Night of the Juggler

Chapter 14

Kate Boyd stopped in the middle of a silent glade glowing softly with moonlight and made a practical attempt to assess and try to find some solution to her problems. She hadn’t heard her Scottie barking for the last several minutes and was praying fervently that he had tired of romping about the park and was now trotting back to Fifth Avenue, where Mr. Brennan would find him and take him up to their apartment.

But Kate, in running after the elusive sound of her Scottie’s barks and yelps, had managed to get herself hopelessly lost; she had the worrisome notion that she had been traveling in a wide circle for at least the last five minutes. If she walked east, that would take her back to Fifth Avenue. If she went south, that would bring her out on Fifty-ninth Street, and from there she could walk to her apartment. But the difficulty was, she wasn’t sure which way was east and which was south. Once on a camping trip, her father had taught her how to find the north star by using the Big Dipper; the handle pointed to it, or the tip of the bowl, she couldn’t remember which. In any event, the information wouldn’t help, because while the pale sky was full of stars, she couldn’t seem to find the Big Dipper.

Then there was something about Orion the Giant. His sword-did it point south? Or was it his belt?

In the distance, but quite a way off, she could see an occasional flash of headlights, cars curving through the park’s traffic system. She turned in a slow, full circle, hoping to find a building on the skyline she could identify. But she was too close to the trees for an unbroken view, and the odd spires and lights she could make out were indefinite patterns against the darkness.

And so she stood uncertainly in the moonlit glade, glancing again at the sky but finding no help or reassurance from the stars. .

Gus Soltik stood in the shadows of a huge oak tree and watched her.

. She was lost. He knew that. It gave him a strange sense of superiority, because he was never lost. He didn’t need street names and numbers. He could go anywhere he wanted, guided by subtle instincts, along alleys and docks, across tenement roofs, aware of every smell and stir within range of his acute senses, moving always with relentless but unconscious precision.

His huge hands tightened on the flight bag, and he could feel the strong, hot rush of blood in his body. Now, he thought.

Now. .

Kate heard the approach of his pounding footsteps. She turned and saw a big man in a brown turtleneck sweater and yellow leather cap rushing toward her, and something familiar about him made her wonder if she had met or seen him before.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, but then she became aware of his slack lips and glazed eyes, and she knew the look of him was wrong, dreadfully wrong, and when his huge hands reached for her, Kate Boyd began to scream for her life.

Rudi Zahn heard her screams. He was about fifty yards away, striding along in his vigorous fashion, when Kate’s first screams destroyed the night’s silence.

Luther Boyd, south and east of the glade by several hundred yards, sensed the merest whisper of that scream and wondered if it had been the cawing of a nocturnal bird or branches of trees twisting against each other in freshening winds.

But he zeroed on that sound like the needle of a radar screen, orienting himself to its location by a stand of Styrax japonica to the left of it and an outcropping of natural rock directly in line with it. And then he began to run.

Rudi Zahn’s first reaction to those screams was a sickening indecision; his fears were so deeply rooted that it was almost physically impossible to take a step toward danger. His instinct was to run in the opposite direction, with the solacing lie in his throat that this was the best thing to do, to find a phone or police officer, professional aid. Then the screaming stopped abruptly, replaced by an even more terrible silence.

His body was trembling with fear, but some emotion kept him rooted to the ground, and that was the rekindled memories of Ilana, whose pale face blazed in his mind like a star. He had watched from a basement window of the priest’s house while soldiers dragged her to the trucks.

She had fought like a hellcat, but no one in the village had raised a hand to save her. The others were willing victims, going to slaughter like cattle, but Ilana had fought back, which hadn’t angered the soldiers, of course; they savored resistance, it added spice to their dreary brutality.

Against his will, against everything he was trying to safeguard for himself and Crescent Holloway, Rudi Zahn ran in the direction of those now-silent screams.

He came into a clearing filled with moonlight and saw a huge man in a brown sweater running toward the shadows of trees with a young child in his arms. The girl’s white legs were thrashing helplessly, but the big man had locked her arms with one arm and had stifled her screams with a huge hand across her mouth.

“Stop!” Zahn shouted, and ran after the man and the struggling little girl.

Gus Soltik wheeled around, his heavy, smudged features working with terror and rage.

“No!” he shouted at the man. “No!” he cried again, his voice high and shrill, almost strangled against the pressures of his corded neck muscles.

“Let her alone!” Zahn screamed the words at him.

