The Devil's Bag Man (2 page)

T
he laws of the universe were simple, Domingo Valentine thought, as he folded his crisp white shirt into a precise square and placed it carefully atop a low stone table positioned close to the bathtub.

Power—real power, brutal and awesome, the kind most people didn't know existed and could not have fathomed even if they'd come face-to-face with it—did not simply disappear. It might change shape, abandon one form for another, but it did not cease to be.

None knew this so well as Domingo, for none had stood as close to power. For six years, he had provided Cucuy—the Great One, the Ancient One, the Timeless One—with the only form of sustenance he required. He had watched Cucuy devour the beating hearts of countless virgin girls,
the vessel of the gods
, and desired nothing more than to remain at the right hand of the master forever.

Domingo stepped out of his trousers and added them to the neat piles of garments. Candlelight grotesqued his shadow, threw an elongated, flickering version of himself across the earthen walls.

A dim memory, dormant for years, flitted through his brain, like a
piece of paper animated by a sudden breeze. Domingo was seven years old, sitting with his grandfather by the sea. It was a time before time—before the fire and the city, before the brothel in which his mother worked became his home, before his own induction into the business of selling female flesh. And long before he'd been thrown in jail to rot and instead found his true calling, here in the bowels of Ojos Negros Prison, in service to the Timeless One.

Domingo's abuelo had pointed at the water and whispered into his grandson's ear.
All the water in the world has been here since the beginning of time
.
And since the beginning of time, not a single drop has been lost
.
It's in our bodies, our oceans, our sky
.
It never stops moving, but it's always the same
.
How's that for magic, mijo?

If water didn't disappear, then how could power?

Yes, two months ago he had discovered Cucuy's body, lying in a chamber adjacent to this one in an advanced state of putrefaction, the flesh melting from the bones, the heavy amulets sinking into a murky stew of organs.

This despite the fact that he had been alive no more than a few hours earlier—alive, and making grand plans to abandon his five-hundred-year-old body for another. A pure, still-beating heart imbued with all his power was en route to Texas, where Cucuy's son Aaron Seth would consume it and be consumed.

At least, that had been the plan.

But Cucuy had not returned. In Seth's body or any other.

Hence this desperate attempt to communicate.

Domingo removed his underwear, raised his leg over the side of the tub, and paused for a moment, foot poised inches from the surface of the bath.

The candlelight did no justice to the color, made the blood that filled the deep basin appear dull and rusty instead of bright and thick and—well, if not alive, then
vital
. Brimming with the stuff of life, like some primal stew just waiting for lightning to strike. Domingo could feel the heat rising off it, in the cool damp air; it was exactly the temperature of a living body.

Had to be, or the communion he was attempting would surely fail.

It would probably fail anyway, he told himself, tamping down
expectations as he eased his leg beneath the surface, inch by precious inch, acutely aware of the young lives that had been forfeited so that this tub might be filled.

Domingo was no initiate. No priest. Nothing holy flowed through his veins. But desperate times anointed men. Demanded that they become other than they were.

For better, or worse.

As the Great One's procurer, Domingo had supplied him with far more than a steady flow of young girls. His expertise had expanded with his responsibilities, until he provided all that Cucuy's vast, unknowable plans required: guns, drugs, men to move them both. As his devotion to his master grew, the outside world faded like an old photograph, withered to the size of a chessboard, with Cucuy looming over all.

Domingo's eyes and soul had adjusted to the darkness; candles replaced the sun, and the old religion overtook the new. Erased it, like a mistaken calculation scribbled on a scrap of paper.

That part had been easy. Effortless, even. Domingo had always been a creature of logic—and if man had been created in God's image, as the priests of his youth insisted, then how ridiculous was the lame on the cross, suffering gladly for the sins of his own creation? Or his holy mother, sacred of cunt, a perversion of every elemental truth?

Domingo knew how a mirror worked. If man was a reflection of God, it was a god like the Ancient One—cruel and ruthless, straining against the confines of the body, the strictures of the world.
That
was an image he could believe he had been made in.

He, and everybody else he'd ever met.

And now, perhaps inevitably, Cucuy had escaped those confines, cast off his mortal coil the way a snake shed skin.

Perhaps Cucuy had never been alive to start with—at least, not in the narrow, mortal sense of the word.

In which case, he certainly could not be dead.

Domingo's line of reasoning had bent itself into a circle those first days. He'd paced that track endlessly, looking foolishly for an exit.

Finally, he'd shaken himself free of the impulse to understand and turned back to the practical matters at which he excelled, the skill set
that had made him indispensable to his master to begin with—and asked himself the only question he might hope to answer.

