Tainted Rose

by Abby Weeks

  “Like you said,” Josh said to him, “you aint seen me, you don’t know my business with Rex, and you don’t care about it.”

  “That’s right,” Drake said. “I aint seen you. I don’t want to see you.”

  “Is there some rope or something in this place?” Josh said.

  “There are handcuffs right inside this closet.”

  “You fucking worm,” Rex Savage said to Drake but Drake didn’t care. Josh was the one with the gun.

  Josh went over to Rex and dug the barrel of the gun into the back of his neck. “Don’t you fucking move, Rex.”

  Then he went to the closet and opened it. There wasn’t just handcuffs in there but all sorts of bondage equipment. It looked like Rex had a BDSM fetish.

  “What is all this?” Josh said.

  He looked at the equipment more closely. There were handcuffs, chains, restraints for the mouth and face. There were leather suits that covered the body and face. There were also torture implements, whips, all sorts of kinky shit.

  “It aint mine,” Drake said.

  “It’s his?”

  “It is.”

  “I should have guessed,” Josh said. “Hey, Savage. Yeah, you, you got a little fetish for this shit?”

  “Fuck you,” Savage said.

  Josh pointed the gun at him. Rex looked up from the ground into the gun barrel.

  “No,” Josh said, “fuck you.”

  He took the cuffs and secured Drake to the copper drain pipe. He wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. Then he checked Drake’s pockets and took his gun and phone from him. It was dark in the room but Josh pulled his jacket collar up in front of his face so that Drake wouldn’t be able to recognize him if they ever met again in the future.

  “Do I need to gag you?” Josh said to Drake as he fastened his hands behind his back.

  “No, sir.”

  Josh grabbed Rex by the collar and dragged him to his feet. He kept the handgun pressed hard against his back.

  “You, come with me. One move and you’re dead.”

  Josh patted Rex down. He wasn’t armed. He brought him out into the hallway and shut the door. He didn’t want Drake overhearing the conversation. He could still kill Drake if he had to but he thought it wouldn’t be necessary. He hoped it wouldn’t.

  The next room was the living room and Josh sat Rex on a ratty old sofa and stood looking down at him, the gun out in front of him.

  “You recognize me?” he said to Rex.

  Rex looked up at him and then looked away.

  “Hey, I asked you a question. Do you recognize me?”

  “Do you know what the DRMC is going to do to you when they find you?”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the DRMC. If they knew who I was they’d have killed me ten years ago.”

  Rex nodded at that. “You’re from one of the old gangs, then. I’m surprised you lasted this long.”

  “You know which gang I’m from?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t give a fuck,” Rex said. “All I know is that if you’re hoping to get back at the DRMC, you’ve started at the wrong place. I don’t hold any weight around their clubhouse.”

  “But you’re a member?”

  “I suppose I am, but they don’t have a lot of love for me.”

  “You know why that is?”

  “Who the fuck are you, kid?”

  “They hold no love for you because they can’t trust you.”

  “They can trust me. I’ve ridden with them for ten years now. They can trust me.”

  “And how long did you ride with the Sioux Rangers before you sold them out?”

  “What do you know about the Sioux Rangers?”

  Josh took off his jacket and showed Rex the inside of the lining. There, sewed into the lining, was the Sioux Ranger patch, and the name Renegade.

  “What are you doing with that?”

  “It’s mine.”

  Rex gave out a long laugh.

  “You want to be me, boy?”

  “No I don’t want to fucking be you.”

  “Well how come you’re wearing my old jacket then?”

  Josh looked at him. He couldn’t believe it.

  “You’re Renegade?”

  “I was,” Rex said. “Before they disowned me.”

  Josh’s mind jumped back ten years to the morning Jack Meadows had given him the jacket. Out of all the jackets hanging over the bar he’d given him that one, the one that belonged to the man who’d killed his father. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t think it was a trick that Meadows had been playing. It was more a sense of irony, a statement on Jack Meadows’ view of the universe, of fate and destiny.

