Tainted Rose

by Abby Weeks

  Josh kept his head low as he ducked and dodged through the house. He gathered up the children and the few women who were taking shelter with them. He led them all to the narrow staircase that led down to the basement. He wasted no time. He passed a few of the remaining Rangers but their attention was on the fight. Josh knew they’d all be dead within the hour.

  In the basement, the women and children were frantic. The five kids ranged in age from a baby to Rose, who was twelve. Five women were with them too.

  “What’s going on?” one of the women said to Josh.

  She was close to hysterical. Josh didn’t blame her. The concrete structure of the building muted the sounds of gunfire up above but whenever something heavier hit the building the entire basement shook. It was like a scene of a bombing raid during World War II. Josh had never seen anything like it.

  “Why did they bring us here?” another of the women said.

  “Shut it, Darlene,” the first woman said. “This club has weathered everything together in the past. We’ll weather this together too.”

  “We’ll die together, and so will our children.”

  “Maybe not,” Josh said. “Gather up those children. There’s a way out and we might still have time.”

  He went over to the safe. It was massive, like the vault of an old bank. The door was a solid, steel circle about three yards in diameter.

  “What’s that?” one of the women said.

  Josh didn’t answer her. He opened the door using the combination Jack had given him. The door was very heavy, almost too heavy to move, but Josh managed to open it just enough for everyone to squeeze through. Jack was the last to enter the vault and he spun the combination dial on the door behind him so that the DRMC wouldn’t be able to follow. At least they wouldn’t be able to follow without blowing that door, which would take time.

  Behind the door it was pitch black. He pulled out his lighter and lit it. It gave only the faintest light but it was enough for them to see that they were in a vault that hadn’t been used in some time.

  “Grab those flashlights,” he said to no one in particular. He pulled the heavy door closed. He had the terrible, horrible fear that someone from the DRMC would come down and see the vault before he could get the door fully shut and locked. It was so heavy that it took over a minute to pull shut and the whole time, he was afraid the DRMC would come. But they didn’t. The shooting continued up above until the vault door sealed and then they couldn’t hear anything.

  There was light in the vault now. He looked around frantically as his eyes adjusted to the light. Rose had been the one to get the flashlights. She looked up at him, her bright eyes reflecting the light even in that dark space.

  Josh went to the back of the vault and found the wooden doors Jack had told him about.

  “Okay,” he said to the terrified group of women and children that were crowded in the vault behind him. “Follow me. The police will be at the other end and we’ll let them take us.”

  “Won’t they arrest us?” one of the women said.

  “They will,” Josh said, “but it’s the only chance for these kids to have any safety.”

  “Why did we wait till now to use the tunnel?” one of the women said.

  “Jack knew we had to wait for the police,” Josh said. “Any sooner and it would have been the DRMC, not the police, who would have gathered us up on the other end.”

  XVI

  JOSH STILL WOKE IN A cold sweat sometimes after dreaming about the things he’d seen on Bloody Sunday. The entire MC had been wiped out in a single, gruesome battle. All those men and their families decimated, wiped out. The DRMC didn’t get their reputation for being brutal for nothing. They took things farther than any other club would have. They decided what needed to be done and then they did it without any mercy. That was the reason they controlled most of the vice and drug trade across Quebec today. In a ruthless business, they were willing to go farther than anyone else.

  Ten years had passed since Josh led that little tribe of women and children through the half-mile tunnel and brought them out to safety at the far side of an abandoned tire factory.

  They came out of the factory onto Elmslie, facing a massive storage lot filled with shipping containers. They were clear of the DRMC and the gunfire but they could still hear it beyond the buildings and factories to the south. There were police everywhere and it didn’t take more than a few seconds for Josh to surrender himself and his group of tattered refugees to the organized crime unit.

  At first the policemen Josh approached couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

  “They were all in the clubhouse?” they asked, shaking their heads.

