The Devil's Bag Man (4 page)

T
here'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.

She was a sight for sore eyes, all right. Looked like a rock video chick, before she takes off her glasses and undoes the bun in her hair and starts whipping it around.

Somehow, Knowles doubted any of that was gonna happen.

Before he could open his mouth, she'd reached through the bars and pressed a manicured fingertip to his chapped lips.

“I'm going to unlock this cage, and then you're going to follow me outside and get in the car. There's no need for us to speak. Got it?”

“Got it,” he said, and grinned against her finger.

She spun away, inserted the key into the lock. A moment later, the door swung wide. Kurt looked over his shoulder, treated the shoplifter to a shit-eating grin and a two-fingered wave.

Adrissa was already striding down the hall, apparently unconcerned with reestablishing the cell's integrity. Kurt took a moment to appreciate her muscular little ass, snug inside its business suit, then followed her toward freedom.

Or whatever it was that lay outside.

He caught up to Coleridge at the door. The light beyond was pinkish, glowing, and for a moment Knowles couldn't remember whether it was dusk or dawn, had to count backward to the last time he'd slept. The cop sat motionless behind his desk, the briefcase open before him, eyes flitting up and down like he wasn't sure where he was allowed to look.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Officer Blanton,” Coleridge said. “And please, give your sister Katie-Ann my regards. And her twin daughters, too. Are they still at 12 Pine Bottom Lane?”

His face went even paler than it had been, and Coleridge smiled.

“That's right, Danny. We know all about you, so play it smart. That's a nice chunk of change for a kid like you. Enough to maybe get out of public service, go into business for yourself. But hey, that's just my advice. Take it or leave it.”

She pushed open the door, and a gust of good clean desert air swept through.

“Adios, pig,” Knowles spat, mostly to irritate the broad, show her he'd speak whenever he damn well pleased. And he treated Blanton to the same little bye-bye wave he'd thrown his cellmate.

“Lead the way, Counselor,” he told Coleridge, and he cupped her left ass cheek with his big, florid hand, gave it a good hard squeeze.

“Hey!” She sprang away from him, pure reflex, stumbled out into the muggy twilight. Spun toward him, fury flashing in her eyes.

He loved an angry woman. The reddened cheeks. The animal musk. A chick about to take a swing at you looked uncannily like a woman you'd just fucked.

This one recomposed herself in the blink of an eye, the professionalism
trumping the ire. Knowles wasn't worth getting upset over; the decision might as well be written on her face. The color died down, and she pursed her lips, exhaled through her nose.

It made him feel disrespected—obscurely, but intensely. Knowles felt his half-hard dick stand down, and his self-confidence shrivel. Now
he
wanted to take a swing at
her
.

“Get in the car.”

There were two. A late-model Beemer and a Lincoln town car, the latter fully murdered out, windows tinted so dark you could barely see where they began or ended. Knowles goggled dumbly at it for a moment, his own wide meaty reflection staring back from inside the high-gloss paint.

Coleridge had the Beemer's door open by the time he snapped out of it.

“Where's the guys?” he heard himself ask. “With the, the guns?”

“There's no guys.” She slid behind the wheel, reached for the door. “Get in the car.”

“Where's it taking me?”

“I'm sure I don't care,” Adrissa Coleridge said and slammed the door. The engine growled to life and she peeled out, dust swirling up as high as Knowles's waist, then floating silently back down to the ground.

The town car just sat there, sleek and solid and indifferent. Knowles considered walking away, just to see what happened. He realized he had no idea where his bike was. Impounded, no doubt. The one thing he owned free and clear was history. And he was a fugitive now, a jailbreaker.

So that was that.

The town car continued to sit there, patiently waiting for him to arrive at what should have been a foregone conclusion and climb in.

He did.

The driver's partition was tinted the same impenetrable color as the windows. The leather felt cool to the touch. Two bottles of water sat in the cup holders. Knowles cracked one, guzzled.

“Where we going?” he asked the plane of Plexiglas before him.

The car banked out of the parking lot, onto the road. “Who the hell sent you?” Knowles demanded, but at this point he was only talking to himself.

K
nowles woke gasping from a restless, terror-speckled sleep—the only kind he knew, unless he drank himself into a stupor. No such luck in the back of the town car, which had shrunk from spacious and luxurious to cramped and miserable over the course of the last ten hours. They'd stopped only for gas, and the invisible chauffeur had ignored his demand for a bathroom break. The two water bottles were full of piss now, Aaron Seth's frequent admonishments about befouling the nest turned literal in the great void of his absence.

Knowles reverting back to his animal nature.

It was dawn, give or take, the tinted windows leaching the color from the spectacle, repainting the picture in frigid hues.

Knowles wouldn't have enjoyed it anyway.

Before him loomed a great high concrete wall, coils of razor wire rimming the top like salt on a margarita glass. Three slim towers jutted from within the compound. Those were crowned by rifle-toting men, their silhouettes backlit by the rising sun. There was nothing else around, probably for miles. This wasn't the only show in town.

