The Devil's Bag Man Read online

  “Maybe you’re right,” Nichols heard himself say. “Maybe it is best if you keep away from Sherry for the time being.”

  Galvan’s head dropped to his chest. Nichols couldn’t be sure if it was a response or not. For all he knew, Galvan’s mind was drifting again, and he hadn’t even heard.

  Nichols wedged the flask between his thighs and drove into the night.

  CHAPTER 4

  Galvan picked himself up, staggered into the trailer, and collapsed onto the bed. The strain of interacting with Nichols had sapped his mental resources utterly, and when he was weak, he was vulnerable.

  He was always vulnerable.

  The monster knew him so well now.

  But no better than he knew it.

  Theirs was an intimacy that defied description. An abomination beyond words.

  Galvan knew how he must look to others. To Nichols, or Sherry. To Cantwell especially, with her psych degree and diagnostic skills.

  Like a textbook psychotic dissociative case—that was how. Flat affect, prone to fits of rage and spells of isolation. Just another lost soul, unable to tune out the voices in his head.

  Except for one thing.

  You don’t understand, Doctor—I’m different!

  The voice in Galvan’s head was real.

  The one telling him to kill, insisting that the subjugation of inferior men was his birthright and destiny. The one forever probing and testing, attacking and seducing, cajoling and terrorizing. Relentlessly widening the corridor of its influence by scraping away at the bedrock of Galvan’s humanity. And always seeking the same thing.

  Control.

  Two souls, one body.

  The math was a bitch.

  It was a battle Galvan suspected he could not win. He was a man, and Cucuy was something else—a debased god, a self-made demon, a being whose very existence had so violated the natural order that perhaps no word existed to describe him. He would have obliterated Aaron Seth had Seth eaten that heart—the cult leader had been bred for just that purpose. And Galvan had expected to be destroyed himself—to consume the vessel and have his soul and body torn asunder, find himself banished to the purgatorial realm of the Dominio Gris.

  But life was chock-full of fuckin’ surprises. A thin genetic filament connected Cucuy to Galvan, and so here they were instead.

  Roommates.

  Galvan felt himself go drowsy and scrabbled to his feet. He didn’t need to pass out yet, would not give in to the urge. Cucuy was winning the war for his subconscious, and so Galvan parried by learning to steer clear of that dark neighborhood, get by on two or three hours of sleep as many times a week.

  That was the irony of this infestation, this tumor, this virus: even as it sought to subsume him, to take over his body and eradicate his mind, it imbued him with certain gifts that he could use to fight back.

  Strength and speed. Endurance and reflexes. Pain barely registered; wounds mended quickly. It was a loophole of sorts: Cucuy could not insinuate himself into the folds of Galvan’s soul without giving off his powers. And if Galvan could maintain the precarious limbo state in which he dwelled, using those powers to stave off their master . . .

  Well, then maybe he could buy himself a few more hunted, hellish months. Stumble on to a plan, or somebody who had one.

  Or a land mine.

  He stepped back into the cool night air and felt his senses flicker and flare, like a fire finding oxygen. When they were fully engaged—when he was running, hunting, sweating, fighting—Cucuy receded, drew back his tentacles and waited.

  Yet another irony—Galvan’s fucking life brimming with them—respite in violence.

  Not a good thing for the mountain lions of Texas.

  He unbuttoned his shirt, sloughed it to the ground, and walked around the trailer. He had a fire pit in the back—an excuse to chop wood, really.

  Ax, block, tree chunk.

  Lift, swing, thunk, stoop, toss. Repeat.

  A few hours of this would do him good. Then, a nice long run into town. By the time he got there, the bars would be closing, which meant drunken shitheads looking for the same thing he was.

  Trouble.

  Ax, block, tree chunk.

  You only postpone the inevitable, Cucuy said.

  Thought.

  Transmitted.

  Whatever the fuck he did.

  “Fuck you,” Galvan replied. He’d taken to that recently, speaking to the monster aloud as a way of refusing to acknowledge and thus strengthen their oneness, their inextricability.