Where was Cucuy now?

It ran through Domingo's head on a loop, as he struggled to maintain the illusion of normalcy, hold together the sprawling, fractious empire the Timeless One had left behind. Perhaps his role was simply to hold down the fort, wait for Cucuy to reestablish contact from whatever realm he now inhabited, whatever vessel now contained his multitudes.

Soon, though, Domingo had tired of waiting. It was not his way; he was a doer, a man who made things happen.

So he'd made things happen.

In the library was a book the Terrible One had read and reread ceaselessly, seeming always to glean new knowledge, excavate old memories. Perhaps, Domingo mused, some explanation of what had happened might be found there—or better yet, some method of communication. And so the procurer had extended his long arms, reached into corners of the world that had never before concerned him. But it was all the same.

There was always a price.

Either you paid it, or they did.

He brought in a translator, an esteemed professor of religion and antiquity said to be one of the few who could decipher the language contained within the ancient scrolls. Munoz was his name: a nebbish-looking man, long faced and crooked toothed. The blindfold he'd been forced to don before stepping into the armored car didn't seem to worry as much as excite him.

But after fifteen minutes in the Ancient One's cavernous, domed library, carved from the bedrock of the earth, discretion had given way to stronger emotions. The professor's hands shook as he turned the gold-leafed pages, traced the ornate handwritten script. Sweat beaded on his brow; every few seconds he dabbed it with a handkerchief, lest he sully the volume splayed open on his lap.

This is unbelievable
, he had stammered as he looked up wide eyed at Domingo, standing at the room's threshold with his arms folded across his chest.

Do—do you understand what this means? If this is authentic, it, it—well, it rewrites everything we know about the Aztec Empire
.

Munoz jabbed a bony finger at the page, and Domingo felt an unexpected stab of disgust, as this peon's digit made contact with the sacred, burgundy handwriting.

Right here—right here!—is the story of how the cult of Tezcatlipoca began! The historical community knows almost nothing of this cult
.
Even its existence has never been proven! And now
. . .

Domingo had turned on his heel and stalked off down the corridor. He was a man who hated mistakes, and the instant he realized he had made one, he sought to eradicate all traces of it. It was a compulsion that threatened to trump even his pragmatism, and he knew himself well enough to avoid the temptation to indulge it. Munoz's passion meant he could never be trusted, never be allowed to leave. The realization set Domingo's body vibrating, made it sing with the urge to kill.

Where he came from, problems were best handled swiftly, directly, and brutally; to let a resentment fester or an uncertainty unfold was to invite worse trouble tomorrow. That impulse had served him well on the outside. There was even a certain blunt honor in it. But in the Timeless One's employ, Domingo had begun to learn more artful methods—to look beyond both today and tomorrow, and to find pleasure in subterfuge.

The honor in dishonor.

And so he had stepped into the chamber that served as his office and summoned the guard who'd fetched the professor.

“Sí, jefe?”

Domingo looked the heavyset minion up and down, searching for some sign that he suspected. He did not. None did. Why would he? A man might serve Cucuy for years and never see his face. Most of them prayed not to. They were used to taking orders from Domingo.

“Tell our friend he's looking for anything about communication,” he said, voice low and level, forcing himself to keep his eyes buried in the ledger lying open on his desk. “Ancient ways of making contact across long distances. Comprendes?”

“Sí, jefe.”

“If he finds something, he writes it down. When he's done, he calls you. You take him out of the library and shoot him in the head.”

“Sí, jefe.”

Domingo glanced up and nodded in dismissal. The guard swiped a hand over his bushy mustache, as if patrolling for crumbs, then turned and lumbered away. From his carriage, he might just as well have been on his way to retrieve a lunch order. Domingo appreciated that in these men: they questioned nothing, and they didn't spook.

Then again, once you'd seen the devil, what else was there to be scared of?

It was a question that seemed particularly poignant now, as Domingo Valentine took a deep breath and sank the rest of the way into the tub, letting the warm viscous liquid fill his ears.

He was no priest, and he was no monster. He had taken no pleasure in the hundreds of deaths he'd arranged. But nor was he a sentimentalist. The butcher did not mourn the cow. He recognized that it gave up its life for a higher cause, and in his own way he honored that.

Just as Domingo honored the girls he had procured on the Great One's behalf.

And the girls whose blood was the medium that might allow him to reach out now, across the cosmos.

Domingo closed his eyes, and waited.

You must clear your mind
, Munoz's notes had said.

