William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

Firing two more shots so rapidly that the sounds merged into a single explosion, Boyd shattered both of the car’s blinding headlights, plunging this mad arena into total darkness.

Inside the car, Tonnelli had flung an arm across his face to block the stinging fragments of glass that were ricocheting from the roof and windows. Blinded by the sudden darkness, he heard two more shots, and his car went suddenly out of control as his front tires exploded.

While he fought the wheel to stabilize his direction, the crazily angling front wheels turned the car onto a collision course with a giant elm tree.

It was at that exact instant in this terrifying eruption of noises that the pain in Gus Soltik’s mind became intolerable. With a scream of anguish that was smothered by the crash of Tonnelli’s car against the trunk of the elm tree, Gus Soltik scuttled like a giant crab into the shadows of the Ramble.

Boyd listened to the sound of his passage through heavy underbrush.

He hesitated only long enough to make sure that Tonnelli was conscious and could summon aid from his radio if he needed it.

Then he ran west after the Juggler. Within a dozen yards, he heard the big man trip and fall, heard his body sprawling and crashing down a long escarpment of rock, his descent creating a noisy cascade of loose shale and stones.

And when the Juggler struck the ground at the foot of that long slope, he screamed in agony, and after that rending cry of anguish, his screaming stopped, and his pain was over.

Luther Boyd stood at the top of the escarpment and looked down at Gus Soltik’s body impaled on a triangular-shaped shard of black lava rock, the characteristic ribbing of the park, an impersonal, arbitrary instrument of execution, without judgment or reason, whose knife-sharp tip had plunged through Gus Soltik’s chest and now gleamed with his blood where it had broken through his spine.

There were flecks of blood on Gus Soltik’s big hand which was extended before him, pointing toward the immense sentinel of a tree where Luther Boyd had stopped earlier that night while tracking the Juggler and his daughter.

It was the tree that had been blasted dead-white by some long-past bolt of lightning and whose trunk had been splintered and breached ten or eleven feet above the ground, and it was there he had seen the dead wood around the black gaping hole brightened by clusters of clinging twigs and a line of frost-turned autumn leaves.

That had been the mistake he had made, and now he prayed to God and cursed himself without mercy that he hadn’t discovered this error too late to save Kate’s life. Traveling at a pace he no longer thought he was capable of, he ran toward that ghostly oak tree, shouting his daughter’s name but hearing only echoes sounding in pulsating rhythms through the darkness.

Not bright fall leaves growing improbably in dead wood ten feet above the ground, not the vivid fleck of berries, not the breast feathers of a robin or cardinal ringing the gaping hole in that lightning-blasted swamp oak. But red silk threads from Kate’s ski jacket. .

Boyd stopped at the trunk of the tree and murmured a prayer while crouching and leaping high enough to gain handholds in the lower half of the great gaping hole. Swinging his legs up and propping his feet flat against the tree trunk, he hung there, suspended in midair, straining against the wood with all his strength, using the muscles of his thighs and back as well as his shoulders and arms. How long Boyd remained in that position he would never know, but after what seemed an eternity, when the great resilient muscles of his body were at their breaking point, he heard a rending, grinding sound, and then, inch by agonizing inch, a wide section of the rotting trunk began to separate from the tree, bending away with Boyd’s weight until finally it snapped well below his feet. And as he hurtled backward, the rotting wood clutched to his chest, he saw-a second before crashing to the ground-the bound and gagged figure of his daughter inside the hollow bole of the tree, the tape on her mouth streaked with mud, her hair matted with rotted wood and fragments of moss.

But while Kate’s eyes were glazed with panic, he knew from the look of her that she was unhurt and gloriously alive.

Joyce Colby stood with Detective Miles Tebbet and Patrolman Max Prima at the Artists’ Gate where Sixth Avenue crosses Fifty-ninth Street and begins its curving northward passage through Central Park.

The night was cold. Many details of detectives and patrolmen had been returned to their precincts and to their normal duties. Traffic was almost normal, the crowds of the morbidly curious drifting off on news that the little girl was back safe with her family.

When Joyce Colby received the phone call telling her that Rusty Boyle had been wounded, she had put on slacks and a sweater, stepped into loafers, and wrapped a polo coat around her slim body before running from her apartment to find a cab.

The wind that whipped across the pond north of Fifty-ninth Street swept through her long red hair and cut like icy whips at her bare ankles.

Miles Tebbet pointed toward the curving extension of Sixth Avenue where he had spotted the revolving red dome light of an ambulance.

“Here’s the big guy now,” he said.

It had been a chaotic night, Tebbet thought, but mercifully it was over, and Fifty-ninth Street was practically deserted except for a few policemen and Joyce Colby and the stocky old woman who looked as wide as she was tall with her layers of sweaters under a cloth coat.

She had been here most of the night and now stood as patiently as a cow in a field watching the approaching ambulance.

Max Prima walked into the pathway north of Fifty-ninth Street and flagged the ambulance down with his red torchlight.

Miles Tebbet took Joyce’s arm, and they walked to the rear of the ambulance, where he pulled open both doors.

The two ambulance attendants flanking Rusty Boyle’s stretcher stared at Joyce and Detective Tebbet with the cynical eyes of men who earn their money going to fires and treating bullet and knife wounds.

“What’s all this shit?” one of them said to Tebbet.

“One more passenger,” Tebbet said, and held Joyce’s arm as she climbed into the ambulance.

“That’s against regulations,” the attendant said, but Joyce had already brushed past him to Rusty Boyle.

She was in his arms, and he was grateful for the clean fragrance of her hair, grateful even for her tears on his cheeks.

Drowsy from the injection the medics had given him, he still had one clear thought: When he was discharged from the hospital, he would go to Epiphany Church at Twenty-second Street and Second Avenue, where he had gone as a youngster. He would go there to say thanks.

Tebbet slammed the rear doors shut, and the ambulance turned west into Fifty-ninth Street, its dome lights flashing and its siren rising with the winds.

Out of curiosity and simple compassion, Detective Tebbet walked over to the fat, swaddled woman who stared with empty eyes after the ambulance. She stood as if rooted to the ground, and there was something abandoned and lonely in her tired old face.

“Can I be of any help, ma’am?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, and turned her vacant eyes toward the trees and traffic in the park.

“Did you know any of the people who were in trouble here tonight?”

She was too frightened and too shrewd to fall into traps. “No, I know nobody,” Mrs. Schultz said, and went away from him with her shuffling walk in the direction of Columbus Circle.

She was praying again for the poor strange man she had been told to take care of, but she was praying in her own old language now, not hard like the English they had made her learn, not hard like this country could be to some of its people.