William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

“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.”