William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

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 sexual 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.