Tainted Rose (16 page)

“I aint here on behalf of my father’s club,” Josh said.

“You mean you’ve come alone?” the younger guy said. “That should be enough to get you killed right there.”

Jack Meadows lifted his hand. “He aint going to get killed. He’s come here to do the right thing. Truth be told, Black Rodeo should have insisted something like this be done at the time.”

“I aint here to talk about Black Rodeo. They can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned. I only care about justice being done for my father.”

“Well that aint going to be as easy as you think,” the younger guy said.

It was clear to Josh that the younger guy had something against him. The older guys, Patsy, Jack Meadows, the guy with the beard, they all seemed sympathetic to his position. The younger guy seemed hell bent on getting Josh into trouble.

“You got something to say to me,” Josh said, addressing the younger guy, “we can go out front and talk it out.”

That got to him. The younger guy got to his feet. He seemed more than ready to fight. That was fine with Josh. If he had to fight this asshole to find out what had happened to his father than so be it.

But Jack Meadows stood up too and put his arm across the young guy’s chest. “Settle down, Flash.”

“I don’t believe this,” Flash said. “He comes into my clubhouse and talks like that and I’ve got to put up with it.”

“You don’t have to put up with shit,” Jack said. “Just sit down and shut the fuck up. The kid’s got a reason to be here and I respect that.”

Josh looked around the table. All the older guys were nodding. They seemed to agree with that.

Jack Meadows addressed him. “Okay, kid. I don’t have time to screw around with you. This is the score. The man that shot your pop was a brother of ours. He goes by the name of Rex Savage, or just Savage. He’s a thin guy, does a lot of smack. We’ve had more than our share of trouble with the guy and he never should have shot your father. There wasn’t no reason for it.”

“So he’s already dead?” Josh said.

Flash sighed. “What is it with this kid?”

“He’s not dead,” Jack said. “We disbanded him. Stripped him of his patch.”

“So where is he?” Josh said.

The old guy with the beard laughed at that. “You sure mean business, don’t you kid?”

“Any one ever shoot your father in cold blood?” Josh said.

“Hey,” Jack said. “This here is Toothless. He’s the vice-president of this club and you speak to him with respect as long as you’re in this clubhouse.”

“Unless you want to get fucked up,” Flash added.

Toothless waved away the concerns. “As a matter of fact I did see my father killed. He was gunned down by police in Chicago a very long time ago. So I can sympathize with what you’re doing here.”

Josh nodded. He wanted to ask Toothless if he ever got revenge on those police but he didn’t want to offend him. He looked at Jack Meadows.

“Can you tell me where to find Rex Savage? If it’s all the same to the Sioux Rangers, I’d like to make him pay for what he done.”

“I don’t think there’s anyone among us who would stand in your way on that count kid, I genuinely don’t.” He looked around the room. Everyone seemed to be in agreement, even Flash. “But that don’t mean it’s going to be as easy as just walking up to the man and giving him a taste of your lead.”

“I never expected it to be easy,” Josh said.

“I dare say you didn’t,” Jack Meadows said, “but it might be next to impossible to get to Rex Savage right now.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because as soon as we took his patch, he went right over to the DRMC,” Flash said.

“That’s right,” Toothless said, “and so, you may not be the only man in this room who has a mind to kill Rex Savage.”

Josh knew all about the DRMC. They’d been fighting hard against the smaller clubs right across Quebec. He’d even heard that they were eradicating the entire families of those who opposed them, including women and children. They’d become notorious in a very short time.

Down in New York most people thought the DRMC would be the only MC in Quebec in a few years. Black Rodeo was already trying to get into negotiations with them. They wanted to ditch the Rangers and start trading with the DRMC instead. A lot of guys back in New York had even thought that was the reason Josh’s father had been shot.

“So you’re telling me it wasn’t this club that ordered the hit on my father?”

“Why would we have ordered it?” Flash said.

Josh looked at Meadows, “Because the Black Rodeo were thinking of switching allegiance from your club to the DRMC.”

