Tainted Rose

by Abby Weeks

  So when Rex Savage looked at him with his beady, drug addict eyes, with that pasty, white little face, and asked him if he had a problem, Josh said what he had to say.

  He said, “No, sir.”

  XVII

  JOSH HELD HIS PEACE. He served Rex Savage and his friend, he watched them, he listened to what they said, but most of all, he gave nothing away.

  “So, you know the whole story?” Rex Savage asked his companion.

  His companion was just the type of man who would be attracted to the DRMC. He was a mean, shifty looking guy who only wanted to be a member of a motorcycle club so that he could have someone tell him what to do. He was a soldier. Josh could tell it just by looking at him. There were two types of men in the world and Josh had long known it. Those who knew what they wanted to do with their lives, and those who wanted to be told. And for all their talk of anarchy and freedom and rebelliousness, the DRMC was a club for men who wanted to be told what to do. Josh had seen it over and over. A big club like that, one with a highly structured hierarchy, with lots of chapters and officers, it was an institution for men who needed structure, who needed to be told what to do.

  The companion shook his head.

  “Jesus, it’s the best thing ever.”

  “Well, tell me,” the companion said.

  “You remember what happened back with the Sioux Rangers, right?”

  “That was before my time,” the companion said, “but I know we wiped them out.”

  “Exactly,” Savage said, “except they were my old club too.”

  “You were a Sioux Ranger before you were a Dark Rebel?”

  “Yes I was. They were going to kill me for some shit that went down south of the border. Some shit with some two-bit fucking excuse for a club in New York called the Black Rodeo.”

  The companion laughed. Josh formed a fist with his hand and it was so tight that his nails dug into his palm and left blood. But he didn’t respond. He knew he wanted to kill Rex Savage but he wanted to do it right. He wanted to make sure Rex knew why it was happening.

  “So you came over to the DRMC?”

  “At the time the DRMC wasn’t the only game in town. They were still struggling for ascendency. There were a couple of other clubs that might have beaten them for control of Montreal, and the Sioux Rangers was one of them.”

  “So that’s why they accepted you?”

  “I gave them the names and addresses of every single Sioux Ranger. After we decimated their club, I gave them the name of every wife or girlfriend I could remember.”

  “I heard those stories,” the companion said. “We wiped them all out, didn’t leave any survivors. Even went after the kids.”

  “Well, not quite,” Savage said. “There were a few survivors.”

  “Yeah, but kids are kids, right? They’re not part of the game.”

  “They’re not fucking kids forever,” Rex Savage said. “I lay awake at night sometimes and think about what might happen when those kids grow up. What if they come after me? I mean, I sold out their fathers. It’s not much of a leap to expect them to want revenge.”

  “So you wanted to kill all the children?” the companion said.

  Josh was sweating. His back was drenched with a cold sweat. He couldn’t believe Rex Savage was right there, after all the years that had passed.

  “I’d love to kill those fucking children,” Rex said, “but the Province brought them into protective custody after the massacre and their files have all been sealed.”

  “Can’t you get someone inside to let you look at the files?”

  “Believe me, I’ve tried,” Rex said, “but they just can’t be accessed. It’s literally impossible to get into those records once they’re sealed for a child’s protection.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Well that’s the story I want to tell you. I can’t track down all those fucking kids, I’ll just have to hope none of them ever finds out what happened to the Rangers. But I did manage to track down one of them. A girl!”

  “You fucking bastard,” Savage’s companion said to him and slapped him on the back.

  Josh brought them over two more beers and then left them. He was listening intently to everything Savage said, but from the storage area where he couldn’t be seen. He didn’t want to risk scaring Savage off, not now that he finally had a chance to get some information on him.

  “Well, it all goes back to when I was a member of the Rangers,” Savage said. “The president was this holier than thou fuck by the name of Jack Meadows. He and a few other fools, Toothless, Patsy, a couple others, they ran the club. Whatever they said, went.”

  “That’s how it is in all clubs.”

  “Yeah, well I got to hating them after a while. They disowned me for shooting some supplier in New York, like I said. Does that sound brotherly to you?”

  “No it don’t.”

  “Anyway,” Savage continued, “they all got killed in the massacre. Every last fucking one of them. But Meadows, the president, he had this daughter, see. A real beauty. She was about twelve years old when all this went down, so that would make her about twenty-two, twenty-three now.”

  “You found her?”

  “I fucking found her,” Savage said. “About two years ago. Bitch was waitressing in the old quarter. She didn’t have a clue who I was. At least not at first. She was too young to understand everything that went down during Bloody Sunday. She was there though.”

  “In the clubhouse.”

  “Her and a bunch of other kids.”

  “How did they escape?”

  “We never knew,” Savage said. “Somehow they got out and the police took them.”

  “So you found her and recognized her?”

  “She hadn’t changed one bit. She always had these two beautiful, fuck me, eyes. She was the kind of girl that would stare at you, even when she was a kid, and you knew she was thinking it. She wanted to be fucked, I knew it. Even back then she was the biggest tease. I’d have loved to give it her while she was still a child.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Believe me, brother,” Rex said, “she was that girl. You know what I mean?” Rex slapped his companion on the back and the man laughed. He would have laughed at anything Rex said. Josh knew it.

