The Devil's Bag Man

by Adam Mansbach

  And slowly, inch by inch, the Jeep rose. The left-side tires came off the ground; gravity shut the open doors, and sent the men sliding the other way, out the right-hand doors and onto the ground in a jumble of limbs and guns. They scrambled to get away before the metal carcass came down atop them, but it was too late—a final roaring effort, and the Jeep was on its side, the men who’d spilled out crushed beneath, the men still trapped inside staring up at the clear blue sky, with nothing to shoot their weapons at but clouds.

  It had taken all of three seconds, but that was enough time for the soldiers in the other Jeeps to shake off the crash and pile out onto the road.

  Fourteen minus the guys riding up front left ten.

  He could work with that.

  If he worked fast.

  Galvan climbed the upturned Jeep in two steps, came down hard with both feet on the bodies trapped inside. He scanned the twisted mass, decided nobody was a threat; one guy was trying to crawl toward the back, escape through the rear doors, but he was unarmed, hand-over-handing it across the leather terrain. Galvan threw a couple kicks, freed up a semiautomatic, made sure it was racked and ready. His breath was loud, raspy inside the close space.

  There were a lot of bullets waiting for him out there. Maybe it was time for a little subterfuge.

  Don’t start getting cute now, he told himself.

  The guy scrabbling for the back door had almost made it. Galvan shot a hand out, grabbed him by the ankle, pulled him back.

  Time for a little test run. See where the shooters were.

  He pulled the dude to him. “You want out, huh?”

  “Fuck you,” the guy responded, through a busted lip, and reared back a few inches to spit in Galvan’s face.

  Or try to. By the time the saliva crossed his lips, Galvan had tossed him straight up, through the open window. The sound of gunfire was sudden, deafening, and shockingly long, as the troops arrayed around the car dumped all their terror and most of their clips into the man they thought was Galvan.

  By the time they’d determined the dude’s identity, Galvan had kicked open the back door, circled around the side of the Jeep. He added his own staccato burst to the chorus, and five of the soldiers dropped dead.

  The other five decided it was time to rethink their career paths and ran—dropped their guns, raised their hands in surrender, and fled down the road in mindless, abject terror, and, Galvan guessed, a good measure of disbelief.

  He watched them go and allowed himself a deep sigh of relief. It was over. The violence hadn’t spilled onto Louis’s property, had not touched his brood. The cartels were in retreat and disarray. Maybe Rosales would have a respite. Perhaps Galvan had done some good in the world. And maybe—

  The crack of a rifle cut the thought short. Galvan ducked and spun, gun at the ready, and his eyes widened.

  A body hung halfway out of the Jeep, doubled over, arms dangling. A pistol slipped out of the man’s lifeless grip, clanged against the hood, fell to the ground.

  He’d been lining up his shot.

  Silently.

  From five feet away.

  A shooter didn’t miss at that range. A man didn’t survive.

  Galvan stared across the field, at the barn. He could barely make out the smoking rifle, much less the farmer who had saved his life.

  CHAPTER 25

  Herman Rubacalo was not a drinker, and thus Herman Rubacalo was drunk. That wasn’t part of the plan, but maybe it was for the best. He melted into the buttery leather of his limousine, cracked open a bottle of water, and took a few deep, calming breaths.

  He pressed a button on the console beneath his elbow, spoke through the intercom.

  “They’re still behind us?”

  A burst of static preceded the driver’s answer. A bad connection to six feet away.

  “Yes, jefe.”

  “Good,” Herman muttered, without bothering to hit the button again.

  He checked his watch. Rosales was less than an hour off. He was closing in on the most important, least predictable rendezvous of his life, and he was traveling with less security than typically accompanied him on a dinner date with his wife.

  Two guards, and two strangers.

  Plus the straggling remains of Azteca’s Rosales detachment, the men skilled or lucky or disloyal enough to have survived last night’s one-man siege. Somehow, Rubacalo doubted any of them would make it to the farm on the outskirts of town where his intelligence said Galvan was hunkered down. He’d have been worried about them tipping off Sinaloa to his approach, but the other cartel’s forces were as decimated as his own.

