The Devil's Bag Man Read Free Page A

and Cantwell now, since her mother was too dead to take care of her and her father too fucked up. A real sweet kid, even if traumatized beyond belief. They all were on some level, he supposed. Made for an interesting household dynamic. Hell of a way to kick-start a romance, too.
    Nichols thrummed his fingers against the flask again and reminded himself that everything was fine. Hell, even the traditionally underfunded, overworked Del Verde County Sheriff’s Department was less fucked up than usual. Nichols had managed to flip a modest surplus and a pair of useless, overpaid, verge-of-retirement ass-clowns into one promising rookie cop.
    Sometimes he could get through half a day on all that, blot the rest out of his mind, feel like the guy he’d always been. The sure-handed, eagle-eyed kid who’d led the Del Verde Vipers back from a three-touchdown deficit in the state semis twenty-five years back and rode the long local memory of his teenage heroism to the unbelievable glamour of his current station.
    Methodical and unflappable, that had been Nichols. Keep everybody locked in, move the ball down the field one play at a time. It had been the same drill in Iraq, give or take a few improvised explosive devices. You either lost your cool, or you didn’t. The guys who didn’t were the ones everybody else wanted to be around, in case it was contagious.
    Sometimes it was.
    If only Nichols could find a guy like that now. Instead, he had a head full of memories that called into question everything he’d ever believed.
    And everything he’d refused to.
    Sure, at election time he’d bullshitted the Bible-humping voters ofDel Verde County into thinking he was down with Team JC, but until ten weeks ago? Nichols had been agnostic to the core, a firm believer that what you saw was all there was. That anybody who claimed otherwise was fooling himself, building castles in the air.
    Then he’d watched physics take a holiday.
    Though maybe holiday was the wrong word. It was more like Nichols had watched physics huff a gallon of paint, take a dump in a urinal, make out with its own sister, black out behind the wheel of a big rig, and broadside a fireworks factory.
    The images were seared indelibly into his mind. When he tried to sleep, there they were, playing in lurid Technicolor.
    Jess Galvan’s hacked-off forearm regenerating right before his eyes, tendrils of sinew and muscle wrapping themselves around pure-white bone, skin pouring itself over the form, tiny hairs sprouting like spring shoots from new-made pores.
    A soft red lump of muscle twitching in a box, miles from the body it had once animated—miles Galvan had been forced to carry it, across a desert pocked with creatures who had once been girls. Who sensed its presence, climbed out of the ground, and tried to take it for themselves.
    White-robed men standing still as cacti, waiting for a new world to be born, an old god to return.
    An involuntary shudder passed through Nichols despite the autumn heat, the dun-brown uniform shirt sweat-pasted to his back. The fact was, the visuals were the least of it. He’d felt the presence of something ancient and monstrous that night, and it had hit him with the force of revelation. He’d fully believed that a banished deity might be sprung from cosmic jail and reclaim the earth as his domain.
    And then bam , it was as if the house lights had come back up, and life just as he’d always known it had resumed. Coffee and pay stubs, cheeseburgers and TV shows and trying to keep a woman happy.
    To call it a mindfuck didn’t even come close.
    And then there was Jess Galvan, who had eaten that heart himself instead of handing it over to Aaron Seth, killed everybody who needed killing, and promptly exiled himself to the fringes of society.
    Whose beat-to-shit trailer half a mile from the end of the service road was just coming into sight.
    Nichols checked his Timex. It was seven on the dot; the