Jack Meadows let out a low whistling sound. He looked at Toothless. It was Patsy who spoke up first.

“I can tell you, son. That aint the way it went down. If your father’s club didn’t want to do business with us anymore, that would be one thing. But that still wouldn’t make it our business to put a bullet in one of their members for no good reason. And besides, as far as we know, our deal with the Black Rodeo is still intact.”

“For now,” Josh said.

Toothless nodded. “All I can say is we definitely weren’t looking to start trouble with the Rodeo. We need them, especially now.”

“What do you mean, especially now?” Josh said.

“Alright, that’s enough. That’s all we got for you, kid. We’re sorry one of our crew hit your father. If we had the chance to do things over, we’d do things differently. We wouldn’t have just kicked him out. He’d be dead. But that aint what we did, and now we’ve all got bigger problems to deal with.”

“What do you mean?”

“The DRMC,” Flash said, getting agitated. “We’ve got the DRMC to deal with. Rex Savage is over their speaking to their leadership right now. He’s telling them everything they ever wanted to know about us. How many we are. What kind of back up we have. What guns we have. What alliances.”

“Are the DRMC planning to hit you next?” Josh said. After what he’d heard about the DRMC he knew that was no joke. When they picked a fight with a gang, they want all in. The usually tried to annihilate the rival gang in the first battle. That way they avoided having to fight a protracted war.

“Between you and us,” Toothless said, “that’s the reason our entire club, and our families, are all at the clubhouse.”

“Jesus,” Josh said.

He wanted to say he was sorry but it wasn’t his place. If the DRMC had set their sights on the Sioux Rangers it was likely that all these men, and their families, would be fighting for their lives very soon. That’s what this party must have been, one last big blow out.

“You’ll forgive us if we don’t want to spend the entire night in here talking,” Flash said, “but we’ve got our families to protect.”

With that, Flash and most of the men sitting around the table got up. They went back out to the bar and Josh heard a loud cheer as they ordered a round of shots. A minute later the band started back up and the party got going again.

He looked around the table. The three main players of the Sioux Rangers were still there, Jack Meadows, Toothless and Patsy.

Jack spoke.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” he said to Josh, “you can pass on a message to the Rodeo for us. Tell them if they don’t hear from us, it was always as pleasure doing business with them, but now they’ll have to do business with the DRMC.”

“The war aint been fought yet,” Josh said.

“That’s true,” Toothless said, “but there’s only one way it can go and we all know how that is. The most we can hope to do at this point is fight bravely.”

“What about all those people out there?” Josh said, indicating their wives and families in the next room.

“There aint no other way to play it. The DRMC have already been rounding us up. They assassinated one of our guys the night Rex Savage went over to them. They killed him in his house. Him, his old lady, and his two month old baby.”

“They killed a baby?”

“And the next night they killed two more members, in their houses with their wives and children.”

“Jesus Christ,” Josh said.

“Jesus Christ,” Jack Meadows said. “So you tell the Rodeo we’re sorry for what happened to your father, if anyone of them ever gets Rex Savage between his sights, we’d be mighty glad to see him dead, but we probably won’t be around to see it, one way or the other.”

XV

W
HEN JOSH LEFT THE CLUBHOUSE
of the Sioux Rangers he felt so sad. He’d never seen a place like that. The Sioux Rangers actually seemed to be like the family that Black Rodeo had claimed to be, but had never really lived up to. They looked out for each other. They gathered in all their members, and all of their members’ families, in times of danger. It was the best protection they could offer. It might not be enough but it was all they had and the offered it gladly.

He’d liked Black Rodeo, he and his father both had a lot of good times with the members of the club, but Josh knew that neither of them had ever fully felt that the club was run the way it should be. A good motorcycle club wasn’t just what ordinary people thought it was. Most people, if you asked them, would have said a motorcycle club was a mix between a criminal organization and a social club. A place where bikers could get drunk and have fun, and later get together to pull a few jobs and make some dough.

