Enforcer (25 page)

‘Yeah, put down your gun and let’s do it. If you win, we’ll drop our colours. If I win, youse drop your colours and that’s the end of the war.’

‘You’re on.’

Leroy was a big boy, and super strong. A real hard bloke. He put his shotgun down against the car and shaped up.

I thought I was alone, but then I looked back over my right shoulder and there were my brothers, Shadow, Chop, Bull, Snake and Wack, along with Davo, Gloves, Roach, Lance and Zorba, all spread in a line just behind me. Bear was running towards us. They’d all come down to back me up and I felt this intense pride. None of us had a gun. This was what it was all about: punching on when the odds were against you.

Then I realised that they were the only ones there. The rest of the club had either stayed back with the cars or run out into the street.

I looked back at Leroy. Standing just behind him was a Como by the name of Hennessey, shaking like a leaf, his gun still at his hip. I thought, This bloke’s gunna be a real worry. He was staring at my brother Snake, and Snake was calling him all the names under the sun. I knew this Hennessey didn’t
want
to start shooting, but that he just might because he was so scared of Snake.

Snake said something like, ‘Put the gun down if you’re not gunna use it. If you’re gunna use it, use it.’

The next thing I knew, there was a bang and Snake went down. He’d been hit in the gut. Snake sat there with his hands over the wound, blood spurting out of his stomach.

I went cold.

I heard Snoddy, still up at his station wagon, calling Chop and Shadow to come back up and join him. Snoddy had to get round the back of his car and throw all his camping gear out to get to the only two guns we had – his two pig-shooting guns, a .357 carbine and a shotgun – and the ammunition.

Back down where I was, Leroy picked up his gun and ran behind a car. Straight in front of me in a tight little group were Sparra, Tonka and Snowy, all with shotguns hanging by their sides. They started to raise them, so I charged. I got my left arm wrapped around the barrels of their guns and had them pointed at the ground while I barged the three of them back onto the front of a car, pinning them down with my body. I was really giving it to Tonka while holding the other two down. Tonka hit the deck and I stomped on his chest and head with my Johnny Reb boots, crushing one side of his skull. I did everything I could to get him out of it until he went limp. Then, still holding Sparra down, I started belting in on Snowy with my elbow. He fell to the ground, soft as, unconscious.

That left just me and Sparra. With my left hand still pinning down the shotty in his right hand, he started throwing punches with his left. I used my spare hand to grab him by the throat. I tried to go for the vagus nerve on the side of his neck. If you know the right spot you can knock a man out or kill him by hitting the vagus nerve.

I looked over my shoulder and saw Snake sitting there holding his guts in, blood pouring through his hands. Leroy was standing over the top of him, his shotgun pointing down at Snake’s head like he was about to finish him off.

I zoned out. The world went red. I gripped harder into Sparra’s neck. I felt the shotty drop out of his hand and I squeezed harder. I felt my fingers ripping his skin. I saw blood coming out, and felt my fingers go still deeper into his flesh. I felt the side of his neck rip away as he hit the ground screaming.

I looked up and saw sneaky little Glen Eaves, Jock’s brother-in-law, a tiny bloke with a real big mouth when he had a lot of blokes around him. He’d been in the army and he was lying on the ground in a firing position, pointing the shotty at me. For some reason, I think to get a better shot at me, he tried to get up onto his knees. But as he tried getting off the ground, he stumbled and the shotgun discharged into the ground near Sparra. I saw Sparra jerk, so I figured something had hit him. When they later took him away and did the autopsies, they found the wadding from a shotgun cartridge in his neck and concluded he’d been killed by the shotgun – but only after half his neck had been ripped out.

Once the shooting started it came from everywhere. All I could hear was gunshots but with all the rows of parked cars it was impossible to see where they were coming from. I looked around: there were Como colours climbing the back fence out of the car park, a bunch of them jumping into a green XY Falcon and heading for the bottle shop entrance. They took the door off the bottle-o they were trying to get out of the car park that quick. Most of the Bandidos who’d come down with me had got back to Snoddy and Bull’s station wagons by this stage.

