Although the processional music had begun, the bigot hadn’t yet assumed firing position. At his side lay Entertainment Weekly, with which he’d apparently been passing time. Only an instant ago, he’d extracted a thick circlet of chocolate from a roll of candies.
Surprised by the shudder that passed through the scaffolding, the gunman turned to his left. He looked up in amazement at Dylan looming no more than four feet away.
As far as the candy might be concerned, the guy was on automatic pilot. Even as his eyes widened in astonishment, he flicked his right thumb and popped the chocolate morsel off his index finger, directly into his open mouth.
Dylan chased the candy with a kick to the chin, perhaps knocking not only the chocolate but also a few teeth down the bastard’s throat.
The chocolate-lover’s head snapped back, rapping the plaster frieze. His eyes rolled up, his head sagged on a limp neck, and he slid onto his side, unconscious.
The kick unbalanced Dylan. He swayed, clutched the frieze with one hand, and avoided a fall.
* * *
On the work platform, Dylan arrived nearest the gunman, with Shep behind him.
Still feeling how it worked, the round and round of all that is, Jilly unfolded third in line and released Shep’s hand. ‘Uh!’ she said explosively because she knew no adequate words to express what she’d come to understand – more intuitively than intellectually – about the architecture of reality. ‘Uh!’
Under more benign circumstances, she might have sat down for an hour to brood, an hour or a year, and she probably would have sucked on her thumb and periodically asked for Mommy. They had folded not merely from the church floor to the top of the scaffold, however, but into the shadow of Death, and she didn’t have the leisure to indulge in the comfort of thumb sugar.
If Dylan wasn’t able to handle the human rodent with the gun, she could do nothing to help from her position, in which case they were doomed to death by gunfire, after all. Consequently, even as Dylan kicked, Jilly looked at once into the church, searching for the other two killers.
Twenty-two feet below, the wedding guests watched as the maid of honor followed bridesmaids along the main aisle. They were more than halfway to the altar. The height of the platform and the shadows gave cover to Dylan kicking, Jilly scouting, and Shepherd shepping.
Below, the bride had not yet appeared.
Step by thoughtful step, a little boy, serving as ring bearer, followed the maid of honor. Behind him came a pretty blond girl of five or six; she wore a lacy white dress, white gloves, white ribbons in her hair, and carried a small container of rose petals, which she scattered on the floor in advance of the bride.
The organist, with nothing but the chords of the wedding march, blasted promises of marital bliss to the high vaults, and in a rage of joy at the prospect of the pending vows, seemed to want to shake down the roof-lifting columns.
Jilly spotted the second gunman on the west-wall scaffold, above the colorful windows, far forward in the nave, where he would have a clean shot down through the chancel colonnade and under the high transverse arches, into the sanctuary. He lay on the platform, angled toward the waiting groom and the best man.
As far as she could tell, given the poor light at this height, the killer didn’t turn to watch the processional, but coolly prepared for slaughter, scoping targets and calculating lines of fire.
Holding an assault rifle by the barrel, Dylan joined Jilly and Shep. ‘Do you see them?’
She pointed at the west scaffold. ‘That one, but not the third.’
Their angle of view toward the east scaffold was not ideal. Too many intervening columns hid sections of the work platform from them.
Dylan asked Shepherd to fold them off this south-wall scaffold, but with an exquisite precision that would bring them to the side of the prone gunman on the west platform, with Dylan in the lead, where he could administer a little justice to the second killer with the butt of the assault rifle that he had taken from the first.