  It was probably useless.

  It didn’t make Galvan look any saner, either.

  The blood of holy men runs through your veins, my son. Weakly, it is true. You are a mongrel. A bastard’s bastard’s bastard. You would have been put to death in the days when I was a man. But today, in this diminished world, where the spark of greatness flickers so dimly, you could be a king. A god. If you only knew the power I could give you, you would end this foolish resistance and join with me. Before you are destroyed.

  “Yeah, well, if you’re so fuckin’ powerful, how come I’m still standing here?”

  Lift. Swing. Thunk.

  Only because—

  “Besides, I don’t want your kind of power. Murdering innocent girls ain’t very godlike in my book.”

  Galvan could feel Cucuy’s sneer curling up within him, like the edges of a burning piece of paper; it was a physical sensation, everywhere and nowhere at once, and he braced for the jab it heralded.

  Your understanding is as pathetic as your precious morality. There is nothing more godly than sacrifice. Man’s purpose, his entire reason for being, is to die for his god. You people have perverted that, with your childish fables, your martyr gods—hidden from it any way you could think to, because your ego is a plague that has swept across the world. But you cannot hide forever. What has always been shall always be.

  “Then I guess you’ll always be a fuckbag,” Galvan grunted.

  Lift, swing, thunk.

  Not his wittiest comeback—downright idiotic, actually, but he didn’t feel like debating theology with the monster just now. He was too ragged around the edges; he might let something slip, give Cucuy new ammunition to use against him or reveal some element of his own embryonic strategy.

  An image flashed through Galvan’s mind.

  The woman in yellow, beckoning in secret from his dreams.

  Cucuy didn’t know about that. Had never mentioned her. Some firewall in Galvan’s mind separated them, and if there was freedom to be had, she was involved. Somehow. She had to be. Her will was set against Cucuy’s. That much, Galvan knew.

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend. . . .

  Ax, block, tree chunk.

  Lift, swing, thunk.

  The bloodlust is in you, Jess Galvan. I can feel it. How long can you sate yourself on animals? On meaningless skirmishes with weak men?

  “I got a better question, dickwad. How come you always refer to me by my full name? Seems a little formal, considering that you’re squatting in my fuckin’ body, don’t you think?”

  Galvan shouldered the ax and allowed himself a smile. It was Cucuy who had revealed something: he had not divined the reason for all Galvan’s exertion—was too firmly locked in the prison of his own mind to realize that it was not bloodlust that drove Galvan at all. He thought the appetite for violence signaled the erosion of resistance, when really it was resistance itself.

  Good.

  All violence was not the same—Galvan had always known that. The distinctions might not have meant anything to the monster, or even to the law, but they comprised Galvan’s personal code, and he’d lived by it long before Cucuy had yanked him from the hell of Ojos Negros, dropped him into a deeper and darker one, handed him a beating heart, and dubbed him a Righteous Messenger.

  The devil’s bag man was more like it.

  That code of honor had kept him alive in the desert, afforded him safe passage through a minefield of undead virgin gi
rls—and when he’d forsaken it in a moment of fury and levied punishment on a pair of child-trafficking scumbags, safety had returned the favor.

  But Galvan was a Righteous Messenger still. He’d carried evil then, and he carried it now—cradled it deep inside, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about that. Hell, maybe everybody did, and this was just a starker, higher-stakes dramatization of the universal human condition.

  More likely, that was a load of poetic horseshit.

  But the fact remained—maybe fact was a little strong; Galvan’s impression was—that evil multiplied evil. When he did something bad, departed from the code, Cucuy gained a toehold in the cold war they were waging. A little more of Galvan’s soul dissipated, the cigarette burning down toward the filter.

  Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

  What exactly “bad” meant—and this was a mindfuck, the kind of circular, pound-your-head-against-the-wall shit that a guy like Galvan, who’d built himself a life of flesh and blood, brick and mortar, actions and consequences, absolutely couldn’t stand—well, that seemed to be somewhat subjective.