  The sheriff seemed all right, Rubacalo mused. A reasonable man thrust into crisis by the vastness of his own confusion—but strong-willed enough to face it, instead of pretending he had not seen what he had. Nichols’s vulnerability had turned him into a moral relativist, and this Rubacalo valued above all. If a man lacked the capacity to embrace the reprehensible, he was of little worth.

  By that rubric, Herman’s own worth was limitless.

  He stared out the window, and forced himself to appreciate the view, the sky, the land, the furious contradictions of the world—its teeming desolation, its brutal equanimity. Through the heavy tint of the glass, he could stare directly at the low-slung sun, blazing its well-worn path across the sky.

  If he had miscalculated in any way, Herman would not live to see it rise again.

  “WHEN THIS IS over,” Nichols said with a certainty he didn’t feel, a certainty that had flat-out vanished from the world at large, “I’m gonna fucking kill you.”

  He scowled over at Fuentes, found his eyes glued to the road. “Where the fuck do you think you get off, setting me up like that? You hear me talking to you, asshole?”

  “Like you said, hermano, you got bigger things to worry about right now.”

  “That’s not what I said,” Nichols snapped back, but goddamn, was it ever true.

  Look on the bright side, Nichols. Galvan’ll probably kill you before you get the first sentence out. Seems to be his M.O. these days.

  Time flew when you were apoplectic with fear and reeling with incomprehensible new facts. Next thing Nichols knew, the sun was grazing the horizon, and the limo in front of them was pulling off the highway, onto a dirt road.

  It didn’t get far.

  Three Jeeps in various states of wreckage blocked the way.

  And then there were the bodies.

  Nichols leaned forward, goggled through the windshield.

  It had been a slaughter.

  At least they’d come to the right address.

  The limo’s front doors opened and out stepped Rubacalo’s goons. They made a slow tour of the carnage, frowned pointlessly at corpses and automotive detritus, bent to gather up the small arms strewn across the killing field.

  “Might as well get on with it,” Nichols said and heaved his bulk out of the car.

  Fuentes stayed put.

  “You comin’ or what?”

  The cop shrugged. “Think I’ll stay here.”

  “The fuck you will. Get your ass on out, or I’ll shoot you myself.”

  Nichols strode to the limo, rapped on Rubacalo’s window. The cartel don buzzed it open, and Nichols stared down at him.

  “What’s the matter, Cortador? Cold feet?”

  He turned away before Rubacalo could answer and trudged in the direction of the small clapboard house, across a broad field planted with some kind of vines that snaked their way up wooden stakes.

  “Yo!” Nichols bellowed at the top of his lungs. Last thing he wanted to do was catch Galvan unaware. “Jess! You in there? It’s me, Nichols. Hey! Jess!”

  He crossed the field slowly, shouting through cupped hands all the way.

  “Jess? Bob Nichols. If you’re in there, come out and talk, man. I came a long way.”

  At last, when Nichols was close enough that shouting felt ridiculous, the door creaked open, and out stepped Galvan.

  He was unarmed. That w
as a plus.

  But the two men who emerged behind him both held shotguns.

  “Hey, Jess. How you doing, buddy?” He gave the other two a hearty wave. “Howdy. Bob Nichols. Me and Jess, we’re old friends.”

  Galvan’s face could’ve been chiseled from stone. “How’d you find me?” he intoned, voice flat and low, as if the answer didn’t interest him. As if the real question was not how, but why.

  Nichols spread his arms, tried out a laugh. It went over like a turd in a punch bowl.

  “Well, you been calling a little bit of attention to yourself, Jess. Know what I mean?”

  Galvan raised his chin. “Who the fuck are they?”

  Nichols twisted at the waist. Cortador, Fuentes, and the bodyguards stood twenty paces behind him, arrayed in a loose horseshoe.

  “You remember my buddy Fuentes. Helped save our asses a few months back?”

  Galvan took that in. “And who are they?”

  Cortador strode up to Nichols’s side.

  “My name is Herman Rubacalo, Mr. Galvan. I am the CEO of Barrio Azteca. But that is not why I am here.”

