The Coliseum
a novella by
Patrick Lestewka
Kindle Edition
Necro Publications
2011
— | — | —
The COLISEUM © 2004 by Patrick Lestewka
Cover art © 2011 David G. Barnett
This digital edition March 2011 © Necro Publications
Book design & typesetting:
David G. Barnett
Fat Cat Graphic Design
www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com
Assistant editors:
Amanda Baird, John Everson, Jeff Funk, C. Dennis Moore
A Necro Publication
5139 Maxon Ter.
Sanford, FL 32771
www.necropublications.com
— | — | —
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
— | — | —
I. ROLE CALL
The Beast
This is how it begins:
“We gotta ice him.”
“The Beast?”
“Yeah.”
“Your doc did a bang-up job. I can hardly notice them.”
“Notice what?”
“The lobotomy scars. ’Cause you must’ve lost your fuckin’ mind.”
Paulo Sorbetti and Joseph Menna sit in the Fulgate pen cafeteria eating off plastic TV-dinner trays. Paulo scoops a mouthful of baked beans onto a slice of bread, grimacing. He envisions himself in his mother’s kitchen, stuffing his face with three-cheese lasagna and veal cutlets smothered in tomato sauce, custard-filled cannoli for dessert. Doesn’t help.
“All shitting aside, Joe,” Paulo says. “The Beast—we’re talkin’ one hardcore brajone.”
Joseph Menna handles the drug trade in Fulgate. Acid, crystal meth, amphetamines, speed, crack, horse: he’ll hook you up. A high-ranking Capo in the Castiglio mob syndicate, Joseph is serving a dime for trafficking. The guy who ratted him turned state’s evidence after being nabbed with two keys of uncut coke. Joseph tracked the stoolie down and jammed a length of piano wire into his eyeball until it tickled gray matter, but not before the guy took the stand.
Still, it’s easy time: the well-greased guards have a habit of looking the other way when Joseph’s mistress visits with a bulging purse or duct-taped shoebox. He and Paulo have their own cell outside gen. pop, get anything they want—conjugal visits, booze, unlimited yard time—and with fellow Castiglio crew members serving time for crimes ranging from extortion to murder one, their ride promised to be a cushy one.
Until the Beast showed up.
“Okay,” Joseph pushes his tray away, “granted, he’s a mean sonofabitch—”
“Big, too. Never seen anyone so goddamn big.”
“Big, sure. A big fucking goomba. The fuck he think he is, gonna just waltz in, start screwing with business? Peddling that monkey-smack of his; shit’ll make you go blind.” Joseph frowns, lips sucked in, brow lowering, face crumpling inwards like a sheet of balled-up newsprint. “Anyone’s going blind in this place, it’s on my shit.”
His name is Harlan Ruddock, but he is known simply as the Beast. Thirty-seven years old, in and out of incarceration since fourteen. He possesses three N’s that have terrified the gambit of social workers, prison guards, teachers and victims he has run across, into, and over: Near-genius IQ. Nihilistic attitude. No conscience. Harlan didn’t follow the typical criminal arc, petty theft to fraud to armed robbery to manslaughter to murder. He saw the brass ring and grabbed it.
The first man he killed was Hector Sanchez, a dogshit dope peddler working Toronto’s seedy Church Street district. Harlan was seventeen at the time, fresh from a stint in Juvy. Even then his physical dimensions were awesome: Six-five, 300 pounds, legs thick around as trash cans and arms like fenceposts, a chest as wide as the horizon and a skull shaven smooth as an eight ball.
“How much a hit?” he’d asked Hector.
“Fifteen.”
“Ten, last time.”
“Inflation.”
“How ’bout give it for ten? Catch you even next time around; you got my word.”
Hector snorted. “Esse, nobody lasts long taking a dude at his fucking word.”
Harlan jammed his gloved hands into his jacket. His pockets were packed with all sorts of shit he should’ve thrown away: Crumpled strip-club flyers and lint-stuck chewing gum, a paperclip, a shred of paper with his parole officer’s phone number…
…a long, sharpened pencil.
