The Devil's Bag Man (20 page)

I
t was amazing what you could accomplish with eight thousand men working in shifts around the clock.

Less than twenty-four hours had passed since the Great One's announcement broke the grip of the cartels, declared the prisoners an army and the prison a fortress.

Already, it was more than that.

They
were more than that.

Ojos Negros was a temple, filled with warrior-acolytes. The men were loyal and eager, boundless in their energy. Valentine didn't know if Cucuy had worked some kind of spell on them, or if the power—the illusion—of their newfound self-determination was what drove them. Regardless, they worked as if the lash were at their backs.

But no, Valentine corrected, that wasn't it—rather, they worked as if fealty to the Timeless One were a form of liberty. Toiling in his service was not like working for the cartels, with their revolving-door midlevel leadership and grotesque campaigns of intimidation, and the men sensed that. His authority was of a different magnitude. A higher order. They didn't need words like
deity
or discourses on the hypocrisy of religion to
respond accordingly, any more than a horse needed to know the pedigree of its rider.

The hand that gripped the reins was firm. That was all that mattered.

Valentine stood in the middle of the yard, let the activity flow around him. The level of coordination and cooperation was astounding; he felt as if he were inside a beehive, or an ant colony. Was it possible that Cucuy orchestrated all this? That in a few short hours, he had molded them into a hive mind? Or was this simply what men looked like when they no longer labored under the weight of uncertainty, individuality, untethered ambition?

Valentine looked up, squinting in the noonday sun, at what had been a guard's tower and was now a command center. Cucuy sat motionless, surveying the landscape from atop a massive golden throne.

But no, not golden.

Gold
.

It had taken six men two hours to carry it up from the catacombs. Valentine had never seen it before, never even known about the room from which it came, but the message it embodied was clear.

A new reign had begun.

The procurer glanced at his timepiece—a Philippe Patek model for which Herman Rubacalo no longer had any use—and saw that it was time.

As if on cue, a mechanized grinding filled the air, and Valentine turned to see the prison's intake gate, through which prisoner transport vehicles delivered the newly unfree into bondage, slowly open.

A long line of identical white vans rumbled out of the prison's belly, kicking up a scrim of dust. Valentine counted as they passed, double-checking his math.

Thirty vans at sixteen men per was four hundred and eighty.

That left sixty men unarmed, and four hundred and twenty equipped with a cache of assault weapons Valentine had laid in three weeks earlier, for distribution to whichever client's inexhaustible thirst for artillery manifested first.

Those numbers would do just fine.

He glanced again at the guard tower, found the throne abandoned, and turned his gaze back to the vehicle bay just in time to see his master's limousine roll out into the sunlight.

Domingo Valentine scurried around the back, yanked on the door's still-cool chrome handle, and joined the Timeless One inside. Not until the last of the convoy disappeared over the horizon did they follow.

Better to give the soldiers a head start.

BARRANCO BLANCO WAS
a forty-five-mile drive from Ojos Negros. It housed twelve thousand men, their crimes ranging from fraud to murder, separated into ten tiers and two buildings according to the seriousness of their infractions. Barrio Azteca was the dominant power, with control of six tiers to Sinaloa's three; the last one was a ragtag collection of foreigners and head cases, men not worth controlling.

The men who sat atop the infrastructure knew what was coming, had been informed the previous evening via cell phone, told to ready their people. The guards in their pockets knew, too: they had been told to stand up or duck down.

By the time the first white van pulled up at the intake gate, Valentine guessed, word would have reached as much as 70 percent of the prison's population. And if Barranco Blanco was anything like Ojos, that meant tension floated through the air like clouds of mustard gas—that every jaw was clenched in anticipation of action, that small fights had broken out since breakfast, that whatever information had come down from the bosses on the top tiers had been diluted, muddled as it spread through the general population, and the only thing the rank-and-file scumbags knew for sure was that something was going to jump bad.

They'd assume it was the usual: widespread chaos as a cover for some specific act of retribution. Thousands set in violent motion so that one disloyal man, one snitch or rat or stoolie—or hell, one dude whose cousin on the outside had tried to steal a shipment, whose sister had rebuffed a boss's advance, whose father-in-law had refused to pay protection—might meet a suitably gruesome and instructive end.