This
was
the town.

Knowles's heart sank, the subconscious hopes he'd been nurturing revealing themselves only at the moment of their demise.

Sprung from jail and delivered to prison.

It didn't make a goddamn lick of sense.

The locks on the car doors clicked open, offering Knowles a freedom that had lost a good deal of its luster. He stepped out anyway, squinted against the assault of the light. The Lincoln wasted no time in roaring away.

Knowles shaded his brow with the flat of his hand and waited for something to happen.

Hopefully breakfast.

Instead, with an ear-piercing metallic whine, a heretofore invisible door swung open, and a man in a guard's uniform strode toward him, eyes cloaked behind black aviators, gun holstered at his waist. The swing of his arms bespoke confidence—the kind of unearned, cocksure swagger that came with authority, with wearing a gun on your hip and telling a bunch of convicts what to do. A quick appraisal told Knowles he had six inches and sixty pounds on the dude, and he liked his chances of getting the weapon away from him.

And then what? Shoot a hole in the earth to escape through?

“Señor Knowles,” the guard said, halting a few paces away and dropping his hands to his hips. “Sígueme, por favor.”

Knowles scowled at him. “The fuck you talkin' Mexican for?”

A twitchy little smile blossomed across his thin lips, and Knowles felt the sap rise in him. “Because this is Mexico, shithead. Follow me.”

The guard turned and walked back the way he'd come.

Damn. No wonder this place seemed familiar.

Ojos Negros. The end of the line for Aaron Seth's pussy parade. He and the club had made this run dozens of times, picking up young pious girls from Seth's compound and delivering them here, but Knowles had never been inside—never even been face-to-face with the front door. The Natives had done their business a quarter mile away, surrounded by scrub brush and sand—a bulkhead opened like a service entrance and a couple guards ambled out into the sunlight. Money and product changed hands, and that was that.

Clean girls for dirty money.

Lifeblood of the club.

One more thing to mourn.

The guard vanished from sight, and once again, Kurt Knowles found himself faced with a choice that really wasn't one.

Once again, he did what he was told.

AT WHAT POINT
,
Domingo Valentine asked himself as he waited for his guest to be shown in, did the steward stop waiting for the king to return?

A better question—more pressing, certainly—was at what point did the king's subjects begin to take note of his absence and whisper revolt? They'd sworn no fealty to the steward. His word meant nothing if he did not speak on the king's behalf. Command the king's army.

And for all Domingo knew, the whispering had already begun.

Cucuy's empire—the portion Domingo knew of, at least, and not for a second did he doubt that there was more—rested on the Ancient One's ability to calibrate and profit from a never-ending, low-grade war. On the subtle machinations by which he pitted one cartel against the other, tipped the balance left and right and left again. The cross-continental drug trade was a ship forever listing on a sea of blood.

It was not a performance Domingo could hope to duplicate. Cucuy saw the whole chessboard, every past configuration and future contingency. Domingo was lucky to understand how his next move would ramify it. He'd never been privy to Cucuy's long-term plans; the latest collision course on which he'd set Barrio Azteca and Federacíon Sinaloa would explode into conflagration in a matter of weeks, or even days, and Domingo had no idea how to prevent or resolve or exploit it. Was one organization to be reduced, by means of a controlled burn, a concentrated bloodletting? Was the profit to be made in guns? In drugs? On the political side of the sprawling equation, with which Domingo was barely even acquainted? Was it a test of the leadership? A diversion, while some greater plan unfolded?

The procurer leaned back in his chair, interlaced his hands behind his head, and sighed. He was overdue to catch a break, and with any luck, Kurt Knowles would provide it. Quite a waste of resources, if
he couldn't. Adrissa Coleridge wore Armani suits, and she charged Armani prices.

A moment later, the biker sat across from him, deposited roughly in the room's only other chair by a pair of corrections officers who lingered by the room's threshold until Domingo dismissed them with a flick of his eyes.

Knowles seemed to spill out of the chair in all directions: a massive, florid man, his limbs like overstuffed pillows, his face underlaid with broken blood vessels, his clothes stinking of campfire smoke and cheap liquor, sunbaked sweat and jail.

Domingo regarded him for a moment. The biker shifted in his chair, eyes darting around the room as he tried to get his bearings. Domingo had instructed the guards to bring him in through the yard, so that Knowles might get a fuller sense of the prison, contemplate what an indefinite stay as an unaffiliated gringo might feel like.

Looking at him now, Domingo realized that had been a waste of time. This wasn't a man who buckled under fear. Or, for that matter, one unduly concerned with envisioning the future.

Your options were limited with a man like this.

But there was no reason to think he and Kurt Knowles were not on the same side.

You didn't play the hand. You played the man.

“We've never met, Mr. Knowles. I'm Domingo Valentine. I manage operations here, you might say. The wares your club delivered, for instance, I received. Now. Can I get you anything.” He kept the inflection flat, the question mark out of it. “Something to drink. Something to eat.”

