She might have stood on the roof for a couple minutes, until she calmed herself and regained her confidence; but she didn’t have that option. Three seconds, four maximum, after her arrival, she began to slide.
Maybe the slate had been black when first installed, but maybe it had been mostly gray or green, or pink, for all she knew. Right now, here in the heart of a rainless summer, these shingles appeared smooth and black because a fine powder of soot had settled upon them from the oily air of smoggy days.
This soot proved to be as fine as powdered graphite. Powdered graphite is an excellent lubricant. So was this.
Fortunately Jilly started near the peak of the roof; therefore, she didn’t at once slide all the way off and drop to whatever expanse of bone-breaking concrete, or impaling iron fence, or pack of savage pit bulls, might be waiting for her below. She glided about ten feet, regained traction too abruptly, almost pitched forward, but stayed upright.
Then she slid again. Skiing down black slate. Big jump coming up. Building momentum for an Olympic-qualifying distance.
Jilly wore athletic shoes, and she was pretty athletic herself, but she couldn’t arrest her slide. Although she waved her arms like a lumberjack in a log-rolling contest, she teetered on the brink of losing her balance, teetered, and then one foot flew out from under her. As she started to go down, realizing that she was going to smack slate with her tailbone, she wished she had a fat butt instead of a skinny little ass, but all the years of doughnut denial had at last caught up to her, and here came the void.
Like hell. She refused to die a Negative Jackson death. She had the willpower to make her destiny, rather than be a victim of fate.
The round and round of all that is, beautiful in its eleven-dimensional simplicity, folded to her command, and she left the roof, the soot, left the slide to death unfinished.
* * *
Falling toward the floor of the church, Jilly vanished, and with her disappearance, the screams of the wedding guests spiked, causing the organist to abandon the keyboard. The many screams broke off as one in a collective gasp of astonishment.
Gazing down on the spectacle, Shepherd said, ‘Wow.’
Dylan snapped his attention toward the work platform on the east scaffold, where the gunman with the rifle stood. Perhaps too stunned to act on his original intentions, the killer hadn’t yet opened fire. His hesitation wouldn’t last long; in mere seconds, his hatred would prove powerful enough to purge the wonder of having witnessed an apparent miracle.
‘Buddy, here to there.’
‘Wow.’
‘Take us over there, buddy. To the bad man.’
‘Thinking.’
‘Don’t think, buddy. Just go. Here to there.’
Down on the floor of the church, the majority of the wedding guests, who hadn’t been looking up during Jilly’s midair appearance and subsequent plunging disappearance, turned in bewilderment to those who had seen it all. A woman started to cry, and the piping voice of a child – no doubt a certain pigtailed girl – said, ‘I told you so, I told you so!’
‘Buddy—’
‘Thinking.’
‘For God’s sake—’
‘Wow.’
Inevitably, one of the wedding guests – a woman in a pink suit and a pink feathered hat – spotted the third killer, who stood at the edge of the work platform atop the east-wall scaffold, leaning out, looking down, restrained from falling by a tether that anchored him to the wall. The pink-suited woman must have seen the rifle, too, for she pointed and screamed.
Nothing could have been better calculated than this cry of alarm to snap the gunman out of his merciful hesitation.
* * *
Sooty roof to scaffold platform, Jilly folded in to the church with the expectation of finding the third gunman and kicking him in the head, the gut, the gonads, or any other kickable surface that might be presented to her. She found herself facing a long run of deserted platform, with the painted-plaster frieze to her left, and with the massive marble columns rising through the open church to her right.