He did his damnedest.

Nothing happened.

He became acutely aware of an itch on his left ankle. He scratched it with his right foot, tried not to disturb the surface of the bath, the profound and unexpected heaviness of the blood against his chest and stomach. But his movement caused a slight ripple, and the taste was in his mouth now, hot and metallic. A slight burn to it, even, perhaps generated by Domingo's imagination.

He resettled. This ritual, like every other Munoz had revealed before his passing, was only to be undertaken by the Line of Priests. What exactly that meant, Domingo did not know. Except that the line was broken—that much was for sure. And the way he figured, that meant all bets were off, and anything was worth trying.

He was no priest, but he was the only one left.

That ought to count for something.

He tried to focus on the Great One's spirit and thus summon him.
Imagined Cucuy's voice slithering through the inside of his skull, as it once had. But the taste would not fade from Domingo's mouth—if anything, it was growing stronger. And the weight, the warmth, the failure, the oppressive way the blood seemed to coat his skin—it was all too much.

He sat bolt upright, his chest heaving.

He had been wrong to play at priesthood.

This wasn't in his nature, and it wasn't going to work.

But something would.

Domingo stepped out of the tub, exalted in the cool air as the blood slid down his thighs in thin rivulets.

He had been going about this wrong. He was a man of the world. A fixer. A procurer. A deal maker. Nothing under the sun was beyond his reach, if he willed himself toward it.

And all that he could reach, Domingo Valentine could reap.

S
heriff Bob Nichols rambled his cruiser over the dirt service road, one hand on the wheel and the other between his legs. He couldn't help playing with it, teasing himself. It was bad, he knew, but he was granting himself a lot of leeway these days, treating himself with kid gloves, and the flask wedged between his thighs served as a kind of security blanket.

Knowing it was there calmed him down—presented a challenge he knew he could meet at a time when Nichols was sure of very little, trusted the world about as far as he could throw it. The flask was a sober man's dumb-ass attempt to dramatize a state of utter, brain-melting confusion.

The discipline not to get shithoused
.

You're a real winner, huh, Nichols?

On paper, everything should have been fine. Better than fine. For the first time since the ink had dried on his divorce, he was in a solid and loving relationship, something that might conceivably come equipped with a future. He'd met Ruth Cantwell less than three months back,
when he'd been called out to investigate the kidnapping of a local girl named Sherry Richards. Ruth was the family's therapist, had helped pry them free of a cult leader to whom the mother had been in thrall.

One Aaron Seth, currently deceased.

Courtesy Jess Galvan, father of the girl in question.

Sherry's mother was dead now too. Murdered that very same day by Marshall Buchanan, a massive, fire-scarred thug in Seth's employ. It was Sherry who'd discovered the body—and Sherry who'd pushed a knife into the belly of the killer a few hours later.

She was living with Nichols and Cantwell now, since her mother was too dead to take care of her and her father too fucked up. A real sweet kid, even if traumatized beyond belief. They all were on some level, he supposed. Made for an interesting household dynamic. Hell of a way to kick-start a romance, too.

Nichols thrummed his fingers against the flask again and reminded himself that everything was fine. Hell, even the traditionally underfunded, overworked Del Verde County Sheriff's Department was less fucked up than usual. Nichols had managed to flip a modest surplus and a pair of useless, overpaid, verge-of-retirement ass-clowns into one promising rookie cop.

Sometimes he could get through half a day on all that, blot the rest out of his mind, feel like the guy he'd always been. The sure-handed, eagle-eyed kid who'd led the Del Verde Vipers back from a three-touchdown deficit in the state semis twenty-five years back and rode the long local memory of his teenage heroism to the unbelievable glamour of his current station.

Methodical and unflappable, that had been Nichols. Keep everybody locked in, move the ball down the field one play at a time. It had been the same drill in Iraq, give or take a few improvised explosive devices. You either lost your cool, or you didn't. The guys who didn't were the ones everybody else wanted to be around, in case it was contagious.

Sometimes it was.

If only Nichols could find a guy like that now. Instead, he had a head full of memories that called into question everything he'd ever believed.

And everything he'd refused to.

Sure, at election time he'd bullshitted the Bible-humping voters of
Del Verde County into thinking he was down with Team JC, but until ten weeks ago? Nichols had been agnostic to the core, a firm believer that what you saw was all there was. That anybody who claimed otherwise was fooling himself, building castles in the air.

Then he'd watched physics take a holiday.

Though maybe
holiday
was the wrong word. It was more like Nichols had watched physics huff a gallon of paint, take a dump in a urinal, make out with its own sister, black out behind the wheel of a big rig, and broadside a fireworks factory.

