Fear Me

14

After Warden Linnard heard what happened and viewed Ad-Seg cell #3 personally, describing it to his wife as looking like “someone had opened Gordo up, fingerpainted the walls with what was inside,” he tried to put a cap on it so the rest of his shitheads didn’t hear about it. But in a maximum security prison with its extremely active grapevine, it was near on impossible. So, deciding he did not make a very effective little boy trying to plug the dike with his finger, Linnard went back to his office and drank half a bottle of Jack Daniels before he got on the phone with the DOC and got his asshole expanded three sizes.

Just as he thought, it was everywhere by noon the next day.

“You heard about Gordo, of course,” Aquintez said to Romero out in the yard, knowing that everybody behind those walls had.

“Who hasn’t?”

Still aching from his dust-up with Gordo, Romero was scanning the yard, trying to see where it was coming from, trying to spot the meat-hungry eyes zeroing in on him so he’d know which group was going to come after him. Thing was, he saw nothing. The ABs and bikers paid him no mind. The Latin gangs clustered together by the wall, ignoring him. The blacks were gathered together in little groups, involved in their own thing.

Ain’t that something, he thought, I’m warned by Black Dog to lay low and I piss all over that warning. Papa Joe should have psychopaths of every stripe closing in on me… but I don’t see any indication of it.

But it was more than that. You survived long enough in max, you didn’t trust your eyes so much as your guts. You got a feeling when danger was coming. It went right up your backbone… but for Romero, today of all days, it just wasn’t there.

“Now ain’t that something?” he said out loud, not even aware of the fact.

“What you saying, home?”

So Romero told him what he was thinking, how he should have had lots of bad boys putting him in their sights but he wasn’t feeling anything and seeing even less.

“They got other things to worry about, home. First Weems and now Gordo… these boys ain’t real smart, but even they’re making the connection between Palmquist and a real ugly death. He’s giving all these lifers and hardtimers bad dreams.”

Romero knew that what was in the kid—and he was no longer believing he had imagined any of that—had been active again last night. But he hadn’t witnessed it because he’d spent the night racked out in the infirmary on sedatives after the doc stitched his face closed from the beating Gordo gave him. So no bad dreams or worse reality for him. But it had happened. He knew that. The kid had fallen asleep and then…

Aquintez told him that he had his ears open and he wasn’t hearing anything about Papa Joe putting money out on a certain con named Romero that wasn’t playing by the rules.

“Not yet.”

“Like I said, people got other things to worry about right now. Besides, home, you’re a living legend in this joint. Going after Tony fucking Gordo open-handed without so much as a shank. Now that takes balls, primo balls.”

“Or maybe just a lack of common sense, JoJo,” Romero said, fingering the bruises and bandages on his face.

Tony Gordo was a walking piece of shit and he got flushed, that’s all there’s to it.

He felt no pity for the man. He was a crawling worm somebody should have stepped on long ago and who does it? Palmquist. Or something inside him. Christ, it was all so buggy, headcase stuff.

He looked around the yard again at all the disinterested cons, but the truth was, though, he wasn’t worrying so much about himself but about the fish, about goddamn Palmquist. Worried that the fear would build and some of the boys would act like the animals they were and kill the kid. That’s what worried him.

“I don’t know what this is about, man, but I think if they just leave the kid alone, they’re gonna be okay.”

“Right now, my friend,” Aquintez said, “it’s gonna take some real dumb motherfuckers to make a play for your boy.”