Fear Me

Weems was already moving off to join the brothers over by the basketball courts, he didn’t pay no mind to Romero and Romero paid no mind to him. Palmquist was sitting on his ass, spitting out blood and teeth. His left eye was beginning to swell shut and his lower lip was almost ripped from his mouth.

“You like that?” Romero put to him, not bothering to offer him a hand or even a squirt of sympathy. “Well, you better get used to it, Cherry. Because you’re gonna be living on a steady diet of ass-beatings twenty-four/seven. Every day from now on. First they’re going to beat you, then…you know what comes next, don’t you?”

Palmquist nodded. “I know. I been here before, in this situation.”

Romero figured some con had busted his ass at Brickhaven. Wouldn’t have surprised him. “Well, then you know what you’re in for.”

But Palmquist just shook his head. “That fucking nigger is dead, only he don’t know it yet and there ain’t shit I can do about it.” He was grinning now, blood all over his teeth. “See, Romero, I got me an ace in the hole.”

“You’re gonna have more than an ace in there, mark my word,” Romero said.

But Palmquist said nothing.

5

Later that afternoon, Riggs passed the word to Romero that Black Dog wanted to see him. It wasn’t good. Anytime Black Dog was involved it just couldn’t be a good thing.

Black Dog was a patched blood member of the Hell’s Angels and one of the Filthy Few, which was the enforcement wing of the Angels who beat, mauled, and murdered any that violated club policies or encroached on their lucrative drug turf. He was absolutely fearless, tough, and merciless. He had a psychotic volatile temper and a reputation for bloodshed and violence that few could match behind those walls. He was sitting n-u on a seventy-five year stretch for murder conspiracy.

“Hell’s he want?’ Romero asked.

But Riggs just shrugged. “Can’t say, my brother. He reached out through us because he wants a sit-down with you.”

By “us” Riggs meant the Mongols. There had been blood wars between the Angels and Mongols on the outside, but behind the walls at Shaddock, they kept an uneasy truce.

Romero found Black Dog over at the iron pile, bench-pressing the sort of weight that would have driven most men into the ground. He finished, mopping sweat from his face with his T-shirt. “Romero,” he said. “Glad you came. We need to talk.”

Romero sighed, lit a cigarette. “I’m listening.”

“It’s about your cellie,” Blackdog said. “That fish Palmquist. I need to know what your intentions are.”

“Intentions?”

Black Dog nodded. “Some shit happened at Brickhaven. You probably heard. Your fish was involved in that, somehow, some way. Was a dude over there, Donnie Fritz, he got done. Some people think your fish had a hand in it.”

Romero laughed. “Palmquist? We talking about the same guy?”

“We are.”

“This kid ain’t got it in him, Dog.”

“Some people think different.”

“Then some people are full of shit.”

“Go easy, man, go easy here.”

Even to Romero, Blackdog was fearsome. He stood an easy 6’6 and weighed 300 pounds and there was not a scrap of fat on him. His body was covered in prison tattoos and many of them, if you knew how to read them, told the story of who he was and where he’d been, the things he’d done and the bodies he’d left in his wake. On each huge bulging bicep there was an immense blood-red swastika.

He was not a man to cross.

Black Dog was not elaborating on these “people,” at least not yet. And knowing him and his connections it could have been anybody from the Italians to the Mexicans, heig Mexicais biker brothers or the ABs. Take your pick.

“Listen, Dog,” Romero said, standing his ground. “Palmquist is meat. He’s harmless. There’s no way he did someone like Fritz. Besides, way I hear it, Fritz and his cellie got done after lock-down. Now how the fuck could the fish be involved in that?”

Black Dog thought about that.

Even with the proper schooling, Romero doubted that Palmquist would ever make a good con. He’d never have the nuts to stand up for himself and that made him a victim, plain and simple.

When Romero was a young punk at Brickhaven, after he’d been processed into the general population, an old timer named Skip Hannaway came up to him and asked him what the state had sent him away to college for. Romero told him about the thing he had for stealing cars.