The images were seared indelibly into his mind. When he tried to sleep, there they were, playing in lurid Technicolor.

Jess Galvan's hacked-off forearm regenerating right before his eyes, tendrils of sinew and muscle wrapping themselves around pure-white bone, skin pouring itself over the form, tiny hairs sprouting like spring shoots from new-made pores.

A soft red lump of muscle twitching in a box, miles from the body it had once animated—miles Galvan had been forced to carry it, across a desert pocked with creatures who had once been girls. Who sensed its presence, climbed out of the ground, and tried to take it for themselves.

White-robed men standing still as cacti, waiting for a new world to be born, an old god to return.

An involuntary shudder passed through Nichols despite the autumn heat, the dun-brown uniform shirt sweat-pasted to his back. The fact was, the visuals were the least of it. He'd
felt
the presence of something ancient and monstrous that night, and it had hit him with the force of revelation. He'd
fully believed
that a banished deity might be sprung from cosmic jail and reclaim the earth as his domain.

And then
bam
, it was as if the house lights had come back up, and life just as he'd always known it had resumed. Coffee and pay stubs, cheeseburgers and TV shows and trying to keep a woman happy.

To call it a mindfuck didn't even come close.

And then there was Jess Galvan, who had eaten that heart himself instead of handing it over to Aaron Seth, killed everybody who needed killing, and promptly exiled himself to the fringes of society.

Whose beat-to-shit trailer half a mile from the end of the service road was just coming into sight.

Nichols checked his Timex. It was seven on the dot; the sun nearly kissed the horizon, the mountaintops outlined in orange. He pulled into the patch of dirt that passed for a front yard, gratified to see Galvan's wood-paneled station wagon, the pride of 1982 Detroit, parked a few feet off. That had to mean he was home—there was nowhere to walk from here, that was for sure—and Nichols's trek hadn't been in vain. Galvan's cell had been going straight to voice mail for a day and a half, so this little visit was both overdue and unexpected.

Nichols unfolded himself from the squad car, knees unlocking with a satisfying pop, ambled up three rusted-out front steps, and rapped on the trailer's busted-and-duct-taped screen door.

Nothing.

“Galvan? It's me, Bob. You in there?”

He peered inside, took stock. A jumble of sheets on the narrow bed, a stack of dirty dishes piled next to the sink. A flannel shirt and a cowboy-style one on plastic hangers in the tiny, jacked-open closet. A bedside minifridge doubling as a night table, strewn with newspapers. Nichols recognized a Sunday section three or four weeks old.

No Galvan.

But no heads on stakes, either.

That was a plus.

Nichols stepped outside and eased himself onto the top stair, figured he might as well watch the sunset, maybe rehearse what he would say. Jess couldn't have gone far.

As soon as he thought it, Nichols winced in self-censure. What Jess could and couldn't do was not something he oughta make assumptions about. For all he knew, the dude had taken a nice long running start and jumped onto the goddamn moon.

A few minutes passed, and then a large-animal rustle someplace nearby brought Nichols to his feet, hand dropping instinctively to the butt of his service revolver. There were mountain lions out here, and those things didn't play. He peered into the twilit underbrush, but the rustling was coming from someplace else—from behind the trailer, it seemed, though pinning down directionality in all this open space was surprisingly tricky. Nichols took a tentative step down and cocked his ears.

Something was definitely coming closer—heavily and steadily—and Nichols didn't like what that might imply. A jag of movement swept across his left periphery; the sheriff spun toward it and found himself face-to-face with Jess Galvan.

He was shirtless from the waist up.

Unless the dead mountain lion slung across his shoulders counted as clothing.

“Sheriff,” he said, with a crisp, weirdly formal nod.

“Hercules.”

Nichols returned the nod. “Whatchu, uh, got there?”

“Action kinda keeps me sane,” Galvan said, and turned sideways to give Nichols a look at the lion. It was a full-grown male, a hundred and forty pounds of coiled muscle; front incisors protruded from the mouth like daggers. The massive head lolled backward, the animal's neck broken.

Nichols pretended to examine the beast and instead took stock of Jess. An inch-long gash on his right forearm oozed blood, and a broad smear of red painted his chest. He was clad in cutoffs and cross-trainers; there was no possible place he might have been carrying a gun, or even a knife.

“You killed this thing bare-handed?”

Galvan shrugged. “I've got a good fifty pounds on him.”

