Night of the Juggler

by William P. McGivern

  What were they looking for? All those cops and those noisy helicopters? He’d give it just fifteen minutes, Manolo thought, try his luck that long and then split and work the lobby of the St. Regis and the Plaza again.

  Gus Soltik had heard Manolo coming through the woods. Alarmed, he had turned from “white legs” and climbed silently down the side of a knoll. Now, drawn by compulsions and feelings he didn’t understand, he stepped into the clearing to stare at the slim young man.

  Manolo turned to him, a teasing, professional smile on his lips, but his heart thudded with panic because he smelled weirdo. The man was huge, wore a dirty brown sweater and a small leather cap, and his forehead bulged wide above muddy, puzzled eyes.

  Maybe not, Manolo thought, and wet his lips with the tip of his pink tongue. The crazies who wanted to twist your arms or burn your belly with cigarettes usually came on fast and violent. But this big stud, ugly as he was, didn’t look like that kind of trouble. But the man’s rank odor disgusted Manolo and he decided to trust his first instincts: weirdo.

  They stood looking at each other in the little glade with moonlight on the hoarfrost and the winds now soft but cold in the big oak trees.

  The word forming in Gus Soltik’s mind as clearly as if it were written there in bold letters was “black-sweet.” This mnemonic unit equated with a concept of “safe” in Gus Soltik’s peculiar lexicon. In blackness he would not be seen and therefore felt safe. And sweet things of all kinds, jellies, sugars, candies, made him feel warm and secure. This, which looked at him with eyes outlined by curling dark lashes, was “safe.” Gus Soltik experienced a strange excitement. He was confused but not angered by a physical sensation he hadn’t known before, or, at least, never so acutely. It was blended of the silence, the moonlight, the soft swell of sexual organ he saw molded by tight blue trousers and a fragrance like that of cherries when they broke in his hands in the store, and he knew that clean, cloying scent came from the boy’s dark, curling hair.

  In damp, silent woods about fifty yards from that clearing, Kate Boyd lay helpless on slick, mossy ground, wrists and ankles bound excruciatingly tight with thin nylon rope. A broad patch of adhesive tape was plastered across her lips. She was crying now, trying desperately but vainly to free herself from the cruelly knotted ropes.

  Within a foot of her eyes Gus Soltik’s airlines bag lay on its side, and she could see the big hunting knife near a cigarette lighter and a gun.

  Drifting casually toward Kate Boyd at this time were a pair of black teen-agers, whose names were Billy Smith and Hugo Thomas.

  They were in a lighthearted and light-headed mood, larking their way through the Ramble, sucking on joints, and occasionally breaking into pointless but helpless giggles. They weren’t out for trouble, although they might have rolled a drunk if they had lucked on to one. They weren’t pushing anything; they weren’t looking to hurt anyone; they were simply young and turned on and curious to find out what all the cops were doing in Central Park that night.

  “Please,” Gus Soltik said. He was terribly confused, but excited; he felt as if his whole body were glowing pleasantly and warmly, but it was a sensation he relished, “black-sweet,” for he realized there was no need to create that dreadful, guilty exhilaration by teaching him lessons. And he realized again, though very dimly, that no one would hurt him or beat him for the rush of emotion now surging through his veins. “Please,” he said again.

  Manolo knew this big man could break his back with those huge hands. But he hadn’t survived the streets and alleys of New York for five years without learning how to take care of himself.

  “You got any money?” Manolo asked him with a teasing little smile.

  Gus Soltik shook his head slowly.

  “Can you get some?” This worked sometimes, Manolo knew: a freak would go off to find bread, whip-dick dumb enough to expect you to wait for him.

  Gus Soltik was thinking about money. He knew the coins in the heels of his boots wouldn’t. . and he thought of Lanny then. He began to hope. Lanny would help him. Give him some money.

  Lanny talked slow and soft to him. And that was why he always knew what Lanny meant.

  Billy Smith and Hugo Thomas stood stock-still, smoke from their joints curling up around their startled, incredulous eyes, staring in fear and bewilderment at the little white girl lying gagged and trussed on the ground.