  “Yes they were,” Josh said.

  “But they’re only children.”

  “No shit,” Josh said.

  “And the Dark Rebels would have killed them?”

  Josh looked the officers in the eye. “Yes,” he said.

  “What the hell were they doing in there?”

  Josh had a hard time explaining. He knew how crazy it sounded now that the Sioux Rangers clubhouse had been blasted to rubble, but up till the moment the DRMC had launched their massive attack, the clubhouse really had been the only safe place for those women and children to be. If they’d been anywhere else they would probably have been killed already.

  Josh shrugged. He felt ashamed as he held out his wrists and let the cops cuff him. He was glad to see that the women and children were being taken into custody, that they were at least a little safer from the clutches of the DRMC, but there was something inglorious about surrendering himself over to the police. As the squad car took him up Emslie toward the special crime unit downtown, he could still hear the last gunfire of the battle that had wiped out the Sioux Rangers.

  *

  THE POLICE HADN’T BEEN ABLE to charge Josh with much. He wasn’t showing up on their database as a member of the Sioux Ranger MC. No one knew who he was. They had an entry for his birth at Coteau-du-Lac but apart from that his record was completely clean. No one thought of checking if he was in the system in New York State. Josh was given two years at Bordeaux Prison and it hadn’t been easy.

  He felt like a fraud. He couldn’t tell anyone inside that he’d been with the Sioux Rangers. It would have been a death sentence. The only reason no one had taken him out was because no one knew who he was. If the DRMC heard that a Sioux Ranger had slipped through their fingers, they’d have had him killed within a day.

  A couple of times he thought of getting the Sioux Rangers emblem tattooed onto his back, Bordeaux Prison was one of the best places in Montreal to get serious tattoo work done, but then he’d heard about one of the women he’d taken through the tunnel being assassinated and decided against it. The DRMC had defeated the Rangers, there was no doubt about that, but they were still taking out the wives and girlfriends of the club when they got a chance. It was a particularly brutal tactic but at least they hadn’t been going after the children. At least not as far as Josh had heard.

  There was some comfort in that. Josh wasn’t sure why, but he often found himself thinking about that little girl he’d seen in the Sioux clubhouse, Jack Meadows’ daughter. He still had the photograph of her mother, it was among his possessions in a locker at the prison storage unit and he vowed that one day he would deliver it to her. He’d meant to give it to her before he was arrested but there hadn’t been time.

  *

  WHEN JOSH GOT OUT OF Bordeaux after his two year stint, he had nowhere in the world to go. He felt like he belonged nowhere. He was an orphan and an outcast. He knew he couldn’t go back to the Black Rodeo. He couldn’t abandon a club like that, even as a prospect, and expect to ever be taken back in.

  And of course, the Sioux Rangers didn’t even exist any longer. His first day out of Bordeaux he went by the old clubhouse. The building had been completely bulldozed. It didn’t even exist. It was just a pile of rubble between the factories.

  One of the factories was being retrofit
ted for some new business. The other was still empty. There were bullet holes all over the walls. It was like a building from a war zone. Josh sat down by the pile of rubble that had been the Sioux Rangers clubhouse and lit a cigarette. He wasn’t even sure why it affected him so strongly. He’d only known the Rangers for that one night, and he’d gone there fully expecting to kill one of them, and now, two years later, he found that he couldn’t get the place out of his mind. That heap of rubble was the only place in the world that felt even remotely like home.

  He still had the jacket Jack Meadows had given him but he couldn’t wear it. If the DRMC saw the Sioux Rangers patch they’d kill whoever was wearing it. Being part of a dead club was hard. If anyone ever found out, even if they suspected, his life would be in danger. He brought the jacket to a seamstress in Notre-Dame and had her remove the patches. It hurt him to see her take them off. There was the crazy looking indian riding a bike, and there was the name, Renegade, written in big white letters above it. Josh didn’t know who Renegade was, he’d been the rider who’d worn that jacket before him, but he decided he would adopt the name for himself. He told the seamstress to sew the patches onto the inside of the jacket where no one would ever see them. He could wear them, but only he would ever know they were there. It made him sick that he had to hide the fact that he was a Sioux Ranger, the last of the Sioux, but it was the only way he’d be able to survive.

