Night of the Juggler

Chapter 26

His odor was rank on the air now, and when Luther Boyd stepped from shadows into a moonlit grove, the movement froze Gus Soltik into immobility, and he stared at Boyd in terror, his body trembling and his breath coming so rapidly and harshly that saliva churned into froth on his lips. This was what he had feared this night, the “coldness” that had stalked him so cruelly and relentlessly. His thoughts were like splinters of steel piercing his tormented mind, bringing the redness there, the agonizing memories of the father’s threats and his mother’s punishment, the way they had held him and beat him, and his terrifying conviction that he knew no words to make them stop.

With an inarticulate scream of rage and fear, he jerked the hunting knife from his belt and rushed at Luther Boyd. He raised the knife high in the air, plunging it toward Boyd’s face, but Boyd trapped his wrist in a powerful Y formed by his own crossed forearms. The tip of the blade glittered inches from his eyes, but it was held there finally and forever by the strength of Boyd’s tempered muscle, and when Soltik tried to free himself, Boyd swiftly went to attack, the palm of his right hand going behind Soltik’s neck and the full swing of his arm sending the big man sprawling to the ground.

When Gus Soltik tried to rise to his feet, Boyd kicked him in the stomach with a lightning-fast blow, and an instant later, he broke Gus Soltik’s right wrist with a chop of his hand that sent the hunting knife flying into thick underbrush.

Sobbing with pain, Gus Soltik stumbled backward and collapsed on the ground against the bole of a tree.

He longed for his pain and torments to cease. He wanted it to be over forever. Why was it always like this? Going on and on. While his eyes filled with tears, he looked up and saw that the man standing above him holding that gun was like something carved from rock.

Luther Boyd stared at Gus Soltik’s swollen features, noting narrow eyes the color of mud, slack lips and bad teeth, the bulging forehead behind which stretched the festering swamp of mind. There was nothing there to salvage; this was human refuse. It was so often like this when you had slain your enemy on the battlefield; there was little cause for triumph because what you had destroyed was only another miserable and suffering human being, a youth whose mother went to sleep praying for him or something black and charred in the wreckage of a war machine.

He asked one question in a voice an inquisitor might have applied to a man stretched on a rack.

“Is she alive?”

Gus Soltik nodded dumbly, eagerly, filled with a desperate need somehow to soften the hatred and contempt he saw blazing in the eyes of the man who held the gun in his face.

“Date,” he said, in a hoarse, choked voice.

Luther Boyd put a hand on the man’s shoulder and jerked him to his feet, spinning him around and ramming the muzzle of the Browning against his spine. “Take me there,” Boyd said in the same voice he had used before.

Gus Soltik nodded quickly, almost happily and lurched forward, the gun at his back prodding him into a stumbling run.

The direction the Juggler had chosen coincided exactly with Boyd’s earlier estimate of where his daughter might be, and with the realization that this dreadful night might finally end with Kate alive and warm in his arms, he felt a surge of relief flowing through his veins.

“Hot chocolate,” Gus Soltik said, and his voice was soft and gentle and questing. “Boats to ride around the water.”

“Shut up!” Luther Boyd said, speaking quietly and ramming the barrel of the gun harder into the big man’s spine, increasing their speed until they were devouring ground with long, running strides.

Boyd flicked a glance over his shoulder. He couldn’t see him yet, but he could hear the soft purr of the motor on the night winds. Earlier he had monitored Sokolsky’s orders to all forces in the Ramble to return to the reserve unit in the Sheep Meadow. And so this could only be Tonnelli coming after him, stalking him in a police squad car, his Sicilian passions aroused to destroy the Juggler at any cost, including Kate Boyd’s life.

Tonnelli quietly braked the squad car to a complete stop and cut the engine. As silence settled around him, he carefully opened the door and stepped from the car, his eyes tracking back and forth across the darkness of the Ramble. Nothing stirred in that black expanse but the silhouettes of moving trees against a clear sky, and the only sounds he heard were occasional gusting winds that created a delicate rustle among the fallen autumn leaves.

Tonnelli’s hand was on the butt of his gun. He knew that Boyd had a two-way radio, and without any doubt Boyd would know the Ramble had been emptied of all police officers. And would know of the missing parks department truck, of course.