  “So I found her in this bar, and I figured, here’s my chance to get in with the club leadership, get myself a little cred with the club, and get one over on the old prick, Jack Meadows.”

  “You didn’t kill her?”

  “No sir,” Rex said. “I did something much worse. I sold her to Serge Gauthier. He needed girls to dance in all those clubs they opened up north. You know, the rape clubs? Where you get to fuck girls that aren’t in to it. So I spoke to him and he said he’d pay me five grand for a girl like that.”

  “How’d you catch her?”

  “That’s the best part. It was so fucking easy. All I had to do was talk to her, I told her the whole sob story about how me and her father used to ride together, and then I told her she could make a little cash delivering a package up north.”

  “And she bought it?”

  “She bought it. She even checked into a motel in Val-d’Or that the chapter up there owns.”

  “That’s too fucking funny, man,” Rex’s companion said.

  They were both laughing, pleased as hell. Josh listened to it all and took note. He knew immediately who they were talking about. He could still remember her as if it was yesterday, Jack’s daughter. Jesus, he thought, he even had the picture of the girl’s mother in his breast pocket. He’d been carrying it there for ten long years.

  He’d heard about those strip joints up there, up along 117 and the Trans-Canada. If Jack’s daughter was in one of those bars, he had to get her out.

  *

  IT WAS A VERY STRANGE night for Josh. After ten years of living completely aimlessly, of drifting through his life without knowing who he was or what his purpose in life was, he’d suddenly been reminded of his purpos
e. He’d been brought face to face with the unfinished business he’d started all those years ago, back when he was just seventeen.

  He served Rex Savage and his friend and didn’t show a single bit of emotion. He numbed himself to the anger and rage he felt so that he could bide his time and make a plan for what he needed to do.

  He couldn’t believe it. The sensation that he was feeling was almost too much. After ten years, he finally knew what he’d been waiting in that decrepit city for. This was the man who’d killed his father. And now it was time to take revenge.

  He watched Rex and his companion like a hawk and when they finally finished their drinks he went out to the back, got on his bike, and followed them. His boss, the owner of the bar, asked him where he was going but Josh didn’t even answer. He didn’t care about his job. He had bigger things to deal with.

  He grabbed his jacket and got on his bike and gunned the engine as if preparing for a drag race. When he pulled out of the lot Rex and his friend were already down the street. He followed them down Van Horne onto du Parc, north past the train station. He kept a good distance. The traffic on the streets was light and he didn’t want them to notice a biker following them. They rode north along Saint Laurent all the way to the river and then got on 335. They took that all the way to Laval and finally stopped outside a brick building with a flat roof on Rue Lavoie. That was it. That was the place Rex Savage lived.

  XVIII

  JOSH DIDN’T HAVE A GUN on him. He didn’t carry a gun any more. He’d decided a long time ago that it was too much of a liability when he’d seen a guy in a bar get shot in the face for drawing at the wrong time.

  Now he needed a gun and he was pretty sure he knew where to get one. There was an underpass by the railway line at Saint-Martin and he knew you could usually find a guy that went by the name of Saturday Night Special sitting on an overturned shopping cart there. Among other things, the man sold guns. They were unlicensed guns without serial numbers, exactly what Josh needed.

  He rode there like a maniac, swerving on the turns and weaving through the traffic in both lanes. When he got to the underpass he saw Special’s cart. He pulled up in front of it. A flickering old streetlight lit the underpass and he could see it was deserted. There was a piece of cardboard on the cart, the kind of sign that homeless people held out in front of them when they begged for change on the street. On it was written a phone number.

  Josh went to a pay phone and called the number.

  “I’m looking for Saturday Night Special,” he said when the other end picked up.

  “Who’s asking?”

  “An old friend from Bordeaux. I need a piece.”

  “When do you need it?”

  “Right now.”

  There was a pause for a moment, then the man on the other end of the line said, “Meet me at the underpass in fifteen minutes.”

  Josh rode back to the underpass and wondered who it was he was meeting. When he got back there were two men waiting for him. They were both dressed in leather jackets and looked like bikers. Josh’s heart stopped. Had someone seen him following Rex and his friend?

  But these two guys didn’t look like they were DRMC. Their jeans and jackets were more tightly fitted than what the DRMC guys seemed to like, and they weren’t wearing any patches on their backs. The Dark Rebels all wore their patches with pride. They owned Montreal and most of the province, including the police, and they didn’t have any reason to be afraid.

  “Who are you guys?” Josh said as he pulled up to them on his bike.

  “We’re just guys,” one of the guys said.

  “But where’s Special?”

  “He’s in Bordeaux.”

  “You two friends of his?”

  “Sort of,” one of the guys said.

  Josh looked them over. He didn’t get a bad feeling from them and he usually trusted his instincts. After the life he’d been living, he’d learned to rely on his instincts more than anything else.