The prisoners were used to that. A riot served a general purpose, the alleviation of boredom, as well as myriad specific ones: under the blanket of tumult, a hundred other acts of vengeance might be committed unseen and without repercussion. The grudge burning a hole in your stomach, the shank burning a hole in your pocket—now was the time to find relief.

But this was no riot, Valentine thought, as the limousine crested a final hill and bore down on the long straightaway that terminated at the gate.

This was regime change, and it was well under way.

The white vans had disappeared into an underground garage, and a legion of men with fresh-out-of-the-crates AK-47s marched back out. By the time Valentine traded the cool confines of his own car for the hot sun, the prison was already under new management—or, at least, the old management was lined up on their knees in the yard, surrounded by a sea of stunned, jostling prisoners held at bay by some of Ojos's finest.

They knelt upright, backs straight, hands clasped behind their heads, sweat stains beneath their arms. A long, snaking row of unbought, outgunned guards, speckled with the occasional prison doctor, nurse, or warden.

The Ojos contingent was thorough, Valentine mused as he strode toward them at Cucuy's side, the Ancient One's pace measured and stately. They'd left no stone unturned, flushed out anybody wearing a uniform or getting a paycheck. And they'd done it with a stunning, bloodless efficiency.

Sure, a few hundred assault weapons lent anybody a certain authority—but that was just it. The control. The discipline. Cucuy had deemed them an army worthy of his name, and here they were, acting like it. No cowboy shit, no murder for the fuck of it.

That lesson was not lost on the new recruits. The Barranco boys were eerily quiet. No calls for mercy or blood, just a breathless anticipation, a million unasked questions thickening the air.

Valentine fell back as the Great One strode to the front of the crowd. With a sweep of his hand, he brushed away the soldiers cordoning off the inmates; they dispersed and he turned to stroll down the row of prostrate prison employees with long, slow strides.

“Today, you shall have justice,” he said, and stopped before the warden. The man was six two and hatchet faced, his small, deep-set eyes electric with fear.

“Rise.”

He stood on shaky legs, lowered his arms slowly to his sides.

“Your fates have been placed in this man's hands,” the Terrible One
said, his voice bouncing off the high walls of the tight-packed, silent yard. “Now, I place his fate in yours. Does he live or die?”

Valentine braced for a cacophony of voices, but instead a low, nervous murmur spread through the yard. Perhaps they feared it was a trick question.

Or that once the killing began, it would not end.

Cucuy waited, his gaze surfing the crowd.

“Die!” the shout came at last. A single man, a single word. A verdict rendered.

“Die!” someone else repeated, and then the cries began, as ragged and staggered as seagulls' caws at first and then coalescing into a chant. A rhythm.

“Die! Die! Die!”

Cucuy raised a hand, and they fell silent.

Then that hand gripped the warden by the neck. The other grabbed him between the legs.

And in one fluid motion, the Great One sent him flying through the air. The prisoners gasped in disbelief, twelve thousand faces rising and turning to track the dark blur framed against the azure sky, hear the fading scream of terror.

The warden cleared the prison's outer wall by several feet and passed out of all knowing.

That wall, Valentine guessed, was a good thirty-five feet high.

“Who wants to join my army?” Cucuy asked, and every convict raised his hand.

He'd streamlined his recruitment speech nicely, Valentine thought.

AN HOUR LATER
,
they were back in the car, bound for Ojos. Valentine was working both his satellite and cell phones, laptop open before him, familiar hat back on his head.

He was a procurer. He reached his long arms into the world and retrieved whatever was needed.

Right now, that meant weapons. Vehicles. Materiel. All of it in quantities that staggered the mind.

There was an army to outfit. Today, it was twenty thousand men. By week's end, it would be ten times that size. The strike teams in the
white vans would not return to Ojos; they would continue on to the next prison. Barranco Blanco had vans of its own. Guns of its own, too, once the guards' room had been pillaged and a portion of the AKs handed off.

The Great One's presence was no longer needed; his legend would reach the prisons long before the vans did.

Valentine glanced up at him, found Cucuy's eyes closed, his breathing heavy.

“Master?” he ventured. He was loath to probe for information, but his ability to do his job faltered without it.

