Tainted Rose (12 page)

*

R
OSE GOT OFF THE BIKE
and pulled the leather suit on over her jeans. It was still a perfect fit. She pulled the top up over her sweater and zipped it up. Her entire body was encased in the supple, black leather. It always made her feel like Catwoman when she had the suit on. She loved it. It was the first leather garment she’d ever made for herself. If she’d had to buy it it would have cost thousands of dollars.

“Jesus,” Serge said. “You look fucking amazing.”

Rose ignored him. She didn’t know if she wanted to encourage this relationship or not. She needed to find a way to survive but surely this wasn’t her only option. She was deeply conflicted about what was happening. She knew that he liked her, and she knew that there were things she could do to make him like her even more. She was an attractive girl and she’d never found it difficult to charm men. The question was whether she really wanted to charm a man like Serge. Once she started down that road there would be no going back. Once he got it in his head that she was his girl, that would be it. She would have to be committed one hundred percent. He would think of her as his property and any man who so much as looked at her would be taking a huge risk.

Was that really what she wanted?

Was she so desperate for protection, was her life at the Cat with Murdoch so bad that she was willing to allow herself to be taken by a man like Serge?

“Come on, baby, give me some sugar.”

She didn’t look at him. She threw her leg over the back of the motorcycle and got on.

“Hey,” Serge said. “I’m talking to you.”

She sighed, silently. Maybe she wouldn’t have to make up her mind. Maybe Serge would decide the issue for her. He took her face in his hand and squeezed her mouth, pinching it so that her lips puckered. Then he leaned in and kissed her, his tongue licking against the outside of her lips.

“Let’s ride,” he said, turning to the front.

He seemed to rev the engine harder than usual as he pulled out of the driveway. She pulled on the helmet,
his
helmet, and held on to his waist as the bike rolled down the street and out of town.

*

T
HEY RODE WEST ALONG THIRD
Avenue and onto the Trans-Canada. There were already more trucks than there had been for most of the winter. It seemed to Rose that as soon as the winter began to give way, the commerce picked up. She saw a line of trucks hauling copper, zinc and lead up the incline of the road, slowly shifting gears as they climbed up out of the valley.

Serge rode past them on the eastbound lane, his left hand stretched out, catching the air.

Rose wondered about him. What was it that made him the way he was? She had seen absolutely no sign of any redeeming qualities in anything he did, and yet she knew that they must exist. There must be something good about the man.

He’d kept her leather racing suit safe for two years. That meant something. What had made him do that? Why would he hold onto something like that for someone he was going to force into slavery?

The highway continued west for a few miles before entering the tiny homestead of Malartic. The squat houses sat in rows close to the ground, hunkered down against the bleak winters that struck them every year. On such a nice afternoon it was hard for Rose to imagine just how brutal those winters could be.

After Malartic the road curved north and then west toward the town of Rouyn-Noranda. Serge didn’t slow as they rode down the main street and Rose noticed a few heads turn to watch them pass.

Another few miles and they crossed the provincial line into Ontario. A green road sign and a small log house was all that marked the border. The sign read, Thunder Bay, nine hundred kilometers. Rose tried to imagine the vastness of that distance, all of it covered in thick boreal forest. It was that forest, as much as anything the DRMC did, that held her captive at the Cat.

They rode on till they got to the small gas station at McGarry. It was on indian soil and so the gas was cheaper than it would be anywhere else. The indians didn’t have to pay the same taxes that other people paid. Serge pulled into the station and began to fill up.

Rose got off the back of the bike to stretch her legs. It was an intensely desolate place. The afternoon was stretching into early evening and the temperature was already dropping fast. She was glad she had the leather suit. Without it she would have been freezing on the back of the bike.

A blue and white sign over the gas pump said Guy’s. There was a little shop and an outhouse. In the window of the store was a sign for live bait. Across the street was a wooden shack that served breakfast and lunch.

“You want anything?” Serge asked her as he finished pumping the gas.

