by Abby Weeks
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
WHEN 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.
*
THE 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.
Without even thinking about it he turned his bike around and rode straight back to the Sioux Rangers clubhouse.
He let his bike fall to the ground as he ran from the lot into the clubhouse.
“Hey,” one of the guys guarding the entrance called out. “You can’t come in here.”
The guard grabbed a hold of Josh but Josh ignored him.
“Jack Meadows?” he called out, “I’ve got to speak to him”. It was hard for him to get heard over the din of the music. No one was at the bar now. They were all out back where the band was. “I’ve got to speak to Jack,” he said to the guard.
The guard wouldn’t let him go and Jack punched him. Then he freed himself and ran out to the back. He got up on the stage and the band, which had been in the middle of a song, stopped playing.
“What the hell are you doing back here?” Flash said.
<
br /> “They’re coming. They’re coming now.”
*
ALMOST TEN YEARS TO THE day had passed since that morning but Josh could remember it perfectly. It wasn’t with pride, or anger, or even guilt that he looked back on it with. It was regret.
The warning he’d given the club had given them just enough time to organize a hasty defense before the DRMC arrived. They positioned men all along the street leading up to the clubhouse. There were brick factories on both sides of the Rue Cordner and Jack Meadows had ordered his best shooters to take positions in them.
The rest of the club armed themselves with sawed-off shotguns, automatics and whatever else they could get their hands on and took up defensive positions within the clubhouse.
The women took the children down the basement and locked it behind them. Everyone knew that if they ran for it, the DRMC would have hunted them all down anyway. Their only chance was to hide in the basement and hope the men were able to repel the attack.
But there was no way the men could repel the attack that was coming. Josh had seen over a hundred bikers partying in the street and he knew the kinds of weapons that a posse like that carried. This would be a fight to the death.
He looked around the clubhouse. He looked at the faces of the men of the Sioux Rangers, at their wives and children, and he knew that they were all going to be killed. And then he saw the girl again, Jack Meadows’ daughter, so small, so young, and he knew he couldn’t leave. If there was something he could do to protect that innocent little girl, he would do it. If these people were about to die, he would stand by their side and die with them. Rex Savage was with the DRMC now anyway, so it might even be that he would get a chance to avenge his father in the battle.
“I’m with you on this,” he said to Jack Meadows.
“You aint one of us, you can get away,” Jack said.
“I’m one of you, if you’ll have me.”
Jack Meadows stopped what he was doing and looked at Josh. “Are you sure about that? I don’t know if any of us is going to walk away from this fight.”
“I’m sure,” Josh said.
Jack took Josh’s hand in his and shook it firmly. Toothless, Flash, Patsy and the others were all there. Someone pulled a jacket down from the wall, it was a jacket of one of the dead brothers of the club, and handed it to Josh. The name on the back was Renegade.
He took off the old jacket he was wearing and put on the Sioux Rangers jacket in its place.
Jack Meadows lifted up a bottle of scotch from the bar and poured some on the ground in front of Josh’s feet.
“I guess we can all start calling you Renegade,” Jack said. “The newest member of the Sioux Rangers. I wish times were better to welcome you but they are what they are.”
Jack took a swig from the bottle and handed it to Josh. He took a long drink and then passed it around to every other member. They all drank from the bottle and then got ready for the fight that was coming.
Josh Carter became the newest member of the Sioux Rangers on the morning of Sunday, April fourth, 2004. That was the morning that the press would later dub Bloody Sunday because of the number of people who were killed on Rue Cordner that day.
*
THE SIOUX RANGERS FOUGHT WELL in the dawn hours of that fated day, but it was a bloodbath. There was no way it could have been anything but a bloodbath. The DRMC had grenade launchers, AKs and every other assault weapon they could have possibly gotten their hands on. They came with over a hundred and fifty men, their mission to wipe out every trace of the Sioux Rangers. The Rangers’ twenty seven members including Josh fought them off for five hours in the wildest gun battle in the history of the city.
It later emerged that the police had waited three blocks away till the shooting stopped before getting any closer. Once it was revealed that so many woman and children had been in the house, there was a public outrage about the fact that the police had been too scared to get involved. The police chief was forced to resign but the truth was there was really nothing the police could have done except get themselves killed if they’d moved in any sooner. They weren’t equipped to deal with a battle like that. It was warfare.
The DRMC blew holes three feet wide into the reinforced concrete walls of the clubhouse. A whole section of one of the adjacent factories collapsed because of the amount of firepower it sustained.
Josh saw the whole thing, the entire massacre, and he fought as bravely as any Sioux Ranger there. He saw Flash take a bullet to the head in the opening minutes of the battle. Toothless charged the attackers and took out five men with his shotgun before being gunned down. It had taken more than ten bullets to bring his charging body to a stop. Patsy was blown to pieces by a grenade a couple of hours into the fighting.
