Child's Play td-23

by Warren Murphy

  Remo changed his shirt and as he was leaving the room, he closed the door gently behind him, holding it open just slightly.

  "HnnnwiKkKkkKk."

  The telephone rang.

  Braawwwwk'k.

  Braawwwwk'k.

  Braawwwwk'k.

  Three rings. Remo put his ear to the door and listened.

  The phone stopped. He listened. There was no more snoring.

  Remo pulled the door tightly shut and walked away down the hall whistling. How did people live before there were telephones?

  Sashur Kaufperson was gone. The jammed closet door had been opened from the outside by some kind of tool, probably a crowbar.

  Remo began rummaging through the drawers In Sashur's bedroom. Nothing, unless one had a letch for panties with the days of the week on them and with men's names on them and with hearts on them and obscene drawings on them. Dozens of pairs of panties.

  Sashur's closets were similarly unproductive. No pieces of paper left in jackets. No handbags crammed full of informational goodies. A zero.

  "Why doesn't this woman write anything down?" Remo mumbled. He looked around the room. Suddenly he sensed that it was one o'clock and the telephone in his motel room was going to be ringing. Three times.

  "Move your own couch next time," he growled.

  The telephone.

  Under Sashur's telephone was a personal phone book with names and numbers and one entry that made Remo suspicious: "Walter Wilkins. Music room. Wednesday night."

  It was Wednesday night.

  The police department switchboard confirmed that there was a Walter Wilkins School, gave Remo the address, but cautioned that it had been closed down for several years.

  It was easy to open the school's front door and even easier to find the night watchman. Remo followed the snores down to the basement where the guard slept, in a brightly lighted room, atop an old cafeteria table which was a history in wood-carving of the sexual life of the school.

  Remo shook the guard awake. The guard's eyes opened wide in panic. His pupils were wide black dots. The guard saw Remo and Remo could feel the man's tension ease.

  "Oh. I thought it was the head custodian." The watchman's voice was thick as he shook his head trying to clear away his sleepiness. "Who are you anyway? How'd you get in here."

  "I'm looking for Ms. Kaufperson."

  The guard tilted his head as if listening to something, "She's here. That's them up in the music room. The kids' chorus and her." The guard looked at his watch. "Hey, shit, it's late. I'd better tell her."

  "Don't bother, buddy. I'm going up there. I'll remind her about the time."

  Remo walked away.

  "Hey. You didn't tell me who you were? How'd you get in here?"

  "Ms. Kaufperson let me in," said Remo, which was not only untrue but illogical, but the guard was too tired to notice and before Remo was down the hall, he heard the guard snoring behind him.

  Remo went up the dark stairwell toward the top floor. Under the soles of his Italian leather loafers, he felt the hard slate of the steps. How many years had he spent walking up the same kind of steps, in the same kind of shabby school? The orphanage school had been like this, and his first memory of it was hatred.

  Every time he came down the steps in that school, he would come down hard, jumping on the edge of each step, trying to crack the heavy slate, never succeeding. At night he would lie in his metal cot in a barracks-type room full of other boys and hate the school and the nuns who ran it and the steps that were as unyielding as life itself.

  No matter what Chiun thought, he had changed. If he wanted to now, he could pound the steps into gray powder. And he just didn't want to. Steps didn't matter anymore.

  The closer he got to the third floor, the louder the singing became. It was street singing of the fifties, a lead singer who sounded like a castrati yodeling the high-noted melody and a background chorus that sounded like a matched set of refrigerator vibrations repeating, over and over again, one word, usually a girl's name.

  "Thelma, Thelma, Thelma, Thelma." Now for our next number we will do Brenda, Brenda, Brenda, Brenda. It was a good thing, Remo thought, that the music died before it ran out of girls' names.

  He paused in the hall outside the door from which the sounds came. The windows in the door had been painted black and he couldn't see inside, but he had to admit, the kids were good. They sounded like a top-forty recording of Remo's youth.

  He opened the door.

  They were a top forty recording from Remo's youth.

  The record was being played on a small stereo in the rear of the room which had a pile of records in position to drop and play next.

  Sashur Kaufperson was at the front of the room standing at the blackboard. She wore a leather skirt and vest and a peach-pink blouse. In her hand was a pointer. The blackboard behind her was crowded with chalk writing. Remo's scanning eye picked up only scattered phrases. There were some state's names. The words "maximum sentence." Written in large capital letters were the words: Training. Performance. Silence. "Silence" was underlined.

  Ten young boys sat at desks facing Sashur. Remo guessed the youngest at eight, the oldest at thirteen.