“What,” the Ancient One replied, without opening his eyelids.

“How many prisons do—did—the cartels control? That is, how many are you planning to . . .”

Cucuy sat up, and Valentine looked into the swirling black whirlpools that were his eyes.

“All of them. In this country and the other.”

He rolled down the window, let the air caress his face, whip through his hair.

“It's brilliant,” Valentine said, half to himself, as massive reams of data scrolled furiously through his mind.

Supply chains.

The routing of payments and trucks, drugs and airplanes.

The unfathomable merger necessitated by the collapse of the cartels. The staggering manpower involved.

It was enough to make him dizzy.

But it was also what Domingo Valentine did better than any man on earth.

“You will be unstoppable,” he whispered.

“That is only the beginning,” the Terrible One said and closed his eyes.

Valentine thought about that, and an involuntary shudder went through him. Whether it was excitement or fear, he could not be sure.

T
he passage of centuries had not blunted Izel Notchi Icnoyotl's faculties, and sometimes he thought this was the cruelest punishment of all. He forgot nothing, felt pain and loss, regret and foreboding with a searing, undiminished acuity. And as his body withered, became an affront to the laws of life and death, his mind seemed to expand—to travel as he could not—and sense the presence, the movement, the agony of other anomalies, other disruptions to the natural order.

Other abominations like himself.

A white-hot jolt had passed through him when Galvan ate the heart that became his doom. This Gum fellow's wanderings were like faint lines traced onto the map of his consciousness. And Cualli's very existence was a boulder that never stopped weighing on Izel's soul.

But his sister was beyond detection.

Izel felt only her absence. The ache of it, almost indistinguishable from the absence of the divine. The soul-deep chill that had enveloped this forsaken world and wrapped itself around whatever was left of him.

Not even the desert heat could touch it, but it was good to feel the sun beat down on him again—to feel a sense of purpose, a glimmer of hope. For too long he had hidden, counseled Herman from secret compartments, and told himself that survival was victory enough, that patience would pay off, that the world turned like a wheel and opportunity would come around.

That Cucuy would falter and they would pounce.

That the means justified the end, and no money was too dirty if it bought revenge.

For too long, Izel had believed it.

But no more. The wheel had indeed turned—and then, swift and brutal, it had turned again. The moment had come and gone.

Unless the girl was right.

Unless this wastrel Gum, this walker in two worlds, could do what he claimed. Succeed where generations of Izel's family had failed.

Though if he did, their problems were just beginning.

The priest looked up at Sherry Richards. Her face was caked with grime, streaked with sweat.

Then, he looked down at Sherry Richards. Her strides were long and sure, legs pumping like pistons. She walked as if the destination lay just around the next bend.

He was sitting on her bare shoulder; he could not remember the last time his skin had touched skin, and the warmth was a revelation.

The fact that she and the pregnant doctor and this Gum creature had left Herman's limousine behind three hours earlier and were striding across parched, unmapped wilderness was less reassuring.

Gum claimed they were close, that they would reach her citadel within the hour and the border of her domain any minute.

What happened after that was anybody's guess. Izel didn't anticipate a warm reception.

Much less an offer of liquid refreshment.

The contents of Herman Rubacalo's minibar skewed heavily toward the alcoholic. Two bottles of tonic water separated them from dehydration.

For Izel's part, a thimbleful was enough to slake thirst, and Gum didn't appear to require much of anything in the way of sustenance. But the other two—the other three, Izel corrected himself, glancing at the
Cantwell woman's stomach, the life inside too small to be visible but the way she splayed her hands over her belly giving everything away—the other three would need to keep up their strength.

A chill went through Izel, banished all thought from his mind. He clutched a hand to Sherry's shoulder to alert her, squeezed with all the strength his brittle fingers had left. She drew up short, with a sharp intake of breath, and the others followed suit.

What Izel sensed, they saw for themselves an instant later. A tremor in the earth, directly ahead. And then another and another. They had passed the invisible borderline of Chacanza's domain, and Izel sensed her minions. She was undetectable, but these tendrils of her will were not. Some hundred and fifty years ago, Izel and Herman's great-grandfather had tried to interrogate them as a way to find her. He flashed on those pointless, misguided months of torture and felt a profound shame at the brutal stupidity of it all.

