~~~
Chapter Eighteen: Exiled
Ramni Mirza Ali Gupta could not be called Doctor because he had lost his license to practice medicine. He had been too free with the prescriptions and had become too fond of pharmaceuticals himself. These days he was more likely to be seen in a bottle of gin. The law required that any doctor who treated a bullet wound report it to the police but Ramni was not a doctor any more, so the Dark Knights retained his services for days like today.
Once the helicopter had lifted from the mansion there was no more need for an assault. It was unfortunate that the operation had not gone as planned, but once the helicopter cleared the creek, the bikies packed up their casualties and moved off. The guards honored the white flag but had no idea what was going on. They had never had to defend the grounds against anything more pressing than a Girl Scout troop. The Knights were gone before the fire department and police arrived and they were not identified since they had not worn their colors.
Ramni still had connections within the medical community and could get pain killers and local anesthetics in limited supply. The prescriptions were written to fictitious workers at a small video store and insured under those names. Ramni’s sister owned the video store and the paychecks went into a fund for her sons’ education. He no longer dispensed the drugs the way he once had but they were still there when absolutely necessary.
Some of the men were beyond repair when the arrived at the compound. They had taken too much lead. Some were in need of a still drink and a cigarette. Others required surgery and Ramni Gupta provided this. The conditions were not sterile, but they were clean. The instruments were sterilized with bleach and gin. The ex-doctor was assisted by his former nurse, who was still quite in love with him, and his sister whom he had trained. The Dark Knights and some of the other bike clubs in Sydney paid very well for keeping the news of their wounds out of official channels.
The bullet that had struck Ginger’s leg had missed the bone. In fact, it had just cut a channel in the flesh of his calf. It was bleeding a great deal and very painful but was by no means life threatening.
Terry pulled the van into the compound with his uncle in the passenger seat and a damaged motorcycle in the back of the van. Gordon MacMaster was nowhere to be seen.
Evan McCormick strode up to Terry as he exited the van and laughed explosively. The police radio scanner had told the tale of the exploding helicopter, it also told the tale of an all points bulletin for Terry Kingston AKA Thompson Barber. “Tommy, lets have a drink and you can tell me all about it,” Evan roared.
“I’ve got to get my uhh, this man taken care of. He was instrumental in taking down the chopper but he took one in the leg and I need the doc.”
“Boys, we got one more. Get this man in the trailer so the doc can have a look at him. You can find me in the bar. I’ve been there all day. Drinks are on the house today. It’s my birthday.” The bikies almost forgot to move Ginger into the trailer where Ramni was stitching up the wounded. The prospect of free drinks was a powerful lure. It was not long before the men in the bar looked as though they really had been drinking there all day.
Caution dictated that Terry not get too drunk for his own good. A drink or two would be fine but any more than that and his judgment would be impaired. He could not help but notice that Evan was trying to get him drunk. He excused himself and went back through the back door to check on Uncle Ginger. Ramni Mirza Ali Gupta had not reached Ginger yet and it looked as though it might take some time. A combination of pain killers and alcohol had sedated most of the injured bikies. A leather-bound bikie with a full beard who had been a medic in the UN forces at Sarejevo was cleaning their wounds and evaluating the level of threat. Ginger was near the bottom of the list.
Terry stood around for a moment and realized he could do nothing productive. When he got back to the bar, he was surprised to see Gordon MacMaster sitting in a corner with a beer in front of him. It simultaneously made him nervous and relieved. It leaped to his mind that the Troy’s had retained Gordon for a job, but once the job was over, it was no impediment to his being hired to kill them. Terry sat at the bar and stuck to beer. Evan was pushing the hard liquor from behind the bar but Terry had second thoughts. The whole situation was becoming tense. Questions passed through his mind: why was Gordon in the bar? Why was Evan trying to get him drunk? Why was Evan not drinking, himself?
If Ginger had not been in the trailer, in the back, Terry would have headed out. As it was, he left the stool at the bar and put his back to the wall at a table across the room from Gordon MacMaster. Evan continued dispensing the spirits but was imbibing in none himself. Terry smelled something wrong. It was nothing he could be sure of, nothing that stuck out glaringly but he was sure he smelled it. He stood with his beer half finished and stepped through the back again to check on progress.
The unlicensed surgeon was making his way through the room. It looked as though the ones who had arrived alive would stay alive. When Terry entered, his uncle stood and hobbled toward him. “We gotta go, now,” Ginger said.
Terry was full of questions and almost sat the elder Kingston back down, but instead he helped him down the steps of the trailer. When they got a few feet from the trailer, Ginger hissed in his ear. “They tried to give me a shot. They got men in there in serious condition and they had no shots for them but they tried to give me a shot. I barely kept them from sticking me.”
The door opened behind them and the ex-medic filled it. “Oy mate, you can’t leave ‘til we get that leg stitched up. That man’s likely to bleed to death from that. Get your stupid backside back in here.”
Terry ignored the demand and kept walking toward the van. They stopped to readjust his hold on his uncle, glanced back and saw the medic pulling a gun from his waistband and following them. Ginger reached under Terry’s vest and as they turned, he jabbed the medic in the guts with a stun gun. Fortunately the man’s finger was not on the trigger or it would have tightened up and gone off. The crackling of the weapon sounded like a TIG welder in the distance. It was a minute later when the shot went off.
