Night of the Juggler

Chapter 22

Gus Soltik stood motionless on a rocky hill, his huge figure merging with the shadows of trees. His heart was pounding, and his dim thoughts were streaked with panic and confusion. The word forming torturously in his mind charged him with frustration and helplessness.

“Walls. . walls.”

The hammer and thunder of the police helicopters were gone from the skies above Central Park. The blaring music had faded away, and the sound of yelping dogs had disappeared into the strange and ominous silence that lay with a smothering weight on Gus Soltik’s angry fears and confusions.

He felt at the exact center of that silence, walls. . It was difficult and dangerous to move. They would hear. And he knew that “coldness” was close behind.

Not hurt. He hadn’t wanted to hurt him. He was too old, not like Lanny, but he wasn’t good like Lanny. He had a gun and yelled at him. Then he had to hurt him.

He tried to control his growing excitement because he could go to find “black-sweet” now. His mother got angry when he was excited.

Because it led to his rages. But he felt no rage at “black-sweet.” It was a relief, a happiness. And he had money. From the old like Mrs. Schultz that he had hurt.

Even if they caught him now, they would never see “white legs.” He would never tell them where she was, because if he didn’t tell them, no one would ever find her. And so they wouldn’t hurt him.

But Gus Soltik’s dim brain was troubled. Not by the pain in his shoulder or whether they would find “greenropes.” It was the dread of the beginning of pain that tortured his thoughts. Once it was present, wild and living in his body, he could accept it. It wasn’t even the fear of “coldness” that troubled him.

It was the silence. .

And it was because of that strange silence that had settled over the park that Luther Boyd made an almost fatal mistake. At that instant he was very close to the Juggler. Boyd was, in fact, slowly and with infinite care, climbing the escarpment of rock on which Gus Soltik was standing.

For the last twenty minutes, Boyd had been trailing the Juggler and Kate across acres of rocky ground, topped with a thick cover of thornbush and gorse.

In three separate places he had found flecks and threads of red nylon from Kate’s ski jacket snagged on spiky underbrush. The last had been impaled on the broken limb of a stunted horse chestnut which was growing out of such a tight crevice of rock that Boyd surmised it had been planted there by a squirrel or blue jay.

Since all those tiny bits of fabric had been snagged approximately six feet above the ground, Boyd knew that the Juggler was still carrying his daughter over his shoulder.

But now Boyd was deeply troubled because sounds he had heard only seconds earlier told him that the Juggler was retracing his original route, which could mean he had abandoned or destroyed Kate at the terminus of that line and was now doubling back in an attempt to slip past the police and out of the park. But now those sounds of his passage through heavy brush had merged into the eerie silence.

The man had stopped moving, was standing above him. Why? Was the psycho stalking him now?

And it was at that instant, climbing the steep angle of the escarpment, that Boyd made a miscalculation. Testing a knoblike tree root for a handhold, he judged it to be strong enough to support his weight, but when he pulled himself up, the rotting wood splintered in his fist, and he slipped a dozen feet down the facing of rock, the sprawling descent of his body creating a miniature avalanche of loose shale and twigs that shattered the silence as dramatically as rifle fire.

Boyd froze his body against the cliff, knowing that any motion would betray him to the man on top of the hill. But his right hand moved silently toward the Browning, which was pressed hard against his stomach by the weight of his own body.

In the shifting shadows created by moonlight and swaying trees, he saw the figure of a huge man high above him on the crest of the hill. The man raised both hands in the air and hurled a large jagged rock at Luther Boyd. The rock struck the side of the hill four feet above Boyd and sent a spray of flintlike splinters into his face and eyes. He threw himself sideways, but not in time; the caroming rock slammed into his left shoulder and knocked him in a breathless, flailing heap to the foot of the cliff.

He bounced from the ground like something made of steel and rubber and dived full length behind the mass of a pair of tangled wild holly bushes. Boyd worked the Browning free from beneath his belt. His mouth and nostrils were full of dust, and he knew his face had been nicked and bloodied by the shower of rock fragments. But it was the shoulder that worried him; if it were broken, the Juggler would have an overwhelming advantage.

Moving with gingerly caution, Boyd climbed to his feet and peered across the tops of the holly bushes. The man was gone. Boyd tested his left arm and shoulder and to his relief felt only the pain of bruised muscles, not the crunch of broken bones.

Then far away to his north and east, Boyd heard someone calling Gus Soltik’s name, the sound high and sweet in the silence, as pretty as circles of silver against the darkness.