The memory dissipated, as a sextet of girls emerged from the ground, hands flowering first, elbows pushing their way free, arms leveraging heads, necks, and torsos into being. Legs scissoring their way out of the grave as if the earth were a swimming pool. Knees flexing, calves going taut as they regained their feet.

For a moment they stood motionless, slack jawed and loose limbed, as if awaiting orders. Izel felt drawn to the closest one, a girl with waist-length raven hair, wearing the dirt-stained tatters of a dress that had once been white.

She was of his time
, he thought. She had not died in secret, stolen away from her family, but with ceremony and fanfare, before throngs of sweat-drenched zealots.

Somehow, that made it worse.

Izel looked into her eyes. Looked through them and tried to imagine his sister on the other side, watching him back.

The girl took a step forward.

Izel nearly fell to the ground as Sherry Richards reached behind her back, pulled the gun from the rear of her waistband, and squeezed off half the clip.

“No!” Izel screamed, but his voice didn't have a chance.

The first bullet hit her in the shoulder, spun her ninety degrees, and
pitched her backward, arms flailing at the air. The second impacted just above the right temple—and at this range, from a gun that big, there was little left of the girl's face by the time she collapsed in a cloud of dust, and even less after the next two rounds tore through her chest. Her legs still scrabbled at the ground, like a dog having a dream about running, but she wasn't going anywhere.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Gum shouted, beating Izel to the question. The other five girls hadn't moved, but Sherry's gun was trained on the next-closest one, fist clenched so hard the knuckles were bone white.

Izel knew what she was thinking: not enough bullets.

“Put it down, Sherry,” he said into her ear—and for an instant, an absurd image flitted through Izel's mind: another him, perched on her other shoulder, egging her on to shoot, the proverbial devil to his angel.

Stay alive long enough, and the imagery of religions you hate saturates your thinking.

“She made a move!” Sherry yelled, swinging the weapon from one girl to the next as if these drones might spook.

“Listen, girlie, if she'd made a move, you'd know it,” Gum shot back.

“Sherry. Please. I must speak through them to my sister,” Izel intoned, in the most authoritative voice he could muster.

In the moment it took Sherry to relent and lower the weapon by halting degrees, Izel reflected on how pathetic it was that after five hundred years, he still had to strain to project authority.

“Thank you,” he said to her, and then he locked eyes with the closest remaining girl, a long-limbed, T-shirt-clad specimen who'd most likely met her end in the filthy bowels of Ojos Negros, perhaps so recently that her family still held out hope for her return.

“Chacanza,” he said, and something in her visage changed. The eyes dilated; the brow furrowed in consternation.

“This is your brother, Izel. I must see you. The gods have turned me into the wretch you see before you, but they have kept me alive. I have but one purpose, sister, and it is the same as yours.”

He paused without breaking eye contact and summoned all the conviction, all the persuasion, he had in him. “I know how to kill him, Chacanza. I failed you once. I will not do so again.”

For a moment, the girls stood stock-still. Izel could hear Sherry's pulse throbbing in her neck; he felt his own heart race and knew that whatever minute trickle of adrenaline his body could still produce was swirling its way into his bloodstream.

Abruptly, the five girls turned on their heels and began to walk.

It took no prodding from Izel for Sherry to fall into step behind them.

THE GIRLS DIDN'T
look back. Not once, in the hour it took them to lead the way to Chacanza's keep.

That she had no doubt the supplicants would follow, Izel understood. That she didn't want to take even one more look at the grotesquely transformed brother she hadn't seen in five hundred years, he found a little more troubling.

I failed you once
. The admission, which had tripped so easily off his tongue, might well have doomed him—doomed them all. He'd had centuries to lament his actions on the day of her death and agonize over whether his sister had guessed at his complicity. He'd once fantasized about begging her forgiveness, but long ago dismissed the notion as selfish. What mattered was destroying Cualli, not salving his own conscience. Anything that complicated that goal had to be put aside.

And yet, what had he done within seconds?

You are weak, old man
.

All the long days of your life come down to this
.

Don't fuck it up
.