  “You’re not DRMC?”

  “We look like DRMC?” one of them said.

  Josh didn’t have to think. “No you don’t,” he said.

  “Well,” the guy said.

  Josh nodded. That was pretty much all the answer he needed.

  “You got a piece for me?” he said.

  One of the guys pulled out a brown paper package. “It aint pretty,” he said, but it will do the job.

  “It loaded?”

  “What do we look like, idiots?”

  “It aint much use to me empty,” Josh said.

  The two guys looked at each other. One of them reached into his pockets and pulled out a pack of .40 Smith & Wesson cartridges.

  “Don’t load it till we’re gone,” one of the guys said.

  “I hear you,” Josh said. “What do you want for it?”

  They looked at each other again. Josh was surprised they hadn’t had a price in mind. He spoke up before they could.

  “I’ve got a hundred, cash.”

  Josh took the money from his jacket and gave it to the guys and they gave him the package. He stuffed it in his jacket and rode out of the underpass back to Lavoie and parked down the street. As he walked to Rex’s house he took the bullets from their case and loaded them into the gun.

  *

  JOSH HAD COMMITTED MORE THAN his share of crimes in the years since arriving in Montreal. Ten years was a long time to be without a club, to be without a family or friends, and sometimes he’d had to do things he wasn’t proud of in order to survive. Breaking into homes had been one of them.

  He walked up to the house as if he lived there, as if he belonged there, and stared at the front of it for a moment. No one was at any of the front windows. He went to the side of the house and along the narrow alleyway that separated it from the neighboring auto parts store. There weren’t any windows or doors along that side of the building and he hurried to the back where he saw a raised wooden porch. He waited at the corner for a minute, listening, watching for any sign of activity. There was none.

  He knew nothing about the building and its inhabitants other than that Rex and his companion had entered it. He imagined that it was just the two of them in there but he knew that he couldn’t assume that. Everything he did had to be moderated by the fact that there could be more men in the building. If he could get in quietly that would be best.

  He walked silently up the steps of the porch, keeping low, and crept to the door. It was a thin, wooden door. Josh was surprised they didn’t have something more secure. It was unlikely that this building belonged to the DRMC. It was probably just Rex’s place. He could easily have forced the door open but he would prefer not to give himself away if he could avoid it.

  He tried the door handle. It was locked. He looked up at the walls. There was a window next to the door that he could reach without much effort. He used the rail of the deck and climbed up onto the window sill. He peered through the window. It led into what looked like an unused bedroom. He tried the window and it wasn’t locked. He slid it open enough to duck in under it and he landed as quietly as he could on the wooden floorboards of the bedroom.

  He drew the handgun. It wasn’t much to look at, its wooden grip stained from heavy use, the mechanism worn and stiff. He cocked it. The clicking sound seemed loud enough to wake the dead.

  He heard movement in the hallway outside the bedroom door. He crouched in a dark corner just as the door opened.

  “Hey,” it was Rex’s companion, “who’s in here?”

  “Don’t move,” Josh said from the darkness. “I got a bead on you, you son of a bitch. Don’t fucking move.”

  The threat worked. Rex’s friend stood motionless, trying to see in the dark where Josh’s voice had come from.

  Like an idiot Rex came right into the room next.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  The companion said nothing.

  “Rex Savage,” Josh said, “you move one inch, you’re a dead motherfucker.”

  �
��What the hell?” Rex said.

  Josh didn’t waste any time.

  “Both of you, on the ground. Hands on your heads.”

  He knew what they would have been expecting. They would be thinking that their deaths had found them, that they were about to be executed. It wouldn’t be the first time that someone had decided to pick off a few bikers for some reason or other. He knew that was what they were thinking was coming, but Josh hadn’t decided yet if that was what was going to happen.

  He had no beef with Rex’s companion. That poor son of a bitch was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He hadn’t seen Josh yet, hadn’t seen his face, and he didn’t know why Josh was there. If Josh could somehow get him out of the way he might not have to kill him.

  He would have preferred not to. Killing wasn’t in Josh’s blood. If something had to be done, Josh could do it, but if it could be avoided that would be better.

  “You?” he said to Rex’s companion. “What’s your name?”

  “Drake. They call me Drake.”

  “Well, Drake. I’ve got business with your friend here, Rex Savage.”

  “Well I guess that’s between you and Rex, mister.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I don’t have to be a part of it. I aint seen you.”

  “You don’t mind that Rex might not live to see the end of it?”

  There was a long pause while Drake mulled over the meaning of Josh’s words.

  “I don’t mind at all,” he said at last.

  Josh nodded. He’d thought as much. Rex Savage wasn’t the kind of guy to inspire a lot of loyalty.

  “You filthy piece of scum,” Rex said.

  Josh held his gun up to the moonlight so that they could see he meant business.

  “So what am I going to do with you?” he said to Rex’s companion.

  “You really mean it, mister?”

  Drake must have felt like he’d just won the lottery. The usual thing for Josh to have done in that situation would be to kill Drake. Everyone in the room knew it.