  “God damn!” Hugo said, his voice tense and anxious.

  “We caught here, we get blamed,” Billy Smith said. “Cops’ll be whipping our heads till hell dries up. We split this mothering scene, Hugo.”

  “No, wait.” Hugo moved closer to Kate Boyd, looking into her tear-bright, hysterical eyes. “It’s the honkie chick Sam put out the word on.”

  “You gonna be a hero?”

  “Well, I ain’t gonna leave a little kid like this. See, she’s scared simple.”

  He knew from the store how to say it.

  “How much?” Gus Soltik asked Manolo, blurting out the words, his excitement frenzied now.

  This was the tough, the dangerous part of it. Name a price too high, you ran the risk the weirdo might take you right on the ground, probably rip hell out of your fancy gear and all of it for free. Manolo moved slowly away from Gus Soltik, smiling at him over his shoulder trying to increase his advantage without making the big man suspicious.

  “Ten dollars,” he said.

  Lanny would give him ten dollars, Gus Soltik thought. Yes, ten dollars.

  “Yes,” he said “Yes.”

  Manolo smiled. “Go get it, lover man.”

  “Wait?”

  “Why sure. Think I’d skip this kind of action? You’ll see.” Manolo’s pink tongue moved slowly between his full, wet lips.

  From somewhere deep in the woods came the hideous sound of a child’s screams.

  Gus Soltik wheeled with amazing speed for his great bulk and ran across the clearing, but suddenly he stopped as if he had collided with a physical obstacle and turned and looked desperately at the slim figure of Manolo. Gus Soltik was like a giant racked by forces of tremendous and almost equal strength; one half of him was pulled agonizingly toward the sound of Kate’s screams, while another part of him was torn with the need to be with this smiling boy.

  “Come back?” he cried to Manolo.

  “Sure,” Manolo called to him, and ran with relief into the shadows of the trees.

  Hugo and Billy had pulled the adhesive tape from Kate’s mouth. And that was when she had screamed. But she wasn’t screaming now, for they were working feverishly and rapidly to untie the knots which fastened the ropes searingly about her slim wrists and ankles.

  “Hurry,” she cried softly. “Use the knife.” They heard him coming then, smashing and clawing his way through underbrush like a wild beast, and before they could finish untying the intricate knots, he burst into sight among the trees and charged at the terrified black boys.

  Gus Soltik struck Hugo across the side of the head and knocked him sprawling, but Billy dodged behind Soltik and hit the back of his legs with a rotting tree limb he had scooped up from the ground. The blow sent Gus staggering to his knees. To break his fall, he braced his weight with both hands on the ground, and the sudden, excruciating pressure on the wound in his upper arm made him bellow with pain.

  Before he could regain his feet, the two black boys were running off through the trees, insubstantial as a pair of midnight shadows.

  Gus Soltik plastered the tape again across Kate’s mouth, scooped up his airlines bag, but then stood perfectly still, testing the night and the winds for movement or sounds, knowing now that he was surrounded by danger, that the girl’s screams would have been a magnet to all those men who wanted to hunt him down and hurt him. .

  But an area of his tortured mind was concentrated on the slim “black-sweet” he had met tonight. Gus Soltik was struggling to understand a concept he was totally without words or metaphors to define or analyze. For the first time in his waking life he had known a sex
ual arousal that for him was truly normal and innocent. His desires had not been stimulated by the thought of hurting him or watching his blood flow or listening to his screams.

  Tears stung his eyes, and when he blinked, they ran down the rough, unshaved skin of his cheeks. “Greenropes,” he thought. If he let her go, they wouldn’t hurt him. No lessons for “white legs.” But she would tell, as someone had told on him tonight. But if they didn’t find her, no.

  In the ground, under rocks. Then he shook his head. Not to her.

  She watched his tears, her own eyes bright with hysteria.

  Maybe his mother had lied to him. There were no razor blades in her handbag, and she knew he was hurt. She said hospital. She knew he could be hurt. Others didn’t know that.

  Since Gus Soltik had no way to understand the thoughts that were flashing through his mind like random electric sparks, he groaned aloud in a torture of self-loathing and frustration, and then, with no plans and no clear purpose, he scooped up the little girl and ran off into the trees.