  And survive is what he did. He tried to find out if any of the other members of the Rangers had somehow survived the massacre but he quickly learned that he was the only one. He rented a tiny, cheap, ratty apartment close to the Latin Quarter. He moved from one dead end job to another. He kept a low profile and stayed out of trouble as much as he could. He lived an anonymous life as the unknown, last member of the Sioux Rangers. He didn’t try to track down Rex Savage, he could have, but he knew it wasn’t the right time. He would bide his time and wait. One day, he knew, he would kill the man who’d killed his father and betrayed the Sioux Rangers. Until that day came, Josh would live the life of a ghost.

  He also tried to track down the women who he’d led through the tunnel but that only made him more depressed. All of them had either disappeared, or had been tracked down by the DRMC and assassinated. He’d never heard of a motorcycle club being so brutal.

  He hung out in a few biker bars around the town but he didn’t make any friends. He just couldn’t seem to settle down. The only real club left in the city by that time was the DRMC. Everyone else had either been decimated, as the Sioux Rangers had been, or had patched over and joined the DRMC. The small clubs that weren’t affiliated with the DRMC were little more than groups of common criminals who were just killing time between stints in Bordeaux. Josh couldn’t see himself riding with any of them and so he kept to himself.

  He didn’t try to track down any of the children who’d survived the massacre. There was no point. He couldn’t do anything for them if he found them. They were all orphans now, in the care of the Province, and the less they knew about the MC and what had happened to it, the safer they were. The DRMC hadn’t made a point of tracking them down and killing them, probably because of the bad publicity that would have stirred up, but Josh knew that things were still pretty dangerous for those children. He would have liked to track down Jack Meadows’ daughter and give her that photo of her mother, he still had it, but it was just too dangerous.

  *

  JOSH GOT SO USED TO keeping a low profile that he began to feel like a ghost. He felt like the last surviving member of some indian tribe that had been wiped out. He felt invisible. He went through jobs without leaving much of an impression. He worked in construction, he got a few jobs in biker bars, a few times he got in trouble with the law. It was never anything serious, just petty charges. You couldn’t hang out in the biker bars of Montreal without getting picked up by the police every once in a while. He just accepted it. He got sent away to Bordeaux a few times, always for short stings, and he did his time as quietly as he lived his life on the outside. He didn’t create trouble. He didn’t make friends. He didn’t make enemies.

  And he never forgot. He didn’t forget the men who had killed everyone he ever loved.

  Often he would go out on long rides. He’d take his Dyna out through Quebec City and Saguenay, or out through New Brunswick or Ontario, but everywhere he rode, he always felt the same. He felt alone and lonely. There was nowhere in the world for him to go.

  He hated being in Montreal because the DRMC ruled the city. At first they controlled only the biker culture, but pretty soon they started increasing their influence, buying important politicians, paying off judges, killing anyone who stood up against them. The entire atmosphere of the city began to change. In the ten years following Bloody Sunday, it was as if dark clouds had descended on Montreal and corrupted it to the core.

  He even tried leaving a few times. He got work logging out west in British Colombia, or he harvested wheat in the vast plains of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but he always found himself back in Montreal at the end of the season. Something about the city kept pulling him back. He had unfinished business there and his soul wouldn’t let him depart the city until it was settled.

  And then, as if he’d been waiting all those years for it, something finally happened.