Josh saw more blood and gore that day then many soldiers coming back from wars would ever see. In the later stages of the battle, someone in the DRMC poured gasoline down a vent leading to the basement and threw his lighter down after it. The women and children were forced to come up then, and pretty soon they were taking casualties too.
Josh would have begged Jack to surrender at that point but there was no point. The DRMC wasn’t there to accept surrender, they were there to annihilate all trace of the Rangers and they wouldn’t stop until it was done.
Close to the end, when it was clear that there would be no mercy, that there would be no succor given even to the children, Jack gave Josh his last order as head of the Rangers.
He pulled a photograph of a woman from his coat.
“Kid,” he said to him. He had to speak quickly as the DRMC henchmen were closing in on the clubhouse, closer by the minute. “You’ve got to get out of here.”
“I’m not leaving you,” Josh said.
“I’m not looking for heroics, kid. Someone needs to get the children out of this place.”
Josh looked around the crumbling building. He wasn’t even sure the roof would hold much longer. A cave in would trap everyone inside. Worse would be if the DRMC came in and put a bullet in them all. There were at least five children still huddled in the rubble of the far corner and Josh knew that if they didn’t get out of there, they would all be killed.
Jack Meadows was fingering the old photograph he’d taken out of his pocket, looking at the face on it. Josh realized then that Jack was bleeding. Blood was flowing from under his jacket, seeping into his clothes and making them heavy.
“Jack, you’re hit.”
“That doesn’t matter. Listen to me. The children, it’s not too late. You’ve got to take them out of here.”
“How can I do that?” Josh said. “You think the DRMC will hold fire to let them leave?”
“No, I know the DRMC will never hold their fire. They’ll kill every last one of those children if they can get their hands on them. But there’s another way out. There’s a tunnel from the basement leading to one of the factories on Cordner. The entrance to the tunnel is through the back of the safe.”
“Okay,” Jack said. He had to duck as bullets rained in through the opening in the concrete wall.
“The combination to the safe is seventy-nine, eight-nine, ninety-nine. It’s an old bank safe, big enough to walk through. At the back of it is a wooden door. Just take the women and children and follow that tunnel till you get out at the other end. It’s about a kilometer to the end. When you get out at the other end, try and find the police and surrender to them. It’s the only way any of them will survive this.”
Josh nodded. “Will you be able to hold the DRMC back long enough for us to get away?”
“I hope so,” Jack said. “I’ll die trying, that’s for sure. Now go. Don’t waste any more time.”
“Your daughter’s down there, isn’t she?”
Jack looked up at him. The pain of the gunshot in his chest was beginning to make him cloudy. He nodded. “She’s down there.” Then he handed Josh the photograph of the woman. “If you get a chance, give her this picture. It’s of her mother. She’s never seen her.”
>
Josh took the photograph and put it into a pocket inside his jacket.
“I’m sorry to have you join a club only to see it decimated,” Jack said.
“Don’t talk,” Josh said. “He could tell Jack Meadows was already dying. He was losing his clarity. His eyes were beginning to fog over. The DRMC guys weren’t far from the building now. They were getting closer and closer. A few scattered Rangers were still taking shots at them but they wouldn’t last long. The DRMC was sweeping through the factories and getting the Ranger snipers, one by one.
“Jack,” Josh said.
“I know what you’re going to say, son. The police will arrest you. I don’t know what to say. If you surrender to the police it will mean a lot of jail time for you.”
That wasn’t what Josh was going to say at all. He didn’t care about jail, not at a time like this.
“No,” he said, “I need to know, is there a way to lock the safe from the inside.”
“Oh,” Jack looked up at him, tears in his eyes. “Yes, it will lock automatically behind you. You’ll just have to hurry to get to the end of the tunnel.”
Jack’s breathing changed. It became more labored and heavy. He was dying. He was bleeding out.
“Go,” he said.
*
THAT HAD BEEN THE END of the Sioux Rangers. The club had been an institution in South Montreal for over twenty years, but in a single morning raid, its entire membership had been decimated. Well, almost its entire membership. One man, the club’s newest member, Josh Carter, had survived. No one even knew he was a member. The DRMC had excellent intel on the Rangers thanks to Rex Savage. They had a list of every single man who had ever been a member of the club, but Josh’s name wasn’t on that list. He’d been sworn in literally minutes before the raid and there was no way anyone could have known he was a member. If the DRMC had known, they’d have made sure they got him, but they didn’t know. And that was how Josh had survived the years that followed.
Josh lowered Jack Meadows’ head slowly to the ground and then left him there with his shotgun propped on his chest. He’d be able to get one last shot off when the DRMC entered the house. That would be the last thing he would ever do.
