His head was bobbing in the shitter, eyes wide and glistening in the flashlight beam.
Weems’ cellie, a skinny black guy everyone called Porker, was kneeling on his bed, the top bunk, holding himself and shaking, completely out of his mind. There was blood on him and bits of tissue. He was shivering and sobbing and whispering something no one else could hear.
Enough.
“All right,” Warres said. He got on his walkie-talkie. “We got an incident down here…”
9
After the scream, Romero did not get back to sleep.
He lay there like the rest of the inmates, bunched and tense and holding his breath, thinking about things that made his flesh crawl. There was electricity feeding through him, as it was probably feeding through everyone on D, like a wire had been stuck up his ass.
But Romero wasn’t like the others.
He knew things and maybe he did not know at all. He’d heard that scream just fine, long and high and sharp and cut short as if something wet had been stuffed in its owner’s mouth.
So he lay there until things began to die down and a silence that was heavy and thick lay over the prison. Around that time he heard something slither back through the bars and smelled the hot, yeasty stink of rancid fermentation. Palmquist started to moan and thrash.
Sometime later, he began to cry in his sleep.
Or maybe it was Romero himself.
10
Next day, it was all you heard about.
Didn’t matter where you were or whom you were with, the topic of conversation was always the same. The prison became a rumor mill and awful, unbelievable stories began to circulate in that close, sullen atmosphere like disease germs, infecting anyone with a set of ears. Some of the stories were darkly humorous, others like something yanked out of a horror comic or a campfire ghost story. But they kept making the rounds, from the carpentry shop to the craftshop, the mattress factory to the library and the metal shop where license plates were stamped out.
And it was funny, but all the groups and gangs that hated each other on site, mellowed incrementally, seemed to realize that they were all in the same boat together, running the same risk of sinking in the night like Reggie Weems. Sometimes, a common enemy or common fear could do wonders at a place like Shaddock Valley.
Out in the yard that afternoon, Romero was sitting with his usual bunch—Riggs and Aquintez, a few Latin gangsters and white criminals that had been around the block a long time—discussing the shit, sifting fact from fantasy whenever possible. But it all kept circling back like buzzards on the trail of roadkilclass="underline" what had happened to Weems was a lot like what had happened to those cons over at Brickhaven. And that got a guy to thinking, maybe trying to make some connections where there weren’t any or where they were strung so thick they’d trip you right up.
Romero’s crew was joined by a shifty, bearded black guy in a wool hat called Beaks because of his sharp, Roman nose. Beaks was doing all-day for murdering his wife and her lover while he was on a coke binge: life without parole. Beaks was locked in the cell across the corridor from Reggie Weems, so people were listening to what he had to say.
“Heard that scream, fuck yes, shit… how could you have not heard it? Weems… motherfucker was screaming like something was tearing his balls off. Never did hear nothing like that before.” Beaks pulled off his cigarette, watching some cons playing a game of pick-up in the distance. “Weems, shit, ya’ll know Weems, big ape-ugly motherfucker what ate his meat raw… I thought right away, somebody was in there, got to him. Shit, but you know that motherfucker, nobody play tag with his black ass.”
“What’d you see?” Aquintez wanted to know.
“It was dark and shit over there, but I heard something, something wet and sliding… I don’t know what the fuck it was… making funny-ass sounds or something, squealing or hissing or some such shit. That’s what I hear first and I think: Shit, what the fuck going down over there? Then Weems lets go with that scream. Man, it was crazy hoodoo bullshit, way I’m remembering it.”
And that was as close as he could get to it.
In the joint, murders were common place. Guys got shanked or piped, thrown off railings or had their food laced with Decon. Now and again, you had something more creative like an electrocution or what was known as a “down-home barbecue”: gas dumped through the bars while some con was in lock-up, his cell and himself drenched with the stuff, then a match tossed in there.
But what the forensic team that went into Cell #17, Weems’ cell, found was unpleasant even for a prison killing. More than unpleasant, but vicious and psychotic and unexplainable. Houle, the hack who first found Weems, said he’d been ripped apart, mutilated, but that didn’t begin to cover it. He had been dismembered and eviscerated, his bowels strung around the cell like streamers of crepe at a kiddy party. His spinal column had actually been pulled out of his back, his head severed but not before his genitals were sheared free and shoved so far down his throat the pathologist had to open his esophagus to get them out. And that was only part of it. Besides the blood and macerated organs, some of Weems’ bones had been yanked through the skin and were riddled with teeth marks.
And then there was Porker, Weems’ cellmate.
They had to take him out in a straight-jacket after he was held down and shot full of Thorazine, the entire time babbling and moaning and whimpering crazy shit about “monsters” and “things that looked like people without bones.” He was taken to the state hospital that morning for intensive psychotherapy.
“All I know for sure, man,” Beaks was saying to them, “is that something got in there, something I don’t want to be thinking about. Whatever it was and whatever the fuck it wanted, they had to take Weems’ ass out in bags and buckets, had to mop the floor to get the rest of him.”
Romero listened and didn’t say a thing.
But he was thinking plenty.
11
Romero was sitting alone in the bleachers by the football field when Aquintez showed. “Hey, home, been looking for you.”
“Lot of people seem to be looking for me.”
“That’s what I hear,” Aquintez said. “Word’s out that Black Dog warned you off of Palmquist.”
“Sure, they’re saving him for Tony Gordo. Don’t want me interfering, doing anything impractical like trying to help the kid out.”
He shared his conversation with Black Dog, though Aquintez had pretty much guessed the lay of it. That was prison life: nothing new behind those walls, just the same old games played year in and year out.
Aquintez pulled off his unfiltered cigarette, spitting out a few stray bits of tobacco. “All right, home. I want you to listen to me and hear me on this. You can’t stand up against these people. You can’t throw yourself against the might of animals like Black Dog and the bikers, the ABs and Papa Joe. They’ll fucking skin you, bro.”
“I know that, JoJo.”
“Then why we having this convo, eh?” Aquintez said. “Why am I seeing something in your eyes that looks like suicide? Why am I thinking you’re just crazy enough to try and protect that fish and forfeit your own life at the same time?”
But Romero would not and maybe could not answer that one. Maybe he didn’t know himself. All these lean, hungry years just getting by, just existing in this cage, not caring, not giving a damn, getting real slick and practiced at turning a blind eye… and now this. Now something he could not understand had been activated just south of his soul and he could not get a handle on it. It told him he had to help the fish regardless of the consequences.