it’s loose in the park. The chiefs have dispatched three armored jeeps with marksmen and tranquilizer bullets. Don’t anybody try to stop him with a police special. It won’t.”
After Sokolsky had transmitted these messages to all patrolmen and squads in and around the park, he flicked his receiving switch and gestured to Tonnelli.
“Something else is coming in, Lieutenant.” Sokolsky listened for a few seconds, nodded, then glanced up at Tonnelli. “The same guys from the Twenty-second. They’ve been checking around, found a parks department truck missing. Seems Lanny Gruber usually took a swing through the zoo area around midnight. Then he parked the truck on the south side of the Arsenal, you know, after making sure there was nobody loitering-”
Tonnelli cut him off with a chopping gesture of his hand.
“When did they find it missing?”
“Couple of minutes ago, I guess.”
Potentials and timetables and routes began to form patterns into the Gypsy’s intricate perceptions. Not south but north. He wouldn’t drive south toward that barrier of squad cars on Fifty-ninth Street. North then. At least twenty minutes ago, possibly more. And the Juggler’s destination? Boyd had given him an answer to that.
West across the Ramble on a line with Seventy-seventh Street. If Kate Boyd was alive, that’s where the Juggler was heading. If she were dead, he would travel north inevitably, hoping to escape from the park through the trackless areas that merged with Meer Lake and the edges of Harlem.
Sokolsky flipped a switch and spoke into his mike. “Code Three, all units. . ” Tonnelli cut him off with an angry headshake.
“Hold it!” Tonnelli said.
Sokolsky looked at him with puzzled eyes. “Sure, Lieutenant. But I thought-”
“We’ll finesse this one,” Tonnelli said. The Gypsy turned and stared north at black stands of trees on the horizon. His expression was hard and cold, and his eyes were narrowing as if he had already caught sight of his quarry.
“Forget the report on that missing truck, Sokolsky. That’s an order.”
“Check, Lieutenant.”
“One more thing. I want every cop and detective out of the Ramble. Instruct them to report to the reserve unit in the Sheep Meadow. Put that signal on the air right now.”
“Check, Lieutenant.”
Tonnelli walked with long, deliberate strides, not to his unmarked sedan, but to a row of pool squad cars which were equipped with standard dome lights and whose interior arsenals included bullhorns and riot guns. Tonnelli jerked a thumb at a young uniformed officer behind the wheel of one of these reserve squad cars. The patrolman slipped hastily from the car, and within seconds Gypsy Tonnelli was driving across the meadow that would lead him to the East Drive.
Gus Soltik crouched low in the dark, warm cab of the parks department truck and watched two young patrolmen crossing the lot in his direction, their red flashlights cutting rhythmic swaths across the paved surface of the parking area. Gus Soltik sat very quietly, but his right hand gripped the handle of his knife with painful intensity.
His thoughts were chaotic, and his body was hot and trembling with his needs.
The red beam of a flashlight flicked across the windshield of the truck; but Gus Soltik’s head was below the dashboard, and the officers continued on toward the East Drive, their lights eventually winking out in the darkness.
With an animal like moan Gus Soltik climbed from the truck and ran swiftly and silently into trees bordering the parking lot.
Chapter 25
Luther Boyd stopped in the darkness near a massive facing of rock.
From Babe Fritzel’s two-way radio he was monitoring a conversation between Assistant Chief Inspector Taylor “Chip” Larkin and Dispatcher Sokolsky, who manned the switchboard at the command post in Central Park.
Commander Larkin was driving north in his chauffeured sedan from the supermarket in Greenwich Village where the gunman, after improbable intercessions from a pair of street people, had released nineteen hostages unharmed and surrendered himself in tears to the police.
Boyd’s reaction to the following exchanges was tense and expectant, but there was something else in his expression, a challenge to the gods, the sacrilege of hope.
“Sokolsky? I’ve had a report from the Twenty-second that a parks department truck was stolen from the Arsenal approximately the time the super was murdered. Did you have that, Sokolsky?”
“Yes, Chief. I had it.”
There was something close to anger in Larkin’s musical Irish voice.
“Why didn’t you notify all units?”
“Lieutenant Tonnelli gave me a negative on that, Chief. The lieutenant made it a direct order, sir.”
“Is Lieutenant Tonnelli at the CP?”
“No, Chief. He left here a few minutes ago in one of the pool squads.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, sir.”
The chief’s voice rose sharply. “Central, this is Borough Commander South. Patch me through to Lieutenant Tonnelli, and don’t waste time about it.”
Boyd stood perfectly still, controlling his emotions with a discipline acquired from years of training, while listening to Central’s operator ordering Lieutenant Tonnelli to report his position and destination immediately to Chief Larkin.
There was no answer from the Gypsy. Boyd could envision the situation as clearly as if it were flashing before his eyes on a screen.
The Juggler was in that stolen truck, and Tonnelli was after him.
But Boyd knew what the Juggler wanted, and he knew why. Only one question demanded an answer now: Where would he leave the truck?
With animal cunning, the Juggler might instinctively realize it would point after him like an arrow if he abandoned it near his eventual destination.
So where would be the most obvious and innocent place to hide a truck? Ideally, a gas station or a used-car lot. But the plain fact was there were no such facilities in Central Park. Then the answer hit Boyd so abruptly that it sent a shock wave of hope and excitement through his body.
And considering that Boyd had an almost certain fix on where the Juggler was heading, he could make a shrewd guess at where he would leave the truck, the parking lot closest to the Ramble, that oblong stretch of pavement that abutted the Loeb boathouse just north of the East Drive.
Tonnelli angled his pool squad car toward the curb and stopped near Max Prima and another patrolman who were in position at the East Drive on a line with Sixty-eighth Street.
When he rolled down the window of the car and looked up at Prima, the faint light from a streetlamp ran like quicksilver up and down the scar that streaked across the Gypsy’s cheek.
“You men spot a parks department truck traveling north fifteen or twenty minutes ago?”
Max Prima hesitated a fractional instant. As in any other tightly interwoven organization, gossip and rumor spread like storm fires through the police department. And there was a rumor, an ugly one, that Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli had gone shut-eye, had cut off his radio, and was deliberately refusing to report to Chief Larkin. Sokolsky had asked all units for a make on that particular truck, but almost twenty-odd minutes after it had first been reported missing by officers from the 22nd. It could be out on Long Island by now.
But Max Prima was not staring into the eyes of just another cop, not just a lieutenant in the New York police department. He was looking at a scarred man who was a legend in all five boroughs of the city, and so he said simply, “Yes, Lieutenant. We spotted it. About eighteen minutes ago, heading north.”