Above him and to his right, he heard the pound of distant footsteps, the passage of a big body through grass and bushes. It was the Juggler, he knew, and by the length and speed of those strides, Boyd knew the Juggler was now traveling alone. .

With nothing to be gained by silence, Boyd rapidly climbed the escarpment of rock, but when he reached the small clearing on top of the hill, the footsteps of the Juggler had faded off on an eastern line into dark stands of trees.

Luther Boyd stood still for a moment, massaging and kneading the muscles of his left shoulder, while testing freshening winds and the unnatural silence with the antennae of his probing senses. The police tactics had been radically changed, he realized then. They weren’t trying to run the Juggler to the ground. They were setting a different kind of trap for him. And there was a sickening implication there which made it imperative for Boyd to change his own plans. He had been determined to go after Kate because as long as there was a chance she was alive, that was his only priority. She might be bound and gagged in a way that would strangle her unless he got to her in time. Or she might be confined somewhere, smothering for lack of air. Or bleeding. .

But he couldn’t go after her now. He had to find the Juggler first because the police might waste him on sight and that psycho was the only person in the world who knew where Kate Boyd was now.

Boyd swept the ground with his flashlight to find the Wellingtons, but something else caught his eye, a large, jagged rock gleaming with blood and a cluster of white hairs. Not Kate’s blond hair, he realized with exquisite relief, but coarse white hair in lacy relief against the shining blood.

He followed drops of blood and the Wellington prints a dozen yards to a mossy ravine, where he found the sprawled body of a white-haired man with a Colt diamond-back.38 revolver lying near his right hand.

The right cheek and skull of the old man had been crushed and bloodied by brutal blows. A wallet lay beside the boy. There was no money in it, but the ID revealed the man’s name to be Samuel Fritzel, with an address in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Protruding from a pocket of Fritzel’s topcoat was a narrow leather case with a carrying strap and Boyd saw that it encased a two-way radio. He pulled it from Fritzel’s pocket, flipped a switch, and spoke urgently into the microphone.

“Lieutenant Tonnelli!”

“Tonnelli here.”

“This is Luther Boyd.”

“I leveled with you, Colonel. The chiefs scrambled those choppers.”

“Why did you discontinue the aerial surveillance?”

“We’ve set a trap for him. We’ve cooled everything, hoping he’ll relax and fall into it.”

“Then goddamn it, listen to me, Lieutenant. The Juggler’s alone, traveling east. Do you understand what that means? He’s either killed my daughter or hidden her someplace where she’s helpless. I’m heading west, on a line with Seventy-seventh Street, trying to find her. But I want your word that you take that bastard alive, Lieutenant. Because he’s the only one who knows where Kate is.”

“You’ve got it, Colonel. We may waste his kneecaps, but he’ll be alive.”

“Two things,” Boyd said, bitter at each wasted second. “Sergeant Boyle’s in the Ramble with a bullet through his thigh. Between Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth, a hundred yards from the eastern border, near a grove of corkscrew willows. Now does this mean anything? I’m using the radio of a dead one, name of Samuel Fritzel.”

“Jesus!” There was weariness in Tonnelli’s voice. “An old bull from New Jersey. Wanted to help us out because-”

Boyd cut the lieutenant’s voice in mid-sentence and was off at a fast tracking gait to find sign of his daughter.

Within twenty yards of the facing of rock, after running a relentless zigzagging course, Boyd found a fleck of red fabric on the limb of thornbush, threads snatched in passage from Kate’s ski jacket. It was still six feet above the ground, so at that time she was still slung over the psycho’s shoulder. Within another few yards he found prints of the Wellingtons, which he followed into a clearing, moving faster now, running very nearly in a straight line, picking up prints by a flicking left-right movement of his flashlight, tracking them easily across the wide lea of rough moist grassland to where they stopped at an immense sentinel of a tree which loomed ghostlike in the darkness, its bark whitened and deadened by some long-past bolt of lightning. The trunk of the tree, which Boyd identified as a swamp oak, had been splintered and breached ten or eleven feet above the ground, and the dead wood around the black, gaping hole was brightened by a few tiny clusters of stubbornly clinging twigs and a feathery tracing of frost-tinged autumn leaves.

The Juggler had stopped here, and Boyd guessed that he had done so to check the clearing he had just crossed to see if there was any sign of pursuit.