Harlan’s breath plumed whitely. “Come on, bro, just this one time—”
“Told you already,” Hector said, squaring his body. “No…can…do. Now beat it, boy, before I lose my patience and do something stupid like kill your ass—”
Harlan’s arm, a flash of blue fabric, swept in a tight arc. Hector caught sight of the yellow shaft of a Mirado Classic #2 before Harlan buried it in the warm cavern of his ear. Hector’s eardrum exploded with the concussive decompression of a pimento sucked from an olive—sschluupp—his knees buckled and he crashed down on the dirty pavement. The pencil snapped deep inside his ear, head hammering off a Styrofoam Big Mac box, crushing it flat. Streaks of mustard and a withered pickle slice stuck to Hector’s greasy black hair. Blood spurted around the pencil in thin geysers, flecking Harlan’s face, his chest. Hector emitted a pitiful gobbling sound, an excited turkey. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed around the toe of Harlan’s Tek workboot. The Beast kicked Hector in the mouth, partly to shut him up and partly because he felt like it. A few minutes later Hector died.
Harlan rolled the body behind a dumpster and looted it for money and drugs. On the way home he tossed his bloody jacket and gloves in an oil drum fire. The police performed a token investigation; some dipshit smack-runner didn’t merit much attention in a city awash with baby-rapers and celebrity stalkers. Harlan ended up back in the slammer on a penny-ante burglary rap. That’s the way his life goes: He pulls light time for petty crimes, while—be it due to charisma, intelligence, intimidation, or simple good luck—he avoids taking the fall for serious offenses.
“So, what we gonna do?” Paulo says. “Have him gooned in the weight room? Cluster-fucked on the basketball court?”
Joe shakes his head. “Christ, no. Like you said, guy’s a monster. We try to bust him in gen. pop, who knows what goes down. We got what, ten crew men in here? Five are made guys; they ain’t gonna stick their necks out to ice the freak. Other five are a tough bunch, but…” Joe covers his mouth with his hand, talking through spread fingers. “I don’t think they’d take the big bastard down. Not without getting hurt.”
“Yeah, it could get…messy.”
“Messy. Right.”
The first thing Harlan did when he entered Fulgate was find out who controlled the drug routes. Forget cigarettes: Narcotics are the bighouse’s hard currency. Most prisons have an intricate network—smugglers, mixers, runners, and collectors. But Harlan cut out the middlemen by wearing many hats: Smuggler when a neighborhood girl brings the drugs to him in the lining of her baby’s diaper; mixer when cutting the street-grade junk with powdered cleaner lifted from the prison utility room; runner when selling his smack in the yard; collector when busting deadbeat’s elbows and divorcing teeth from welsher’s gums. Harlan knows he’s stepping on Joseph Menna’s toes. He just doesn’t give a shit.
Paulo says, “Who’s doing it?”
Joseph
produces a squeeze bottle and a box of waterproof matches from his overalls. He uncaps the bottle and Paulo inhales the greasy odor of kerosene.
“We are.”
“What?”
“Us. We do it.”
“You nuts? We’re walkin up to the Beast and tellin’ him, Please hold still while we turn you into a roman-fuckin’-candle?”
“What, I’m a fucking lunatic all of a sudden?” Joseph says. “I got it set up with the guards. We walk right up to his cell and hose him down,” he jiggles the bottle, “then we light a match and poof—problem solved.”
“Why don’t you get one of the guys to pull it? We’ll hear the screams down the cellblock.”
“Remind me: When exactly did you grow a pussy? Come on, it’ll be like firebombing the gorilla cage at the zoo. Besides, this psycho’s been hurting business. Hurting our guys.”
A week ago, Harlan had been visited by two Castiglio goons. One currently occupies the prison infirmary with two broken arms and an ass that burns like a tire fire when he takes a shit. The other one occupies a mortician’s slab.
“I want to look into his eyes as he goes up,” Joseph says. “Watch him burn.”
The lockdown horn sounds. Convicts rise and return to their cells, an exodus of orange sackcloth. Joseph and Paulo remain. In ten minutes a guard appears in the doorway and nods.
