William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

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.

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.