  Galvan looked from Nichols to Rubacalo, then back to Nichols.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he demanded. And then, before Nichols could answer, he pointed a finger at Cortador.

  “Give me one reason not to rip out his throat right now.” Galvan’s face twitched—spasmed, almost. “What are you doing with him, Nichols? You know what he’s done to this town?”

  The goons didn’t cotton to that kind of talk about the boss. They were ready to flex. Cortador shot them a stand-down look and took another step toward Galvan.

  “I have no doubt that you could, Mr. Galvan. I do not even dispute that you would be justified. But please, hear us out first. Listen to your friend the sheriff. That is all I ask.” He folded his palms behind his back. “My life is in your hands.”

  Galvan’s furious, perplexed gaze jumped back to Nichols.

  “Start talking.”

  If he’d been wearing a necktie, Nichols would have loosened it. “Okay. Look. I know what’s going on. You don’t have to hide anymore.”

  Galvan just stood there, seething, so Nichols faltered on.

  “Cucuy,” he stammered. “I know about Cucuy. He got inside you, and you’re fighting him. Every minute since you ate that heart, he’s been trying to take over. Isn’t that right?”

  Galvan’s chest heaved. His eyes twitched, and he squeezed them shut, shook his head violently. All of a sudden, Nichols could see it, clear as day: the torment, the struggle, the insane amount of energy his friend burned to keep the demon inside him at bay.

  And the inevitability of Galvan’s failure.

  “He’s talking to you right now, isn’t he?” Nichols went on, his voice just above a whisper. “What’s he saying, Jess? He telling you to kill me?” Nichols gestured behind him, in the direction of the bodies, as if Jess could see him. “Did he tell you to kill them, too?”

  Galvan’s eyes fluttered open. Sweat had popped out on his brow, and he spoke through gritted teeth. “I did that myself.”

  His breath was coming in quick, shallow snorts. “I’m fighting him,” he said, and the ferocious intensity of the words sent a chill down Nichols’s spine.

  “I believe you,” Rubacalo declared, walking another pace toward Galvan. It was all Nichols could do not to turn tail and sprint away, or dig himself a hole to hide in. Now that he knew what it was, bearing witness to Jess’s moment-by-moment battle to contain himself was horrific, grotesque in a way he could barely wrap his mind around.

  “And because I believe you,” the cartel boss continued, “I’m going to tell you something that has been hidden from Cucuy for generations. Something that puts my life, my family, at risk. Cards on the table time.”

  Galvan’s eyes were locked on him now.

  Or were they Cucuy’s eyes, Nichols wondered. How much of his friend had the monster colonized? How tenuous was Galvan’s control, how sapped his resistance?

  “My forefather was Izel Notchi Icnoyotl. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Galvan shook his head. His hands flexed at his sides, as if in search of a weapon, or a neck. Nichols clenched his own fists and watched, transfixed, helpless.

  Rubacalo stepped directly in front of Galvan and looked into his eyes as if peering into the recesses of a murky lake.

  “What about you, Cualli? Remember your old friend Izel? What about Chacanza? Do you remember her?”

  A glazed and distant look came over Galvan’s face, and his mouth dropped open.

  “He does,” he whispered.

  The color rose in Rubacalo’s cheeks. “Then let me tell him this. Izel did not die in your purges, Cualli. He and his line survived. We have watched you from the shadows and kept guard over the final wisdom the gods gave to man before they left this place.”

  He smiled, as if imagining the impact of his words on his enemy. Nichols didn’t like it one bit. Speaking directly to Cucuy or Cualli or whoever he was couldn’t be a good idea.

  Say the devil’s name and he appears.

  “The immortals were not so quick to abandon man as you thought,” Rubacalo breathed. He had probably waited his entire life for this moment, Nichols reflected. To reveal himself, his family’s existence, to Cucuy.

  “Izel offered them a sacred sacrifice. And do you know what they gave him in return?”

  He searched Galvan’s eyes, gone blank and liquid, then pulled himself up to his full height.

  “The secret of your undoing.”

  Rubacalo paused.

  “I can feel his fear. Do you feel it too, Mr. Galvan?”