Gus Soltik threw the girl aside and ran at Rudi Zahn, his mouth twisting spasmodically, his body feverish at this dreadful, frustrating intervention; his excitement had been so intensified by the girl’s struggles that he felt as if his blood were boiling.

Zahn avoided Soltik’s first lunging charge, leaping to one side and kicking at Gus Soltik’s legs, which sent the huge man sprawling to the ground.

“Run!” he shouted to the girl. He might take the beating he had always dreaded, but that might buy enough time for the girl to get away.

“Run!” he shouted again, as Gus Soltik scrambled to his feet, his breathing heavy, eyes dilated with rage.

But Kate Boyd didn’t run; she stood her ground. She wasn’t sure why, but some deep instinct of survival told her that was the wise thing to do. She would fight back her fear and stand fast because she believed she knew what excited this big man, and that was her screams, her struggles; she had already felt what they did to his body.

Rudi Zahn swung a fist at Gus Soltik’s face, and while the blow landed, it had no more effect than if it had struck a mountainside.

Soltik bellowed hoarsely and with the back of his huge hand struck Zahn across the side of his head and sent him reeling to the ground, his skull exploding with roaring flashes of pain.

Gus Soltik kicked him in the ribs with his heavy, thick Wellingtons, and Zahn groaned in agony. The powerful kick struck Zahn in the face, laying bare his cheek to the bone, but after that searing torment came merciful oblivion.

Gus Soltik stared at Kate, puzzled and vaguely fearful. Why didn’t she run? You couldn’t chase them if they didn’t run. Then his big body became tense once more with fear and anger. Someone else was coming after him. . Silent, so silent that the girl hadn’t heard the whispering sounds in the underbrush beyond the black trees. Picking up his flight bag, he grabbed the fabric of Kate’s ski jacket, twisting it sharply at the collar line, so powerfully that it strangled the scream rising in her throat. With long strides which forced Kate into a stumbling run, Gus Soltik vanished from the clearing, losing himself with the girl in the shadows of big trees.

It was only seconds after this that Luther Boyd came on the body of Kate’s little Scottie, its head twisted sideways at a grotesque angle, its black body pitifully small in death, looking somehow lonely and discarded and forgotten on the ground in a tangle of wood ivy. But Harry Lauder’s death had not been without point, for it gave Boyd a direct bearing on the course of the man who wore those huge Wellingtons. He had no longer needed the dog’s barking to lure Kate toward him; from this exact geographical fix, he obviously had a visual make on Kate Boyd.

Without fully regaining consciousness, Rudi Zahn stirred reflexively against the pain in his face and stomach. When he tried to rise, placing his palms against the ground and pushing down hard, his ribs reacted in an agonized spasm, and a groan forced itself past the constricted muscles of his throat.

Boyd, coursing warily through the trees a dozen yards away, heard the sound and ran toward it, his right hand whipping the Browning from beneath his belt and flipping it off the safety in a fluid gesture that was as effortless and reflexive as the beat of his heart. He ran into the moonlit glade and saw a man with thinning hair lying motionless on the ground. One side of his face was chopped up like raw meat, the cheekbone pale and clean in the soft yellow light.

Boyd checked the perimeter of the clearing with alert eyes. A mugging, that was a first thought. As he walked to the figure on the ground, his eyes checking the black honey locusts circling the glade, he spotted something that caused anger to surge through his veins, but it was anger tinged with hope, for in several areas near the unconscious man were the familiar imprints of big Wellington boots, their stacked heels creating indentations an inch deep in the damp earth.

Boyd checked the clearing in an ever-widening circle until he came to footprints he knew had been made by Kate’s small black boots.

Running back to the unconscious man, Luther Boyd gripped his shoulders and turned him as gently as he could onto his back.

Nevertheless, a groan of pain burst from the man’s lips, and Boyd then saw the muddy imprint of a boot against the tattersall vest under the man’s gray flannel jacket. The jagged flap of flesh hanging away from his cheekbone was probably the result of another blow from those Wellingtons. Boyd checked the man’s wallet: Rudi Zahn was the name on his driver’s license, and his address was in Beverly Hills, California.

Luther Boyd had spent his adult life in practicing and teaching martial arts and as a military historian had professionally examined terrain long after the cannon had faded into the silence of history.

And now he stared about this open stretch of moonlit ground and studied it as he would a battlefield.

Kate had screamed; no cawing bird or rustling tree, but his daughter, Kate, screaming. This man, Rudi Zahn, had heard her, had gone to her aid and had taken a brutal battering from the man who wore the Wellingtons. The question he couldn’t answer was this: Why hadn’t Kate made a run for it? Maybe she believed she had no chance of getting away. But possibly, and this gave him a certain hope, she had been shrewd enough to do something so unpredictable that it might jar a psycho off balance.