“Almost there, boss,” Gum said, lengthening his stride and pulling up alongside Sherry. And indeed, Izel could sense a kind of mounting density, a hum of life.

But no, not life.

A hum of undeath.

At its center, its hub, there was nothingness. A void in his sensory map so profound, it had to be Chacanza.

Izel looked up and found himself staring at the slope of a tall hill, the only incline of note between here and the horizon. Something fired in his memory: this was a place he had known once, in the days before the fall.

A holy site.

One that Cualli, in his manic erasure of the old ways, had forgotten to raze.

Or one that he had left alone.

The Mount of Sacred Grace. Holy to Chimalma, the last of the gods. Whose blessing, whose curse, kept Izel's heart beating in his chest even now.

If his sister had died with a prayer on her lips, it was Chimalma's deaf ears upon which it had fallen.

But the girls did not lead them toward the summit, where worship and burial had once taken place. They marched instead to the base of the hill, where an enormous boulder rested against its sharply inclined side.

Together they grabbed hold and pushed it aside. Izel was astonished that the five of them could manage such a feat, until the passageway behind the boulder was revealed, and he saw that another half-dozen of Chacanza's minions stood inside, assisting in the task.

The smell of earth, damp and fetid, wafted from the mouth of the cavern. Torchlights flickered in the far distance, throwing light that failed to reach the high ceiling or the well-trodden floor. Pinpricks of light filtered in from tiny holes, just large enough to vent the meager smoke of the torches.

This is her work,
Izel marveled.
He buried her here, and she turned her grave into this
.
Hollowed out an entire mountain
.
Made it a crypt
.

Though not without help.

Sherry stepped across the threshold, and Izel felt the cool air envelop him.

The girls fell away, joining countless others in the dim recesses of the cavern.

They were on their own.

“This way,” breathed Gum. “She's over here.”

“How do you know that?” Cantwell asked, in the same hushed mausoleum tone.

“I feel her.”

The girls they passed on the trek through the yawing cavern ignored them utterly. Izel watched one, naked and statuesque, carry a lit torch to a wall niche where its predecessor had burned out and swap the one for the other.

This is her staff,
he thought.
Warriors out there, elect in here
. Another girl, equally alluring and unclothed, passed in front of them, and Izel wondered what other duties the staff might perform for their master. Whether her legendary appetite for flesh might extend beyond protein, and into pleasure.

Gum led them up a long, twisting stairway, carved from the bedrock of the mountain; it hugged the contour of the main chamber for some hundred feet, then broke off and climbed at a steeper angle, toward a pale yellow light seemingly siphoned from the world above.

Sherry stepped inside, and the timeline of Izel's life collapsed on itself, five hundred years of misery blowing away like dust in the breeze as he gazed across the long room at his sister.

For a split second he was young again—as radiant as she was—and the gods had not forsaken the earth. He
felt
them: ghostly and dilute, mere shadows flitting across a wall, but it was more than he had ever hoped to feel again.

She rose from her stone chair and strode toward him so swiftly that her long raven hair fanned out behind her like a veil. And then the hard, shimmering emeralds of Chacanza's eyes filled Izel's visage, and the hard grip of her hand encircled his fragile torso.

The heat of Sherry Richards's body faded away, replaced by the shocking, bone-deep chill of Chacanza's flesh.

The world in which she lived, he understood abruptly, was devoid of warmth.

She brought him close, inspected him. Izel did the same. She looked exactly as she had the day she'd stood atop the temple steps and pledged her body and soul to Cualli.

The smell of her breath put the lie to that. Her mouth was closed, her lips pressed together in a tight, pinched look of appraisal, but the stench of rotten flesh behind them was almost unbearable.

As if it filled her,
Izel thought.
As if it occupied the vacant space where her soul ought to be
.

“Sister,” he said, and her clasp tightened, became a vise.

“I am no one's sister. No one's daughter. No one's wife.”

“Chacanza,” he managed, with the last of his air. If she squeezed any harder, the brittle bones of his rib cage would shatter, become dust.

“I do not answer to that name.” But her grip loosened. For the first time, she looked past him, eyes flickering up and down the lengths of his companions. Whether in curiosity or contempt, Izel could not be sure.

Or it might have been hunger.