Then the Wellingtons resumed their western line, but Boyd lost them within a dozen yards because the terrain changed from spongy grassland to jagged sheets of shale and granite.

Ahead of Boyd were walls of rock rising in irregular contours against the horizon, and as he made his way toward these natural barriers, assaying their obvious capacity for concealment or imprisonment, he began to experience a touch of hope.

For this was a logical and strategic goal for the Juggler; a maze of gullies, caves, and potholes, dank and fearsome as dungeons, natural oubliettes a deranged mind would choose for the confinement of a small, helpless child.

If Kate was dead, he thought, there was nothing but heaven for her beyond tonight, because as a marine epitaph he had seen on Guadalcanal put it, she’d already served her time in hell.

Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli was waiting for the Juggler. He stood with Samantha in the shadows of a grove of colossal male cork trees, with heavily corded bark and wide, spreading limbs. The Gypsy and Samantha were concealed five yards behind a ten-man formation of marksmen, who were also covered completely by the shadows and trunks of the giant trees.

Every pair of eyes was fixed on Manolo, who strolled through a moonlight glade, softly calling Gus Soltik’s name, his sweet voice threaded with suggestions of intimate excitement.

The marksmen were in uniform, rifles at the ready. The eyelets of their boots and their belt buckles were painted black. The buttons of their uniforms were covered with black suede. Each man wore a helmet of tight black knit. No man was wearing a ring, a wristwatch, or an identification bracelet. Nothing on their persons could create betraying reflection of moonlight.

Everyone was scanning the opposite side of the glade toward which Manolo was casually sauntering.

Lieutenant Tonnelli had in effect given the western side of the glade to the Juggler. At the opposite end of this open clearing there were no police officers. All potential firepower had been concentrated on the eastern side of the field, while the western area had been left enticingly empty for the Juggler.

But Tonnelli’s conscience was uneasy. As a police officer he knew he had made the right decision and therefore could live with it. But it had been hard to lie to Luther Boyd. The marksmen were not going to take the Juggler alive. Their orders from Tonnelli had been cold and classic: shoot to kill. There was simply no alternative. They had to kill him now while they had the chance. If they failed, where would he surface next October 15? How many tender, young victims might he claim in the coming years if they lost him tonight?

That was their job as cops, to waste him the instant he appeared on the cross hairs of the marksmen’s scopes, the instant he moved into Manolo’s moonlit terrain.

Then, with the Juggler dead, Tonnelli could send a thousand cops into the park to search every square foot of it. They could illuminate shadows with the brilliance of light trucks and helicopters, and each cop could work with the confidence that there was no madman running loose to blow his brains out with a gun or drive a knife between his shoulder blades.

Luther Boyd had himself confused with Daniel Boone and God, Tonnelli thought bitterly. But the Gypsy’s attempt to assuage his conscience was not wholly successful. Because it wasn’t his daughter’s life at balance in the golden scales of Libra; it wasn’t his blood and kin.

“The little bastard’s showing off,” Samantha said tensely.

“He’s doing fine.”

They spoke in whispers.

“Well, I’m scared for him,” she said. “I’m scared for him, you hear me, Gypsy? He’s a smart butt. A showboat.”

And indeed, Manolo was showing off, converting his slow and sensual passage across the glade into an amusing and outrageous ego trip.

Laughing softly, he patted his pretty curls and called to Gus Soltik in tones that quivered with sexual promise.

Manolo felt lucky and happy. On a practical note, he was out of hock to Sam, and when you did a favor for a police lieutenant, you just might get one in return, and that was a nice thing to have going for you when you sold your ass for a living in the streets and alleys of New York.

Manolo lit a joint and sucked smoke slowly and deeply into his lungs, holding it there for a pleasurable, dizzying moment before exhaling it through the perfect circle formed by his soft red lips.

“Come on, Gus. No need for a big stud like you to be afraid. Big lover stud, we’ll trick up a storm.”

In the grove of cork trees, Samantha said tensely to Tonnelli, “What’s he using that psycho’s name for? You told him not to.”

“It’s all right, Maybelle,” the Gypsy said, but he had also felt a stir of anxiety. Manolo was taking a long and unnecessary gamble using Gus Soltik’s name.

They had told him to stay in plain view in the moonlight, to keep out of shadows. But Manolo wasn’t afraid of Gus Soltik. He was supremely confident of his ability to manage and manipulate faggots. He was always in charge there, literally in the saddle. He was the candy they drooled for, and unless they were good little boys, they’d never get their hot fingers on it.