he told the guy, “go ahead. Walk over there and pick it up. We might as well make this interesting.”

The Sinaloan didn't move.

“I mean it. Here's what we're gonna do. I'll stand right here. You get the gun, and you shoot one of us. Me or him. You hit me, then hey, it's all good, the both of you go home. That's if you hit me. But I'ma tell you something, and maybe you'll believe it and maybe you won't. You
can't
hit me, because I'm too fast. Bullet looks like a fucking badminton thingamajig to me, whaddayou call it—a shuttlecock. And if you miss, I'm gonna rip your head off, tear a couple trees out of the ground, build me some goalposts, and punt your skull through 'em from sixty yards away.”

You are enjoying this,
said the voice in his head, with a kind of curdled satisfaction, and it took Galvan a moment to understand that it was not Cucuy.

It was him.

The would-be gunman didn't move. His partner was still writhing, quieter now, cognizant of the way ownership of his fate had changed hands.

“Shoot this crazy son of a bitch,” he yelled. “Put a fucking bullet in his brain.”

Galvan raised his eyebrows. “Pretty much what you'd expect him to say. All right, let's go, we don't have all night here.”

Haltingly, the Sinaloan walked over, crouched, picked up the gun. He was ten feet from Galvan, from the driver. Galvan had to give it to him: from the look on his face, he had absolutely no idea what the dude had decided.

“No man is faster than a bullet!” the guy with the broken wrist screamed, and then the crack of the gunshot tore through the air.

T
he slug caught the driver in the chest and he fell silent forever. His boy squeezed off another three to be sure, the shots tightly clustered, a downright respectable bit of marksmanship, stopping only when the gun clicked.

He dropped his arm and let the pistol fall from his hand. It thunked onto the stone, a low-key punctuation mark.

“Smart man,” said Galvan.

The shooter shrugged. “I only met him Tuesday. He seemed like a prick.” He turned a steady gaze on Galvan. “So now what?”

“First, pick up that gun before some little kid finds it.”

Galvan watched as he complied, contemplating the absurdity of his own words. There was a pair of murdered men lying in the middle of the plaza, and he was worried about an empty handgun?

The kid straightened, jammed the gun into his pants.

“Okay. So?”

“Like I said. Wherever you're staying, take me there.”

“So you can . . .” He didn't break eye contact but couldn't finish the sentence.

“Have a frank exchange of views. You got a problem with that, Bosco?”

Bosco thought about it, or pretended to.

Or wondered why he'd been dubbed Bosco, which was certainly a legitimate question.

“Can you get me a job with Azteca, then?”

Galvan goggled at him. “Excuse me?”

“Tell them I helped you or whatever. I got four kids to support, carnal.”

“I don't work for Azteca. I don't work for anybody.”

Now it was Bosco's turn to goggle.

“So what the fuck, then?” he asked, after a moment.

“I'm on the Rosales Beautification Committee. Get in the car.”

Bosco shook his head. “I gotta get paid, man. One way or another, you feel me?”

Galvan walked over, came face-to-face with him. Bosco's cheeks were pockmarked with acne scars, his hairline mottled with pimples. He looked like he ought to be worrying about who to ask to the junior semiformal, not working as a hired gun in the middle of a war zone.

“You wanna do right by your kids, find another line of work. Your life expectancy's like
this
.” He snapped his fingers. “Now get in the car. You don't have to get out. Just drop me at the front door, and you're done.”

“What—”

“I'm not asking, chief.”

Bosco didn't press it. He retrieved the keys from his ex-partner's pocket, slid into the driver's seat. The engine turned over, and he swept the car around in a wide U-turn, navigating carefully around both bodies.

Soon they were on a narrow dirt road, winding through forest thick enough to stanch the seep of moonlight.

Bosco drove with his hands at ten and two, his posture rigid. Like Galvan was his driver's ed teacher or some shit.

After a dozen forks, the forest thinned and the ocean came into view, surreal in its sudden expansive rolling grandeur. Bosco jabbed the brake pedal with a heavy foot, and the car lurched to a stop.

“There's no point, you know,” he said. “They'll just replace 'em with new guys.”

“Then the replacements are gonna need replacing. I ain't got shit else to do, homes.”

