The Devil's Bag Man (18 page)

Galvan clenched his fists. “You've gotta stop her.”

One look at Gum's face, and Galvan knew that wasn't gonna happen. Sherry was too willful, too reckless, too headstrong.

Too much his daughter.

“I gotta get out of here.”

“Nobody gets outta here, man. It's—”

“Then I'll be the first.”

“Yeah?” Gum crossed his arms. “How you plan to do that, guy who just got here five minutes ago?”

Galvan mulled that over. “I'm gonna make Tezcatlipoca an offer,” he said at last, the germ of an idea taking root. “You know where I can find him?”

“Why you think I'm here?” Gum countered. “He sent me to come get you, boss. Only I wouldn't be so eager, if I was you.”

O
jos Negros loomed before him, huge, squat, and menacing. Finally Domingo Valentine had something to stare at besides the man sitting across from him in the limousine's spacious rear chamber.

Man
.

It was a term he used loosely.

The change that had come over the former Jess Galvan was subtle but unmistakable, and for the journey's duration Valentine had toyed deliciously with the paradox, as if it were a wiggly tooth.

It was almost too much to hold in his mind, the way his companion both was and was not the Ancient One. Valentine remembered an interview he'd heard on the radio, decades ago. Some scientist, talking about a made-up experiment where you replaced each part of a man, one after the next, until nothing of him remained. A new heart, a new lung. Cornea transplants. Artificial legs. Finally, the brain. At what point, the scientist had asked—or maybe he had been a philosopher—was the man no longer himself, but someone else?

This was different, of course. No surgery, and no question. Jess
Galvan had been obliterated. There was a god inside the man. That was what the Great One had always been.

It is of no more significance than a new suit of clothes
, Valentine thought.

But that wasn't exactly true either. This body was stronger. Much stronger. Valentine thrilled at the possibilities. The power. Only now, seeing Cucuy enshrined within this new form, did he understand how enfeebled the Ancient One had been in the previous one. How limitless his reach was now.

And yet, Valentine mused, the Timeless One might walk undetected in this new skin. The very prisoners who had slept and eaten alongside Jess Galvan a few months earlier would merely assume he had returned to Ojos, as so many did, and take him back into the fold with nary a second glance.

But that was only because, as the Great One had taught Valentine, the human brain refused to process anything that lay outside its understanding of the world. Like any animal, man relied on filters. Blinders. Ignorance was survival, except when it was death. A frog recognized a fly when the fly flew. Surround it with live flies hanging from strings, and the creature would starve to death.

Of course, only a cruel god, a force outside of nature, would present a frog with such a scenario.

And under closer scrutiny, the Great One would not be able to disguise his glory—not that Valentine imagined he intended to live undetected among inmates.

Galvan's eyes had been brown or green or hazel; now, they were a black beyond black, and possessed of an intense magnetism, so circuit scrambling that Valentine could not be sure whether they attracted or repelled. They were Cucuy's eyes; Valentine had watched in jubilant disbelief as Galvan's had dulled, like spent lightbulbs. An instant later the Timeless One's glowed, brighter than Valentine had ever seen them.

His whole body glowed, in fact. As if his heart pumped molten lava through his veins instead of blood.

That was new.

“Everything is new,” Cucuy declared, reading his mind. Valentine startled and nodded. The voice was hardest to get used to; it was
Galvan's through and through, no matter how closely Valentine listened for some subsonic growl, some hint of his master's vicious rasp.

“The world is remade,” Cucuy continued. “And it is time to work. Are you ready to work, Domingo?”

Valentine drew himself up, his back arching away from the leather seat. “I have never stopped.”

Until he said it, Valentine had not known how deeply he pined for his master's recognition, for the Timeless One to credit him with orchestrating this triumph—and now, he castigated himself for being weak, petty.

Everything might have changed, but some things never would. To clamor for Cucuy's praise was to invite its opposite.

But the Great One had not noticed his petulance or else chose to ignore it. Either way, Valentine was grateful.

“Tell me what you need,” he said.

Cucuy stretched his legs in front of him, locked his elbows, fisted his hands, and turned his arms left and right, as if turning a pair of spigots.

