The Devil's Bag Man Read online

“Well, I ain’t,” Galvan grunted, and he punctuated the remark by plunking the glass down on the bar.

  The dude raised his palms in a practiced none-of-my-business gesture and turned away.

  “I am looking for work, though,” Galvan informed his back, drunker than he must have thought, the sentiment sliding from his brain to his mouth with zero friction, the whiskey turning Galvan into a waterslide.

  The bartender shrugged his shoulders, grabbed the towel off his shoulder, and polished some grime into a shot glass.

  “You seen the pit out front,” he said, sizing Galvan up. “Might make some money that way, if you don’t mind a little risk.”

  It had been empty when he’d entered, but Galvan remembered from last time: roosters kitted out with razor blades, clawing one another to death, the money flowing as the warm blood sprayed.

  “I don’t know shit about picking a winning bird.”

  The barman shook his head. “Weekdays, it’s cockfighting. Weekends, that pit’s for men. Ultimate fighting style, carnal. You look like maybe you could kick some ass, ey?”

  Galvan took that in and sighed.

  “You got a fuckin’ sign-up sheet or something?”

  Three whiskeys and thirty minutes later, he was in the ring, shirtless, facing off against a three-hundred-pound Mexican with arms like Christmas hams. Drunken gaming enthusiasts surrounded them on all sides, leaning over the barbed wire that marked off the arena, shouting and waving fans of currency.

  Kill him, Cucuy crooned. Snap his neck like you did Seth’s. The door to your old life has closed. You are a fugitive. Dead to your daughter. Dead to them all. Become what you are meant to be. It begins right now.

  They were more than words. Galvan could feel the monster’s strength, pulsing through his muscles like bursts of electricity. It merged with the flow of his adrenaline, the cocktail dizzying.

  Why the fuck not? he thought, as the enormous luchador-looking cocksucker stampeded toward him and the crowd roared, drunk on the promise of blood, the possibility of money.

  What have I got to lose?

  Why fight it?

  I’ve been a loser. I know what that’s like. Been a moralist too.

  Maybe he’s right. Maybe we don’t understand shit. Maybe we’re all just ants. Maybe our only purpose is to die for God.

  So why not be a god, then?

  The man was almost upon him. At the last possible instant—well after it, if your neurological frame of reference was the human male, and more so if it was the human male after seven whiskeys—Galvan darted out of his path. Raised an arm to crucifix position and let the dude run straight into that instead.

  It might as well have been a brick wall, the way he went down—broad back slamming against the hard-packed dirt a fraction of a second before his skull landed, lessening the impact and allowing him to maintain consciousness. He slurped for breath, the intake riotously loud against the throng’s stunned silence.

  Galvan’s knee was on his throat before the guy could exhale. His hands clamped around the luchador’s wrists, as inescapable as the steel shackles he’d found himself wearing when he first awakened in Cucuy’s dungeon beneath the prison, three months and an entire lifetime ago.

  Finish him. You are a god.

  A flash of crimson obscured his vision, and Galvan shook his head. He could not extricate his thoughts from Cucuy’s, did not know whether the man below him was supposed to live or die or why or whether such a thing as why existed anymore. He jerked his head and felt a shooting pain, then looked into the man’s eyes, found them wide with surrender. He pulled his knee back, sprang to his feet, offered him a hand up. Yanked the luchador vertical and turned to address the audience.

  “So. Who’s next?”

  We call that mercy, motherfucker. It’s what makes us human.

  Silence. Both inside and out.

  The win netted Galvan a C-note, plus all the whiskey he could stomach. Its speed and flawlessness prevented him from earning any more; the patrons of El Chango might have been desperados, but they weren’t stupid.

  The fight earned Galvan a new buddy, too: Bebo, his conquered foe. He’d insisted on buying the first round, regardless of the fact that it was supposed to be on the house. Turned out he’d held the crown for two or three months—easy enough to believe; the motherfucker was built like a brick shithouse, probably hadn’t been knocked off his feet since he was knee high to a duck. His friendliness seemed to stem from a mixture of awe that Galvan has bested him so easily, gratitude that he hadn’t taken the opportunity to pound Bebo senseless once he was down, as most would have, and relief that Galvan was just passing through town and thus Bebo would be the odds-on favorite again come tomorrow.