  Jess ground his teeth so that his jaw flared, and he gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.

  Nichols realized he wasn’t breathing and huffed a draught of air into his lungs.

  “Will you help us to destroy him?” Rubacalo pressed. “To eradicate the power of Tezcatlipoca from the world forever?”

  Galvan was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was a rasp, as dry and bleached as corn husk.

  “What’s he asking me to do, Nichols? He asking me to die?”

  The sheriff dropped his hands to his waist and grimaced at his friend.

  “Yeah, Jess. Something like that. But the good news is, it gets to mean something.”

  Galvan stared at him for a long moment, and then his gaze flickered over to Rubacalo. “Cucuy told me that if I died, Tezcatlipoca would be freed.”

  “That depends on how you die. Perhaps you know of the Virgin Army.”

  “I’m pretty goddamn familiar, yeah.”

  “Their queen. His wife.”

  Something changed in Galvan’s face—the scowl softening, something Nichols couldn’t identify moving in to take its place.

  “The woman in yellow,” Galvan muttered, and Nichols knew what it was.

  Apparently, Galvan was not yet beyond shock.

  Nor was Rubacalo.

  “You have seen her?” he asked, incredulous.

  “Only in my dreams. Or his dreams. I dunno which.” The scowl was back in place. “What about her?”

  “You must die at her hands,” Rubacalo said simply. “It is the only way.”

  A sound like a low growl buzzed in Galvan’s throat, and his eyes darted over to Nichols.

  “You trust this motherfucker?”

  Nichols sighed. “On one hand, he’s the biggest narco trafficker in Mexico. On the other, he’s been right about everything so far.”

  Rubacalo shifted his weight. “It is remarkable that you have resisted for so long,” he told Galvan. “But you cannot do it forever. You know this.”

  He raised his eyebrows, waited for Galvan to concede the point.

  It didn’t take long.

  “My life’s unbearable,” he said, mouth barely moving around the words. “I’d have ended it already if I wasn’t afraid of what might . . .”

  He trailed off, took a backward glance at the two men st
anding by the door, shotguns dangling from their slack hands. Nichols wondered how much they were able to follow.

  “This fuckin’ plan,” Galvan said abruptly. “You’re sure it’ll work?”

  “For five centuries, Mr. Galvan, my family has—”

  “Yeah, you said that already. Seems like your fuckin’ family found plenty of time to get rich off other people’s misery, though.”

  “A means to an end, Mr. Galvan. It was the only way to get close to Cualli. Or so we thought—we never came near. He was too careful.” Rubacalo spread his arms. “It’s now or never, Mr. Galvan, and the choice is yours. I cannot force you.”

  “Yeah, I get that a lot.” Galvan scratched at a stubbled cheek. “And if I say yes—if I give up my fuckin’ life—what are you prepared to do, Rubacalo?”

  The cartel chief opened his arms wider, the posture of entreaty transformed into one of beneficence.

  “Anything you ask, Mr. Galvan. I give you my word.”

  “Your word don’t mean shit to me. The shit I want you to do, I’m gonna watch you do it myself. And once I’m satisfied, well . . .” Galvan threw up his own arms. “Then I’ll take one for the fuckin’ team.”

  Rubacalo could barely contain his excitement. “Let us waste no time,” he said. “What is it you—”

  “I’m getting to that.” Galvan unfolded a finger. “Number one, you get the fuck out of Rosales. You pay to rebuild it. And you do right by the families of the dead.”

  “Consider it done.”

  Galvan unfolded another finger. It was clear he was making this up as he went along, thought Nichols, wondering how far a man with bottomless leverage and zero fucks to give might take things.

  “Number two. You’re out of the drug business, as of right now.”

  Rubacalo nodded vigorously. “You have no idea how happy it will make me to comply, Mr. Galvan. This entire—”

  “I’m not finished. You’re in a new business now, Rubacalo. Barrio Azteca’s new job is destroying Federacíon Sinaloa. One cartel is one too many. They’ve gotta both be gone.”

  Rubacalo was momentarily speechless. “That . . . will not be easy,” he said at last.