Joseph says, “Let’s do it.”
Harlan sits on the edge of his bunk. The toothbrush—a purple Reach with angled neck and hard bristles—rests easily in his massive hand. He scrapes the handle over the cell’s cinderblock wall, a purple scar cutting across the unpainted brick; purple powder collecting at his feet. He melts the plastic at the head with a cigarette ember. He wants to stick and snap, leaving the weapon inside a neck or a belly or an armpit, something to be remembered by.
Two prisoners appear in front of his cell. Their bodies are pressed against the walkway railing, maintaining as much distance as possible between themselves and the bars. Harlan stands, bedsprings groaning, palming the sharpened toothbrush up his sleeve.
Although Joseph is smiling, his face is pale. “How’s it going, you piece of shit?”
“Fine, Joseph,” Harlan says. His child-like tone of voice is somehow horrific. “And you?”
“Better than you’re gonna be,” Paulo says, stepping from one foot to the next as if he might piss himself.
“Do we have an issue, gentlemen?”
“Yeah, we got an issue.” Joseph pulls the squeeze bottle. “A 300-pound psycho issue. A soon-to-be barbecued motherfucker issue.”
“I see.” Harlan’s movements are relaxed. “That’s a shame.”
His hand dips below the mattress.
Harlan has made a weapon on the sly in the prison metal shop: an interlocking series of copper pipes tipped with a sharpened sickle of sheet metal. Though only eight inches recoiled, it telescopes to six feet with a flick of the wrist.
This is how it ends:
Joseph sprays the cell with kerosene, wetting the bunk, the bookshelf, Harlan. He and Paulo are edging closer to the bars, their giddy demeanor that of children tormenting a caged dog. Harlan walks towards them.
“That’s right,” Joseph says. “Come feel the burn.”
Paulo trembles in anticipation. “Nobody fucks with the Castiglios. Nobo—”
Harlan’s hand flashes at the hip and the baling hook unfurls in a streak of liquid quicksilver. It passes between the bars and snaps to full extension somewhere behind Paulo’s skull. Paulo barely conceives the danger when Harlan yanks his arm in the manner of a trainer bringing a leashed dog to heel. The hook’s tip punches through the tendons of Paulo’s neck, exploding through the back of his mouth. It juts between his teeth like a blood-slicked metallic tongue as Paulo’s body jitterbugs like a boated fish, crepe-soled shoes beating a tattoo on the cement. All this happens in the span of seconds, in a heartbeat, a blink. The smell of kerosene is cloying and its greasy fumes shimmer the air.
Joseph fumbles for a matchstick as Paulo quakes and drains beside him.
Harlan reaches between the bars, grabbing a handful of Joseph’s overalls. The Castiglio honcho screams like a terrified infant, feet backpeddling uselessly, fingernails tearing bloodless gashes across his attacker’s hand. Harlan twines his arm around Joseph’s sparrow-thin neck and spins him around, pulling his quaking body against the bars.
“Sorry, Joe.” He drops the toothbrush-shank into a waiting palm. “Two’s a crowd.”
He drives the shiv between the cleft of Joseph Menna’s ass, twists, re-asserts his grip, and stabs again. Joseph gasps as if he’s immersed himself in an unexpectedly cold bath. Harlan’s arm pistons with the steady rhythm of a sewing machine. Crimson rosettes bloom on the seat of Menna’s overalls and dark blood patters to the floor. Harlan stabs over and over, ripping the hole deeper, until his fist disappears into the wound. Joseph’s big pink tongue falls out of his big pink mouth and the noises he is making are, for the most part, unintelligible. The guards can only stand, horrified, as blood spreads across cold gray concrete. The shiv snaps somewhere deep inside Menna’s lifeless body and Harlan drops everything.
“So,” he says to the ghost-faced guards, “What now?”
— | — | —
The Broken
This is how it begins:
“Albert, I have good news and bad news.”
