The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [157]
The cop said, “Even if we could round everybody up and arrest them, we got no way to transport them, no way to process them. I’m not sure where we’d even keep them at this point. The city’s just failing right now. Falling apart. Until the power’s back on and those fires are finally out, a few broken windows and stolen knickknacks at a rich guy’s house, especially a rich dickwad who’s been rubbing everyone’s face in it with his air-conditioning and whatnot, that’s an insurance matter.”
Bobby leaned back in the seat and made an obscene gesture at the house. “I’ve been thinking over what we talked about,” he said to Della as if the cop weren’t sitting right there. “You think as a cop at least you’re making some kind of difference. But we’re just oiling the machine, aren’t we? Whoever the shitheads are who killed Marlena Falcone, or the prick who lives inside this house, there won’t ever be a difference made unless they let it, which they won’t, because if this prick decided to change something, some bigger prick would just stop him. There is always a bigger prick, Della. Anytime we get close to making a difference, they take us off the job or they tell us to sit back and watch a fucking beautiful old house get torn apart. Because some prick’d rather gut it to the bricks than let us see what’s in there. Fuck that. Fuck them.”
He reached into his pocket and inserted a new magazine into his gun. Then he kissed her quickly, told the uniform to let him out of the car, and dashed across the street.
64
NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME since he had fled Las Vegas, a voice in Wayne’s head told him to stay facedown in the dirt, to surrender to the pain and chaos, to let himself be trampled by the riot, to let the police handcuff him and push him into the back of a van somewhere, to stop running and fighting and turn his fate over to the universe and the courts. Let somebody else choose red or black for him. He was probably physically incapable of doing much for Nada anyway. He doubted he had the strength to find her, much less save her.
But then the image of his friend Peter Trembley stepping through that door, closer and nearer to Canada Gold, and now the gunfire from inside the house motivated him to his feet, to full adrenaline alertness. The fellow he had shot was alive—a relief—and Wayne hobbled toward the open door and then inside Gary Jameson’s home.
A looter skipped out over the shouts and ran past, his pockets no doubt full of stolen treasures. Wayne heard screaming within and without, and crying and wailing and laughing, too. Stepping inside, he felt an air-conditioned breeze.
It felt so good, he didn’t notice right away that the long foyer had been destroyed—furniture turned on its side, paintings ripped from the walls, canvases torn. Shattered glass crunched beneath his thick-soled shoes. A massive wooden door had been toppled, and now it leaned against the cracked plaster of the opposite wall.
Wayne walked down the hall in a crouch and turned the corner into another mess of a corridor. No one in sight. Most of the looters had already departed, it seemed, smashed and grabbed and fled from the bullets.
He slowly turned another corner into the kitchen. Boxes and canned food spilled from open cabinets. A man Wayne recognized from earlier, outside, was on the floor, whimpering in pain, bleeding from his leg. A small television, tuned to local news, showed the outside of the house from above, three police cars