1975 - Night of the Juggler (26 page)

“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.

Chapter 23

Preconceptions of the human mind and eye are the prime hazards in aerial reconnaissance: Airfields are expected to be long and narrow; military units in barracks are formed in squares; cannon revetments, with circles of sandbags, appear as doughnuts from the sky; and their supply roads, unless artfully camouflaged, are arrows that reveal their existence by pointing straight at their hearts. Nature is haphazard, careless, disorganized; man’s inevitable tendency is to make his environment conform to orderly and discernible patterns.

Luther Boyd was searching acres of rock and underbrush for the sign of man. He was seeking evidence of someone’s need to alter the natural disorder of environment.

The night was colder, and the wind was rising, stirring dry leaves on rock-studded sheets of ground. Rain was in the freshening air, and above him the sudden gusts and squalls drove tatters of clouds across the waning moon.

It was then he found what he had been searching for. Before that moment his frustration had deepened into despair. He remembered the quotation from Von Moltke which had been stressed at the Point:

“First ponder, then dare.” But what to dare? What to dare
with?
he had been thinking helplessly.

But now his flashlight revealed a heap of stones stacked against a wall of rock in an orderly fashion, and this was what he had been seeking, not the casual formations of nature but the defining work of human hands.

He hurled the rocks aside, breathing hard after the first minutes of work, because the stones were large and heavy and packed tightly against the mouth of a tunnel. But when he forced an opening and poured light from his flashlight into a small cave, he found himself staring at a dusty stack of empty wine bottles. He read labels with listless interest, his eyes helpless and despairing, realizing that each passing second might be ticking off his daughter’s life. Wine-Apple, Muscatel. . . . Suddenly, and for reasons he didn’t understand, he was warned and alerted by a leaf on the ground. It was flecked with mud, but beautiful with the autumn colors of yellow and scarlet. His heart began to pound. He knew then he must have made a dreadful error. A mistake of miscalculation. First ponder, then dare. He had dared, in a sense, to outguess the Juggler, but had he pondered, had he
thought?

He had misread signs, he was sure of it. A clue, an arrow pointing to his daughter, had escaped his trained eyes.

This conviction of failure was a special torture to Luther Boyd because he had failed Kate where he shouldn’t have failed her, in the area of his own professional strengths and skills.

Boyd picked up the mud-flecked red-and-yellow maple leaf and stared at it, demanding an answer from it.

From behind the shadows that Manolo was approaching, Gus Soltik was crouched close to the ground, concealed by dense underbrush and the low black limbs of trees. His body was responding with almost agonizing excitement to Manolo’s presence and beauty. But some primal fear warned Gus Soltik against revealing himself. It was the man in black climbing the rocky hill to get him. That was what had been behind him all night. The “coldness.”

Deflecting that primitive terror was the thought that they would never punish him because they would never find her.

He was blinded by lust. His eyes saw nothing but Manolo, the black, curly hair and the soft, smoothly vulnerable throat.

Manolo was only twenty feet from the Juggler now, standing in moonlight, blending with shadows, and Gus Soltik was achingly ready for him.

In an urgent whisper Samantha said to Tonnelli, “Get him the fuck out of there, Gypsy.”

“Don’t worry, we got him covered.”

“But not if you can’t see him.”

It had amused Manolo to drift at last into the shadows of the big trees.

It amused and excited him because he thought (or hoped, at least) that it would frighten Samantha. It made him feel important to know he could do that to her. She had some kinky thing going for him, the way she had hugged and patted him in the police car that brought them up to this area of the park.

He stood shrouded in darkness, laughing and softly calling Gus Soltik’s name.

When Manolo disappeared from view, Samantha tried to scream a warning at him, but Tonnelli saw the tightening cords of her throat and swiftly clamped a hand across her mouth, stifling the sound into a strangled sob. Several of the police marksmen turned, reflexes instinctively triggered by the silent struggle between Samantha and Lieutenant Tonnelli.

The Juggler spotted movement in the trees at the east side of the glade. Frowning lines formed on his wide, rounded forehead. At first only a dim curiosity stirred in his mind. Somebody . . . somebody else wanted the boy.

But after that first jealous thought, which made him wince like the cut of a whip, other thoughts formed in his mind, ugly and dangerous. His animal instincts were suddenly aroused. He listened, and he sniffed the air, and his small, muddy eyes focused on the trees on the other side of the clearing. The shadows there were merging into patterns.

He saw the shapes of men. While numbers confused him, he singled out four shapes, counting them on the fingers of his massive right hand. He saw more shapes, but trying to count them deepened the texture of his confusion and anger. The shapes stood still, like people waiting. He could smell the essence of cherries in the oil glistening on Manolo’s curly black hair; but the word “wall” had appeared in his mind, and his hands were beginning to tremble with fury.

He knew why those men were waiting. They were here to hurt him, using the boy to trap him inside walls. His name. Sometimes he forgot his own name. But the boy knew his name. Someone had told him.

They always said calm down. Stay calm. His mother, Mrs. Schultz, Lanny at the zoo. They said it was the other thing, the anger, that caused the trouble. Always. But Gus Soltik couldn’t fight the rage that gripped him now. It was like an animal inside him, a snarling that roared in his head, claws slashing at his heart and lungs, screaming for release.

Resisting a compulsion to bellow his rage at this betrayal, Gus Soltik opened the flight bag and removed his heavy hunting knife. Then he ran silently into the shadows behind Manolo, and before Manolo could scream even once, the Juggler’s knife had flashed across his throat, opening an inch-deep furrow in that soft, vulnerable flesh, the flesh he had wanted only to touch, he thought, as he sobbed and lifted Manolo’s body high above him and hurled it like a broken doll into the moonlight of the glade.

And then, while rifle fire erupted and muzzle blasts glowed in the night like angry, flaming eyes, Gus Soltik fled in terror toward the sanctuary of the trees.

Luther Boyd threw aside the scarlet-yellow leaf he had been examining and wheeled in the direction of the fusillade of gunfire that was exploding through the dark trees on a line far to the east of him.

He experienced a sick and savage anger at Tonnelli’s betrayal, for these were not the precise and meticulously squeezed-off shots of marksmen aiming only to wound. No, this was barrage fire, random and reckless and murderous, and he knew from its volume and intensity that it was designed not to disable the Juggler, but to execute him.