Bosco shook his head. “Whatever. At the end of this road, look to your left and you'll see an old hotel, a hundred yards up the beach. They're gonna have sentries posted.”

“How many?”

“Maybe three, four. I never did it yet, so I'm not sure.”

“And how many men inside?”

He shrugged. “Like thirty.”

“All right, get outta here. And don't let me see you again.”

Bosco nodded, fast and tight. Galvan heaved a sigh, climbed out of the sedan, shut the door softly. He watched Bosco bang out a three-point turn and tear off down the road, three times faster than they'd come.

He trudged up the path; at its head a dozen vehicles were parked, from beat-up Toyotas to murdered-out Jeeps like the one he'd barbecued.

Galvan tried a couple of doors, thinking there might be a cache of weapons he could liberate, but everything was locked down tight. He weighed smashing a window and stuck a pin in the idea—no use drawing out the sentries before he'd gotten the lay of the land.

He strode up the path, onto the sand. To his left, as promised, was a ramshackle three-story hotel. It sat on stilts at the edge of the woods, a hundred feet from the water. The windows were dark, half of them broken. The paint had peeled off long ago. The whole thing looked slapped together from driftwood, maybe by shipwrecked carpenters delirious from sunstroke.

Galvan walked to the shoreline and let the ocean lap gently at the toes of his cross-trainers.

The temptation to throw himself into the water was unexpected, and tremendous.

Galvan resisted.

Resisting, after all, was what he did.

He'd take a swim later. When he'd earned one.

Bathe in their blood, my son
.
Show them what real strength looks like
.

He saw a cigarette flare, on the porch of the hotel, and then another. The crash of tiny waves made it impossible to hear the men from here, but they'd hear him if he made a sufficiently hellacious amount of noise—flip a fucking car over, and they'd come running.

He ran the movie in his mind, saw himself waiting in the woods as
they tried to figure out how the fuck a Jeep had done a backflip then springing at them, a human sandstorm of violence, taking down the sentries, grabbing their weapons, and tiptoeing toward the house.

Eh.

It seemed needlessly elaborate. Plus, the sound would be hard to calibrate, might be loud enough to wake the soldiers slumbering on their dirty mattresses and bring everybody rushing outside.

Galvan clocked the men a moment longer, dim shapes lounging on plastic chairs, their rifles resting against the broken railing.

Vigilant
was not the first word that popped into his head. More like
ass-clowns
.

The shortest distance between two points was a straight line.

Works for me,
he thought, and ran toward them—footfalls silent in the sand, body gathering speed, a perfect blank clarity filling his mind. He vaulted the porch and came down between them: two guys in T-shirts and cutoffs, exclamations frozen in their throats, weapons out of reach.

Time up.

He snapped the first one's neck between his palms, spun away from him, grabbed the other by the arm and tossed him off the porch. The two sentries landed simultaneously, one crumpling lifeless and the other landing shoulder-first in the sound-muffling sand. Galvan leaped after him, foot connecting with the side of the sentry's face as he tried to stand and knocking him flat. Galvan grabbed a handful of hair, yanked the head backward until he heard a crack.

Two down.

Galvan froze, ears cocked for any hint of movement from inside the house. Nothing.

Go time.

He crept back onto the porch, glanced at the rifles. They might as well have been alarm clocks, for all the racket they would make. Galvan walked past them and through the front door.

He looked left: a dining room, stacked high with broken chairs.

Right: check-in desk, two couches, two dudes asleep beneath thin blankets.

Galvan stared down at them, hands flexing at his sides, hypnotized
by the syncopated rhythm of their breath, and felt all the resolve drain from him.

They are no less guilty asleep than awake,
Cucuy hissed.
Give them what they deserve
.

Galvan clenched his jaw and shook his head.
Not like this
.

More false morality,
the monster sneered.
A man lives because he sleeps and dies because he wakes? Understand, Jess Galvan: there need be no reason
.
No law but your own
.

He shook his head again, heart beating faster now than it had in the thick of combat.

A shout from outside broke the stalemate. Galvan whipped toward it just as the report of a rifle split the air like lightning.

An alarm clock after all.

This was about to get interesting.

He dove off the porch and found a third sentry standing over the body in the sand, firing rounds into the air.