  “So where you headed?” the dude asked. He and Galvan were hunched over the bar, and roughnecks clamored for beers on either side of them, the handful of big winners who’d bet on Galvan engaged in the time-honored tradition of giving the money right back.

  “Dunno. South.” He shrugged. “Gun for hire. Just looking for work.”

  Bebo arched his eyebrows, jowled his cheeks, nodded. “Just steer clear of Rosales. Trust me, no amount of money is worth getting caught up in that.”

  A guy with his back to them perked up his ears at the mention of Rosales and turned toward the conversation. He was tall and poker-faced, the poker having hit him just beneath the cheekbone, the gash poorly stitched, the scar a livid red.

  “Don’t listen to this pendejo,” he said, throwing a play punch at Bebo’s meaty shoulder. “He’s a family man. In Rosales, any vato willing to get his hands dirty can make three, four times the normal rates.”

  “Sure,” said Bebo darkly. “Just enough to cover your own funeral.”

  “I wanna be where the action is,” said Galvan, glancing at one and then the other. He rapped a fist against his skull. “Keeps me sane. What’s in Rosales? Where is Rosales? I never even heard of it.”

  “That’s cuz it’s a little godforsaken fishing village in the middle of nowhere,” said Pokerface.

  Bebo drained his drink, beckoned for more. “It was. Until that big-ass cell-phone company decided to build its corporate headquarters in Gómez Palacio and brought in an army’s worth of private security to drive out Barrio Azteca. Now Rosales is the only place with a seaport and a highway for a hundred miles.”

  “Which is why Federacíon Sinaloa was set up there to begin with,” Pokerface finished.

  “So it’s war,” said Galvan. This was sounding better and better. Keep the ol’ brain and body occupied, maybe even do some kind of good in the world.

  Or at least do some bad to some bad guys, if he had to do some bad.

  Which it seemed like maybe he did.

  Bebo affixed him with a wet-eyed look, full of a pleading affection that belied the thirty-seven minutes they’d known each other. “Don’t do it, man. Hell, stay here and kick my ass once a week instead.”

  Galvan clapped him on the back. “I wish I could. How far’s this village?”

  Pokerface calculated. “About two hundred miles southeast,” he said.

  “All right, then.” Galvan slammed his drink, beckoned to the bartender. “You got gallon jugs back there? Yeah? Fill two of ’em with your finest water, would ya?”

  Bebo blinked at him. “You’re not leaving now.”

  “Sure am.”

  “Where to?”

  He already knew, so Galvan didn’t tell him.

  Bebo swiped a hand across his face. “You’re not walking.”

  Galvan shrugged. “Probably run most of the way, and walk the rest. I’m a, whaddayou call it—an endurance athlete. This kinda shit is fun for me.”

  Bebo stared at him. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  He knew the answer to that one too, so Galvan kept it zipped.

  “There are easier ways to kill yourself, cabrón. Shit, wait till tomorrow and I’ll drive you there myself.”

  “Thanks anyway,” he said. “You’re all right, Beb
o.”

  Galvan dug into the pocket of his jeans, pulled out the damp, folded wad of bills he’d won and pressed them into the dude’s hand. “Here. I’m gonna be raking in the big bucks in a few days anyway.”

  Bebo tried to give it back.

  “I can’t take this.”

  “Buy your kids something,” Galvan said. He grabbed the water jugs from the bartender and headed for the door.

  “At least sober up first!” Bebo called, behind him. “You’ve had like fifteen drinks.”

  “That’s what the water’s for,” Galvan replied and stepped out into the sunlight.

  Here it comes. Here it comes. He braced himself.

  You cannot outrun me, Jess Galvan. You cannot outrun your destiny.

  A sharp pain flashed through his head, his chest—like the electrical bursts he’d felt in his muscles, before the fight, but different.

  Weaponized.

  A lash. A slavemaster’s whip.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  And Galvan ran.