But that wasn’t ever the real ideal of the motorcycle club. Josh’s father had taught him that. His father had always said that the real idea of the club, the thing that held it all together, was brotherhood. The members swore their loyalty to the club for no other reason than out of love for the other riders. It wasn’t just a place to get drunk, it wasn’t about pulling jobs and making money, it was about family. It was about banding together and protecting each other, sticking up for each other and looking out for each other and each other’s families. It was about providing some certainty and security in a wild and unpredictable world.

Black Rodeo had never really done that. That fact was hammered home for Josh when his father had been killed. Those guys were supposed to live and die for each other. When they wouldn’t ride out to help him avenge his father’s death, he knew that they were all talk. They didn’t care about each other. They were just a club because it was easy for them. It was convenient. It was away to organize the trafficking that occurred through the Mohawk reserve. The Black Rodeo was just a business, it wasn’t a family.

Josh saw in the short time that he was in that rundown little clubhouse on Rue Cordner that the Sioux Rangers were different. They really were a family. They had their kids in that clubhouse. They had their old ladies in there. They were all prepared to die together in order to protect each other. There was something about that that touched Josh. It meant something.

If he thought about it, he should have been wondering why anyone was at that clubhouse at all? Why were they all there, waiting for the DRMC attack? If the DRMC were so powerful, if they were so brutal and violent, wouldn’t it have made better sense to run for it?

What did each man have to lose? Jack Meadows could have pulled his little daughter onto the back of his bike and rode off, never looking back. Who would have stopped him? Flash, Toothless, Patsy, all of them, especially the ones that didn’t have families, what was stopping them from running?

But no one ran. They were all there in the clubhouse, together, ready to die for each other. And Josh knew the reason. He’d seen it right there in the bar. There were young kids there, there were old folks there. They couldn’t all run. There was no way all of them could ride out and get away. The young, the lone men, they could run, but what about the weak, the old, the children? And so, they all stayed. Maybe it would mean they would die together but for them, for a real motorcycle club, there was more honor in that than in running and living the life of a coward.

“Respect few, fear none.”

That was what Josh’s father had always told him. Well, he knew he’d met a few men that day that he could respect. They refused to fear the DRMC. And Josh respected them for it.

*

T
HE CITY OF MONTREAL WAS
built on an island in the Saint Lawrence and Lasalle was on the southern shore of it. Josh headed toward the old quarter along the canal after he left the Sioux Ranger clubhouse. The Boulevard de la Vérendrye was a wide road with a levy on the south side protecting the city in case the canal flooded. It was the kind of road he would have ridden down fast if he was in another city, but he wasn’t in another city, he was in Montreal, and the surface of the road was cracked and potholed. Montreal had some of the worst roads of any major city in North America because the city gave so many maintenance contracts to the mafia. It was a stunningly beautiful city, but also rotten to the core. With the potholes as deep as they were and the street lights broken along most of the route, Josh was riding pretty slowly away from the Sioux Rangers clubhouse.

The slowness of his driving matched the sadness of his mood. The sun was just beginning to redden the eastern horizon ahead of him and the crimson light seemed almost like blood.

He’d come to the city to kill a man and all he’d found was sympathy for the club that that man had belonged to. But at least he had a name. Rex Savage. He’d find a way to get to the bastard.

And then he saw something that he couldn’t ignore. Ahead of him, about a mile down the wide, straight boulevard, was a biker gang. There was no mistaking it. They must have been the reason the road was so empty. They were blocking the entire street in both directions and had pulled barrels out into the middle of the street and filled them with gasoline. They were having a party. Even from that distance he could hear the music. He could hear the revving engines of their bikes too. He pulled off the road and up the side of the levy to get a better view. It was the DRMC. It had to be. They were partying in the street, right out in the open. They obviously weren’t afraid of the police or the residents of Montreal. They must have been stronger than Josh had realized if they were able to act with such impunity in the middle of the city.

He heard shots being fired. They were letting off their guns, drinking, playing music. And then it hit him. They were getting ready for their attack. Why else would they be this far south? Their stronghold was around Anjou if he remembered correctly.