Val Ristone, Albert Rose’s boss, is undoubtedly the fattest man in the continental United States. Al has seen pictures—Guinness World Book of Records black-and-whites, those freakish brothers on their mini-bikes—but not real-life, sitting in front of him, close enough to see the beading sweat and a head round and flat and pale as a wheel of mozzarella. Val somehow manages to smell fat: A combination of bacon grease and baby powder seeps out of the man’s fistulous pores.
“What seems to be the concern?”
“Albert, I won’t piss around: You’re fired.” Knitted together on the desktop, Val’s fingers resemble haphazardly-piled sausage links in a butchershop window. “Your bookwork’s fine; your nose for numbers has saved the company some decent coin. But you’re one antisocial son-of-a-bitch and truthfully—” Val, who has attended Tony Robbins’ Say It Like You Mean It seminar not once, but twice, prides himself on his no-BS attitude. “—you strike me as a guy who’s gonna snap and show up wearing a dynamite overcoat one day. No offense.”
Al’s body crumples like a collapsed lung. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t think my social ski—”
“Hey,” Val raises his arms in mock-surrender, “what about last week? We throw a retirement bash for Patty Hersh and where the hell were you? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.”
“There was some pressing work I had to—”
“That’s right, you were bivouacked in your cubicle with your nose stuck in some file or another. Might as well be on Mars.”
“Mr. Ristone, I need this job. I’ve got…expenses.”
“Too late, shooter.” Val shakes his head, an executioner feigning contrition. His body sloshes around in its ill-fitting pinstriped suit, threatening to spill out like silicone from a busted implant. “A boat can’t move if every oar isn’t in the water.”
“I…I don’t even know what that means.”
“My hands are tied. Have your desk cleared by five.”
Rot in hell, you fat pile of shit! May Satan boil your fat ass down for candle wax!
Of course, Albert doesn’t say this. He thinks it, and much worse.
But what does he do?
“I disagree with your decision.”
Albert is halfway to the door when he asks, “What’s the good news?”
“Uh?”
“You said there was good news and bad news.”
“Uh, right.” Val shrugs. “Well, you get some free time. Collect your thoughts.”
It is short work to clear Albert’s spartan cubicle—a coffee mug with Hang In There, Baby! stenciled in blue cursive, a travel
ling alarm clock, a framed photograph of his wife…
…oh, God. His wife.
Pamela Badenhorst-Rose is the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Her childhood was an endless cavalcade of polo tourneys and garden parties, high teas and opera galas. Expensive upbringings breed expensive tastes. They met at a midtown bar, the type of joint where beer is sold by the tray and tabletop-dancing is encouraged. She was slumming it; Al had been dragged out by work cronies. It wasn’t a case of their eyes locking across the dance floor: Pamela did not swoon rapturously, Albert did not sweep her off her feet for a night of torrid lovemaking.
He spilled a drink on her. A banana daiquiri.
She called him an oaf, a clod, a moron. He apologized profusely. She wasn’t an attractive woman: Her features appeared to have been chipped from unforgiving flint, a long and regal nose according her face the rough aspect of a lawn dart. A lean angular frame, a pair of token nubs poking through an angora sweater, legs like menthol cigarettes matching the coolness of her personality. Albert was mesmerized.
Pamela had finally found a man willing to grovel, to cower, to fulfill her every whim and who had no idea of her background. His supplication was genuine and not an attempt to grease the wheels for the Badenhorst fortune. Albert, meanwhile, had found a woman who licked the internal wound in him that called out to be dominated, fed the fire of his inferiority.
But she really, really loves me. Loves me for who I am.
And, in her way, Pamela does love Albert. Loves him the way a hound-trainer loves a Bluetick, the way a pimp loves a whore, the way an alcoholic loves the bottle. He gives her what she needs, provides a crucial service, scratches her nagging itch.
I don’t know what I’d do if she didn’t love me.
Al’s car is a rattletrap but he cannot afford a new one. Pamela manages the finances. She drives a ’98 Saab car and dresses in up-to-the-minute fashions and foots the bill for extravagant parties. Albert, meanwhile, drives a rust-bucket Dodge with torn upholstery and wears blazers with fraying elbow patches.
The Coliseum Page 1