Part Three – The Covenant’s Fall Guy
"A predator never admits the cage until the door is locked." – R. Lovejoy
Parchman Prison, Mississippi – August 2025
Bobbie “Waggy” Rawlins stared across the yard, eyes dulled, body sunk in a wheelchair. He was still breathing — technically — though every day in Parchman felt like life on a drip. Just that morning he’d watched an inmate have his eyes punched out over a debt. He hadn’t flinched. Horror was his native tongue, and he’d spoken it fluently for decades.
How had it come to this?
Head of the Iron Covenant in Mississippi, long-serving assassin, man who could order a killing with a nod — reduced to a husk waiting for the needle, or worse, the convenient “suicide” arranged by friends or foes.
He knew. He’d felt it in his bones since March. Lovejoy. That damned Englishman. Somehow he'd undone him — unseen, uncanny.
Back in March, the Covenant had sent him to “take care of business.” Driscilla. Thirty-three years bound to Willie Tuddos, a hard, cruel Pentecostal who’d kept her in thrall until his “natural” death. Natural, Waggy wasn't so sure. But Willie’s widow — Driscilla — was still a liability.
The order wasn’t to kill, not outright. It was to probe. See what she remembered. Names, contacts, suppressed details of Willie’s work. If she’d glimpsed too much. Execution was always in the cards, but only if her memory proved dangerous.
Waggy knew how to do it. Create chaos, then play saviour. He staged robberies at her rural Mississippi property, sent gangs of all colours — Aryan bikers, Black crews, it didn’t matter, business was business — to harass her. Then he and his partner Mutt swept in to “protect” her. The sheriff’s department was no use. They were on the take, skimming from drugs and flesh both.
So Waggy and Mutt stayed. Days bled into nights. Then the work began. Military-grade brainwashing. Keep her awake for five nights straight. Slip drugs into her drinks. Break her down. Make her doubt her past, her memories, her bond with that mysterious Englishman she kept calling her “consort.”
That part had rattled Waggy. A bond going back years? Some kind of psychic marriage? Nonsense. But he had to break it. What's more he'd found himself becoming enamoured with Driscilla. In his eyes, she had become his saviour. She didn't judge. See seemed so innocent, and this beguiled this cold-blooded killer.
Waggy and Mutt even joined in her calls with Lovejoy. Waggy remembered the voice — smooth, polite, almost mocking. Lovejoy played to their vanity, flattering their Aryan delusions. Sent them video clips of English churches, as if handing them a pedigree. They’d lapped it up.
But beneath the playacting, Waggy sensed something off. He told himself it was just paranoia. Still… he’d wake at night to shadows shifting in the corners. He and Mutt both saw things. Heard things. Poltergeist activity, they muttered. Sometimes even Willie’s ghost — or what they thought was his ghost — looming in doorways.
Lovejoy’s shadows, though they didn’t know it.
And then came the sickness. Waggy’s body broke. Fever, sepsis, the stink of death clinging to his skin. He’d always been hard as nails, but suddenly he was rotting from the inside. He knew he’d been hexed. Conjured against. In the South, you didn’t need to be Black to believe in such things — Christianity made a man superstitious enough.
Ironically (and much to Lovejoy's dismay), Driscilla saved Waggy. Stockholm Syndrome, it’s called. She dragged him into hospital, kept him alive when he should have died.
For what? A few months later, Tennessee cops picked him up on a parole violation. The judge didn’t hesitate — threw years on his sentence. And here he was: a cripple in a chair, waiting to fade.
Waggy thought back to Lovejoy.
Not human, surely. But what, then? Some kind of conjuror? A sorcerer in Savile Row? Waggy didn’t have the words. He only knew his life had been cracked open by something unseen, something that fed on him in the dark and spat him out like spoiled meat.
He wheeled himself back to his cell, past men who once called him “boss.” Now they barely looked at him.
A predator in a cage.
And somewhere, out there, Raoul Lovejoy was smiling.
YouTube Shorts: Raoul Lovejoy — gentleman, predator, Nosferatu — delivers more razor-edged aphorisms from the roads of rural Suffolk.
👉 Click Here To Watch.