The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [154]
“I want everyone here to sit the fuck down,” Bobby yelled, shaking the pain from his hand. A few did as he said, but others continued to hurl rocks and epithets just yards away. All the cars were inside the gate, and down in the garage, so the mob occupied the street and aimed projectiles at the house. The scene had quickly devolved past Bobby’s ability to contain it.
Frustrated, and still angry from being sucker punched, he pointed his gun in the air and fired.
Big mistake, he thought as soon as he had done it.
Panic all around. Shrieking, running. Some were flat on the ground, covering their heads. Men and women held sticks like bats. Rocks were being thrown in every direction. One hit Kloska on the left cheekbone, stinging him, cutting him. His hands in front of his face, warding off stones and fistfuls of gravel like swarming bees, he dashed for his truck, which was already beset with rioters. Bobby yelled and waved his gun as he ran, and the panicking Yuppies opened a path for him.
He was steps away from the door when he heard his name: “Bobby!”
Jesus, Della.
He spun around, scanning faces. He saw her, buffeted by the crowd, its anger focused intensely on Jameson’s house, which, as the sun drifted lower, seemed to glow even more brightly. A hundred people were now lined up, banging on the fence with metal tent poles, throwing rocks. Bobby fought his way toward Della, absorbing elbows and shoulders and a few more stones to the body. He grabbed her hand and the two of them ran in a crouch to the door of the truck, which Bobby unlocked with a button hanging from his key. He pushed Della inside, threw a would-be assailant to the pavement, and closed the door behind him, locking it tight.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her.
“Forget about me. What’s going on?”
Outside, half a dozen twenty-something men were pounding on the body of the truck, rocking it and chanting, “Turn on the lights! Turn on the lights!”
“Things just sort of blew up,” Bobby said. The windshield was smashed into a concave web of white lines.
“Can they tip this thing over?” Della asked with admirably less fear in her voice than Bobby thought was warranted. He pressed the barrel of his gun against the driver’s window and snarled. The vandals dispersed, at least for the time being.
“What are you doing here?” he asked again, almost shouting over the din.
“Traden was trying to get your cell,” she said. “You weren’t answering the radio.”
“I was busy.”
“Wayne Jennings is here.”
“What? Where?”
“Here in Chicago. Some trucker flagged down a cop. Said Jennings overpowered him at a truck stop and forced him to give him a ride.”
“Some trucker?”
“He says Jennings has a gun and a knife.”
The rioters were shuttling back to the park for more ammunition—bigger rocks, bigger sticks, tree branches. Bobby saw one kid wielding a stop sign, banging it on Jameson’s gate. Unsober battle cries all around, long days of anger and frustration simmering in the dark, were now diverted at the house with lights on.
“We need to get out of here,” Della said.
Bobby turned the key and the engine responded with a horrible dull clicking.
Shit!
“You didn’t replace the battery, did you?” Della said.
“Shit!” Bobby could feel himself blaming his ex-wife. That was unfair, as she had warned him about the battery, but there was nothing fair about the present situation. He picked up his phone and tried to call Traden.
“What are we going to do?”
“You’re going to get down as low as you can,” Bobby said. A big rock banged hard into the driver’s door. Della shrieked and squeezed herself into the foot well. Bobby scanned desperately from window to window. He couldn’t see anything out of the windshield, but it provided them with a thin veneer of protection, at least for now.
At a distance, he heard an engine. He spun around in his seat, hoping it was a patrol car.
“Fuck me,” he said. “Stay down!”
The pickup that had been parked in the