Snake was still sitting there with the blood spurting out between his fingers. My only thought was to get to him, and anyone who got in my way was a dead man. I took a step towards him. I saw Bull had this really huge Como down at the front of his car, kicking the shit out of him while the bloke tried to crawl under the car.

A Como came towards me and I grabbed him by the hair and started laying in. Davo was standing alongside me fighting another Como I’d never seen before. He was a real good bluer, Davo. He’d just finished this bloke off when I saw another Como coming up behind him with a bowie knife. I had my hands full so all I could do was yell out to Davo. He turned around just in time. Instead of getting it in the middle of the back, he got it up under his arm. Didn’t that get him started. He beat the shit out of the bloke.

I finished with the bloke who’d just come at me and took another step towards Snake when for some reason I turned to my left.
Bang
. I felt it in the right shoulder. I staggered back a metre and it felt like I’d been hit by a baseball bat. I didn’t know what it was at that point, I was stunned. It was a funny feeling. I always figured that if you got shot with a serious weapon, you’d get this burning, hot feeling, all the stuff you see in the movies. But it wasn’t like that, it was just like getting hit with a baseball bat. I’d been hit with a .22 before but that was more like a little pin prick; .22s aren’t much use to you unless you’re actually standing up alongside the bloke and you got the barrel pointed just in under the ear. That’s the best spot to put it.

I realised I’d been hit by a shotgun when I saw blood spurting out of lots of holes. My arm went numb.

Then I felt another thud – this time to my chest. It was like I’d been hit with another baseball bat but this time I knew straightaway that I’d been shot. Blood spurted out of my arm and my chest and into my face. It was suddenly hard to breathe. I coughed and blood came out.

I think I went down on one knee because I was bent over when a Como by the name of Alan came at me with a baseball bat or an iron bar and – w
hack
– he hit me on the side of the head, which I didn’t like.

I just went
whooshka
, swung my hand out and caught him right in the nuts. He hit the ground alongside me and I grabbed him by the throat. I tried to rip his throat out, and I don’t know if it was from being shot or what, because my wounds were on my right side, but I just couldn’t get enough power into my left hand to do it.

I got to my feet, took the iron bar off him and hit him with it, then put the heel of my boot into his mouth. His teeth went everywhere and I started stomping on his head.

I could hear Chop and Shadow, about twenty feet off to my right, yelling, ‘Bandidos! Bandidos!’ It’s a sound I’ll always remember. They just seemed to keep yelling out, and even though I’d been shot twice, hearing my brothers yelling gave me strength.

L
ANCE AND
Zorba were over bashing some Comos, Glovesy was still giving it to someone. I looked up and I was hoping to see the rest of the club come screaming towards us because I knew if the lot of us had gone these blokes we’d have run over the top of them. But it didn’t happen.

I saw the Como JJ and his old lady down between two cars looking up at me pointing a handgun. To tell the truth, I can’t remember whether it was JJ or his old lady with the gun because I had blood spurting into my eyes and I was feeling real dizzy, but knowing JJ it was probably his old lady. She had more balls than he did. I was looking down there through this haze and then all of a sudden
whack
, I was hit in the forehead. I didn’t think I’d been shot; I just felt this thud and then this burning sensation and blood was in my eyes. I was staggering around blind, but I heard a voice. It was Bull. ‘Get out of here, Ceese!’ I wiped my eyes and saw Bull and Wack heading towards Snake.

I started finding it really hard to breathe. I’m gunna pass out, I thought. I didn’t want to pass out down where the Comos were so I turned round and started to walk up the gentle slope to the street where the other half of the club were.

I looked up to Snoddy’s Falcon about ten metres away and saw him leaning out of it, shooting towards the Comos who were about ten metres behind me. There was Chop and Shadow standing out in the open back where I’d been, just a couple of metres from the Comos, firing away and screaming to the other Bandits to get up to the street.