  CHAPTER 15

  When the sun disappeared, Galvan slowed to a walk and kept on trucking. He had yet to locate the limit of his endurance; he knew how to tire himself enough to sleep, but he’d never pushed past what the weightlifting magazines of his youth referred to as muscle failure. That last rep you just couldn’t power through, that wind sprint your body insisted you abort.

  He was determined to do it now. He’d move until he couldn’t. Drop where he stood. The tank had to empty out sometime.

  But when the pink blush of dawn came, he was still putting one foot in front of the other. Just as remarkable, he had one full jug of water left, slung across his back in what had once been his best shirt—best and second-worst—and was now a makeshift bandolier.

  The early morning desert stretched out in front of him, an endless gold-lit vista of scrub brush and cacti, rolling hills and shallow valleys and big sky. He’d been charting a rough southeastern path, keeping well off anything that resembled a road and tacking wide anytime he saw so much as the distant glimmer of lights.

  Every once in a while, the breeze shifted and he caught a waft of salt air, but whether he was anywhere near Rosales, or the ocean, was strictly a matter of conjecture.

  Sooner or later, he’d have to roll through civilization, ask somebody for directions. Find a meal.

  It wasn’t a thought he relished.

  Cucuy seemed determined to match Galvan’s feat of endurance with one of his own. There had been no silence on this journey, no respite. The narrative unspooling from the monster’s mind was wide-ranging, part history lesson and part enticement, part threat and part theology.

  He discoursed on the Line of Priests: the farmer who had been its progenitor, how he’d seen a vision and wandered the desert for weeks, growing weaker and purer, the veil between the worlds lifting, lifting, as he searched for the great spear cast from the heavens into the earth so that he might mortify his flesh upon it, and come to know the mysteries of the Divine Sorcerer.

  How Tezcatlipoca, Most Fearsome and Beloved, had taken an interest in man that far surpassed that of his fellow gods and molded the world like clay, through the Holy Instrument of his priests. How his dictates had caused the scales to fall from the eyes of man, so that Tezcatlipoca came also to be known and worshipped as the Bringer of Glory.

  Galvan knew he should shut it out. Shut it down.

  But it was fascinating.

  So he listened.

  And he walked.

  Cucuy told him of the great betrayal of Tezcatlipoca by the goddess Omecihuatl: how she seduced him, then bound him to a magical bed as he slept. He awakened to find the greatest of the gods assembled before him, a celestial tribunal eager to judge and sentence him.

  Tezcatlipoca’s crime, they said, had been to teach his acolytes too much. To love mankind with too hot a passion.

  Tezcatlipoca argued that the spark he lit within his priests was meant to illuminate the ways of the universe. So that they could more fully understand, more skillfully serve the majesty of the gods.

  This explanation was deemed irrelevant. But then, the crime of which he was accused was not the real reason he was on trial. That would go unspoken.

  The gods conferred at length about his punishment. Tezcatlipoca had grown to be among the most powerful of them. His sorcery, his spellcraft, was unmatched—and these were arts he had invented and perfected, not attributes endowed to him upon creation.

  This, according to Cucuy, was the real reason the others sought to be rid of him: in Tezcatlipoca’s diligence, his enterprise, they saw their own demise foretold. He alone possessed the capacity for change, for growth, and they found it terrifying. His very existence had become a threat.

  And yet, he could not be destroyed. For the gods to raise arms against one of their number would bring about calamity, unmake the universe.

  Instead, they expanded it. Called into being a new realm, a dimension beyond all knowledge, for the sole purpose of imprisoning their brother. Then, in hatred and jealousy, they cast him into that gray place.

  But Tezcatlipoca was not entirely without defenses.

  Nor was the gods’ fear misplaced.

  Had they not conspired to strike first, the Divine Sorcerer would soon have forced a reckoning. His mastery of his arts had grown apace with his disdain for the natural order, the fixity of power. And in the fervor of his boundless exploration he had discovered a method of rending that order, that fixity.

  He meant to increase his power by leaching it from others—to render those who dared to challenge him impotent, victims of their own refusal to embrace the principle of change.

