Read Online 1975 - Night of the Juggler by William P. McGivern - Free Book Online

the first doctor I guess nobody does. But the second one said the same thing. I still go out every morning like I used to, and when I get home at night, I have to make up stories for her. That’s the worst part of it. I’m not much good at making things up.”
    “What do you mean? Why do you have to make up stories?”
    “Well, I tell her about my calls. Our daughter’s away at school, she’s in premed, so there’s just the two of us. So I tell my wife what fabrics people like and any little stories I can dream up, like some lady matching a sofa to her poodle or maybe a redheaded grandchild.
    Then I sit at my desk and write up orders on sales that I pretend I made during the day.” He sighed, but his smile and manner remained oddly apologetic. “I just don’t know how to tell her,” he said. “It will be so hard on her. There’s no money for my daughter to finish college, to go on to med school. I really don’t know what to say to her either. My daughter, I mean.”
    Police work had not made Detective Sergeant Boyle a fatalist; on the contrary, despite massive evidence which failed to support his view, Rusty Boyle remained an optimistic and charitable human being who detested what seemed to him a manifest unfairness in life. Here was a prime example of it.
    Sergeant Boyle’s father had died when Rusty was four years old, and this had seemed a gross unfairness to him, and he had never truly got over it. But the scales had been balanced by his mother, a marvelous person, who had believed that man had no business trying to get up to the moon, but had also quoted Micheas, Chapter Six, Verse Eight, to her son, saying in her musical Irish voice, “What more does the Lord require of you, but to do just, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”
    He had had all that. And he had Joyce, whose love for him and his for her was much deeper and even more significant than the riotous physical pleasure they took in each other. And he had the Gypsy to work for, while this poor bastard had a body laced and woven with pain and was staring death in the eyes and couldn’t even tell his wife about it. And on top of that, forced to write fake orders and tell her funny stories while his guts were dying inside him.
    “Jesus,” Rusty Boyle said again. Then an idea occurred to him. A splendid idea. And when such thoughts occurred to this large emotional Irishman, they struck him with a force of natural laws. He put a big arm around Ransom’s shoulders and gave him a conspiratorial smile.
    “Look, where’s your wife now?”
    “She’s out shopping.”
    “All right. Let’s you and me go across the street and have a couple of beers. A time like this, a guy should have somebody to talk to. So how about it?”
    “I’d like that very much,” Ransom said quietly, and then looked off down the street, but not before Rusty Boyle saw the glint of tears in his eyes.
    Detective Sergeant Boyle told Tebbet to notify Lieutenant Tonnelli that he’d be out of the office for a half hour or so, but if the Gypsy needed him for anything, he’d be across the street at the Grange Bar.
    At approximately the same time that Rusty Boyle and Mr. Ransom entered the Grange, Gus Soltik was prowling the jungles of Manhattan looking for a cat.
    The Juggler walked slowly and quietly through a refuse-littered alley in the vicinity of Eleventh Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, his shadow falling massive and tall beyond him, his black silhouette topped by the leather cap with its metal button. They liked cats, he knew, anything small and soft and warm. Like they were. . . . He heard a faint purring sound and stopped in his tracks, looking about tensely, but finally realized it was only the hum of high winds in the power lines above his head.
    Something bothered Gus Soltik. He felt a stir of panic. It wasn’t forgetting his name. He knew that all right. “Gus Soltik,” he said, speaking the two words softly into the winds of the night. It was something