Rick the Prick – Part 4

A Battle Royale between a whinging sook and a crippled crook.

We could, so easily, have him shifted to protection. The last thing Rick wants (or needs) is to be left alone with the contents of his own head. And that gives us leverage. Leverage to push him toward some kind of help. Or, at the very least, convince him to keep his murderous fantasies to himself.

“Status report, Gio?” I asked his cellmate.

“You wouldn’t believe it, Mark. Not a single whinge. In fact,” he leaned closer, “he was grateful for his dinner. Probably for his first time ever.”

For what it’s worth, he has been quieter the last few days. Less whingy. And we haven’t heard him talk about killing his family. So that’s... something. But the peace, fragile as always, didn’t last.

The trigger, as always, was Rick’s mouth.

It was a warm summer’s day, the kind of heat that makes the asphalt soft. I was on a yoga mat in the concrete yard, trying to stretch the prison stiffness from my back. Across from me, Rick sat on a picnic bench, a monument to misery, droning on about the food.

“...a fuckin’ meat pie,” he groaned. “A pastie. A vanilla slice. Just one proper Four’N Twenty. Is that too much to ask?”

I heard the slow scuff-and-slide of Harley’s walker before I saw him. When he first came in twelve months ago, he was a mangled mess in a wheelchair, injuries sustained by crashing his motorbike after the cops ran him off the road. It’s been inspiring to watch him progress to the walker due to sheer determination, especially when the experts told him he'd never walk again. He is only in his early thirties, but he carried the weight and wisdom of a lifer. In here, years are measured in sentences, not birthdays—and by that calendar, Harley was most definately an elder.

He parked himself near me, forming a triangle.

“Rick,” he said, voice calm but sharp, “I don’t think any food they give you will make you happy. So can you shut the fuck up, or find something else to whinge about?”

Rick’s head snapped up. “Yeah, I can whinge about being stuck in here,” he spat, second chin wobbling from my low vantage point. “I know I keep saying it, but I shouldn’t even be here talkin’ to you blokes.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Harley said, letting out the line. He pointed a steady finger at the protection unit. “You should be over there. With the paedos, stalkers, rapists and perverts. They all think they’re innocent too. You might have more luck convincing them.”

“So what are you saying, Harley?” Rick sputtered. “You trying to say I’m a paedophile?”

Harley had him now. No raised voice. Just reeled him in, slow and cold.

“Well, we already know you sit 200 metres from your son’s school with a rifle scope just to watch him come and go. You told us that yourself. We haven’t seen your legal brief, so we don’t know what other perverted shit you’ve been up to. But that’s not the point.”

He leaned forward. “The point is, even the kiddie fuckers probably aren’t sick enough to sit here day after day talking about killing their own family. The laws you hate? They were made to keep people like you off the street…if anything, you deserve to be in here as much as anyone.”

Silence.

Rick was dismantled. Harley watched him a moment longer, then turned his walker with quiet finality and hobbled back inside.

As soon as he was out of earshot, Mickey strolled over and parked himself next to Rick.

“Nice day for it,” he said, trying to lift the tension.

Rick stood, stalking over to where I was stretched out. Looming over me, he delivered his line not just to Mickey—but down at me.

“Nice day for what, bashing Harley?” he snapped. Then he lied, cool as you like: “I was just tellin’ Mark, if he wasn't in a fuckin’ wheelchair, I would’ve bashed him for calling me a pedo.”

He looked at Mickey, but the threat was aimed low. At me.

A cheap power play. On another day, it might’ve triggered me. But all I felt was pity. He didn’t even grasp the weight of his own words.

I pushed myself off the ground and into my chair.

“He never called you a pedo, Rick.”

Rick leaned in close, eyes hard. “Yeah, well, he might has well have. If that cunt wasn’t in a wheelchair already, I’d be puttin’ him in one.”

I didn’t respond. I just rolled away.

But the image stuck. Rick, towering over me. The venom. The casual violence.

Harley let it go for the rest of the day. But the next morning, he rolled up to my cell as he always does to check in on me (and the rest of the lads, like the crippled mother hen he is).

“So,” he said, low, “what did Rick say after I left yesterday?”

I told him everything. The lie to Mickey. The threat. How Rick stood over me. Harley listened, impassive, just nodding.

Then: “Come with me. I’ll show you something.”

We rolled down to Rick’s cell. He was outside in the yard; the room was empty. Harley positioned his wheelchair beside Rick’s bed. Calm. Precise.

Then, faster than I thought possible, he unlatched the steel leg plate from his wheelchair, stood up, swung it over his shoulder, and brought it down—

It hit the mattress like a gunshot. I felt the air shift. That smack of metal on vinyl would've echoed to the officer’s desk.

I stood still. Harley relaxed, clicked the plate back into place. A small, knowing smile played at his lips.

“Can you tell him,” he said, soft again, “I want to have a quiet chat about what he said about me yesterday?”

Just then, Mickey wandered in and sat on his own bed.

“What’s goin’ on here then?”

Harley didn’t miss a beat. Pulled the leg plate again, lightning fast, and whacked Mickey’s empty bed.

Mickey flinched like a gun dog.

Harley pointed the metal plate at him, voice cold as the steel. “Go get that fat prick to come in here, will ya?”

I headed out like a baby and got to Rick first. You see, in the cells there are no camera’s, and when I told him that I’d mentioned to Harley his wheelchair bashing comments from yesterday, Rick connected the dots and went a few shades paler—and didn’t go back to his cell.

It blew over like I knew it would, because for all his tough talk, Rick is a coward that would not in a million years front up to a prison heavyweight like Harley, wheelchair or not. The dumb prick told me again that he could never fight a man in a wheelchair. I tried to get him to understand the insult that statement carried, but he completely lacks empathy.

Also, Harley put on a good show for Mickey and me…but there was no way I was letting Rick go back to his cell to find out how a crippled man could give him a hiding. Especially when it was my mouth that caused it.

I recounted a story to Rick that Harley once gave me…to give some context to the way he felt towards him. It's a horror story so tragic that it had Rick apologise to Harley for any ill words spoken about him.

I've realised in doing my ‘Substack’ edit that this story…Bert’s BBQ, demands its own part, and so Rick is now a prick in five parts rather than four.

Please, stay tuned for the (happy?) ending with Rick's Reckoning.