It was then, with his exceptional peripheral vision, that Boyd noted a movement among the trees, and when Patrolman Prima came running into the glade, the Browning in Boyd’s hand was pointed squarely at Prima’s head. Prima’s own police special was in his hand, but it was pointed fifteen degrees off target from Boyd, and instinct told Prima with chilling force that he couldn’t move it fast enough to turn the situation at least into a stalemate. Something in the way that big, rangy man held the gun warned Prima that he knew how to use it.

“Holster your weapon, son,” Boyd said quietly, and turned back to look for signs of consciousness in Rudi Zahn.

“On your feet,” Prima said, swinging his gun around on the man crouched in the middle of the clearing.

“I told you, put that gun away,” Boyd said without looking at Prima.

“I’m Colonel Boyd.”

“And I’m telling you-” Prima stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, swallowing with difficulty, reacting then to Boyd’s name. “Jesus Christ,” he said softly. “You’re the kid’s father.”

Boyd looked at him intently. “How would you know that?”

“Well, your wife called it in.”

“Goddamn her,” Boyd said bitterly. And now, he thought, the park would be crawling with cops, rookies like this one blundering through the woods with drawn guns, and he had to stay here until he asked Rudi Zahn one vital question. No, he thought, and checked his wristwatch. I’ll waste just thirty more seconds.

“Sir, she did the right thing,” “Prima said. “Lieutenant Tonnelli’s already got the park sealed off with squads.”

Still eyeing his watch, Boyd said. “Then tell your lieutenant to set up an east-west skirmish line between Sixty-ninth and Seventieth Streets, from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West. Some psycho-and my daughter-are traveling north and they’ve crossed Seventieth.”

Rudi Zahn moaned and opened his eyes.

“Ilana,” he said. “He took Ilana.”

The man was in shock, Boyd knew. Maybe he’d wasted a precious moment after all.

“Why didn’t my daughter try to run?” he asked Zahn, his voice low and intense.

“I couldn’t help her,” Zahn said. “He was too big, too crazy. He took her away.”

Patrolman Prima removed the police artist’s sketch of the Juggler from his tunic, quickly opened it, and held it in front of Zahn.

“This the guy grabbed the kid?”

Zahn’s eyes narrowed, and he nodded.

“Brown sweater, maniac.”

“Was my daughter tied up?” Boyd asked him sharply.

Zahn shook his head wearily. “I told her to run. I shouted at her to run. But she didn’t.”

“Get a medic for him,” Boyd said to Prima, and while Prima was debating with himself just how many orders he should take from this civilian, Boyd leaped to his feet and within seconds was lost among the dark trees, running north after the imprints of the big Wellingtons.

Patrolman Prima snapped a switch on his two-way radio and spoke into it.

“This is Patrolman Prima. About twenty yards east of the Mall, between Sixty-ninth and Seventieth. We got action here. Lieutenant Tonnelli? Lieutenant Tonnelli?”

“Give me what you got,” Rusty Boyle answered him. “He’s on wheels. I’ll patch it to him through Central. . ”

Within minutes after receiving a positive make on the Juggler and the confirmation that he had crossed Seventieth Street and was traveling north, Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli’s unmarked car turned off the Mall and drove at speed through a formal stand of red maples toward the glade where Prima was administering rudimentary first aid to Rudi Zahn.

More equipment had already been dispatched to the scene: light trucks, an ambulance with police medics, communications units and emergency service vans equipped with shotguns and snipers’ rifles, and two teams of expert marksmen. The caliber of the ammo used in the sniper’s rifle was incredibly low, almost a third less than a.22, but with a muzzle velocity so fast that its striking power was such that a human target would go down no matter where the bullet struck it. The scopes on the rifles were powerful enough to bring targets to the cross hairs that would be invisible to the naked eye.

And from the first radio broadcast ordered by Lieutenant Tonnelli, the print and electronic media had been gathering pools of photographers, reporters, TV and radio staffs to monitor the remote-control units already on their way to cover still another of the Juggler’s grisly escapades.

While from opposite ends of the borough, Commanders Slocum and Larkin, in their limousines with sirens wailing, were on their way to give the public what it seemed to want and need: the drama of the human chase, the exhilaration of a televised scrutiny of the police running a monster to ground under the direction and scenario of borough commanders in uniform, twin silver stars gleaming on their shoulders.