Enforcer (26 page)

‘Calm down,’ the nurse said, ‘all right. It will take me a few hours, but I’ll get you up to the ward with your brothers.’

She came good on her promise and they wheeled me in my bed up to a room where Lard and Snake were. I was that glad to see Snake had survived the shot to the belly. He told me that Davo had just left, having recovered from his stab wound under the armpit.

I saw Donna having a big confab with a doctor. She came over with tears in her eyes and I thought, This isn’t gunna be good. I’m gunna lose an arm or a leg or some bloody thing. She sat down beside me. ‘Do you remember what I told you down in intensive care?’ she asked.

‘I don’t remember anything from there.’ She pulled the curtain round. ‘I don’t know how to tell you this.’

‘What?’

‘Shadow and Chop are dead.’ She started crying. I put my left arm around her and just lay there. I couldn’t believe it. Two of my brothers were gone.

Donna stopped crying. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘No . . . Would you mind going, and letting me talk to Snake?’

‘I’ll wait out in the corridor.’ She pulled the curtain back so I could see my brother.

‘Do you know?’ I asked Snake.

‘Yeah, I knew on the day. Did Donna just tell ya?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I know how you’re feeling.’

‘Sorry, brother,’ Lard said from the other side of the room.

There was an empty bed next to mine. ‘Where’s Wack?’ I’d been told Wack was in this ward. It turned out he was in the room across the corridor, so I hit the buzzer to get the nurses in.

‘Is me brother over in that room?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well bring him in here and put him in that bed.’ Wack was the youngest of the Campbell brothers – except for Chrissy – and I thought it was important that we be together. He’d had part of his arm blown away and the remainder was sewn to his chest through a skin graft. After a bit of arguing and carrying on, they got Wack and put him in the bed alongside me.

I just couldn’t take the news in. I was shattered. The worst day of my life was when my father died. That was the first time I’d ever shed a tear. This was the second time.

Wack started telling me what he knew. Apparently the Comancheros had turned up at the Viking Tavern at least twenty minutes before us and had been running round with shotguns and walkietalkies while Jock swanned around with a machete in his hand playing the king dick. I don’t know how they knew we were planning a trip to the Viking that day. Jock never went to bike shows.

Wack said that when we’d first rocked up to the tavern, he was with Bull and they walked down towards the Comos after me. As he was following me, he saw a heap of Bandits running out of the car park and onto the street. I really would’ve thought the whole club would be down there punching on. And if they had been, I don’t think there would’ve been anyone killed because the Comos would have dropped their bundle and run.

Wack said that when the shooting started there was only Snoddy’s shotgun and the .357 carbine. That was all we had. But Snoddy had called Wack and some of the other fellas who’d been punching on back up to the car, and on their way up some of them had picked up shotties that had been dropped by the Comos. So we ended up with a couple more guns and Snoddy had spare ammo in his station wagon from the hunting trip.

Shadow and Chop had each grabbed a shotgun and ammunition off Comos and started blasting away, but they’d been stuck deep on the Comos’ side of no-man’s-land. Shadow was killed by a single shotgun pellet in the throat. Chop had six pellets go through his chest. Wack had been shot standing up at Snoddy’s car.

I asked Wack whether he’d seen Jock during the fight, because I hadn’t.

‘After you headed off up to the street there was a lull in the shooting and some of the Comos started yelling out, “Caesar’s gone! Caesar’s gone!” Then Jock came running out from behind the pub waving a machete above his head yelling, “Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all!”’

Jock later claimed that he’d been around the back of the pub and hadn’t heard the shooting. As if.

Wack continued with the story. He said Lard ran down towards Jock with a pick handle and that’s when he got shot in the foot. Snoddy started shooting at Jock so Jock ran back into the cars. Snoddy kept saying, ‘Fuck! I’ve only got rabbit shot left.’

‘The way he’s running that’s what you need,’ Wack answered.

Wack remembered seeing Jock drop his machete then bend over to pick it up, facing up towards the car. Snoddy said, ‘Fuck the old prick.’ And shot him. Jock went down.