  *

  JOSH HAD BEEN WORKING AT a bar called Dieu du Ciel close to Outremont. It wasn’t the kind of place he usually would have gotten a job but they were desperate for bartenders and he’d just been released from Bordeaux for beating up a guy. The guy had asked him if he knew a brothel where he could find underage girls. Josh had just lost it on the guy, hospitalized him. He’d received three months for it. It was a lenient sentence because the judge and prosecutor both admitted they would have liked to do the same thing.

  Josh had noticed that there were more and more things like that going on in the city. Everyone had noticed it. The city seemed to be slipping into anarchy, getting worse with each passing years. It hadn’t always been that way. In the past there had been some moral order to society. Now, everything seemed to be in decay. The DRMC was getting its hands into every aspect of Montreal’s civic life. They had started a string of clubs up north where the girls were being kept against their will. It seemed that a lot of guys got a kick out of going to them just because they knew the girls didn’t want to be there. It made Josh sick to his stomach. It was like the clubs were selling rape. Clubs with underage girls was the logical next step. He’d heard of things like that happening in other countries but for it to be happening in his own city, that was too much.

  Josh didn’t care about doing the jail time. He had nothing going on in his life anyway. Ten years had passed since his father’s death, since the massacre of the Sioux Rangers, and it seemed like the whole world was falling apart in the interim. Josh had pretty much accepted that he would be living his life alone, friendless, without any family. If all he was doing was watching his city decay, piece by piece, then he might as well do it from a jail cell. He’d given up hoping for anything better.

  He was standing behind the bar trying to get a new keg attached to the pipe when two guys wearing DRMC jackets entered. It had happened plenty of times in the ten years since Josh had first encountered the DRMC. He’d see their members walking around town, getting drunk in bars, and he would always look the other way. It was probably the hardest thing about his life in Montreal. It made him feel like a coward. But this time it was different. This time, the man who had crossed his path was the man he’d been waiting for.

  The DRMC had grown to such strength that they now had over a thousand members in Montreal. They had hundreds more in the towns and cities to the north. Josh wanted to fight them, he knew they were bad men, but he had never dared to do it. He knew that the city was dying under their influence. Someone needed to stand up to them. But what the hell could one man do against a thousand?

  So when the two DRMC members came in, Josh swallowed his anger and tried not to take any notice. He did
n’t want trouble. There was no use picking a fight he couldn’t win.

  “Two beers,” the older of the two said to Josh.

  Josh served them and then went about his work. He couldn’t help listening to their conversation, though.

  “She just believed you?” the younger guy said.

  “She sure did, stupid bitch, she was probably so desperate to have some connection with her daddy that she’d have done anything I told her to.”

  The older man leaned back his head and laughed and it suddenly struck Josh. In a flash of recognition he realized, this wasn’t just any DRMC member, this was that two-faced son of a bitch, Rex Savage. Here, right in front of him, was the man who had killed his father ten years ago.

  He looked into Savage’s face and he realized in that instant that this was the reason he’d kept coming back to Montreal. This was the reason he had never been able to leave the city, like a lost soul. He’d tried to shake the idea from his head, he’d fought it for over ten years, but the feeling was still there, locked on his chest like a clamp. He hadn’t finished the job he’d come to Montreal to do. He hadn’t avenged his father.

  Josh knew in his heart that the time had come to finally do something, to strike out against the DRMC. He looked into the man’s face and couldn’t even breathe.

  “Hey,” Rex Savage said to Josh when he saw him looking his way, “you got a problem?”

  Josh looked away. He wanted to get out of that bar. It was too much. For ten years Josh had lived in Montreal, had drifted around the city alone, quiet, friendless, like a ghost. Now he could finally finish the one thing that gave his life purpose.

  Josh was suddenly filled with an overwhelming rage. He wanted to leap over the counter and kill Rex Savage with his bare hands, right then and there. But he didn’t. He held himself back. He’d waited ten years, he could wait a little longer. He knew that when the time came, he wanted to make Rex face him for the man he was, he wanted Rex to know what was happening to him, and he wanted him to know why.