  No, not subjective. It was ironclad, a clear line in the sand. Step over it and pay the price.

  The word he was looking for was internal. Or self-generated. It was Galvan himself who’d made these rules, erected this moral framework, and it was Galvan who suffered the consequences. When he did shit he knew was wrong—and especially when he drew on the glowing, clenched nexus of power that Cucuy’s presence afforded him in order to do wrong—the monster surged and swelled and Galvan could feel himself getting sucked away, as if his soul were a puddle of water somebody had sicced a vacuum cleaner on.

  His soul. Most of the time—and Galvan did spend most of his time contemplating his soul, its strength and shape and qualities—he pictured it as a color-saturated version of that Ojos Negros labyrinth, a subterranean warren of corridors and rooms the deep red of a human heart.

  Cucuy might be hiding in any one of them.

  Galvan’s job was to cordon them off, brick them up, trap the monster inside.

  He was getting good at it.

  But the monster always escaped.

  And there was always another room.

  The soul being fuckin’ infinite and all.

  Cucuy had fallen quiet, Galvan realized. It happened. Sometimes his mind cleared and quieted—as if the monster had other business to attend to, hung up a BACK IN FIVE MINUTES sign, and disappeared. The lacuna was welcome but eerie, a respite Galvan could never enjoy, the other shoe always about to drop, the fear that Cucuy was off improving his position dominating what should have been an out-breath of peace.

  Galvan tossed the ax aside, sat heavily on the chopping stump, and replayed the encounter with Nichols in his mind, now that he had the bandwidth to analyze it.

  The impotence he felt at knowing Sherry was in free fall and he couldn’t do shit to help her was staggering. For years, the desire to protect her was all that kept him alive. To be this close and yet this far away—to know that the greatest threat to her safety was him—that knowledge threatened to break him faster than the monster.

  Galvan wiped the cooled sweat from his brow and stood. He bent double, picked up the ax, and ran his thumb across the edge of the blade, swiping off the pungent sap with which his frenetic activity had left it coated. The blood of trees.

  He was a fighter. He wasn’t done yet.

  Not by a damn sight.

  There was still too much he loved in this world.

  CHAPTER 5

  There’s something unique about everybody, Kurt Knowles’s mother had told him, on a damn-near daily basis, back when he was just a skinny little knees-and-elbows bastard, riding his cousin’s hand-me-down Big Wheel around in the chicken-beshitted dust outside their double-wide.

  For years, he’d tried to figure out just what that could be. What separated him from everybody else he’d ever met. Sure, he’d grown up bigger than most, and maybe better with his hands. He could outdrink and outdrug many a man, and he didn’t fear the law. People listened to him, heeded what he had to say—other hard-drinking, rock-fisted, speed-freak lawless sons of bitches, anyway, if not the folks he’d by then come to think of as civilians. But none of that quite cleared the bar on unique.

  Then he’d met Aaron Seth, a great man if ever there was one, and started opening up his eyes to the various and sundry ways the deck was stacked against regular old hardworking natural-born American white men like himself. Started speaking out on the need to keep the country free and pure, the beaners on their side of the fence and American jobs on ours. Started doing whatever Seth said was necessary and improving his own prospects in the bargain. Learned discipline. Found out what it was to have a father.

  You had to shake your head at that. Knowles, a grown-ass man, discovering for the first time what it meant to have somebody in your life whose authority you didn’t question. It was amazing how completely that could put you at ease, how much sharper your focus became. Seth had turned him into a goddamn laser beam of intention, filled him with purpose and confidence. Made him a part of something.

  The Prophet’s Sergeant at Arms. That was the private title he’d given himself and worn like a mantle of honor.

  Now all that was gone. Destroyed. And what did Kurt Knowles have left? What made him unique now that Seth was a corpse and his followers had scattered like roaches when the kitchen light turns on?

  Well, there was one thing.

  He was the only son of a bitch he’d ever met or heard of who liked prison food. Didn’t just tolerate it but found it delicious.

  As of about forty-eight hours ago that fact had become mighty handy, Knowles reflected, and crammed the rest of his cheese sandwich down his gullet.