Tonnelli stood quiet and motionless in the darkness for at least thirty seconds, straining for a glimpse of Boyd or the Juggler, testing an almost unnatural silence by turning his head from side to side, trying to track sound and motion like a human radar screen.

At last the Gypsy moved carefully behind the wheel of the car, settled his powerful torso silently into the leather seat, and then turned the ignition and allowed the motor to idle softly before touching the accelerator and letting the car inch slowly toward a tunnel formed by towering fir trees.

Luther Boyd had checked the Juggler with a grip on his arm, and they had stood stock-still after Boyd had heard the sound of the squad car’s engine fade away into the silence of the night. He turned and stared over his shoulder at tangles of underbrush and the slowly swaying crowns of tall trees, trying to analyze Tonnelli’s tactics. Why had he stopped? Was he tracking him on foot now?

Then, after an interval of almost a minute, Boyd heard the squad car’s motor cough softly to life, and he tried to judge whether Tonnelli had got a fix on his position during that beat of silence.

He pushed Gus Soltik forward, prodding him with the barrel of the Browning.

“Faster,” he said, his voice as soft as the whispering winds in the trees.

Gus felt blood welling from the wound in his shoulder, and a sobbing moan grew helplessly in his throat.

“Quiet!” Boyd said, again speaking softly.

Tears were blinding Gus. Each time his heavy boots struck the ground, hot pain streaked through his body. His great chest heaved in spasms, but the air gave him no relief; it was scorching his lungs like the fires he dreaded at the dead mass. He was close to exhaustion, eyes blurred with helpless, agonized tears, when his swinging foot collided abruptly with the gnarled root of a tree, and he pitched forward to the ground, his great weight crashing down against the bullet wound in his shoulder. An involuntary scream was torn from the corded muscles of his throat, and he bellowed in pain again as Luther Boyd seized his arms and jerked him back to his feet.

Boyd clamped a hand with savage strength across Gus Soltik’s mouth, cutting off his screams.

“There’s a cop behind us,” he said, staring into the Juggler’s glazed, terrified eyes. “He wants to kill you.”

Gus Soltik fought back the scream that was trying to explode from his throat, for he realized in the depths of his shredded mind that this “coldness” would stop hurting him while the man with the scar he remembered so fearfully would never. .

Tonnelli hit the brakes of the squad car and quickly rolled down the window. There was silence now, but he had heard those screams and he knew he was on line with them. Removing his.38 from its holster, he took the bullhorn from the dashboard and pot it on the passenger seat, and then, his mood blackly triumphant, he floored the accelerator of the squad car and it raced ahead under a surge of power as if flung into the darkness by a giant catapult.

Boyd heard the sudden, accelerating roar of the squad car’s motor, and simultaneously he was blinded by the brilliant radiance of the car’s headlights. When Boyd spun to face the onrushing car, Gus Soltik collapsed to the ground, now attempting to stifle his screams by pressing the knuckles of his huge hands into his mouth.

Tonnelli slammed a foot against the brakes and pulled down powerfully on the steering wheel, bringing the car to a stop in a four-wheel drag, ten yards from them, the.38 in his hand, the bullhorn at his lips.

“Get out of my way, Boyd,” Tonnelli said.

“Kiss off, Tonnelli. You promised me you’d take him alive, but you tried to slaughter him.”

“Goddamn you to hell,” Tonnelli said, and his amplified voice was hoarse with anger and frustration. “We waste the psycho. Then I’ll flood this park with a thousand cops to find your daughter. He’s first priority. That’s police business. Don’t make me waste you too, Boyd.”

“Our covenant did not include sacrificing my daughter,” Luther Boyd said, his voice cold.

“You’re the bleeding-heart civilian after all,” Tonnelli said, naked contempt in his voice.

“He’ll lead me to my daughter. That’s what matters. Nothing else.”

“You’re wrong, Boyd. There’s more at stake.”

“I’m taking him out of here now,” Boyd said.

“God damn you!” Tonnelli shouted at him. “They’ll plea bargain him into five years at some mental country club. Then he’s out on the streets with that knife again. How many kids does he get on the next go-round? We got him now, Boyd. I want him dead. Can’t I get through to you?”

“On your feet,” Boyd said to the Juggler.

“One last time!” Tonnelli said furiously. “Out of my way.”

