“I told you, it didn’t matter,” Tonnelli said. “Tell Samantha thanks.”
“Why don’t you tell her your own self, Lieutenant?”
As the squad car rolled south again Tonnelli checked his watch, then asked for Garbalotto on his radio.
When Garbalotto came in Tonnelli said, “Garb, I got a name for you. Gus Soltik. Could be the Juggler. Start checking Motors, phone books in all boroughs, the FBI, Social Security, criminal records, everything we’ve got.”
“Right, Lieutenant.” Garbalotto lowered his voice. “Something you should know, Gypsy. Your last orders to me got tipped over by the chiefs. They’ve scrambled the choppers and sent dog teams up to Seventy-fifth Street.”
“All right,” Tonnelli said, and with a weary sigh broke the connection.
Glancing at his watch, he saw that Luther Boyd hadn’t got his half hour after all. Just seventeen minutes to be exact, and if Boyd was right, the little girl didn’t have a prayer in hell now.
Chapter 19
He had been moving slowly and cautiously through a grove of white trees, his big hand tight on the collar of her ski jacket, when he first heard the strange music on the horizon. It confused and hurt him because its rhythm matched the throbbing pain in his left arm. It had made him anxious and fearful because where he expected comforting silence there was instead a relentless barrier of noise.
He stopped and listened, his senses alert to danger. Kate twisted her head to look up at him, trying to learn something from the fear and confusion in his face.
Gus Soltik, still clutching the girl’s collar, made his way west, trying to turn the corner of that sound. Then he retraced his steps, pulling Kate behind him. But there was no break in the wall. The rhythm was relentless, blocking his way and matching the pulsing pain in his arm. The sound made him think, or try to think, which was worse. The security beyond the reservoir, the dark paths, the silent stretch of trees, that was denied to him now, taken from him by the music.
Music frightened and angered Gus Soltik because he didn’t understand it. Even at the Delacorte clock with Lanny he was puzzled and sometimes angered by people who smiled and snapped their fingers to the music of the prancing little animals. He had never known the thrill of a marching band. He had never shared a song with a girl. He had never been sung to sleep. Thus the sounds that other men smiled at were frightening assaults on his senses. At work, pushing refuse into heaps, browned cabbage leaves, bruised and rotting fruit, he would hear noise from the radio, and one clerk might nod to another and say something like, “
He was like a trapped animal. Something was behind him, the “coldness,” and the frightening noise sounded all around him. If he could make them stop. But they wouldn’t stop hurting him. And they wouldn’t let him die. His mother had told him that.
“Listen to me,” Kate Boyd said, the words a whisper on the winds.
She didn’t scream. He felt no fear in her body.
“You’re hurt,” she said. “Blood is soaking through the sleeve of your sweater. We should go to a hospital.”
Kate knew there was some kind of trap ahead of them. The loud music stretching the width of the park was no coincidence. Without realizing it, she had become his conspirator. The soft, vulnerable warmth she felt for puppies and kittens made her sorry for this dumb wounded creature and made her hope he might escape. But this hope was more than a budding maternal instinct. It was based on the practical realization that unless both escaped, both would die.
“I know someone who can help you,” she said.
He looked down at her, squinting in the darkness, to peer into her eyes. She knew that the mention of the word “dog” had triggered sullenness in him and the word “father” had evoked a dangerous rage. Her throat was dry with fear as she sought a safe way to manipulate him.
“He’s kind and strong. And he’d be good to you,” she said.
Gus Soltik scratched the thick blond hair at the base of his broad neck. How did she know?
“Lanny?” he asked her, the word squeezed with an effort from his corded throat muscles.
Now she could only guess. “Well, he’s like Lanny.”
But Gus Soltik wasn’t listening to her then. Another sound distracted him. He looked up and saw three helicopters flying toward them, motors thundering, giant beams of light covering the ground, flashing through the tree like brilliant lances.
His heart pounded with fear and rage. He clamped a hand across Kate’s mouth, and it was then he felt her fear, her terror. As she fought against him, he was shaken by a savage joy. But he must hide now, and he knew where to hide. He set off at a run, sweeping Kate off the ground with his uninjured arm, traveling toward the middle of the park to the Ramble.
Gus Soltik, with animal instinct, had chosen his terrain with savage, tactical brilliance. In that expanse of gullies and caves and grottoes, all of it hidden by massive trees and choked with foliage, they would never find him and never hear her. .
Sergeant Boyle stood in the shadows of a grove of trees a dozen yards south of Transverse Number Three. He was the point of a skirmish line of patrolmen stretching across the transverse from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West.
Rock music blasted to the right and left of him, but his eyes were keyed to something several hundred feet away. In a broad meadow dappled with moonlight, the most obvious cover was a towering stand of silver linden trees, ghostly and white in the darkness. Rusty Boyle had thought he had detected someone moving in those trees. But it might have been shadows or tree limbs moving in the wind. Or for that matter, his imagination, his nerves. It was hard to wait. It was easier in action when adrenaline flowed to add power and speed to your reflexes and muscles. But waiting was wearing him down. And John Ransom’s call, patched through to him by Sokolsky, hadn’t helped much. . Couldn’t kill himself. . but grateful to Boyle for caring. .must thank him. . must see him. .
Something moved behind the sergeant.
Rusty Boyle spun around, dropping into a crouch, while his hand moved with blurring speed toward the butt of his gun, but he froze when he saw that the tall man who faced him had extended both hands to indicate that they were empty.
Sergeant Boyle had an impression of rangy strength, dark hair, and cold, chiseled features that reminded him of portraits he had seen as a boy of Indian scouts.
“Luther Boyd,” the man said.
“Boyd? The girl’s father?”
Boyd was staring with bitter eyes at the helicopters crisscrossing the northern end of the park.
“Sergeant Rusty Boyle here, sir.”
“I lost him when your people sent up those goddamn firecrackers,” Boyd said. There was no place in his strategy for anger, but he couldn’t stifle all of it. “Ten minutes more and I’d have had the bastard,” he said. “He doubled on me somewhere in those lindens.”
“Hold it,” Sergeant Boyle said, his voice suddenly tense with excitement. “I thought I spotted something moving west over there just a minute or so ago.”
“Give me the line,” Boyd said. “Use your arm as a pointer.”
Boyle turned and extended his hand toward the tree, then moved it to the right about a dozen inches. “About there, sir.”
Boyd moved behind the sergeant and took a bearing along his rigidly extended arm. He charted his course on the tallest of the silver lindens, a giant of a tree several degrees to the left of the line Boyd was indicating.
Boyd dropped to a crouch in a single fluid motion and with the flat of his hand wiped a square of earth free of leaves and twigs. Taking a key ring from his pocket, he used the tip of a key to draw a furrow in the earth eighteen inches long on the east-west line of Transverse Three.