  “Well, it’s mine now,” Josh said.

  “What do you have to do with the Sioux Rangers?”

  “I’m the last surviving member.”

  “You aint a member of the Rangers. I rode with them right up until the end and I never saw you before in my life.”

  “You might not have seen me, but I saw you, and you’re wrong. I was sworn into the Rangers on Bloody Sunday.”

  Rex laughed at that. “You must be the unluckiest biker ever to have ridden. You were sworn into the Rangers the day they were decimated?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “And I suppose you’re here to get retribution for the club?”

  “I think that would be appropriate, wouldn’t you? The last Ranger, here to take out the man who betrayed the club.”

  Rex nodded at him. The man’s eyes looked tired and watery. He wasn’t well. That much was clear. He probably had cancer or something. Now that Josh looked at him he could see that Rex Savage didn’t have that much time left anyway.

  “You’re sick, aren’t you?” Josh said.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing I suppose.”

  “You think it means less to kill a sick man?”

  “I think it means the same.”

  “You ever killed a man like this before?” Rex said. “At close range?”

  “I’ve done it,” Josh said.

  Rex looked at him. His beady little eyes showed nothing, there was no emotion in them, no fear, just the defeated, helpless eyes of an addict who was ready to meet his Maker.

  “What are you waiting for?” Rex said.

  “I aint told you the whole story yet?”

  Rex sighed. “There’s more?”

  “There’s always more, old man.”

  “Then out with it.”

  Josh found the man so wretched, so repulsive, that he had to fight back the urge to shoot him right then and there.

  “You ever been to Akwesasne, New York?”

  “Akwesasne?”

  “The indian reservation on the border.”

  “Akwesasne. I remember that place. A two-bit dump, full of lowlife, alcoholic half-breeds.”

  *

  BANG!

  *

  THE SOUND OF A GUNSHOT rang out through the room. The noise was deafening. It was an old gun but it packed a punch. It even shocked Josh, and he’d pulled the trigger. The sulfurous smell of the smoke reminded him of a match being lit.

  Rex writhed in pain in his seat. The bullet had gone into his thigh and the blood was spilling out like a leak, soaking his pants.

  “You remember the Rodeo? Black Rodeo? My father rode with them.”

  “You’re the fucking kid. I knew it.” Rex held his leg and breathed in through his teeth in pain. “I always fucking knew it would be one of the kids who came back to get me.”

  “That why you wanted to go after them?”

  Rex looked up at him. “No fucking way. You’re the waiter from Dieu du Ciel.”

  “Yes I am, and I heard what you pulled with Jack Meadows’ daughter.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Lets just say I’d like to get her out of whatever cesspit you’ve thrown her into.”

  “Well good luck finding her.”

  “I’ll find her. I’ll ride up and
down the northern routes and stop in all the bars run by DRMC if I have to. They’re not hard to find, and I swear to god I’ll know that girl when I find her.”

  “Oh, you’ll know her when you find her, will you?”

  “Yes I will.”

  “Well,” Rex said, “I don’t suppose it will make much of a difference to me now, but I’ve got to hand it to you kid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It took you ten years, but you finally found the man that done in your father.”

  Josh eyed Rex wearily.

  “A lot of sons would have done less.”

  Josh nodded. “It took me longer than it should have.”

  “The important thing is that you got me in the end, kid. I always knew one of the kids of the men I killed would come for me. That’s why I wanted to go after them. But you know what scared me even more?”

  Josh wasn’t in much of a mood to hear the dying words of Rex Savage but he let the man talk.

  “What was that?”

  “I was more afraid that none of them would ever come. I was afraid that out of all the men I betrayed and double-crossed in this world, and it’s been many, that not a single son of any of them would step up and try to avenge his father. What would that say about the world?”

