In the distance, but quite a way off, she could see an occasional flash of headlights, cars curving through the park’s traffic system. She turned in a slow, full circle, hoping to find a building on the skyline she could identify. But she was too close to the trees for an unbroken view, and the odd spires and lights she could make out were indefinite patterns against the darkness.
And so she stood uncertainly in the moonlit glade, glancing again at the sky but finding no help or reassurance from the stars. .
Gus Soltik stood in the shadows of a huge oak tree and watched her.
. She was lost. He knew that. It gave him a strange sense of superiority, because he was never lost. He didn’t need street names and numbers. He could go anywhere he wanted, guided by subtle instincts, along alleys and docks, across tenement roofs, aware of every smell and stir within range of his acute senses, moving always with relentless but unconscious precision.
His huge hands tightened on the flight bag, and he could feel the strong, hot rush of blood in his body. Now, he thought.
Now. .
Kate heard the approach of his pounding footsteps. She turned and saw a big man in a brown turtleneck sweater and yellow leather cap rushing toward her, and something familiar about him made her wonder if she had met or seen him before.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said, but then she became aware of his slack lips and glazed eyes, and she knew the look of him was wrong, dreadfully wrong, and when his huge hands reached for her, Kate Boyd began to scream for her life.
Rudi Zahn heard her screams. He was about fifty yards away, striding along in his vigorous fashion, when Kate’s first screams destroyed the night’s silence.
Luther Boyd, south and east of the glade by several hundred yards, sensed the merest whisper of that scream and wondered if it had been the cawing of a nocturnal bird or branches of trees twisting against each other in freshening winds.
But he zeroed on that sound like the needle of a radar screen, orienting himself to its location by a stand of
Rudi Zahn’s first reaction to those screams was a sickening indecision; his fears were so deeply rooted that it was almost physically impossible to take a step toward danger. His instinct was to run in the opposite direction, with the solacing lie in his throat that this was the best thing to do, to find a phone or police officer, professional aid. Then the screaming stopped abruptly, replaced by an even more terrible silence.
His body was trembling with fear, but some emotion kept him rooted to the ground, and that was the rekindled memories of Ilana, whose pale face blazed in his mind like a star. He had watched from a basement window of the priest’s house while soldiers dragged her to the trucks.
She had fought like a hellcat, but no one in the village had raised a hand to save her. The others were willing victims, going to slaughter like cattle, but Ilana had fought back, which hadn’t angered the soldiers, of course; they savored resistance, it added spice to their dreary brutality.
Against his will, against everything he was trying to safeguard for himself and Crescent Holloway, Rudi Zahn ran in the direction of those now-silent screams.
He came into a clearing filled with moonlight and saw a huge man in a brown sweater running toward the shadows of trees with a young child in his arms. The girl’s white legs were thrashing helplessly, but the big man had locked her arms with one arm and had stifled her screams with a huge hand across her mouth.
“Stop!” Zahn shouted, and ran after the man and the struggling little girl.
Gus Soltik wheeled around, his heavy, smudged features working with terror and rage.
“No!” he shouted at the man. “No!” he cried again, his voice high and shrill, almost strangled against the pressures of his corded neck muscles.
“Let her alone!” Zahn screamed the words at him.
Gus Soltik threw the girl aside and ran at Rudi Zahn, his mouth twisting spasmodically, his body feverish at this dreadful, frustrating intervention; his excitement had been so intensified by the girl’s struggles that he felt as if his blood were boiling.
Zahn avoided Soltik’s first lunging charge, leaping to one side and kicking at Gus Soltik’s legs, which sent the huge man sprawling to the ground.
“Run!” he shouted to the girl. He might take the beating he had always dreaded, but that might buy enough time for the girl to get away.
“Run!” he shouted again, as Gus Soltik scrambled to his feet, his breathing heavy, eyes dilated with rage.
But Kate Boyd didn’t run; she stood her ground. She wasn’t sure why, but some deep instinct of survival told her that was the wise thing to do. She would fight back her fear and stand fast because she believed she knew what excited this big man, and that was her screams, her struggles; she had already felt what they did to his body.
Rudi Zahn swung a fist at Gus Soltik’s face, and while the blow landed, it had no more effect than if it had struck a mountainside.
Soltik bellowed hoarsely and with the back of his huge hand struck Zahn across the side of his head and sent him reeling to the ground, his skull exploding with roaring flashes of pain.
Gus Soltik kicked him in the ribs with his heavy, thick Wellingtons, and Zahn groaned in agony. The powerful kick struck Zahn in the face, laying bare his cheek to the bone, but after that searing torment came merciful oblivion.
Gus Soltik stared at Kate, puzzled and vaguely fearful. Why didn’t she run? You couldn’t chase them if they didn’t run. Then his big body became tense once more with fear and anger. Someone else was coming after him. . Silent, so silent that the girl hadn’t heard the whispering sounds in the underbrush beyond the black trees. Picking up his flight bag, he grabbed the fabric of Kate’s ski jacket, twisting it sharply at the collar line, so powerfully that it strangled the scream rising in her throat. With long strides which forced Kate into a stumbling run, Gus Soltik vanished from the clearing, losing himself with the girl in the shadows of big trees.
It was only seconds after this that Luther Boyd came on the body of Kate’s little Scottie, its head twisted sideways at a grotesque angle, its black body pitifully small in death, looking somehow lonely and discarded and forgotten on the ground in a tangle of wood ivy. But Harry Lauder’s death had not been without point, for it gave Boyd a direct bearing on the course of the man who wore those huge Wellingtons. He had no longer needed the dog’s barking to lure Kate toward him; from this exact geographical fix, he obviously had a visual make on Kate Boyd.
Without fully regaining consciousness, Rudi Zahn stirred reflexively against the pain in his face and stomach. When he tried to rise, placing his palms against the ground and pushing down hard, his ribs reacted in an agonized spasm, and a groan forced itself past the constricted muscles of his throat.
Boyd, coursing warily through the trees a dozen yards away, heard the sound and ran toward it, his right hand whipping the Browning from beneath his belt and flipping it off the safety in a fluid gesture that was as effortless and reflexive as the beat of his heart. He ran into the moonlit glade and saw a man with thinning hair lying motionless on the ground. One side of his face was chopped up like raw meat, the cheekbone pale and clean in the soft yellow light.
Boyd checked the perimeter of the clearing with alert eyes. A mugging, that was a first thought. As he walked to the figure on the ground, his eyes checking the black honey locusts circling the glade, he spotted something that caused anger to surge through his veins, but it was anger tinged with hope, for in several areas near the unconscious man were the familiar imprints of big Wellington boots, their stacked heels creating indentations an inch deep in the damp earth.
Boyd checked the clearing in an ever-widening circle until he came to footprints he knew had been made by Kate’s small black boots.
Running back to the unconscious man, Luther Boyd gripped his shoulders and turned him as gently as he could onto his back.
Nevertheless, a groan of pain burst from the man’s lips, and Boyd then saw the muddy imprint of a boot against the tattersall vest under the man’s gray flannel jacket. The jagged flap of flesh hanging away from his