For a dude pounding a panic button, he wasn't very attuned to the presence of danger. Galvan hit the ground three feet in front of him, rolled, stood, and as the guy scrambled to lower the barrel of his rifle, Jess plowed into him, shoulder to gut, a nice clean football hit. The rifle flew from his hands as the guy went down and Galvan snatched it in midair, momentum carrying him forward; he pump-loaded the next round single-handed and shot the guy in the sternum.

You didn't have to be a sniper at that range.

The first window to light up was on the top floor. Galvan beelined for it,
be the last place they're expecting
.

A standing leap, and he was back on the porch railing; another, and his hands gripped the ledge of a second-story balcony. He swung himself up, leaped again,
fucking King Kong shit
, and by the time a shirtless torso leaned out that lit window, right arm terminating in a pistol, Galvan was propelling himself upward again. He grabbed the dude's arm like a gymnast on the uneven bars, and a couple heartbeats later Galvan was standing where the guy had been, holding his gun, and the guy was facedown in the sand below.

Four rooms on the top floor, two men per room. Galvan cleared them all in less than thirty seconds—head shots until the clip was
empty, these dudes clumsy-stumbling from their beds, half of them too confused to shoot straight and the other half too far from their guns to even do that much.

He ran out of bullets, dodged a knife, heard it thwang into the door frame beside him, pulled it out, returned it to sender. Found the last dude, roommate of the first, cowering in the bathroom, a porno mag still spread across his lap, and kicked him backward through the clapboard wall, taking out half the toilet in the bargain.

Footfalls on the stairs, a clatter of them like a sudden monsoon. Whatever confusion there might have been about the attacker's location had burned off; the twelve or fifteen Sinaloans left were ready for a fight.

Might as well keep 'em guessing.

Galvan swung himself out a window, made a lateral jump onto an aluminum drainpipe, and shimmied down to the first floor.

The rifles were right where he'd left them. Galvan grabbed one in each hand, set up shop behind the welcome desk, and trained his sights on the staircase. Sure enough, the herd reversed direction a few moments later.

Might've sounded like buffalo, but they were sitting ducks.

He picked off ten without moving more than his trigger finger, the bodies logjamming the stairs and the final gaggle of soldiers tripping over the fallen, some reversing course and others planting their feet, making a last stand, jockeying for a sight line, finding nothing to aim at but a banquette.

Galvan pressed himself flat, crept around the far side of the desk, and was back on the porch before they'd even noticed he was gone. He sprinted around the back of the hotel, nabbing a pistol along the way, courtesy of the dude he'd tossed from the window.

They were still arrayed along the staircase, firing at the desk; he could see them clearly through a busted window. He wondered how long they'd do that. Decided to find out.

Until they ran out of bullets, was the answer.

And then, the silence was deafening. Smoke, blood, terror filled the air. Somebody'd shit himself, too. There was also that.

Galvan closed one eye, lined up a head shot, squeezed. The man fell over the staircase railing, head over heels, and the last four broke in all
directions: upstairs left, upstairs right, downstairs left, downstairs right. It would have looked choreographed, if it weren't so ugly.

Galvan watched them go. He'd made his point. And somebody had to tell the Sinaloa higher-ups what had happened. Might as well let them sing the story in four-part harmony.

He turned on his heel, figuring he'd grab a Jeep and find his way back to Louis's in style, and found himself face-to-face with one of the runners, a young kid with a busted nose.

Both their eyes went wide, and then the kid threw it in reverse, twisted an ankle in the sand, and landed on his ass.

Galvan shot him a grim look and started to walk away. But wait.

He'd seen this kid before.

The busted nose.

He'd done that.

Who's we, junior?

Azteca, maricón
.

Bosco, you sly motherfucker.

Galvan trudged toward him, until his body bathed the kid in shadow.

He raised a hand, thrust it up into the space between them, shook it frantically.

“I told them, man. Just like you said to. ‘There's a new monster in town.' I said it just like that.”

Galvan sighed and threw Bosco a grudging imaginary head nod of respect.

Well played, pendejo
.
Hope you took my advice and went home to your kids, because if I see you again I'm gonna rip off your head and feed it to your asshole
.

Good thing Galvan didn't give a fuck which cartel he'd just slaughtered.

Six of one, half dozen of the other.

He looked down at the kid. “Well, junior, I guess you'd better tell somebody a little higher up the food chain, me entiendes?”