Night of the Juggler

And indeed, Manolo was showing off, converting his slow and sensual passage across the glade into an amusing and outrageous ego trip.

Laughing softly, he patted his pretty curls and called to Gus Soltik in tones that quivered with sexual promise.

Manolo felt lucky and happy. On a practical note, he was out of hock to Sam, and when you did a favor for a police lieutenant, you just might get one in return, and that was a nice thing to have going for you when you sold your ass for a living in the streets and alleys of New York.

Manolo lit a joint and sucked smoke slowly and deeply into his lungs, holding it there for a pleasurable, dizzying moment before exhaling it through the perfect circle formed by his soft red lips.

“Come on, Gus. No need for a big stud like you to be afraid. Big lover stud, we’ll trick up a storm.”

In the grove of cork trees, Samantha said tensely to Tonnelli, “What’s he using that psycho’s name for? You told him not to.”

“It’s all right, Maybelle,” the Gypsy said, but he had also felt a stir of anxiety. Manolo was taking a long and unnecessary gamble using Gus Soltik’s name.

They had told him to stay in plain view in the moonlight, to keep out of shadows. But Manolo wasn’t afraid of Gus Soltik. He was supremely confident of his ability to manage and manipulate faggots. He was always in charge there, literally in the saddle. He was the candy they drooled for, and unless they were good little boys, they’d never get their hot fingers on it.

Chapter 23

Preconceptions of the human mind and eye are the prime hazards in aerial reconnaissance: Airfields are expected to be long and narrow; military units in barracks are formed in squares; cannon revetments, with circles of sandbags, appear as doughnuts from the sky; and their supply roads, unless artfully camouflaged, are arrows that reveal their existence by pointing straight at their hearts. Nature is haphazard, careless, disorganized; man’s inevitable tendency is to make his environment conform to orderly and discernible patterns.

Luther Boyd was searching acres of rock and underbrush for the sign of man. He was seeking evidence of someone’s need to alter the natural disorder of environment.

The night was colder, and the wind was rising, stirring dry leaves on rock-studded sheets of ground. Rain was in the freshening air, and above him the sudden gusts and squalls drove tatters of clouds across the waning moon.

It was then he found what he had been searching for. Before that moment his frustration had deepened into despair. He remembered the quotation from Von Moltke which had been stressed at the Point:

“First ponder, then dare.” But what to dare? What to dare with? he had been thinking helplessly.

But now his flashlight revealed a heap of stones stacked against a wall of rock in an orderly fashion, and this was what he had been seeking, not the casual formations of nature but the defining work of human hands.

He hurled the rocks aside, breathing hard after the first minutes of work, because the stones were large and heavy and packed tightly against the mouth of a tunnel. But when he forced an opening and poured light from his flashlight into a small cave, he found himself staring at a dusty stack of empty wine bottles. He read labels with listless interest, his eyes helpless and despairing, realizing that each passing second might be ticking off his daughter’s life. Wine-Apple, Muscatel. . Suddenly, and for reasons he didn’t understand, he was warned and alerted by a leaf on the ground. It was flecked with mud, but beautiful with the autumn colors of yellow and scarlet. His heart began to pound. He knew then he must have made a dreadful error. A mistake of miscalculation. First ponder, then dare. He had dared, in a sense, to outguess the Juggler, but had he pondered, had he thought?

He had misread signs, he was sure of it. A clue, an arrow pointing to his daughter, had escaped his trained eyes.

This conviction of failure was a special torture to Luther Boyd because he had failed Kate where he shouldn’t have failed her, in the area of his own professional strengths and skills.

Boyd picked up the mud-flecked red-and-yellow maple leaf and stared at it, demanding an answer from it.

From behind the shadows that Manolo was approaching, Gus Soltik was crouched close to the ground, concealed by dense underbrush and the low black limbs of trees. His body was responding with almost agonizing excitement to Manolo’s presence and beauty. But some primal fear warned Gus Soltik against revealing himself. It was the man in black climbing the rocky hill to get him. That was what had been behind him all night. The “coldness.”

Deflecting that primitive terror was the thought that they would never punish him because they would never find her.

He was blinded by lust. His eyes saw nothing but Manolo, the black, curly hair and the soft, smoothly vulnerable throat.

Manolo was only twenty feet from the Juggler now, standing in moonlight, blending with shadows, and Gus Soltik was achingly ready for him.

In an urgent whisper Samantha said to Tonnelli, “Get him the fuck out of there, Gypsy.”

“Don’t worry, we got him covered.”

“But not if you can’t see him.”

It had amused Manolo to drift at last into the shadows of the big trees.

It amused and excited him because he thought (or hoped, at least) that it would frighten Samantha. It made him feel important to know he could do that to her. She had some kinky thing going for him, the way she had hugged and patted him in the police car that brought them up to this area of the park.

He stood shrouded in darkness, laughing and softly calling Gus Soltik’s name.

When Manolo disappeared from view, Samantha tried to scream a warning at him, but Tonnelli saw the tightening cords of her throat and swiftly clamped a hand across her mouth, stifling the sound into a strangled sob. Several of the police marksmen turned, reflexes instinctively triggered by the silent struggle between Samantha and Lieutenant Tonnelli.

The Juggler spotted movement in the trees at the east side of the glade. Frowning lines formed on his wide, rounded forehead. At first only a dim curiosity stirred in his mind. Somebody. . somebody else wanted the boy.

But after that first jealous thought, which made him wince like the cut of a whip, other thoughts formed in his mind, ugly and dangerous. His animal instincts were suddenly aroused. He listened, and he sniffed the air, and his small, muddy eyes focused on the trees on the other side of the clearing. The shadows there were merging into patterns.

He saw the shapes of men. While numbers confused him, he singled out four shapes, counting them on the fingers of his massive right hand. He saw more shapes, but trying to count them deepened the texture of his confusion and anger. The shapes stood still, like people waiting. He could smell the essence of cherries in the oil glistening on Manolo’s curly black hair; but the word “wall” had appeared in his mind, and his hands were beginning to tremble with fury.

He knew why those men were waiting. They were here to hurt him, using the boy to trap him inside walls. His name. Sometimes he forgot his own name. But the boy knew his name. Someone had told him.

They always said calm down. Stay calm. His mother, Mrs. Schultz, Lanny at the zoo. They said it was the other thing, the anger, that caused the trouble. Always. But Gus Soltik couldn’t fight the rage that gripped him now. It was like an animal inside him, a snarling that roared in his head, claws slashing at his heart and lungs, screaming for release.

Resisting a compulsion to bellow his rage at this betrayal, Gus Soltik opened the flight bag and removed his heavy hunting knife. Then he ran silently into the shadows behind Manolo, and before Manolo could scream even once, the Juggler’s knife had flashed across his throat, opening an inch-deep furrow in that soft, vulnerable flesh, the flesh he had wanted only to touch, he thought, as he sobbed and lifted Manolo’s body high above him and hurled it like a broken doll into the moonlight of the glade.