She sighed again as she walked from the classroom.
Remo had taken a wrong turn and instead of being in a stairwell going down, he was in a stairwell that went only up. Feeling the stones under his feet, he ran to the top of the stairs.
Behind him, he heard the corridor door open again. "He's gone up," he heard a young voice whisper.
The angled stairway ended at a door. It had once had a pushbar to open it, but. that was back when there had been students in the school. The pushbar was now removed and the door was locked. Remo grabbed the handle of the door and turned slowly and removed it from the metal door as easily as removing the top from a once-opened catsup bottle.
The roof smelled of a fresh tar coating, and he could feel the small pebbles imbedded in the sticky surface. A three-foot-high wall surrounded the roof. There were no stars, no moon, and the roof was as dark as the inside of an inkwell, its level surface broken only by a question-mark-shaped large pipe from an old unused ventilator system.
If Remo hid behind the pipe, it would be the first place the children would look.
Remo hid behind it. He heard the voices as the boys ran onto the roof.
"Hey," one hissed. "He's got to be hiding behind that pipe. Everybody be careful. Don't let him get your guns away from you."
Remo peered out from behind the pipe. As he did, he saw a splash of light come onto the roof from the open door. One of the boys apparently had found the light switch in the stairwell. Then the light faded as one of the boys pushed the metal door shut with a heavy clang.
Behind the pipe, Remo now heard the feet moving toward him, shuffling over the pitted roof. He heard the footsteps split into two groups and move around to come behind the ventilator from both sides.
Timing his footsteps to coincide with the soft shuffling of the boys' feet, Remo backed off from the ventilator shaft toward the far wall of the roof. He felt the railing around the roof behind him, then moved silently to his right, a dark shadow in a night of dark shadows, to the right angle corner of the railing, then back toward the center of the roof and the door that led downstairs to safety.
He was near the shedlike structure of the door when he heard the voices back in the darkness.
"Hey. Where is he? Charley, be careful, he ain't here."
The door was unguarded. Remo opened it and slipped inside, closed it softly behind him. He turned to go downstairs. Halfway down the steps was a boy, perhaps nine years old.
"Charley, I presume," said Remo.
"You're dead," Charley answered. His pistol was pointing at Remo's stomach.
It was a small-caliber weapon. Remo could take one bullet in the belly and get away with it, but the full cylinder of the gun would mincemeat him, and the knowledge of it, the galling rotten knowledge that he was about to be done in by a nine-year-old boy, made Remo angry rather than sad. He did a smooth reverse foot spin and the boy looked to the left where Remo's body had moved. But Remo was already back on the right, moving down the steps, not seeming to rush, but taking all the steps in one motion. Then he was beside the boy and the gun was ripped from the boy's hand, and Remo lifted him under one arm.
The boy screamed. Remo stuck the gun into his belt and slapped the back of the boy's head, hard, and the scream turned into a wail.
Remo stopped short. He had hit the boy. Whatever had blocked him from striking a child, he had overcome. Like a dog with a toy, he slapped the back of Charley's head again. And again.
Then he turned and still carrying the boy like a balsa log under his arm went up the stairs and toward the door leading to the roof.
"Hey, let me down. You let me down or.. "
"I'm going to smack your head, kid," Remo said. He did. Charley cried.
Remo tossed the boy through the door onto the roof just in time for Charley to smash into three boys approaching the door, carrying them down to the roof surface.
Then Remo was low, moving through the door, and jamming it behind him so no one could escape.
As the door closed, the roof was swallowed up in darkness again. Remo opened his pupils wider than normal pupils were supposed to dilate. He could see almost as if the roof were lighted. He moved through the crowd of boys.
He slapped a face and took a gun and jammed it into his belt.
"Ooooh, shit, that hurt."
"Good," Remo said. "Try this."
He slapped again, then turned and kicked a behind and took another gun.
"Son of a bitch," the boy snarled. He was ten years old.
"Naughty, naughty," Remo said. He slapped the boy alongside the ear. "No cursing in school."
The boys spun around on the rooftop, like puppies looking for a hidden piece of meat that they could smell but not see, afraid to fire for fear of hitting each other, and Remo moved among them, hitting, smacking, slapping, spanking and collecting guns.
"Hey. That fucker's got my gun."
"Mine too."
"Anybody got a gun?"
Smack!
"Mustn't go calling names, big mouth," Remo said. "I'll send you to the principal's office."
"Who's got a gun?" someone cried, in a voice that bore more anguish than it was possible to experience in eleven years.
"I have," Remo said. "I've got them all. Isn't this fun?"
"I'm getting out of here. Fuck Kaufperson. Let her do her own dirty work."
"You get away from that door," Remo said, "while I put these guns away."
The biggest boy on the roof, thirteen years old, got to the door and yanked. One second he was yanking, the next instant he was sitting on the gravel-topped roof, the sharp small stones pressing into his rear.
"I said stay away from that door," Remo said. "And no peeking for the guns. That's not the way you play huckle buckle beanstalk."
Remo slipped the top grate from the ventilator shaft and dropped the small handguns in the top. He heard them slide and then thump below, as the first one landed, then the clicks as the later ones landed atop other guns. He didn't know where the chute led, but wherever it ended was exactly seventeen-and-one-half feet away, his ears told him.
Behind him, he heard whispering. It was meant to be too soft for him to hear.
"The door's jammed. I can't open it."
"All right, we'll rush him."
"Yeah. Everybody jump him. Stomp him in the balls."
The boys huddled around the door as Remo walked back. They were able now to make out his silhouette even in the dark. Remo saw them as if it were light.
"Can all of you see all right?" Remo asked. "No? Let me fix that."
The boys nearest the door felt nothing except a brush of air by their faces, then they heard a thud and a ripping sound and then a splash of light as beams shone on the roof from a hole Remo had just torn open in the metal door with his bare right hand.
"There," said Remo backing up. "That's better, isn't it?" He smiled at the boys. His teeth glinted gravestone marble white in the dim light, and there was not a sound as the boys looked first at him, then at the hole in the door.
"Attention, class," said Remo, wondering how Sister Mary Elizabeth would have handled this bunch back at the Newark orphanage. Probably with a ruler across the backs of their hands, and Remo had a hunch it would still have worked. It was decades of time and social light years away from Sister Mary Elizabeth and her corporal methods of teaching, but Remo guessed that if she had had these children when they were smaller, they would not now be huddled frightened on a roof with a man they had just tried to murder.
"You're probably wondering why I called you all here," Remo said. "Well, at the board of education, we've been getting bad reports on you. That you're not doing your homework. That you don't pay attention in class. Are those reports true?"
There was only sullen silence. From the darkness, Remo heard a half-whispered, "Go fuck yourself."