“Try me,” Boyd said quietly. And there was an edge to his tone that had brought battle-weary soldiers to attention in dozens of combat areas throughout the world, but Tonnelli either didn’t recognize it or chose to ignore it.

He nodded grimly. “Right,” he said.

Tonnelli put the car into reverse, and slammed his big foot down on the accelerator. As the car leaped backward, he spun the steering wheel until the grille of the car pointed directly at Boyd and the huddled body of Gus Soltik.

“I’m coming,” Tonnelli shouted and floored the accelerator, but as the car leaped forward under maximum power, Boyd whipped the Browning up with practiced speed and fired a shot that smashed through the passenger side of the windshield.

Firing two more shots so rapidly that the sounds merged into a single explosion, Boyd shattered both of the car’s blinding headlights, plunging this mad arena into total darkness.

Inside the car, Tonnelli had flung an arm across his face to block the stinging fragments of glass that were ricocheting from the roof and windows. Blinded by the sudden darkness, he heard two more shots, and his car went suddenly out of control as his front tires exploded.

While he fought the wheel to stabilize his direction, the crazily angling front wheels turned the car onto a collision course with a giant elm tree.

It was at that exact instant in this terrifying eruption of noises that the pain in Gus Soltik’s mind became intolerable. With a scream of anguish that was smothered by the crash of Tonnelli’s car against the trunk of the elm tree, Gus Soltik scuttled like a giant crab into the shadows of the Ramble.

Boyd listened to the sound of his passage through heavy underbrush.

He hesitated only long enough to make sure that Tonnelli was conscious and could summon aid from his radio if he needed it.

Then he ran west after the Juggler. Within a dozen yards, he heard the big man trip and fall, heard his body sprawling and crashing down a long escarpment of rock, his descent creating a noisy cascade of loose shale and stones.

And when the Juggler struck the ground at the foot of that long slope, he screamed in agony, and after that rending cry of anguish, his screaming stopped, and his pain was over.

Luther Boyd stood at the top of the escarpment and looked down at Gus Soltik’s body impaled on a triangular-shaped shard of black lava rock, the characteristic ribbing of the park, an impersonal, arbitrary instrument of execution, without judgment or reason, whose knife-sharp tip had plunged through Gus Soltik’s chest and now gleamed with his blood where it had broken through his spine.

There were flecks of blood on Gus Soltik’s big hand which was extended before him, pointing toward the immense sentinel of a tree where Luther Boyd had stopped earlier that night while tracking the Juggler and his daughter.

It was the tree that had been blasted dead-white by some long-past bolt of lightning and whose trunk had been splintered and breached ten or eleven feet above the ground, and it was there he had seen the dead wood around the black gaping hole brightened by clusters of clinging twigs and a line of frost-turned autumn leaves.

That had been the mistake he had made, and now he prayed to God and cursed himself without mercy that he hadn’t discovered this error too late to save Kate’s life. Traveling at a pace he no longer thought he was capable of, he ran toward that ghostly oak tree, shouting his daughter’s name but hearing only echoes sounding in pulsating rhythms through the darkness.

Not bright fall leaves growing improbably in dead wood ten feet above the ground, not the vivid fleck of berries, not the breast feathers of a robin or cardinal ringing the gaping hole in that lightning-blasted swamp oak. But red silk threads from Kate’s ski jacket. .

Boyd stopped at the trunk of the tree and murmured a prayer while crouching and leaping high enough to gain handholds in the lower half of the great gaping hole. Swinging his legs up and propping his feet flat against the tree trunk, he hung there, suspended in midair, straining against the wood with all his strength, using the muscles of his thighs and back as well as his shoulders and arms. How long Boyd remained in that position he would never know, but after what seemed an eternity, when the great resilient muscles of his body were at their breaking point, he heard a rending, grinding sound, and then, inch by agonizing inch, a wide section of the rotting trunk began to separate from the tree, bending away with Boyd’s weight until finally it snapped well below his feet. And as he hurtled backward, the rotting wood clutched to his chest, he saw-a second before crashing to the ground-the bound and gagged figure of his daughter inside the hollow bole of the tree, the tape on her mouth streaked with mud, her hair matted with rotted wood and fragments of moss.

But while Kate’s eyes were glazed with panic, he knew from the look of her that she was unhurt and gloriously alive.