William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

“Is Lieutenant Tonnelli at the CP?”

“No, Chief. He left here a few minutes ago in one of the pool squads.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

The chief’s voice rose sharply. “Central, this is Borough Commander South. Patch me through to Lieutenant Tonnelli, and don’t waste time about it.”

Boyd stood perfectly still, controlling his emotions with a discipline acquired from years of training, while listening to Central’s operator ordering Lieutenant Tonnelli to report his position and destination immediately to Chief Larkin.

There was no answer from the Gypsy. Boyd could envision the situation as clearly as if it were flashing before his eyes on a screen.

The Juggler was in that stolen truck, and Tonnelli was after him.

But Boyd knew what the Juggler wanted, and he knew why. Only one question demanded an answer now: Where would he leave the truck?

With animal cunning, the Juggler might instinctively realize it would point after him like an arrow if he abandoned it near his eventual destination.

So where would be the most obvious and innocent place to hide a truck? Ideally, a gas station or a used-car lot. But the plain fact was there were no such facilities in Central Park. Then the answer hit Boyd so abruptly that it sent a shock wave of hope and excitement through his body.

And considering that Boyd had an almost certain fix on where the Juggler was heading, he could make a shrewd guess at where he would leave the truck, the parking lot closest to the Ramble, that oblong stretch of pavement that abutted the Loeb boathouse just north of the East Drive.

Tonnelli angled his pool squad car toward the curb and stopped near Max Prima and another patrolman who were in position at the East Drive on a line with Sixty-eighth Street.

When he rolled down the window of the car and looked up at Prima, the faint light from a streetlamp ran like quicksilver up and down the scar that streaked across the Gypsy’s cheek.

“You men spot a parks department truck traveling north fifteen or twenty minutes ago?”

Max Prima hesitated a fractional instant. As in any other tightly interwoven organization, gossip and rumor spread like storm fires through the police department. And there was a rumor, an ugly one, that Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli had gone shut-eye, had cut off his radio, and was deliberately refusing to report to Chief Larkin. Sokolsky had asked all units for a make on that particular truck, but almost twenty-odd minutes after it had first been reported missing by officers from the 22nd. It could be out on Long Island by now.

But Max Prima was not staring into the eyes of just another cop, not just a lieutenant in the New York police department. He was looking at a scarred man who was a legend in all five boroughs of the city, and so he said simply, “Yes, Lieutenant. We spotted it. About eighteen minutes ago, heading north.”

“Still got that good pair of eyes, Max,” the Gypsy said.

The parks department truck was at the far end of the boathouse lot, its shiny surfaces partially obscured by the overhanging limbs of immense willow trees.

Luther Boyd approached the truck with the Browning in his hand. He jerked open the door and smelled the rank, fetid odor of the Juggler and saw-as he had guessed-that the cab was empty. There were bloodstains on the leather of the passenger seat.

After checking the rear of the truck and finding it empty, Boyd ran across the pavement of the parking lot to open ground that led toward the Ramble. He came to a thick tangle of hawthorn hedges, stopping at an area which looked ragged and torn, as if a wild animal had charged through it. And as he forced his way through this ragged passage, his flashlight picked up the distinctive prints of the Juggler’s Wellingtons.

Attack now, he thought, and as he bent low and ran swiftly along the line of those tracks, an irrelevant but annealing maxim of war came to his mind: “My center is giving way, my right flank is crushed, situation excellent, I am attacking.” That was Marshal Foch to Paris Headquarters, Second Battle of the Marne.

Within minutes, he spotted a movement far ahead of him in the shadows created by the tossing crowns of great trees. Then Boyd saw him clearly, still hundreds of yards ahead of him, a huge figure lurching across a moonlit meadow. And Boyd could see, even at this distance, the Juggler’s yellow cap and the light flickering on the blade of the knife in his right hand.

Luther Boyd flicked off the beam of his flashlight and ran silently at speed after his quarry.

Lieutenant Tonnelli drove slowly into the boathouse parking lot, and his headlights bathed the sides of the parks department truck, in brilliant illumination. The front door of the truck was open, and the cab was empty, and this confirmed the first estimate of the Juggler’s route: into the Ramble west on a line with Seventy-seventh Street. That was the fix that Luther Boyd had given him. Gypsy Tonnelli didn’t need to track the prints of those Wellingtons, even if he had had the skill to do it. Cutting the headlights of his squad car, Tonnelli drove slowly from the parking lot across a meadow that was flanked by a tangled thicket of low hawthorns. He rounded this hedgerow, which had been torn apart in one area, and drove slowly onto the flatlands of the park, the squad car merging slowly and silently with the shadows of huge trees.

His odor was rank on the air now, and when Luther Boyd stepped from shadows into a moonlit grove, the movement froze Gus Soltik into immobility, and he stared at Boyd in terror, his body trembling and his breath coming so rapidly and harshly that saliva churned into froth on his lips. This was what he had feared this night, the “coldness” that had stalked him so cruelly and relentlessly. His thoughts were like splinters of steel piercing his tormented mind, bringing the redness there, the agonizing memories of the father’s threats and his mother’s punishment, the way they had held him and beat him, and his terrifying conviction that he knew no words to make them stop.

With an inarticulate scream of rage and fear, he jerked the hunting knife from his belt and rushed at Luther Boyd. He raised the knife high in the air, plunging it toward Boyd’s face, but Boyd trapped his wrist in a powerful Y formed by his own crossed forearms. The tip of the blade glittered inches from his eyes, but it was held there finally and forever by the strength of Boyd’s tempered muscle, and when Soltik tried to free himself, Boyd swiftly went to attack, the palm of his right hand going behind Soltik’s neck and the full swing of his arm sending the big man sprawling to the ground.

When Gus Soltik tried to rise to his feet, Boyd kicked him in the stomach with a lightning-fast blow, and an instant later, he broke Gus Soltik’s right wrist with a chop of his hand that sent the hunting knife flying into thick underbrush.

Sobbing with pain, Gus Soltik stumbled backward and collapsed on the ground against the bole of a tree.

He longed for his pain and torments to cease. He wanted it to be over forever. Why was it always like this? Going on and on. While his eyes filled with tears, he looked up and saw that the man standing above him holding that gun was like something carved from rock.

Luther Boyd stared at Gus Soltik’s swollen features, noting narrow eyes the color of mud, slack lips and bad teeth, the bulging forehead behind which stretched the festering swamp of mind. There was nothing there to salvage; this was human refuse. It was so often like this when you had slain your enemy on the battlefield; there was little cause for triumph because what you had destroyed was only another miserable and suffering human being, a youth whose mother went to sleep praying for him or something black and charred in the wreckage of a war machine.