  Josh nodded. He cocked the hammer of the gun. “You ready to die, old man?”

  Rex held up his hand. “I’m ready,” he said. “I’ve been ready a long time, son. But listen to one last thing before you pull that trigger.”

  “Talk fast, Rex.”

  “The girl, the Meadows girl, she’s in the very last DRMC bar. Across the border, past Val-d’Or and Malartic and Rouyn-Noranda, over the border into Ontario, the very last bar run by the DRMC, the VP of the Val-d’Or chapter runs it, that’s where you’ll find Jack Meadows’ girl.”

  Josh looked at Rex. He wondered what it was that made the man share that information with him. Now that his end had come, had he become sentimental? That seemed like a lot to believe.

  “That’s from me to you, the one kid who stepped up and avenged his father. The last bar, the VP’s an dirtbag by the name of Serge Gauthier. Now pull that trigger, boy.”

  Josh didn’t waste any more time. He let his finger get heavy on the trigger and a second bang shook through the room.

  Rex Savage was dead. The one thing that had been giving Joss Carter’s life a purpose for the last ten years, the need to avenge his father, was finished. The question was whether he would be able to find a new purpose for his life now that it was done.

  XIX

  JOSH LEFT FOR VAL-D’OR THAT night. Before he left he threw Drake the keys to the handcuffs. Then he went and put bullets in the tires of Drake’s and Rex’s bikes. He rode out of Montreal with nothing but the handgun he’d bought and the gun he’d taken from Drake. He had some money on him, his jacket, his bike and nothing more. He didn’t need much more than that in the world.

  Val-d’Or was a long way north of Montreal so he filled gas on the edge of the city. With the temperature dropping the way it was, he knew he wouldn’t be able to ride through the night so he checked into a motel close to the gas station. A few hours sleep would do him good.

  He didn’t say much to the clerk in the motel and went straight to his room. It was small and functional with a battered old air conditioner at the window, a color television and a door leading to the bathroom. Starched sheets were spread over the bed. Josh went straight through to the bathroom. He was cold from the ride but when he stepped into the shower he ran the cold water. He stood there naked and let it wash over his body. He took deep breaths. He had a lot to take in. Ten years he’d been waiting in Montreal, drifting, watching, waiting. Now he’d finally take action. Rex Savage was dead. The man who had killed his father was dead at last.

  Josh didn’t realize it until after he’d done it, but he’d punched the wall of the shower so hard that the tiles around his fist cracked.

  He got out of the shower and lay on his back on the bed, naked, soaking wet. It seemed like he only closed his eyes for a second but when he opened them it was morning. If he dreamed at all he had no memory of it. He looked at the clock by the bed. It was seven. He made some coffee in the machine in his room and drank it standing by the window. Then he took out his wallet and left fifty dollars on the bed to pay for the damage to the tile. He went down to the parking lot and got on his bike and kicked off. He rode hard and fast north through the vast province of Quebec and only stopped to fill gas.

  In the late afternoon he was passing through the Réservoir Dozois. As he drove on the long causeways that formed the dams through those lakes he got the strange sensation that he was being followed. He pulled over and looked back. A few miles behind him was a rider in black, wearing a black helmet.

  The rider was closing in on him fast. Josh drew his guns and checked them. He had the gun he’d bought and the gun he’d taken from Drake. The rider seemed to reach down to his leg and when he straightened up Josh saw that he’d drawn a rifle and was aiming it at him. He’d never seen anyone aim with a rifle from the back of a motorcycle before and he had only just enough time to dive over the wall of the causeway when a bullet grazed past his ear. He landed hard on the broken rock that was on the other side of the barrier. Below him was the icy water of the reservoir.

  Who’d followed him, he wondered but he didn’t have time to answer the question as another shot was fired. Josh was behind the barrier but he heard the bullet hit his bike, right in the gas tank. Miraculously the bike didn’t explode.

