The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [95]
“Oh shit,” Kloska said. The street ahead was black, with only headlights and car batteries to illuminate it. “You want to turn around?”
Della shook her head. “No way. Lights might come back on. And they might have power farther up north. It’s probably one of those rolling blackouts.”
He loved that she was always game. The cop part of Kloska wanted to press ahead through the darkness. To stay on unofficial patrol. To dare the bad guys to use the city’s misfortune as their cover. Of course, within seconds of the lights powering down on either side of the road, the noncop part of him was already thinking about blackout sex, which he just now realized he had never had.
After long consideration he had chosen Gilbert and Sullivan to play in the car, not because he cared for it, but because he’d heard a lot of college kids did. Now Bobby felt especially ridiculous navigating through the dark with The Mikado playing through the police department’s cheap speakers.
Our great Mikado, virtuous man,
When he to rule our land began,
Resolved to try
A plan whereby
Young men might best be steadied.
So he decreed, in words succinct,
That all who flirted, leered or winked
(Unless connubially linked),
Should forthwith be beheaded …
He turned the volume low and they advanced slowly, the dark pierced by flashes of Della’s cigarette and the silence interrupted by her silly jokes and law firm gossip.
With lights out and heavy traffic, it took them another hour to get even within the neighborhood of the club, where Kloska parked his ticketproof Caprice in a yellow zone under the el. It was all black up here, too, and when he caught a glimpse of the buildings downtown, he saw their shapes were ghosted by backup generators powering emergency hall lights. A brighter glow formed a halo around the skyline farther south, which led Kloska to think they still had juice on the other side of the Congress Expressway. It gave him hope his own condo was still lit.
And maybe a good excuse for a North Sider like Della Dickey to come spend the night down south of Roosevelt.
In front of the club, hundreds of people were packed so densely together that the last line of them had trouble keeping their toes on the curb. Others had started using parked cars as benches. Some remained just inside the door, demanding refunds for a half-finished show. Young people spilled into the street, plastic cups of beer in their hands, assuming, perhaps correctly, that the least of the city’s laws had been suspended for the blackout. Dozens of tattooed and provocatively dressed kids, weaving between the headlights of crawling cars, looked underage to Kloska, although it had been a long time since he’d been able to consistently tell the often critical difference between a girl who was seventeen and a woman who was twenty-two.
A white van pulled in front of the main doors, displacing a dozen loiterers and fans and causing an enthused commotion. Kloska watched a hulk of a man, head down in a black parka—a parka in this heat!—straight-arm his way to the passenger seat.
“That’s Burning Patrick!” Della clenched Bobby’s arm with surprised delight and Kloska wished, not for the first time, that he had used even a fraction of the idle time of his youth to learn to play the guitar. Even a glimpse of this mope was disgusting—fat, hairy, and ungroomed, the distant sight of him almost giving up an odor—and yet the look on Della’s face and on the faces of fans Burning Patrick had indifferently manhandled on the way to his ride was undeniably worshipful.
For the first time, Bobby let his thumb graze the back of Della’s hand, and with her long nails she stroked the face of it lightly in reply.
They pressed forward, Della anxious to get a more intimate look at the man. Another guy, apparently also a musician—based on the similar, if more muted, reaction—led a young woman through the same gauntlet from bar to car.
“Omigod,