  The NYPD command post was charged with boiling excitement now, but the accelerating energies were held in disciplined harmony by Borough Commanders Larkin and Slocum. The TV and newspaper coverage had intensified, and the cameras were now focused at Sokolsky and Maurer’s switchboards, where a semicircle of top-ranking police brass, including the borough commanders, Deputy Chief of Detectives Greene, and Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli were listening to the amplified voice of Sergeant Rusty Boyle coming over the police speakers.

  “. . and my suggestion is we move that line to the southern edge of the Ramble. I’m moving my people to surround it. I’m going in west on a line with Seventy-seventh.”

  “You got a fix, Rusty?” Tonnelli said.

  The connection was broken then, a dry final click that told Gypsy Tonnelli Boyle believed he was close to the Juggler.

  Their problem, as the chiefs and Gypsy Tonnelli fully understood, was that pinpointing the Juggler within the forty-odd acres of the Ramble intensified the danger to Kate Boyd, if in fact she was still alive. They could not flood the area with police. There were literally thousands of hiding places in the rocky grottoes and gullies of the Ramble. It could not be attacked like a fortress. If they invaded it (the Gypsy was now in agreement with Luther Boyd), the Juggler would break the child’s neck or bury her under a heap of rocks.

  Chief Larkin, as if reading the Gypsy’s mind, said, “Lieutenant, send in a small task force on Sergeant Boyle’s line. Five of your best, Gypsy.”

  From his own unit, Tonnelli chose Detectives Scott, Brohan, and Garbalotto and from Boyle’s unit, Detectives Miles Tebbet and Ray Karp.

  In unmarked cars with dome lights dark, that group was dispatched at speed to the Ramble.

  Standing inconspicuously on the outskirts of these scenes of orderly tension, the arrival and departure of squads, the exploding flashbulbs, the noontime brilliance of the TV lights and reflectors, aching with the cancer he knew was soon to devour him, was John Ransom. He had got into the park by telling an earnest young rookie at Fifty-ninth Street that Sergeant Boyle had given him a verbal message for Dispatcher Sokolsky.

  In life, generosity is not only possible but gratifying because of the benison of tomorrow, but in the certain expectation of death, the corollary to life, there is only selfishness. And now John Ransom was selfishly determined to find and speak again to the one man who had given him not only compassion and kindness in his ordeal but the courage to bear it.

  Within minutes of hearing his daughter’s screams, Luther Boyd had found the mossy area where she had lain bound and gagged on the ground. He noted several footprints, probably made by tennis sneakers, and then he found the prints of the dreadfully familiar Wellingtons.

  When Boyd traced the heel marks away from the mossy grove, he found no sign of Kate’s boots. But now the prints of the Wellingtons were deeper in the ground, and he presumed the big man had slung her over his shoulder, which could mean that she was bound and gagged or was unconscious or dead.

  Sergeant Boyle, however, was closer to the Juggler than Luther Boyd was. He was traveling in the shadows of big corkscrew willows, their frantically contorted silhouettes outlined in movement and moonlight.

  These trees bordered three sides of a clearing which abutted against a towering wall of rock, whose jagged surface was scarred and pitted with fissures from which grew a dense maze of thornbushes.

  Approximately five minutes earlier, Rusty Boyle had spotted two drops of blood gleaming and wet on a leaf fallen from a paper birch tree.

  This wasn’t conclusive in itself, but he knew the man they were after was wounded. The fact, and that his name was Gus Soltik, had been crackling from radios in the park for an hour or more. It was the evidence of the blood which had prompted his call to the CP. And the screams that he’d heard.

  From that moment he had proceeded on a western line, and he now stood in the shadows of the willow trees, studying with narrowing eyes the massive escarpment of rock rising dramatically at the edge of the clearing. Could a wounded man climb it? Alone, perhaps, but not with the girl. So if the Juggler had got up there, there must be an easier route. The back or sides of the rock might be more sloping, providing a practical angle of ascent.

