William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

Boyd froze his body against the cliff, knowing that any motion would betray him to the man on top of the hill. But his right hand moved silently toward the Browning, which was pressed hard against his stomach by the weight of his own body.

In the shifting shadows created by moonlight and swaying trees, he saw the figure of a huge man high above him on the crest of the hill. The man raised both hands in the air and hurled a large jagged rock at Luther Boyd. The rock struck the side of the hill four feet above Boyd and sent a spray of flintlike splinters into his face and eyes. He threw himself sideways, but not in time; the caroming rock slammed into his left shoulder and knocked him in a breathless, flailing heap to the foot of the cliff.

He bounced from the ground like something made of steel and rubber and dived full length behind the mass of a pair of tangled wild holly bushes. Boyd worked the Browning free from beneath his belt. His mouth and nostrils were full of dust, and he knew his face had been nicked and bloodied by the shower of rock fragments. But it was the shoulder that worried him; if it were broken, the Juggler would have an overwhelming advantage.

Moving with gingerly caution, Boyd climbed to his feet and peered across the tops of the holly bushes. The man was gone. Boyd tested his left arm and shoulder and to his relief felt only the pain of bruised muscles, not the crunch of broken bones.

Then far away to his north and east, Boyd heard someone calling Gus Soltik’s name, the sound high and sweet in the silence, as pretty as circles of silver against the darkness.

Above him and to his right, he heard the pound of distant footsteps, the passage of a big body through grass and bushes. It was the Juggler, he knew, and by the length and speed of those strides, Boyd knew the Juggler was now traveling alone. .

With nothing to be gained by silence, Boyd rapidly climbed the escarpment of rock, but when he reached the small clearing on top of the hill, the footsteps of the Juggler had faded off on an eastern line into dark stands of trees.

Luther Boyd stood still for a moment, massaging and kneading the muscles of his left shoulder, while testing freshening winds and the unnatural silence with the antennae of his probing senses. The police tactics had been radically changed, he realized then. They weren’t trying to run the Juggler to the ground. They were setting a different kind of trap for him. And there was a sickening implication there which made it imperative for Boyd to change his own plans. He had been determined to go after Kate because as long as there was a chance she was alive, that was his only priority. She might be bound and gagged in a way that would strangle her unless he got to her in time. Or she might be confined somewhere, smothering for lack of air. Or bleeding. .

But he couldn’t go after her now. He had to find the Juggler first because the police might waste him on sight and that psycho was the only person in the world who knew where Kate Boyd was now.

Boyd swept the ground with his flashlight to find the Wellingtons, but something else caught his eye, a large, jagged rock gleaming with blood and a cluster of white hairs. Not Kate’s blond hair, he realized with exquisite relief, but coarse white hair in lacy relief against the shining blood.

He followed drops of blood and the Wellington prints a dozen yards to a mossy ravine, where he found the sprawled body of a white-haired man with a Colt diamond-back.38 revolver lying near his right hand.

The right cheek and skull of the old man had been crushed and bloodied by brutal blows. A wallet lay beside the boy. There was no money in it, but the ID revealed the man’s name to be Samuel Fritzel, with an address in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Protruding from a pocket of Fritzel’s topcoat was a narrow leather case with a carrying strap and Boyd saw that it encased a two-way radio. He pulled it from Fritzel’s pocket, flipped a switch, and spoke urgently into the microphone.

“Lieutenant Tonnelli!”

“Tonnelli here.”

“This is Luther Boyd.”

“I leveled with you, Colonel. The chiefs scrambled those choppers.”

“Why did you discontinue the aerial surveillance?”

“We’ve set a trap for him. We’ve cooled everything, hoping he’ll relax and fall into it.”

“Then goddamn it, listen to me, Lieutenant. The Juggler’s alone, traveling east. Do you understand what that means? He’s either killed my daughter or hidden her someplace where she’s helpless. I’m heading west, on a line with Seventy-seventh Street, trying to find her. But I want your word that you take that bastard alive, Lieutenant. Because he’s the only one who knows where Kate is.”

“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.