  A second later, following close behind the bullet, the rider swooshed past without stopping. Josh got up and took aim and let a single bullet fly. He didn’t know if it hit the rider or not but a moment later the driver slumped, and a second after that his bike swerved and struck against the barrier of the causeway. The crash occurred at full speed, well over a hundred miles per hour, and there was no way whoever was riding that bike survived. Josh ran toward the wreckage. As he was running a huge explosion mushroomed from the bike. The force of it blew Josh backward onto the asphalt of the road.

  The rider was over a hundred yards farther up the road and Josh got back on his feet and ran toward him. He had to shield his face from the heat of the fire as he ran past the wreck.

  When he got to the body it was already dead. He pulled off the helmet. It was Drake. That’s what he got for showing mercy. He should have known better. He wondered if Drake had told anyone what had happened at Rex’s but given that he had followed alone, Josh figured Drake had been acting alone. He wondered how he’d known to follow him in this direction.

  He went back to his bike and examined the damage. Apart from the hole in the gas tank the bike was undamaged. The problem was that without a gas tank he wouldn’t be going anywhere. He kicked the bike in frustration.

  Then he lifted it over the barrier of the causeway and hid it among the rock above the reservoir. There was a mile marker nearby and he remembered the number on it, seven-seventy-two. He could come back for this bike later. He looked up and down the road. Then he went over to Drake’s body and dragged it over the barrier too. He loaded the body with rocks and then dragged it down to the edge of the water. He didn’t want the body to be found anytime soon so he took off his own clothes and got into the water. He dragged it out as far as he could. The water got deep very fast and he dived down with the body and rolled it along the bottom of the lakebed to make sure it went deep.

  The water was icy cold and he could only bear it for a few minutes. He got out and dried off and dressed. Then he gathered whatever useful things he could take from his bike and began walking. He was still a couple hundred miles from Val-d’Or.

  *

  IT TOOK JOSH A LONG time to reach Val-d’Or. He hadn’t hitchhiked in years and he quickly remembered why. The highway was long and hard and the wind that blew over it came straight from the forgotten norths, far beyond the last habitations and logger camps.

  It had been mid-afternoo
n when he was attacked by Drake. It was dark before the first freight truck passed him and that was headed in the wrong direction. Josh saw the driver turn to look at him in awe. It just wasn’t natural to see a man walking that way alone. It is hard to imagine how desolate the highway got beyond the last of the major towns. The landscape was almost completely empty. It was not like other places where farms and farmhouses punctuate the space between towns. That far north there were no farms. Nothing grew but trees and wilderness. There were vast swathes of forest that had never been logged, never been cut down, never even be seen by men. Around some lakes there were fishing huts and beer cans and signs of human presence but around many of them there was nothing human. No one went there, no one lived there. It was a harsh and inhospitable place that even the Native Americans declined to settle.

  Over an hour passed before another truck went by. This one was taking supplies up north from the port in Montreal. Josh held out his hand and heard the truck shifting down through its gears long before it reached him. It was a big operation to bring one of those heavy trucks to a halt once it got going but the driver pulled over. There was no way he could pass a man on foot on a road like that.

  “Where you headed, son?”

  “Up past Val-d’Or.”

  “Well I’m going as far as the town if you want a ride.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Josh said.

  Josh pulled himself up into the cab.

  “Was that your bike back there?”

  “Afraid so,” Josh said. “Spun out on some ice. I was lucky.”

  “I’ll say. I drove past it and I was afraid to stop. There’s still smoke coming off the wreckage.”

  “Guess I should call that in or something.”

  “I can let dispatch know,” the driver said. “They’ll notify the highway department. Might have to wait till it warms up before they send out a crew.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Josh said.

  The driver radioed his dispatch in Montreal and called in the accident. They drove on in silence for a while. They got to Val-d’Or a few hours later. Josh had been dozing in his seat and the driver asked him where he wanted to get dropped off.