“No,” she said, and watched him walk across the lot toward the store. Then she thought better of it. If he was going to treat her like his woman, she might as well get what she could out of it. “See if they’ve got Du Maurier’s,” she called after him.

“They won’t,” he said.

The indians sold their own brands of cigarettes. They were a lot cheaper than the regular brands, tax free, but they had a much harsher taste.

“You want what they got?” Serge said.

“Sure.”

He nodded and went into the store. Rose walked over to the side of the highway and looked back the way they’d come. A low mist was rising off the trees. It would be very cold soon. She hoped they got home before dark. She looked at the sky. They had plenty of time to make it.

She turned and looked west toward their destination. It wasn’t much more than another ten or twenty miles. And then she saw something unexpected. There was a man walking by the side of the road. He was quite a ways in the distance, too far to make out much detail, but she thought it was odd. He was walking away from McGarry, and small and decrepit a place as it was, it was still a lot more habitable than the vast wilderness that lay to the west. At least there was a gas station and restaurant there. There were also a couple of houses, the last ones for quite a ways. She wondered where on earth any man could be walking to, headed out that way this close to nightfall.

Were there some logging huts she didn’t know about? It was possible but she didn’t think so. She shrugged. It was a strange sight.

Serge came back out of the store. She went over to the bike and got on it behind him. He gave her the cigarettes he’d bought.

She looked at them. “Ménage?” she said.

“That’s the only brand they had.”

“Really?”

Serge shrugged. He pulled out of the gas station and they were back on the highway. A minute later they passed the vagrant that Rose had seen walking. He looked tall and strong, with a confident stride. He was wearing a black leather jacket and black boots. He had scraggy, blonde hair that was long enough to touch his shoulders. That was all she had time to see before they’d passed him.

He didn’t look like one of the locals from the reserve. She’d been at that gas station a few times and would have noticed a guy that good-looking with long hair. Serge didn’t slow down to look at the guy but she knew he noticed him.

When they finally pulled up outside the Cat, the drifter was the first thing Serge mentioned.

“Did you see that guy?”

“Of course I saw him,” she said.

“What the hell’s a guy like that doing hitchhiking along here?”

“Was he hitchhiking?”

“He must have been. I don’t see any other way he got to be here.”

“Well, so what?”

“Something about him. I swear he’s a biker. I have half a mind to go back and find him.”

“What are you going to do? Kill him?”

She looked at Serge and knew that was exactly the thought that was crossing his mind.

“Jesus,” she said. “He’s just a wanderer. What do you care who the hell he is? He can’t do you no trouble.”

“He’d do me less if he was dead.”

“You’re paranoid, Serge.”

Serge shook his head. “Mark me,” he said. “That son of a bitch was a biker. I could see marks on the back of his jacket where the patches were before he ripped them off.”

“You could tell that just from riding past him?”

“Yes I could. And I know all the reasons a man might rip the patch off his back.”

Rose shrugged. She knew what he meant. Something about that drifter did look like he was a biker. The cut of the jacket, it looked just like a Perfecto, and his boots too. He definitely looked the type. And if there had been patches on his back, that meant he’d ridden with an MC. The only reason to remove those patches was if he’d been disowned by his club or if he was trying to hide the fact of his membership. Either one would be reason enough for Serge to pick a fight.

“Come on,” Rose said before Serge talked himself into going back for the guy, “let’s get inside.”

Serge followed her into the bar. She could hear him talking to himself behind her. “If he’d been wearing a patch,” Serge was saying, “I’d go back and get him right this second. This is my territory.”

XI

I
NSIDE THE BAR, ROSE WAS
surprised to see that Rust Brody was still there. He’d spent the entire day sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. Serge had brought the package in from the bike. Rose had her bags of clothes and cosmetics and she went back to the dressing room to put them in her locker.

“Looks like you finally got to go shopping,” Murdoch called down the hall after her.

Rose ignored him but she had to admit she was pleased with the new things. She unpacked the bags, placing the underwear neatly in her locker and the makeup and other things in the shower room.