Acclimating to his new dimensions
, Valentine thought.

He unclenched his right hand, finger by finger, counting off a list.

“Girls. My appetite for girls remains the same.” He said it slowly, as if realizing it as he spoke or surprised that it was so. Another finger unfurled from the thick, muscular palm, and a toothy grin spread across the Great One's face. “And fruit. I have a need for fruit.”

“Fruit?” Valentine repeated, incredulous, before he could stop himself.

What am I, a caterer?

Thankfully, Cucuy was half lost in reverie.

“Yes. The fruits of my young days. I cannot remember their names.”

“I will look into it, my lord,” Valentine assured him, growing more anxious by the moment. Had the Timeless One lost some part of himself, trapped in that incorporeal netherland? Had his lust for—

“And now, to more important matters.”

Ah. Okay.

Cucuy gestured at the prison. “How many men?”

“About eighty-five hundred.”

“Assemble them. Now.”

The sweat seeped from Valentine's brow, and the air conditioner
converted it into a salty residue, tight on his skin. The only place the entire population of Ojos Negros could conceivably fit was in the yard, and no more than a tenth of the inmates were permitted to congregate there at once. A quarter might overwhelm the guards; en masse, they would be fools not to look around, do the math, and realize how simply collective exodus could be achieved.

These men might be cutthroats, but they were far from fools.

“If I may make a suggestion, Great One . . . in the past you have controlled them from a distance. Through guards. Intermediaries. The leaders of the cartels. To bring together so many men at once might be . . . unwieldy.”

Cucuy's smile was icy.

Icy, and unprecedented.

“You doubt I can control them, Valentine?”

The procurer gulped down the lump rising in his throat. “Of course not, master. I was only—”

“Go, then.”

Valentine reached for the door, threw it open, stepped into the late-afternoon heat. A shaft of sunlight fell into the car, and Cucuy slid across the seat to bathe in it, catlike.

Valentine hesitated, just long enough to banish a thought from his mind.

“Something else?”

Valentine's pulse pounded in his temples, so hard he wondered if his head was vibrating like a bass woofer. He turned, sucked in a breath of air, bent to look at Cucuy and found himself caught in those oil-well eyes.

“It's just . . . in your absence, I . . . I had to manage the cartels as best I could. I hope I didn't—”

At first, Valentine didn't know what to make of the sound that emanated from the Ancient One, low and syncopated, dastardly, like a man falling down a flight of stairs.

Then he realized it was laughter.

“They are of no consequence. You have done well, Domingo Valentine. There is a place for you in the New World.”

He crossed his legs at the knee and folded his hands, the pose oddly
aristocratic, and for the hundredth time today the procurer reflected that he knew nothing, must assume nothing. The habits, the manners, the concerns of the master he had served were no more. A new master sat before him, and his own survival depended on learning how to become indispensable to him.

Who he was, and what he wanted.

Both questions had the same answer, Valentine thought abruptly.

Everything
.

“Thank you,” he whispered and hurried off to do his master's bidding.

THE GUARDS WERE
nervous. Trigger happy. They'd refused to stand among the inmate population, and for the sake of expedience, Valentine had agreed to put them all on the roof and in the watchtowers, safe from the riot they seemed to think was inevitable the moment you asked Azteca and Sinaloa to share the yard.

He had invoked Cucuy's name—as if they didn't know for whom he spoke—but, over the last few months, the power of that invocation had waned considerably due to overuse, invisibility. His grip on power had been far more tenuous than he had realized, Valentine reflected. But he had completed his task.
Done well
.

The steward had worn the crown until the king's return. It had not touched the ground.

And now
, he thought, as he stood by the Great One's side and watched the men emerge from their cells and shuffle down the five stacked tiers, trickle out of the cafeteria, the laundry, the workshops—streams and rivers of humanity fusing into a vast ocean that flowed toward the open, dusty yard at the prison's center—
the kingdom would be set right
.

He hadn't the foggiest notion what that meant.

The only Great One Valentine had ever known had been intent on survival, stealth and shadow, manipulation and puppetry. The biding of time. The gathering of strength. He had never spoken of what came afterward, and it had never occurred to Valentine to wonder, much less ask.