As I was walking up, I felt w
hack
, w
hack
,
whack
, little stings in the back. I knew from experience that they were probably .22s but I didn’t know what was going on. It was too hard to see through the blood.

‘Fuck it.’ I stopped to turn around and go back down there to kill as many of them as I could before dying. Then something inside me said, No. Walk out. So I turned around again and staggered back up to the left and out of the direct crossfire.

My right leg was dragging behind and I couldn’t feel my right arm. I was having trouble breathing but I just kept going and made it to the road. I saw all these Bandits up there.

Knuckles came up and grabbed me under the left arm. Kid, Lout and Bernie came over. Someone yelled to Hookie to come and help me. One of them waved down a car and it turned out to be this sheila who knocked around the club, Big Sue. Lout, Hookie and Bernie threw me into the back of her green Holden and I remember the car moving and seeing red and I was playing the last few minutes over in my mind. The numbness turned to pain. I remember Lout saying, ‘We’ve got to get him to the hospital,’ and hearing sirens.

Suddenly, someone was helping me up a hospital driveway and leaving me there on the ground outside. Later I found out that one of them had run over and rung the bell to emergency and the nurses had come out and found me lying there.

I was helped through some glass doors and now there were nurses all around me. I was on a bed or a table.

I was the first person from the tavern to reach the hospital. I could hear on the radio that they’d interrupted the regular programming to report a bikie shooting in Milperra. The doctor who was working on me said, ‘What’s going on down there?’

I was thinking, ‘Fuckin’ just fix me up.’ The pain was getting worse.

The nurses tried to make me as comfortable as possible, but the doctor was trying to get my colours off me.

‘You’re not having me colours,’ I said.

‘You’ve got to take them off so I can examine you.’

There was no way anyone was getting my colours. I’d been shot. I’d seen my brother shot. I’d smashed and probably killed one bloke by ripping half his throat out. All for these colours. There was no way they were coming off.

‘I’ve got to examine you,’ he said. There was a running argument for about five minutes and I took a swipe at him. ‘My colours stay here.’

‘You’ll die if we can’t get them off.’

I had my left hand over my chest holding the vest under my right arm so they couldn’t take it. Some wardsmen came in and they had enough blokes to hold me down. They cut the vest up the right-hand side and along the top of the shoulder so they could slip it off.

I heard the doctor say, ‘We’ve got to stem the flow of blood from his head.’ Something sharp got stuck into my head, then the doctor was pulling at something in my forehead. ‘Does this look like a bullet to you?’ I heard the doctor asking the nurse.

‘Yes.’ It turned out that JJ or his old lady had shot me in the head with what they said was a .38, which miraculously just lodged in my skull without penetrating.

Then the quack yelled out to a nurse that my lung had deflated. He grabbed a rod about a foot long with a thread on it like a self-tapping screw. He came up to me and thumped it in under my right arm, and started more or less screwing it in through the side of my chest. All of a sudden I took a deep breath, and that’s the last thing I remember.

I
was waking up and dozing off. All I can remember is lights, a frigging lot of pain and Donna’s face. Sometimes Mum was there too. I remember Mum sitting next to me holding my hand. She gave me a big hug and told me that she loved me. Then I went unconscious again. And there was always this bloke’s face appearing in front of me. I couldn’t work out who he was.

When I came to, they told me I was in intensive care and that I’d been out of it for a month. I asked about my brothers. Donna told me Snake and Wack were in a ward upstairs, but that was all she said. I saw three coppers standing just inside the door. Donna said they’d been there the whole time.

I felt like I had to see my brothers. I told the nurse that I wanted to go up to their ward but she said, no, I had to stay down here a bit longer.

‘Take me up or I’ll walk up meself. I’ll crawl if I have to.’ I started pulling tubes out of myself and tried to get out of the bed.