  Of evolution.

  Now, instead, he would teach his priest—a lowly mortal, a halting supplicant—to do to Tezcatlipoca exactly what he had schemed to do to them.

  There was no other way. It was either that, or allow his very essence to be obliterated. Sheared from him the instant Tezcatlipoca stepped into the great void of the Dominio Gris.

  But along with all that was great and potent, Tezcatlipoca decided, the priest must also inherit his god’s pain.

  He must know heartbreak.

  Betrayal.

  If he was to become more than a man, he must first become less.

  Empty himself utterly, so that he might be filled anew.

  The vassal would become a vessel.

  And the Dominio Gris would perhaps not be so barren as Tezcatlipoca’s enemies intended.

  If he must serve out eternity in hell, the god would make of it a kingdom. Shape it to his needs.

  And what he needed most was company.

  Galvan jerked his head sharply, at the word. “Whaddayou mean, company?”

  You’re having a conversation with him, Galvan reprimanded himself. Like he’s a friend. Stop it.

  The monster within paused, almost as if it pained him to explain.

  Don’t assign him human attributes. He’s only got one purpose.

  And then Cucuy’s answer filled Galvan’s mind, the way a candle did a cave.

  When the soul and the body are severed from each other in a manner that is unnatural . . .

  He trailed off, and Galvan finished the thought aloud.

  “The soul goes there. To the Dominio Gris. While the body . . . stays behind.”

  That is correct. In a manner of speaking.

  A few minutes of silence, Galvan picking up the pace, matching body to mind as he parsed the ramifications.

  Keep it to yourself, Galvan. There’s no fuckin’ reason to tell him what you think. He ain’t gonna give you a gold star for being such a smart boy and figuring it out. Just—

  But he was already talking. Apparently, the art of ignoring Cucuy had deadened his ability to listen to his own advice, too.

  “Tezcatlipoca didn’t just take away your wife. He took your wife. For himself.”

  Cucuy was silent. Galvan felt a chill run down his spine, as if an inky cloud had passed over the mounting
face of the sun.

  Another thought hit him, and Galvan stopped dead in his tracks.

  “But not just her. All of them. It’s like the goddamn—the Muslim heaven for martyrs, where everybody gets, what is it, seventy-two virgins to fuck around with.”

  I do not know what it is like, Cucuy said, the words icy and sharp.

  For the first time he could remember, Galvan grinned. “Boy, ol’ Tezcatlipoca sure did all right for himself, didn’t he? Talk about making the prison experience comfortable. These cartel bosses got nothing on T-Cat, lemme tell you.”

  On the contrary, his separation from the divine is an agony you cannot begin to fathom.

  “And here you are, his sworn enemy for what he made you do—”

  I am no such thing. I am him. All that he was, and more.

  “Yeah, no, that’s bullshit. You hate him. But what do you do? You keep on sending over girls. It’d be fucking hilarious, if it weren’t so tragic. He played you like an all-day sucker, and you know it.”

  Cucuy fulminated, and Galvan grinned wider. Those cheek muscles were gonna be sore tomorrow.

  “Five hundred years is a long time to be pissed off, man. Maybe you oughta just let it go, find some new hobbies. Do a little yoga, learn to yodel—”

  Enough! Your insolence grows tiresome. But understand, Jess Galvan: if I depart this world, Tezcatlipoca will return. The Dominio Gris is no longer his prison—I am. You are. The other gods have withdrawn from this realm—

  “Because they couldn’t stomach you, from what I heard.”

  What he made me was an abomination in their eyes, yes. But if you believe nothing else I say, believe this. Tezcatlipoca’s return would doom mankind.

  “I thought he was this big-time friend of man. Wasn’t that the whole problem to begin with? You’re not making a whole lot of sense here.”

  Galvan shook his head—and then narrowed his eyes at a small, jerky movement just short of the horizon line.

  Something was out there, and it wasn’t an animal.

  “I don’t buy it,” he went on. “Your doom, maybe. Yours and mine. But you know what? I’m good with that. I’m great with that.”

  You do not understand. There is nothing left here that can match his power.