She took off her clothes, including her underwear and looked at her body in front of the mirror. It was the same ritual she went through every evening before going on stage. It looked like Rust and Serge would be hanging around for the evening so she would have to dance, whether or not there were customers.

She thought about Rust and Serge watching her dance for another night. She knew she hated being there alone with Murdoch, it made her feel as if the world was passing her by and leaving her behind. It was as if she was missing out on her youth and all her chances of happiness. But dancing for Serge and Rust was even worse than that.

And standing there in front of the mirror, she knew that it could never work between her and Serge. As badly as she needed someone to get her out of that place, she didn’t want it to be Serge. She couldn’t bring herself to be the girl of a man who was that violent and nasty.

She knew it deep in her heart, deep in her bones, if Serge kept giving her attention, if he kept trying to make her his girl, it would end very badly for her.

*

R
OSE SHOWERED AND GOT DRESSED
in some of the new lingerie she’d picked up at the drug mart. It felt good to be wearing a new outfit. She also had some new makeup and lotion and that felt even better. She felt a lot more confident and comfortable. The only thing that was still a problem was the fact that her shoes were a size too small. The drug mart didn’t sell shoes. If it did she’d have definitely picked some up.

When she came back out to the bar, Murdoch, Rust and Serge watched her walk to her seat. She was wearing a matching pair of blue, satin panties and bra with rhinestone decorations on them and she looked a lot more like a stripper than she usually did.

“Damn,” Rust said when she sat at the bar. “Why don’t you get up off that ass and give us a few dances.”

She looked at Serge to see if he was going to say anything but he didn’t. She went and put on the music and then got up on stage. She stripped while she danced and got completely naked for them. Apart from that she didn’t put a lot of effort into the dancing. The men weren’t watching her that closely, they were mostly talking among themselves and drinking their beer. There wasn’t much point in getting tired. It was still pretty early and some real customers might show up. If they did she’d need the energy to put on a show for them.

She saw that Serge had his paper package up on the bar and she listened to see what it was. She’d been wondering since she’d seen it back in town.

“This is our latest venture,” Serge was explaining to Murdoch and he began opening the package.

Rose wrapped herself around the pole and leaned back so that her breasts fell down over her face. She remained in that position for a while, swaying to the music. It looked like she was dancing but she could have maintained that position for hours without getting tired.

“What’s in it?” Murdoch said.

Serge pulled off the paper, revealing a plastic wrapped brick of cocaine. It was about a kilo. That was a lot of coke.

“It’s cocaine,” Serge said. “It’s the next thing we want to get into.”

“We’ve been selling cocaine for years, haven’t we?” Murdoch said.

“We have, but down in the cities. We want to start pushing it along the highway now. Deuce thinks there’ll be a good market for it among the truckers. They don’t have anything to do with their time and money up here. A little coke would probably be an easy sell.”

“It would let them drive longer hauls too.”

“It would,” Serge said. “That’s what Deuce figured. The new laws limit their hours but a lot of them get around that. If they want to get in sixteen hours of straight driving, a little coke is definitely the way to go.”

Murdoch was nodding. “So how will I advertise it?”

“Just offer it to whoever looks like they might buy some. Try and get a hundred bucks a gram.”

“Will they pay that?”

“I don’t know what they’ll pay. If you can’t get a hundred get seventy-five. Don’t go lower than sixty. We don’t want kids driving up from Toronto and Montreal and cleaning us out.”

“I’ll stick above seventy-five,” Murdoch said.

“Good.”

Serge drank his beer and looked at the brick of cocaine on the bar in front of him.

“Pass me that knife,” he said after a few minutes.

Rose knew it was only a matter of time. Serge was the kind of guy who could go only so long before opening a brick of cocaine.

Murdoch passed him a knife that was lying by the grill. Serge wiped it clean against his jeans and cut open the package. He took a small amount of coke onto the tip of the knife and passed it to Rust.