The Reformed by Tod Goldberg Read Free Book Online Page B

need proper inspection. “Now it’s a party,” K-Dog said. “Like old times. K-Dog and the Axe, right?”
    “Sure thing,” Sam said. It was true they’d had some old times, but it wasn’t like they were best friends. In fact, they’d met under rather odd circumstances. K-Dog (whose real name was Kevin, but no one bothered to call him that, especially since he wore a gold chain with a dog bone around his neck and had a tattoo of a bulldog on both of his arms and the words “Dog Pound” etched across his chest) had run a nice fake-passport business back in the late eighties and early nineties, before he was pinched post-9/11. Sam had met a nice girl in Cuba on a mission and couldn’t get anyone in the government to listen to him about what an important, uh, asset she’d be, and so he had to turn to K-Dog to try to get a decent batch of papers for her. It cost him a bit of dough, but it was worth it ... or, well, it would have been worth it if the girl ever even bothered to give him a call once she got stateside, but Sam didn’t dwell on that. You win some, you lose some, and sometimes you end up buying a fake passport for someone.
    Over the years, though, they’d formed a nice friendship based on mutual respect and the fact that they both had things on the other person that could be used against the other. Sam even tried to help after he got picked up after 9/11, but K-Dog understood that old alliances didn’t mean much in the scope of world calamity. So he did his time. And now here they were again ... drinking prison wine.
    K-Dog filled Sam’s glass and then the two toasted, as if they were drinking some nice scotch. Sam took a sip of his pruno, swallowed, and then felt a burning sensation akin to drinking electricity. He had to try to keep his balance, even though he was sitting down.
    “Good?” K-Dog asked.
    “The best,” Sam said.
    “Added a little something new this time,” K-Dog said.
    “Battery acid?”
    K-Dog slapped Sam’s leg. “I ain’t in prison, Axe Man. I put in a couple habanero chili peppers.”
    “A couple?”
    “I wanted it to have that same bite I remembered from the joint. You can’t get that usually unless you add something like engine coolant or acid. Thought the habaneros would do the trick.”
    That explained the thick brow of sweat that had already formed on Sam’s neck. But it also proved the best opening Sam could think of to get the information he needed out of K-Dog.
    “Who taught you how to make this?” Sam knew the answer to this already, since it was the first thing he’d asked him after their last evening on the pruno train, but Sam knew it would lead to where he wanted to go.
    “Originally? My man Ernesto. We bunked for six months before he caught a shank. Poor guy. He’s pissing out of a tube now.”
    “Who cut him?” Sam liked saying things like “Who cut him?” It reminded him of being a kid and watching prison movies, which is probably why prisoners talked like that, too. Everything anyone knew anymore was learned on television. Sam took another sip of the pruno. It went down smoother this time, possibly because he no longer had feeling in his extremities.
    “Mexican Mafia guy,” K-Dog said. He took another drink, too, but made a face. “You think this needs more ethanol?”
    “No,” Sam said. “They have some beef? I mean, wasn’t Ernesto in his fifties?” Oh, crap, Sam thought, he hadn’t told me that again. Fortunately, K-Dog seemed to have been tasting his work all day long and didn’t seem to notice Sam’s fumble.
    “Well, Ernesto, he was Latin Emperor from back in the day, and the Mexican Mafia was trying to make a move into Coleman back then, and for some reason they thought Ernesto was a shot caller. Man, he was just an old-ass man already. Read books most of the time. Didn’t even lift anymore. He thought it was foolishness and got stuck regardless. Sam, my man, don’t do time.”
    “I’m not planning on it,” Sam