William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

Then he remembered something Lanny had told him about animals.

Animals in forests. Animals in barns. Gus Soltik stepped back over the barrier and left the animal house and went to where there were rows of trash cans waiting a morning collection.

He ignited a newspaper with his cigarette lighter and pushed it deep into the can. Soon the brisk night wind whipped the blaze into roaring flames.

Gus Soltik put the can on his shoulder, grunting harshly at the pain in his arm, and stumbled back into the lion house.

Sparks trailed brilliantly in his passage; smoke and fire gusted toward the tiled ceiling.

Gus Soltik hurled the can of blazing trash through the open door of Garland’s cage. The heavy container fell with a metallic crash on the concrete floor, its contents scattering across the concrete floor in flaming heaps.

While Garland raced from one barred wall to another, whining at the searing barrier of fire, and other big cats began roaring in panic, Gus Soltik ran through the double doors of the lion house and out into the night.

Garland, roaring with pain and fear, leaped across the blazing trash through the door of the open cage. By then Gus Soltik was running toward a parks department vehicle and thinking with savage anticipation of “white legs.”

Uncaged for the first time in seven years, Garland faced the open double doors of the lion house and the black night beyond them. Belly close to the ground, trembling with fear and excitement at this new experience, Garland padded through the open doors and into the darkness of Central Park.

Twenty minutes later, Tonnelli was giving urgent orders to Sokolsky on the switchboard in the Central Park command post. The Gypsy himself had just received a tense report from patrolmen in a cruising squad car operating out of the 22nd Precinct on Transverse Three. The report had created a reaction like a spasm in the orderly and disciplined chaos at the CP. Squad cars had been sent streaking toward the Arsenal from all areas of the park, their revolving dome lights flashing like giant fireflies against the black trees.

Gus Soltik drove north on the East Drive, traveling at a conservative speed which in no way reflected the thoughts storming at gale force within his tortured head. The interior of the cab was dark, and his face was only a blur behind the windshield, and this, plus the parks department legend on the doors of the truck, gave him safe-conduct past clusters of uniformed patrolmen who stood with red flashlights at hundred-yard intervals along the drive.

He would leave the truck in the parking lot off the drive. Then he could hide in the darkness and make his way to her.

The headlights of oncoming traffic struck at his face like angry lances, and their glaring attacks intensified his rage and his hungers.

Tonnelli had said to Sokolsky, “First, send a homicide detail to the Arsenal. Lanny Gruber is dead. Then alert every cop and detective in this area that there’s a lion, that’s right, Sokolsky, a lion, and it’s loose in the park. The chiefs have dispatched three armored jeeps with marksmen and tranquilizer bullets. Don’t anybody try to stop him with a police special. It won’t.”

After Sokolsky had transmitted these messages to all patrolmen and squads in and around the park, he flicked his receiving switch and gestured to Tonnelli.

“Something else is coming in, Lieutenant.” Sokolsky listened for a few seconds, nodded, then glanced up at Tonnelli. “The same guys from the Twenty-second. They’ve been checking around, found a parks department truck missing. Seems Lanny Gruber usually took a swing through the zoo area around midnight. Then he parked the truck on the south side of the Arsenal, you know, after making sure there was nobody loitering-”

Tonnelli cut him off with a chopping gesture of his hand.

“When did they find it missing?”

“Couple of minutes ago, I guess.”

Potentials and timetables and routes began to form patterns into the Gypsy’s intricate perceptions. Not south but north. He wouldn’t drive south toward that barrier of squad cars on Fifty-ninth Street. North then. At least twenty minutes ago, possibly more. And the Juggler’s destination? Boyd had given him an answer to that.

West across the Ramble on a line with Seventy-seventh Street. If Kate Boyd was alive, that’s where the Juggler was heading. If she were dead, he would travel north inevitably, hoping to escape from the park through the trackless areas that merged with Meer Lake and the edges of Harlem.

Sokolsky flipped a switch and spoke into his mike. “Code Three, all units. . ” Tonnelli cut him off with an angry headshake.

“Hold it!” Tonnelli said.

Sokolsky looked at him with puzzled eyes. “Sure, Lieutenant. But I thought-”

“We’ll finesse this one,” Tonnelli said. The Gypsy turned and stared north at black stands of trees on the horizon. His expression was hard and cold, and his eyes were narrowing as if he had already caught sight of his quarry.

“Forget the report on that missing truck, Sokolsky. That’s an order.”

“Check, Lieutenant.”

“One more thing. I want every cop and detective out of the Ramble. Instruct them to report to the reserve unit in the Sheep Meadow. Put that signal on the air right now.”

“Check, Lieutenant.”

Tonnelli walked with long, deliberate strides, not to his unmarked sedan, but to a row of pool squad cars which were equipped with standard dome lights and whose interior arsenals included bullhorns and riot guns. Tonnelli jerked a thumb at a young uniformed officer behind the wheel of one of these reserve squad cars. The patrolman slipped hastily from the car, and within seconds Gypsy Tonnelli was driving across the meadow that would lead him to the East Drive.

Gus Soltik crouched low in the dark, warm cab of the parks department truck and watched two young patrolmen crossing the lot in his direction, their red flashlights cutting rhythmic swaths across the paved surface of the parking area. Gus Soltik sat very quietly, but his right hand gripped the handle of his knife with painful intensity.

His thoughts were chaotic, and his body was hot and trembling with his needs.

The red beam of a flashlight flicked across the windshield of the truck; but Gus Soltik’s head was below the dashboard, and the officers continued on toward the East Drive, their lights eventually winking out in the darkness.

With an animal like moan Gus Soltik climbed from the truck and ran swiftly and silently into trees bordering the parking lot.

Luther Boyd stopped in the darkness near a massive facing of rock.

From Babe Fritzel’s two-way radio he was monitoring a conversation between Assistant Chief Inspector Taylor “Chip” Larkin and Dispatcher Sokolsky, who manned the switchboard at the command post in Central Park.

Commander Larkin was driving north in his chauffeured sedan from the supermarket in Greenwich Village where the gunman, after improbable intercessions from a pair of street people, had released nineteen hostages unharmed and surrendered himself in tears to the police.

Boyd’s reaction to the following exchanges was tense and expectant, but there was something else in his expression, a challenge to the gods, the sacrilege of hope.

“Sokolsky? I’ve had a report from the Twenty-second that a parks department truck was stolen from the Arsenal approximately the time the super was murdered. Did you have that, Sokolsky?”

“Yes, Chief. I had it.”

There was something close to anger in Larkin’s musical Irish voice.

“Why didn’t you notify all units?”

“Lieutenant Tonnelli gave me a negative on that, Chief. The lieutenant made it a direct order, sir.”