The suggestion seemed perfectly reasonable.
“Okay,” she answered.
“Let me talk to him first.”
Holding the receiver at her side, she turned to Howard. He was standing right beside her, the rifle cradled in his arms, crossed before his chest. “They want you at the window, Howard. Your truck is here. But Officer Winters needs to talk to you first.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Not going,” he mumbled. “Won’t talk.”
“Howard…” She put a warning in her voice, and the students at the back of the room lifted their heads as one. They knew that tone. “You asked for your truck,” she said. “And it’s here now. You have to be reasonable about this, or Officer Winters isn’t going to help you.” She held the receiver out to him. “Talk to him. He wants to help you.”
“No.”
She found patience from somewhere deep inside her. “Why not?”
“Don’t want to.”
“All right, then. Forget talking to him. Just go to the window and look out. Right now. No more messing around.”
He glanced at her, but there was no other warning.
He simply grabbed her and she screamed without thinking. From the back of the room, one of the children cried out. Jennifer dropped the phone. Then Howard dragged her roughly toward the window.
“OH, SHIT!”
“Jennifer!”
“What’s going on?” Beck spoke again, overriding Randy’s curse. “Randy? Can you see them?”
“He’s heading to the window, but…I’m not sure…wait, wait a minute…he’s coming to the window. Goddammit—”
Beck leapt from his desk and peered out into the night. It was completely dark now and the outline of the window was nothing more than a square of blackness. He fumbled for the night vision binoculars that had been sitting on the desk but Lena had already grabbed them and brought them to her eyes. “Tamirisa? What’s going on? Can you see?”
“He’s coming to the window and he’s got the teacher with him. Oh, man…I don’t frigging believe this!”
“What? What is it?”
“A kid…a little boy…he’s just run up to both of them—” His voice turned deep. “Don’t do it, you son of a bitch, don’t do it—” Randy’s voice broke off abruptly.
Beck yanked the binoculars out of Lena’s hands but before he could even focus, the horrible sound of glass shattering split the humid night air. A second later, a scream followed, the kind of scream he knew would be replayed in his dreams for months to come. When it stopped, Beck heard nothing beyond the beating of his heart.
Another second passed, then that stopped, too.
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