“Yeah, but you
chased him down
.” A beat of silence, the heat coming off Galvan in waves, Nichols wondering just how far to push this.

Fuck it
, he decided.

As he often did.

“Look, I'll pretend that's normal if you want me to. But, I mean, come on.” Nichols spread his arms, tilted his head to the side. “I'm guessing you weren't doing shit like this say, oh, three months ago.”

Jess's eyes flickered up to meet his, and Nichols could feel his friend straining within himself; the sheriff had the uncanny feeling that if only he could figure out the secret knock, Galvan would open up.

The moment passed. Galvan sloughed his bounty to the ground with a small grunt, dropped his hands to his hips as the dust kicked up around them.

“I'll get us a couple beers,” he said and disappeared into the trailer.

He reemerged with two generic supermarket cans, tossed one at Nichols, and shrugged on the flannel from the closet.

“Oughta be a lawn chair over there,” he said, pointing. Nichols unfolded it, metal grinding against the grit worked into the joints, and made himself semicomfortable.

Galvan popped the tab and knocked back half the beer in two swallows. Nichols waited for him to take a seat on the stairs, but he stayed put, legs spread shoulders' width apart, staring into the desert and the darkness like he didn't want to miss what happened next out there.

Nichols felt strange sitting, so he stood too.

It didn't help much.

“Your phone's been off,” he said after a while. Galvan didn't respond, so Nichols pressed.

“Is everything . . . okay?”

Galvan finally looked over. “You fuckin' kidding me? Yeah. Sure, Bob. Everything's just hunky-dory.”

“Well, do you wanna talk ab—”

Galvan turned, heaved open the screen door. It slammed against the trailer's exterior and stayed that way.

Nice going, Nichols
.
You're off to a great start
.

An instant later Galvan was back, a second round of brews in his hand. Nichols was only two sips into the first. It was the shittiest beer he'd ever tasted. He turned the can in his hand, looking for the ingredient list, wondered if weasel piss was on it.

Galvan threw his empty can at the sky. Try as he might, Nichols couldn't hear it land. Imagined it attaining escape velocity, rocketing into the next solar system.

“I moved in with Ruth,” he heard himself say. “We're gonna try and make a go of it.”

“Congratulations.”

Nichols grimaced. “We'll see what happens. They say when you've been through a traumatic experience with someone, it either bonds you, or tears you apart, so . . .” He flashed on his marriage to Kat, the prolonged struggle to conceive. It had certainly seemed traumatic then, but the goddamn bar on trauma had come up a ways since.

The velvet blackness had engulfed them now, the moon late to rise.

“That's good,” Galvan said at long last. “For Sherry too. Having a man in the house.”

“She misses you,” Nichols said quickly. “Last thing I wanna do here's step on your toes.”

“And I miss her.” Galvan said it without inflection or conviction. “But I can't do it right now. I mean, look at me, Nichols. I can barely . . .”

He sighed and tipped the new can to his mouth. Nichols waited. There was only so much beer in there.

Galvan crushed this one before he pitched it. Not much of an environmentalist, thought Nichols. Though the farmers would certainly applaud his dedication to wildlife control.

“You know why I live like this, Nichols?”

“Because you're broke.”

“Because I'm broken.”

He finally sat down.

“I don't trust myself around people, man. That shit took too much out of me.”

That shit
.
That night
.
What happened
. Nichols wished he could cut through all the euphemisms, get to what was real:
You ate that goddamn heart and grew an arm and threw Seth thirty feet as if he were a fucking Beanie Baby
.
You wrestle mountain lions
.
You're a goddamn superhero, and you're paying the price—I don't know what that price is, but I know there's no such thing as a free lunch
.

“It took a lot out of us all, Jess. Including your daughter. I'm just gonna come right out and say it, man—you're breaking her heart. She's in a bad way, and she needs you. Whatever you've got to give, even if it's not a lot.”

Galvan furrowed his brow, stared down at the ground like he was trying to burn a hole through it.

Hell, maybe he could.

“I went by the ice cream shop a couple days ago,” he said. “She seemed okay.”

“Because she doesn't want to worry you. And that wasn't a couple days ago, Jess. Sherry told me this morning she hasn't seen you in two weeks. Going on three.”

Galvan pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I lose track,” he said quietly.

“You can talk to me, you know,” Nichols blurted. “Shit, Jess, I was there. Whatever you're dealing with, maybe I can help.”

Galvan dropped his hands. Blinked, shook his head, blinked again. Finally, he looked over at Nichols, and the sheriff felt his face redden beneath the heat of Galvan's scrutiny, his heart race in anticipation.