But here they were.

That word flashed through the procurer's mind again.

Everything
.

At last, the cells were empty, the yard full. The smell, the energy, the sheer jittery malevolence of so many men accustomed to being treated like animals was overwhelming. The yard was a rippling ocean, yes—and at the center of it was an island, a small circumference of space upon which the water did not dare encroach.

Alone on that island, like a single palm tree, stood the Great One, his hands clasped behind his back as his terrible eyes moved across the crowd, the subtle glow of his body brightening as the light failed.

Valentine watched the men watch him. The silence was absolute. They didn't know what they were looking at, but they felt its power, knew they had never seen its like before.

The Timeless One luxuriated in their attention for a full minute, and Valentine sensed the fear, the wonder, the excitement cresting. Becoming a wave.

When Cucuy finally spoke, a low current of electricity ran beneath his words—a subsonic vibration that buzzed against some pleasure center in the brain, splitting the difference between seduction and hypnosis.

“You may think you know me,” he said, softly enough that they had to strain to hear him, and it dawned on Valentine that this was no public address, but rather eight thousand private conversations.

“But you do not. You may recognize the body of a man named Jess Galvan who was once a prisoner here. But I am not Jess Galvan. This, you already know.”

He dropped his head to his chest, walked forward a pace.

“You have heard my name whispered all your lives.”

He looked up, met the collective gaze.

“I am the one they call Cucuy.”

Valentine scanned the sea of faces, expecting shock, skepticism.

All he found was silence.

“I was once a priest,” the Ancient One went on. “My god was the god of your forefathers. The god of your true nature, before that nature was buried under lies.

“Mercy.” He spread his arms and spat the word. “Have you found mercy in the world? In your own hearts?”

He glared at them, long and hard. Waited. Let them mull it over.

Silence, awestruck and fearful.

Thoughtful.

“Answer me!” he thundered, and they jolted out of it.

“No,” a thousand voices mumbled and shouted, plaintive and choked, furious and reverent.

“Redemption.” Cucuy turned left and right. “Forgiveness. ‘The lamb who goes not to the slaughter.' These are the lies on which your world is built. And when you reject them and embrace your nature, what then? Are you given mercy? No.” He stamped his foot, raising a cloud of dust that swirled as high as his waist. “Prison!”

A murmur of agreement rippled through the yard. Of possibility.

He has offered them nothing
, Valentine mused. Demonstrated no power. Made no promises, no threats. Merely claimed a name out of some ancient, collective nightmare and spun a world around it.

“The old gods are gone,” Cucuy went on. “But I am here. Their power is mine.” He made a fist and shook it in the air. “Because I
took
it. I took it, and I waited. Until the time was right. Until falsehood and delusion had crippled the world, made it ripe for collapse. That time is now.”

Valentine took stock again. Something had shifted, by a hair. The rhetoric was too abstract for men like these. They knew they'd been wronged; they felt the boot of the world on their necks. But their world was within these walls, and there was no falsehood here, no delusion. Authority wasn't abstract. Authority could have you raped in the showers or shanked to death in your bunk.

No sooner had Valentine thought it than the Great One pivoted, gave them his terms, exploded their world.

“Today this is a prison. Five hundred years ago, it was a temple. And tomorrow it will be a fortress. The first of many. And you, all of you, will be an army.
My
army.”

He paused, to let that ripple through the crowd and settle, and then his mouth cleaved into a vicious grin.

“Unless you prefer to remain shackled and powerless.”

Valentine reeled with the genius of it, even as he tensed for the inmates' response.

Every prison a fortress.

Every prisoner a soldier.

They were already vicious and disciplined, regimented and organized. If there was a swifter way to recalibrate the balance of power in the world, he couldn't bring it to mind.

“I already got a boss,” somebody said, from deep within the dense thicket of bodies, and a nervous ripple of guttural agreement spread from that unseen point.

Cucuy nodded. “Yes. Of course. Azteca. Sinaloa. Those organizations have raised you, no? Taught you the meaning of loyalty. But the new war must bring the old war to an end.”