Puzzled, Rusty Boyle knelt beside him and glanced from Boyd’s lean profile to the mark he had drawn in the ground. Sergeant Boyle believed in this man; there was a rocklike quality about him, a projection of authority you could depend on. He had been impressed by the concept of a wall of music, not only because Chief Larkin had endorsed it, but because it appealed to something mystical in his Celtic spirit.
Boyd, in turn, liked what he had seen of this sergeant, a tall and resolute man with alert, intelligent eyes.
“Sergeant, where is the southern line of patrolmen now?”
“They’re at about Seventy-sixth Street, sir.”
“Then here’s what we’ll do,” Boyd said, and pointed to the furrow he had drawn in the earth. “Equate that line with your troops alone the transverse. Think of that line as three mobile units, a middle and two flanks. Order the middle to move out south on a straight line, while your east and west flanks move forward at a fifty-five-degree angle toward the middle line. This is a simple enfolding operation. Your east and west wings will eventually link with the line moving north from Seventy-sixth. It’s the fastest, simplest way to take terrain away from that psycho.”
Never mentions his daughter, just the Juggler, Boyle thought. But it probably wasn’t lack of emotion; it was probably the only way to stay functioning and sane, think of an exercise in tactics, not a small girl screaming, in agony. .
“When I move my men out, I’ll follow your line, sir.”
“Welcome aboard,” Boyd said. “But let’s not have any surprises out there. If I hear you or anyone else, I’ll say one word: ‘bullet.’ Your countersign is ‘trigger.’”
“I use it the same way? I say ‘bullet’ and you bounce a ‘trigger’ off me?”
Boyd simply nodded and was gone toward the stand of silver lindens in long, loping strides, but silent as a cat stalking prey across the mossy floor of a jungle.
The three Bell helicopters flew crisscrossing patterns above the middle and northern areas of Central Park. The downdraft from their rotary blades lashed at treetops like blasts from miniature hurricanes; their powerful searchlights probed at pathways and stands of trees, brilliant as columns of fire, and the thunder of their engines beat on the ground like flails, and those explosions raced in trembling, diminishing waves along the length and breadth of the park.
The crews of the helicopters were scanning the grounds rushing beneath them with high-power binoculars. From their vantage point, despite the dizzying, erratic patterns they were flying, they could see the line of police pressing steadily north, individual officers defined by the powerful torchlights they carried. And they could see the east and west flanks of Sergeant Boyle’s troops closing in like great wings on the middle of their own line, slowly but inevitably narrowing the distance between the formations advancing from the opposite directions.
Police officers in Central Park had already stopped and interrogated dozens of men and women. Prostitutes of both sexes, winos, couples making love in shadows and a half dozen or more types who had managed to slip past police cordons to savor personally the action and excitement in the park and at the command post.
Another problem confronted New York police that night, an unnecessary problem, although a real and ugly one. That problem was rooted in the human need to witness tragedy, to examine, if possible, the mother’s ravaged face, to speculate with other voyeurs on what peculiar torments might already have been inflicted on the missing child. Instead of following the story on radio and television, there were New Yorkers from all five boroughs converging on Central Park to the disgust and wrath of patrolmen assigned to traffic control.
Their job was complicated enormously by carloads of flushed and noisy people turned on by the prospect of tragedy unfolding before their very eyes.
Some of the questions shouted at traffic cops angered and sickened them in almost equal proportions.
“She dead yet?”
“The weirdo, Officer. He’s a nigger, right?”
“Is it true he cut something off her already?”
“It wouldn’t have happened if she was a God-fearing child.”
But there were moments of sanity.
“I’m a doctor, Officer. Any way I can help?”
“Look, Mac, I’m on my way home. I’m not rubbernecking. But if you want, I’ll stall this rig right here and block all those crazies behind me.”
“Thanks, pal, but keep it moving.”
Old John Brennan stood with his arms crossed and looked with sadness and anger at the streams of cars flowing down Fifth Avenue, circling the park like effing vultures, he thought, adding to the cops’ problems, just for the thrill of seeing somebody shot or killed or a little girl (he crossed himself at the thought) lying dead and bloody somewhere out there in the park’s trees and meadows.
During a rare break in the traffic John Brennan saw a kitten creeping along on the opposite side of Fifth Avenue. As he walked swiftly across the street, he wondered if this was what had drawn Kate toward the park earlier that evening.
The little kitten cringed away from John Brennan’s hands but didn’t attempt to run off, and he was able to pick it up and cuddle it against the warmth of the rough fabric of his doorman’s coat.
As he started back across the street, his way was blocked momentarily by a car halted in the traffic. The driver was a beefy young man with small, lively eyes. He wore a scarf knotted high about his throat, and this gave his narrow head a curios but definite resemblance to that of a turtle.
“Hey, pop. You’re a doorman. Can you get me up to the roof of your building for a better look? I got binoculars. I ain’t asking favors. .there’s ten bucks in it for you.”
With distant memories of the roars of St. Nick’s Arena stirring in his mind and the cheers for gamecock dubbed Kid Irish, John Brennan’s left hand moved with professional speed and power, flattening the young man’s nose and causing twin jets of blood to spurt from each of his splayed nostrils.
“There’s your ten dollars,” John Brennan said, and returned to his post under the awning of the apartment building.
Chapter 20
Manolo crossed the East Drive and walked through stands of dark trees until he came to the eastern boundary of the Ramble, where he stopped at the edge of a clearing, a frost-bright expanse sparkling with moonlight.
It was pretty, and Manolo smiled at it. The gleaming frost made him think of the cookies his mother used to make for him, the tang of lemon, the icings of sugar.
Manolo still needed two hundred and ninety dollars for Samantha. He was frightened by the presence of so many cops in the park, but he knew the park like the palms of his pretty pink hands and so far had had no trouble slipping through their ranks and avoiding their flashlights. What frightened him was they would probably scare off his customers. And even more frightening was what Samantha would do to him if he came up short. Not that she’d do anything herself; she’d just turn his sweet ass over to Coke and Biggie. But she had been good to him yesterday, arousing him so effortlessly and excitingly that the memory now made his cheeks grow warm.
His emotions were a nerve-racking blend of anger, frustration, and fear. Manolo had turned a trick about forty minutes ago on a park bench, like a rough-trade freak. But he was desperate for the money the man had offered him, forty-five dollars, but when it was over and after he rinsed his mouth out at a water fountain, he checked his pocket and found that the forty-five dollars was gone. The fink had picked his pocket, and Manolo had got nothing for his efforts but a sour stench in his mouth. He prided himself on being street-smart, and it enraged him to be taken like that. Fortunately he had lost only the forty-five dollars and not the nearly four hundred taped inside the arm of his white fur jacket. He took some satisfaction in knowing that he still looked exciting and desirable, with gracefully teased black curls and midnight blue suede pants which fitted his rounded buttocks and slim thighs as if the material had been applied with a spray gun.
He had been lucky on more than one time in the Ramble. Once he had made almost four hundred dollars from