Snoddy was frantically searching for more slugs to put in the shotgun. He found a couple on the floor and loaded the shotty with them. ‘This is it,’ he said to Wack. ‘The old cunt’s dead.’

Snoddy was lining up the kill shot to the top of Jock’s head when Bear came down to see if he could help any of the blokes that were round Snoddy’s station wagon get out of the car park. When he saw Snoddy taking aim at Jock, he pushed Snoddy’s arm to the side. Snoddy fired but missed by a couple of feet. Snoddy pumped it again and fired down towards Jock but couldn’t get a good shot at him because Bear still had hold of the gun.

‘What are you fuckin’ doing, Bear?’ Snoddy yelled.

‘C’mon, Snoddy. There’s been enough killing,’ Bear replied.

Snoddy told Bear to fuck off. Bear headed back up to the street and Snoddy reloaded the gun with the rabbit shot to have another go at Jock, but by this time some of the Comos had dragged him behind a car and Snoddy couldn’t get a good shot at him.

Wack said, ‘But I’ll give Snoddy this. From the time we got there till the time the coppers arrived, he never left that car. He just kept firing. Even after Chop and Shadow were hit. It just seemed to make him worse. He just wanted to shoot everything that had Como colours.’

Wack told me that four Comos had died in the fighting: Sparra (the bloke whose throat I’d ripped out), Foghorn, Dog and Leroy. I was really sorry to hear about Leroy. I said that the biker world had lost a good bloke. A lot of the blokes in the club wouldn’t understand that, but he was a top fella.

Snake told me that after he’d been shot and the whole shitfight had erupted, Leroy had stood over him with his gun pointed at his head. Snake told Leroy, ‘Well if you’re gunna shoot me, fuckin’ do it.’ And Leroy had said, ‘Not today, Snake. You’re me brother. We’ll get into it another day.’ And with that he’d walked off and started shooting at other Bandits up in the car park.

‘I just wish fuckin’ Leroy and I had punched on and none of this had happened,’ I said.

‘Don’t blame yourself, Ceese,’ Wack said. ‘It’s that old cunt Jock’s fault, not yours.’

‘Wack, it’s always been my job to look after you guys and the club.’

Wack reckoned that the only Como with any guts was one of their new blokes, Sunshine. ‘After Jock was shot and I was there with part of me arm blown off, Bull stood up and yelled out to him, “How ’bout you let us get our wounded out, and we’ll let youse get yours out.” Sunshine agreed and so we went down and pulled everyone who was hurt up onto the road.’

Someone checked Chop but found that he was dead. Bull was getting Shadow out of the car park when the Comos started shooting again. Sunshine yelled at his fellow Comos to stop the shooting, which they did, and Bull was able to get Shadow out.

I didn’t really want to hear the details of what had happened to Shadow. It was upsetting Wack, too, because he’d seen it happen. But the one it had the biggest effect on was Bull, because Shadow was still alive when Bull got him out of the car park. Bull had tried to keep him going, but Shadow just died in his arms. So even though Bull wasn’t shot, he probably had the worst time of it out of all us brothers.

Wack said it took a whole heap of Bandits to stop Bull going back into the car park to try and get Chop’s body out from deep down in the Como’s territory. A bunch of them grabbed him and told him that Chop had gone and he’d only get himself killed.

After that, the battle turned into a standoff. They shot at us a few times and we shot at them but the killing was over.

Wack said, ‘When we got up onto the street, Snoddy got all the blokes together. He was really going off at the ones who didn’t go down and punch on. But then he looked over and saw Bull laying over Shadow’s body and he started to choke up and walked off by himself. Then the ambulance blokes rocked up. We let them in, so did Sunshine. Then some coppers. One copper went down and got Sunshine’s shotty off him and that was kind of the end of it. A heap of coppers rocked up and they were going around quietening everybody. They took the guns and told us to stay where we were.’