Domingo's voice had been his first weapon in life. It was as smooth as high-grade motor oil, could betray nothing or lay everything bare.

Knowles grunted, rearranged himself again, tugged at his dick through his denim. “You got some whiskey or somethin'?”

“Certainly.” He rapped his knuckles on his desk, the sound echoing through the chamber, and a guard appeared.

“Whiskey for Mr. Knowles. And for me,” he added, not wanting to affront the man by making him drink alone. Not that Knowles was likely to give a shit.

“So,” Domingo said, leaning forward and interlacing his fingers on the desk. “I hope your trip was comfortable.”

Knowles just stared, his eyes bloodshot and mean.

Domingo gave him a close-lipped smile. “I'll come to the point. I am trying to determine the circumstances of our friend Aaron Seth's demise, and locating witnesses has proven quite difficult.”

The whiskey arrived: a half-f bottle of a rotgut brand. Domingo stifled the urge to break it across the jaw of the guard who'd delivered it. But they didn't keep a stock of alcohol on hand; he'd probably gone upstairs, borrowed it from some cartel chief's cabinet.

Knowles kept his eye on the bottle as Domingo poured them each three fingers of the pungent brown liquor. It disappeared into his mitt when Domingo handed the glass over, and then straight down his gullet.

Glass back on the desk. Domingo poured a refill, watched the biker chase the first drink with the second.

“Why the hell should I tell you anything?” he asked at last.

“Our interests are aligned, Mr. Knowles.”

The outlaw, impatient with the service, leaned forward and grabbed the bottle by the neck.

“Yeah, how you figure that?”

“You worked for Aaron Seth. I work for his father.”

Knowles paused, the bottle cocked just short of a pouring angle.

“His father,” he repeated.

“That's correct.”

Third whiskey, down the hatch.

“Forget it,” he said. “I ain't goin' nowhere near that fuckin' . . . if that's what you think, you got the wrong guy, I'll tell you that right now.”

He reached for the bottle again, but Domingo snatched it away.

“What are you talking about, Mr. Knowles?”

“The guy who killed Seth. Galvan. Look, I want revenge so bad it makes my dick hard. But I'm not tanglin' with him.”

Domingo relinquished the whiskey, crossed his legs. “And why is that?”

“'Cause that son of a bitch ain't
human
. I watched him snap Seth's neck like a fuckin' twig. Hell, we hacked his goddamn arm off, and bam—he grows a new one.” Knowles gave an involuntary shudder.

Domingo's heart was racing. He filled the biker's glass. “Go on, Mr. Knowles. Tell me exactly what happened.”

Knowles narrowed his eyes and drained his glass. “You know, I'm a fugitive thanks to you, Valentine. How 'bout we talk money?”

Domingo swiped a palm over his lips, as if spot-checking his poker face. “An interesting perspective. One might also say that you're a free man thanks to me, Mr. Knowles.”

The biker took that in—that, and a fifth slug of whiskey. Domingo watched, placid, mind sprinting to keep up with his heartbeat.

It was the Great One. It had to be. These were not acts of man Kurt Knowles described, but acts of god. Cucuy had cast off one form, taken up another. Domingo's faith had been rewarded.

Man had died for god, just as he always had. But why had this Galvan been the Ancient One's instrument, and not Aaron Seth?

And why had he not come home to reclaim his throne, his kingdom? Was all this useless to him now?

Or was something, someone, somehow holding him back?

Domingo would find out. His will surged toward knowing, compressed itself into a single arrow point of purpose.

“Tell me all you know of this Galvan,” Domingo demanded, his voice a razor now, cutting through Knowles's games and the sweet haze of the whiskey. “What did you see? Where can I find him?”

Knowles grinned at him from behind the glass. “Let's talk money, Valentine. I could be a real good—”

“Do not overplay your hand,” the procurer snapped, rising to his feet.

Cucuy was out there: the knowledge had annihilated what patience Domingo might otherwise have had with this hulking moron.

“Everything you know. Right now. Or you can spend the rest of your life in this prison. Do we understand each other?”

“Loud and clear, boss,” the biker drawled, raising his palms in mock surrender. “Like you said, same team here.”

He looked up at Domingo, grim and unfazed, and Domingo had the sense that it was he who'd overplayed. He was not Cucuy, from whom a threat could never be perceived as a sign of weakness. Domingo was vulnerable, and he had to be cautious. A man like Kurt smelled frailty. There was no percentage in making him an enemy.

Domingo smoothed his shirt, found his seat and his manners. “From what you say, this Galvan is too dangerous to go after directly, Mr. Knowles.”

Especially with my resources tapped, my legal protections evaporating, my loyal subjects gossiping at the palace gates
.

“We need a pressure point,” Domingo went on. “Something to leverage. Something he cares about. Someone he loves.”

Kurt Knowles nodded and cracked the knuckles of his right hand with the heel of his left. “That's easy,” he said. “Cocksucker's got a daughter.”