  He’d been at loose ends since Seth died—Seth, and the better part of Knowles’s charter, his brothers in arms, his fucking family—and the only surprise was that he hadn’t seen the inside of a cell earlier.

  He barely recognized himself; worse yet, he recognized himself as the shithead he had been at twenty-five. Pissing around on his bike, meandering from one sad-sack town to the next, fucking with civilians, daring them to step up. Stealing goddamn burritos from gas stations just to watch the pimply-faced countermen gulp and turn away. Staying tooled up on booze and shitty crank. Banging the sleaziest hookers he could find. Passing out over a campfire and a bottle of Jack, a few hundred feet off the road. Waking up the next morning and doing it all over again.

  They’d pinched him for vagrancy, run him through the system, and hit the jackpot. Fucking Ardmore, Oklahoma. If the world had an asshole, this town was the little shitberry dangling from the longest hair. The jail was a glorified drunk tank, a fifteen-by-fifteen holding pen down the hall from the front door, the patrol desks. Open toilet, fluorescent glare, couple of lice-ridden mattresses.

  All the comforts of home.

  He currently shared it with a hammered old Mexican day laborer and a terrified teenage shoplifter.

  That meant two more sandwiches for Knowles. They tasted even better when they were stolen.

  He was looking at a transfer to Texas tomorrow or the next, according to the cop who’d booked him. A supermax facility. Bad sign. Guy couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him what the charges were—he looked about two years past his senior prom, the little pencil-dicked fucker—but Knowles figured the worst of what he’d done couldn’t possibly be in play. He’d seen the dead climb out of the goddamn ground and walk, but unless they’d learned to testify in a court of law, he wasn’t gonna burn for human trafficking or murder. Nobody saw shit and lived: that had been the True Natives’ policy for as long as Knowles had held the gavel.

  An all-business female voice, fall-apple crisp, jarred him out of his reverie.

  “Good evening, Officer. Adrissa Coleridge. I understand you have a Mr. Kurt Knowles in custody. Is that right?”

  He strode to the front corner of the cage and tried to catch a glimpse of her. A thin vertical strip of
high heel, black nylon, and dark knee-length trench coat were all he could make out.

  What new fuckery was this?

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, we, uh, we don’t have visiting hours here.” The fluster in the young cop’s voice suggested that she was something to look at.

  “Quite all right, Officer. I’m not here to visit. Let me explain how this is going to work.”

  Knowles saw her lift the briefcase, heard the clasp click open, the soft thump as she laid it flat across his desk.

  “Mr. Knowles will be leaving with me, Officer Blanton. We can—”

  Knowles heard him stand, the desk chair toppling over backward with a clatter.

  “The hell you say, lady. What the—”

  Her voice cut through his like a garrote through a neck.

  “We can do it the fun way, or we can do it the ugly way.”

  “Listen, lady, I—”

  “Either you take this briefcase and cook up a nice little escape story, or I press a button on my phone. If I do that, we’ll have about twelve seconds to make conversation, and then four men with automatic weapons will walk in the door and put your brains all over that wall.”

  Knowles pressed himself against the bars, all his senses strained toward the scene playing out around the corner. He could feel the electricity in the air, smell the cop’s panic as the sweat burst from his pores. He braced himself for the kid’s response, realized he was pulling for the hard way.

  Roast that fuckin’ pig, lady.

  Whoever you are.

  And whatever the hell you want with me.

  Knowles was a realistic man. He didn’t imagine she was his guardian angel. However much money was in that briefcase, it was more than anybody he knew had.

  Even if it was stocked with rolls of pennies.

  A little clicking sound echoed through the corridor. At first, Knowles thought it was a gun. Then he realized it was the cop’s mouth, popping open.

  “Fun way,” he stammered.

  “Excellent choice. Your keys, please.”

  A jangle like sleigh bells, as he fumbled them off his belt, handed them over. And then the rhythmic clop of high heels as Adrissa Coleridge strutted his way.