  They turned toward him when he entered the room. Ten children. Children and their faces frightened Remo. They were hard cynical faces, with eyes that were blank of feeling. The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke.

  The boys looked from Remo back to Sashur.

  "What are you doing here?" she said, her voice struggling to be heard over the roar of, "Thelma, Thelma, Thelma, Thelma."

  "Just came to see how you were getting on. Can we talk?"

  "What do we have to talk about? Your behavior tonight? Locking me in a closet?"

  "Maybe your behavior. Fibbing to me about Warner Pell. Didn't you ever learn it's not nice to fib?"

  "I know it. That's why I'm telling you the absolute truth when I tell you it'd be healthier if you left."

  "Sorry," said Remo.

  Sashur nodded slightly. Her class rose, as if on military command, and turned to face Remo. They were smiling, smiling at him, those hateful little bastards, and Remo wanted to rip them apart. He wanted to beat them, bust them, but mostly he wanted to spank them. He knew now how the nuns in the orphanage must have felt.

  Again, almost in unison, their hands went into their pockets, jacket pockets, trouser pockets, shirt pockets, and they brought out pistols, small Saturday night specials.

  They moved toward Remo, slowly raising their guns, like underage zombies. Remo remembered how he had frozen in the elevator when Alvin fired at him, and he did what instinct told him he should do.

  He turned and ran.

  The pack was after him then, silently like a pack of hunting wolves who neither bay nor howl nor yelp. Who just run.

  Sashur Kaufperson stood at the blackboard as the last of the boys went out the door after Remo.

  With a damp cloth, she erased the blackboard, then dried her hands on a paper towel, then walked to the back to turn off the blasting phonograph. She sighed as silence returned to the room.

  A big sigh.

  Remo was a man. It was a shame he had to die. She heard the pop of shots around the corridors. Poor Mr. Winslow, she thought, remembering the custodian asleep in the basement. He never knew what went on in his school. All he knew was that Sashur Kaufperson religiously brought in a can of beer on chorus nights and poured half the can for him and stayed with him while he drank it. It gave him pleasure that an educated Jewess was his Gofor. It never occurred to him to wonder why the beer put him so quickly and deeply to sleep. He never suspected that there might be sleeping pills in the beer.

  Mr. Winslow would not hear the shots, she knew.

  She put on her jacket, walked to the classroom door, then remembered something.

  Back at the front of the room, she picked up the chalk and wrote on the blackboard: boys. be sure to clean up before you go.

  Then she left, feeling good. It would not
do for the boys to leave Remo's bullet-riddled body around where Mr. Winslow might find it in the morning and tell who was in the building.

  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."

  Remo sin
gled out the whisperer for a blinding smile. "That's not exactly the answer I was looking for," he said, "but we'll get back to that. All right, now, what is the capital of Venezuela? Anybody who knows speak right up."

  Silence.

  Remo reached forward to the nearest two faces and slapped them hard, across both cheeks with his left and right hands.

  "You're not trying, class. Again. The capital of Venezuela?"

  A voice ventured: "San Juan?"

  "Close, but no cigar," said Remo, who did not know the capital of Venezuela but knew it was not San Juan.

  "All right now, all together, the square root of one-hundred-sixty-eight. Come on, don't be shy. The square root of one-hundred-sixty-eight."

  He paused. "Nobody knows. Too bad. You don't know arithmetic, either. That'll have to go into my report to the board of education."

  He smiled again. "Let's try grammar. Is 'walking' past tense or an infinitive?" asked Remo, who would not know either if it was mailed to him in an envelope.

  "Hey, mister, can we go home?"

  "Not while class is in session. What kind of child are you, wanting to miss out on your education? 'Walking.' Past tense or infinitive? Don't all speak at once."

  There was deathly silence on the roof. Remo could hear only the worried shallow breathing of ten frightened boys whose decision to jump him and stomp him had evaporated when he put his bare hand through a steel door.

  "I've got to tell you that this is probably the worst response I've had in all my years in the classroom."

  "You ain't no teacher." It was the same voice that had told Remo to fuck himself.

  "Oh, you're wrong," Remo said. "I am a teacher. True, I didn't go to teachers' college to avoid going to Vietnam. That explains why I'm not wearing jeans and peace buttons. But I'm a teacher. For instance. You,.. come out here."

  "Me?" said the same voice.

  "Yes, dummy, you." The boy, the oldest and biggest, got to his feet and shuffled slowly forward. Even with the light behind the boy, Remo could see his animal eyes, sizing up Remo, thinking maybe about a quick kick to the groin to disable Remo or at least to put him down.

  "I'll prove I'm a teacher," Remo said. "Like right now, you're thinking about trying to kick me. So go ahead."