There was so much confusion and so many people around, that any of the blokes could’ve just taken their colours off and walked away. They would never have been arrested. But the loyalty in the club was that strong that nobody left – except the three who had already taken me to hospital. (Hookie, Bernie and Lout went to Lance’s house and watched the rest of the blue on TV.) There were still blokes with minor wounds, like Lard, who was shot in the foot backing out towards the street shortly before the ceasefire, and Porky, who’d been shot in the leg. Others had been hit with baseball bats and that. I would have been dirty on them if they’d left because I know if it had been me, I would have stayed till I saw the last bloke taken to hospital.

Wack said the ambulance rushed him to Bankstown hospital. ‘They took me into surgery and this one doctor wanted to cut me arm off, but lucky for me they had a visiting specialist there and he said to the other quack, “We can save this young man’s arm.” So they put me under and when I came to, me arm was sewn to me stomach. That’s all I sort of remember.’

I lay there for the rest of the day thinking about Chop and Shadow until a nurse stuck something into me and I passed out.

I
BLACKED
out for a few days and when I woke up I noticed that Lard, in a bed across from me, had a bandage around his foot. He told me a bullet had shattered it and they’d had to put a dirty great pin in it to hold it together. In the bed next to him was Porky, who’d moved into Snake’s bed after Snake had been discharged.

Porky had been shot in the leg. They had it in a brace weighted down with a sandbag. He told me that after he’d been shot, he was trying to crawl out of the car park when he saw a Como lying there, trying to get up. He saw an iron bar so he crawled over to it, picked it up, crawled back to this Como and started bashing him. Then he got helped up to the street.

As for me, I was told I’d had four shotgun pellets go through my right lung and out my back. Four others had stayed in my back. I’d had thirty-three pellets inside me and the surgeons had managed to get more than twenty of them out.

I had tubes coming out of me everywhere. I’d developed an infection from the wounds in my lung and had a massive fever, so they had fans on me with big trays of ice in front of the fans to keep the fever down. At some stage a bloke came into the room and started talking to me like he knew me. I thought, ‘Hang on, you’re gay.’ And he was.

‘Do you remember me?’ he asked. I just looked at him suspiciously. ‘Come on, big fella, you gotta remember me.’

Fuck me roan, I thought, this bloke’s trying to crack on to me.

Turned out he was the main nurse down in intensive care who’d been looking after me. It was his face that had kept fading in and out of my dreams when I was down there.

Then this other nurse came in. She was tall with long red hair. A real good looker. Lard was looking at me: ‘You oughta thank her.’

‘What for?’

‘You’d be dead if it wasn’t for her.’ Lard turned to her. ‘Hey, Ginger, tell Caesar what happened when you found him.’

She said she’d been called into work to help with the influx of casualties on the day. As she walked down the hallway towards emergency, she noticed a dead body on a trolley with a sheet pulled up over it. But then she saw the sheet twitch. She looked more closely and saw an arm hanging out and it twitched too. So she said she pulled the sheet back and went searching for a pulse. She found one then wheeled me back into emergency. ‘Who put this bloke in the hallway?’ she yelled.

No one owned up.

‘Well whoever did, he’s not dead.’

She told us how the doctor who’d pronounced me dead came running over and then I ended up in theatre and they pulled a few slugs out of my chest.

‘Thanks, Sister,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said, ‘and call me Ginger.’ Her friends reckoned she looked like that sheila on
Gilligan’s Island
.

Ginger explained that the doctor who first worked on me had lost my pulse and couldn’t pick up any breathing so he’d declared me dead. By that time, other wounded had started coming in so I got wheeled into the hallway.

‘You must have died but somehow kick-started yourself again. It just wasn’t your time to go. We were all amazed considering the gunshot wounds you had.’

After she’d gone, Lard said to me, ‘If that quack ever comes back up here I’m gunna bash him.’

D
ONNA VISITED
every day. Then she’d leave to check on the kids and come back of a night. My mum was there a lot too, even though her health wasn’t the best. Lard and Porky had their visitors as well. Every time a visitor came, the cops searched their bags and put them through the rigmarole.