  Boyle considered the prospects of scaling the face of the rock. He could use the roots of thick thornbushes for handholds. The risk was that he would need both hands to do that, and if the Juggler heard him coming, Boyle’s gun would be useless in its holster. But on the plus side, if he could make it, he’d have the tremendous advantage of speed and surprise.

  But at the instant he made up his mind to take the chance a slender man walked into the clearing and said to him, “Sergeant Boyle, I had to come here. . I had to thank you.”

  Boyle spun around, his gun covering the man. When he recognized John Ransom with a start of shock, he said in a low, insistent voice, “For God’s sake, take cover.”

  But Ransom had already lost touch with the practical world. He didn’t know he was endangering himself and the big redhead who had befriended him. He didn’t know he was recklessly intruding into a police operation where a child’s life was at stake. He knew only the needs of his selfish gratitude.

  “You will never know what your help meant to me,” he said, stopping and speaking the words simply and quietly in the silence of the glade.

  Jesus Christ, Boyle thought. I’ve got to get the poor sick bastard out of here.

  “Sergeant, I’ll write down what you’ve done for me. So my wife and daughter will know. . ”

  Boyle came out of the shadows like a sprinter from starting blocks, driving fast for Ransom, with the thought of dragging him into the cover of trees. But at that instant Ransom, looking past Boyle, saw the silhouette of a huge man with a gun in his hand standing high above them on the facing of rock, a spectral, terrifying figure against moon-bright skies.

  Ransom shouted a warning at Boyle, and that sound caused Gus Soltik to change aim. Instead of cutting down the red-haired man who had tried to hurt him in a dark basement, Soltik swung his gun left and squeezed off two shots, which struck John Ransom in the face and killed him instantly.

  Instantly in a temporal sense, but in a different calibration of time, there was a unit of eternity in which John Ransom had a last memory of his daughter, a moment to realize he had given her this final gift, and thus that last memory was free of guilt or shame, charged instead with shimmering pride.

  Instinctively, Boyle had gone to the ground at the first shot, rolling over twice, then swinging his gun rapidly toward the towering figure above him, the butt locked tightly in both of his big hands. But before he could squeeze off a round, Soltik fired two more shots, one of which went cleanly through Boyle’s left thigh and a second which drew a scalding line of pain across his rib cage, smashing through his radio, finally spending itself in earth already darkening with his blood.

  Gus Soltik pulled the trigger again, but the hammer fell on an empty chamber. With a
sob of fear, he threw the gun aside and ran toward the shallow cave where he had left Kate Boyd, gagged and helplessly bound, but now mercifully insensate from the enduring terrors of her ordeal.

  . . didn’t get one shot off, Rusty Boyle thought, fighting down his nausea but feeling the dizzying surge of blood through his veins. Not one shot. Turning with an effort, he looked at the body of John Ransom. Poor bastard, he thought. No, this was what he wanted.

  Curtains. It wrapped everything up for him. College, his wife, a certain honor. But, Christ, I’ll bet he wouldn’t have wanted it at my expense.

  He wouldn’t have wanted to take me with him.

  Fighting back gasps of pain, Rusty Boyle pushed himself to a sitting position, bracing his back against a tree trunk. Blood was pumping evenly and rhythmically from the wound in his thigh. His head felt light.

  His thoughts were already blurred. Even if he could use the broken radio, it probably wouldn’t help. He was close to shock now. Losing too much blood. They hadn’t shared that steak and wine and made love tonight. And now they never would.

  While he was thinking of Joyce, resigned to never knowing her beauty and grace again, he heard a single word, an urgent whisper against the dark silence. One word.

  “Bullet!”

  For an instant, Rusty Boyle didn’t believe it. Then, relief choking his voice, he gave the countersign to Luther Boyd. Again one word.

  “Trigger.”

  Triage, from the French, is a word defining the process of grading marketable produce. The word is also used on the battlefield and defines a similar process, except it involves the grading of wounds inflicted on human beings rather than foodstuffs destined for the marketplace. Thus, the dead are ignored as dysfunctional; the grievously wounded receive a low priority; terminally wounded soldiers are given the lowest rating of all; those with superficial wounds are treated first because they can be swiftly returned to their units or to battlefronts.