The tavern full of drunken patrons emptied itself through the back door to see the white van moving slowly across the dirt compound toward the gate. Evan McCormick had no more patience for the game and pulled his pistol. “Shoot the traitors.” He exclaimed. They just killed Mickey.” Indeed, Mickey was lying unconscious outside the trailer’s doorway. The bikies had been drinking a lot of hard liquor and could not have hit anything smaller than the van at that range, but something that large was difficult to miss. The barrage that resulted left nothing in doubt. They knew they had killed whoever was in the van and Evan moved to confirm that as it coasted to a stop against the compound wall.
When the shooting began, it drowned out all other noises. Nobody paid any attention to the sound of motorcycles here as a rule, they were firing and riding all day every day. These two should have been noticed, however. When everybody else was watching Evan, opening the doors of the van, these two motorcycles charged out of the repair barn, around the back side of the meeting house, and directly for the steps behind the bar. The drunks turned too late to see them coming and scattered as the bikes charged up the steps and through the back door. It was not a straight run through the bar to the street, but it was straight enough for a motorcycle as long as the bike wasn’t raked too long.
Terry and Ginger burst through the front of the bar, not through the narrow door, but through the window. The confiscated leathers kept them from being sliced up by the glass and the helmets protected their eyes.
As he went through the window, Terry saw Gordon MacMaster with a rocket launcher pointed right at him but the weapon did not track to follow him; it spit its load of death into the tavern door, demolishing the building from the inside, out. It also prevented the Dark Knights from reaching their motorcycles on the front side of the wreckage.
The Land Rover was running and dirt flew from the tires as MacMaster followed the Kin
gstons down the road.
“How did you know?”
“What?”
Terry spit into the campfire and asked, “How did you know we would make it out of there alive?”
“I didn’t. All I knew was that if anyone could have made it out, it would have been you. I was only there for back up. If they hadn’t let me drink in the bar, I would have been waiting outside anyway. When the gunfire started I expected you had breathed your last. If I’d been holding a gun instead of a rocket launcher I might have shot you myself with those helmets on.”
“You knew they were going to try to kill us, though?”
“No,” Gordon said slowly. “I didn’t know that. In fact I didn’t even suspect it.”
Terry was not convinced but he had no other friends at this point. The mob wanted him dead, the bikies wanted him dead and the police just wanted him. “Well, I’ve just about bollixed this all up,” he said.
“Look, mate,” Ginger began. “You’re still on this side of the grass so there’s still a chance but I’m afraid there’s no going back.”
Terry could not help but look at the crude job he had done sewing up his uncle’s leg. “No, there’s no going back,” he replied, softly.
“Quit pissing and moaning,” Gordon growled. “You got what you wanted and now maybe you didn’t want it? It’s true you can’t go back. Not for 10 or 20 years. It doesn’t matter who is in charge, the constables or the jackasses, they’ll want you dead.”
“You knew that was going to happen too, didn’t you?” Terry opined.
“I’ve seen it happen before. There is so little honor today.”
Terry heard echoes of his father and his uncle in the statement and it touched him. “I’ll tell you what, Gordon MacMaster, I have pledged to be honorable and I pledge it again. Like the Samurai, an honorable assassin.”
MacMaster just laughed.
~~~
Epilogue
Mr. Streng had been Terry’s solicitor his entire life. He was sorry to hear that the Viper’s son would need to leave the country but was willing to facilitate whatever needed to be done. Large amounts of cash can be difficult to explain, though it can be shipped a variety of ways. Mr. Streng accepted the rocket box full of cash that Terry had accumulated, promising to invest and steward the money according to his best efforts.
Linda Pettigrew was still under guard but this could not be maintained in perpetuity. The groups that protected her soon wanted information she did not have. The matron of the house lent her a car to go to the grocery store. She was careful in what she said but Linda got the idea that returning to the house was a bad idea so she headed south and took up residence in a small town outside Melbourne. Within a year she was married to the local chief of police.
Evan “Saxon” McCormick survived the explosion at the compound. He moved quickly to consolidate his hold on the underworld network the Troys had left in place. He was ruthless and decisive, but there were too many interests, in a delicately balanced web that disintegrated once the heads of power were killed. Evan was not enough of a builder to regain what had been in place and he learned how valuable a man like Terry Kingston would have been. He deeply regretted their falling out and tried, in vain, to reestablish contact with him. The underworld operations quickly became fragmented as each disparate concern began to slide further from what had been a central power. Some of the gangsters were willing to work for him, but Evan found that many were angry over the death of their leaders, and others simply did not have any respect for bikies. Since the gangsters were not going to get legitimate jobs, they all tried to take a slice of the pie for themselves and the streets ran red with the blood of rival factions vying for control in the wake of the power shift.
Superintendent Theodore Barlow was flabbergasted. He had been inches from the perpetrator of so much death and destruction, and he had been forced to let him go. He was certain that there would be a time when he once again looked into the eyes of the child that had been pulled from the ocean, and he longed for that time until his death. Most men would have retired from service before this time and certainly in the turbulent wake but not Barlow. Theodore was destined to die in the service of his country and while he was alive, he made it his first priority to capture the man who had pulled him from the burning building; the man who had danced through the shadowed world of corruption, carving a place for himself where he could attack from within. Theodore Barlow saw Terry Kingston as a cancer and he was to be removed from the body of Australia. Theodore Barlow never again saw Terry Kingston.
About the Author:
Jason Lord Case spent the early years of his life in Europe and North Africa, which has colored his attitude and his writing. Although books and writing have always been his passion, along the way he has earned a Master’s Degree, supervised employees in the American Auto Industry, and acquired a Commercial Driver's License to see America as a long-haul trucker. He lives with his wife in Michigan, where he does most of his writing.
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Honorable Assassin
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