"Elegant," Belson said. He drank some whiskey and shook his head with respect. "New York ain't going to put people on overtime," he said. "Hookers get aced, you know."

"Tell them to check Rambeaux," I said.

"Sure," Belson said. "They sit around waiting for me to call and tell them what to do. They're grateful as h.e.l.l when I do."

"Drink the Black Bush," I said.

"Sure, but not fast. It's a waste to drink it fast."

"Take the gla.s.s," I said. "Sip it in the car."

Belson grinned for the first time. "Okay," he said. He glanced at the tangle of clothes on the floor. "My love to Susan," he said.

13.

Maine is much bigger than any of the other New England states and large stretches of it are, to put it kindly, rural. Lindell is more rural than most of Maine. If three people left, it would be more rural than the moon. The center of town appeared around a curve in a road that ran through scrub forest. There was a cinder block store with a green translucent plastic portico in front and two gas pumps. Next to it was a gray-shingled bungalow with a white sign out front that said in black letters LINDELL, MAINE, and below it U.S. POST OFFICE. Across the street was a bowling alley with a sign in the window that said Coors in red neon script. Beyond the three buildings the road continued its curve back into the scrub forest. Some years back there had been a timbering industry, but when the forest got depleted, the timber companies moved on while Lindell sat around and waited for the new trees to grow. I parked in front of the Lindell sign and went into the building. Half of it was post office, one window and a bank of post office boxes along the wall. The other half .of the building was the site of town government in Lindell. Town government appeared to be a fat woman in a shapeless dress sitting at a yellow pine table with two file cabinets behind her. I smiled at her. She nodded.

"h.e.l.lo," I said. "I'm looking for a man named Vern Buckey."

The fat woman said, "Why?"

"I need to talk with him about his daughter.

"Vern don't like to talk to people," the woman said. There was a gap in her upper front teeth about four teeth wide.

I smiled at her again. She didn't swoon. Was I losing it? Of course not. She was just obdurate.

"Sure, ma'am. I don't blame him. I respect a person's privacy. But this might be important to Vern." If the smile didn't work, the silver tongue would.

"Vern don't like people talking about him neither," she said.

"Well, sure," I said. I was smiling and talking. "n.o.body does, but why don't you just tell me where he is and I'm sure I can explain it to him."

"Vern don't like people telling other people where he lives."

"Lady," I said, "I don't actually give a rat's a.s.s what Vern likes, if you really want to know. I drove seven hours to talk with him and I want to know where he is."

The woman laughed a wheezy laugh. "A rat's a.s.s," she said, and laughed some more. "By G.o.d."

She fumbled around in the litter on the table and found a tired-looking pack of Camels and got one out and lit it with a kitchen match that she scratched on the underside of the table. She inhaled some smoke and blew it out with a kind of snort.

"Well," she said, "you're a pretty good-sized fella."

"But fun-loving," I said, "and kind to my mother."

She smoked some more of her Camel. "Let me tell you something for your own good," she said. She was squinting through the smoke from the cigarette, which she left in the corner of her mouth while she talked. "If you go bothering Vern Buckey he'll knock you down and kick you like a dog."

"Even if I object?"

She laughed again, wheezing, and choked a little on the smoke of her cigarette and laughed and choked and wheezed at the same time.

"Object," she gasped. "You can object like a... like a rat's a.s.s," and she laughed and wheezed so hard she couldn't talk for a minute. She stopped laughing and wheezed a little longer and got her breath back and squinted at me some more.

"You are a by-G.o.d big one," she said. "Might be sorta interesting."

I was gaining ground, so I shut up and smiled and listened. Susan said it was a technique I might consider polishing.

The fat woman pointed with her chin. "Vern's truck is parked 'cross the street in front of the bowling alley. He'll be inside drinking beer."

"Thank you," I said.

She inhaled, coughed, and chuckled in her wheezy way. "Rat's a.s.s," she said.

I was wearing jeans and running shoes and a gray sleeveless T-shirt and a gray silk tweed summer jacket and a gun. I took off the jacket, and unclipped the gun from my belt and folded the jacket on top of the gun and put them on the front seat of my car. Then I walked across the street and into the bowling alley. The bowling alley was one of those round-topped corrugated buildings that look like a big Quonset hut or a small airplane hangar. There were only three lanes inside, and a snack bar that sold beer and sandwiches. No one was bowling. A short dark-haired man with a bald spot and tattooed arms was behind the bar. He had on a sleeveless undershirt with a spot of ketchup on it. Sitting on a barstool drinking Budweiser beer from a longnecked bottle was a guy with a round red face and a big hard belly. He was entirely bald and his head seemed to swell out of his thick shoulders without benefit of neck. He had small piggy eyes under scant eyebrows that were blond or white and barely visible and his thick flared short nose looked like a snout. The eyes and nose gave his face a swinish cast. He was wearing a dirty white T-shirt and baggy blue overalls and work boots. He hadn't shaved recently, but his beard, like his eyebrows, was so pale that it only gave a shabby glint to his red skin. He wasn't talking to the bartender, and he wasn't looking at the soap opera on television. He was staring straight ahead and drinking the beer. When I came in he shifted his stare at me and in its meanness it was nearly tangible. The hand wrapped around the beer bottle was thick and hammy with big knuckles. There was no air-conditioning in the place but a big floor fan hummed near the bar, pushing the hot air around the dim room.

I said, "Vern Buckey?"

He unhooked his bootheels from the lower rung of the barstool and let his feet drop to the floor and stood up. He was at least six feet four, which gave him three inches on me, and he must have weighed eighty pounds more than my two hundred. A lot of it was stomach but what he lacked in conditioning he probably made up in meanness.

"What did you say?" He spoke in a hoa.r.s.e kind of whisper.

"Vern Buckey."

"I don't like you saying that," he rasped.

"I don't blame you," I said. "Sounds like an a.s.shole name to me, too, but I want to talk with you about your daughter."

Buckey put the beer bottle down on the counter and stepped toward me.

"Get the f.u.c.k out of here," he said.

"Your daughter's dead," I said.

"I told you to get out," he said, and took another step. "People round here do what I say."

"I need to know about Ginger, Vern."

"Then I'm going to rack your a.s.s," he said.

I shrugged. "Sure. In the parking lot. No point messing up this slick amus.e.m.e.nt complex."

I turned and went out the door. In the parking lot cars and pickup trucks and two motorcycles had arrived. People sat in the cars and trucks and on the bikes in a kind of expectant semicircle. The fat woman from the town office was there with a group of other citizens in a cl.u.s.ter, near Buckey's green Ford truck. I gave her a short thumbs-up gesture. She poked an elbow into the man next to her and pointed at me with her chin. I could hear her wheeze. Buckey came out of the bowling alley squinting with his little pig eyes in the glare of the summer. He looked around at the circle of onlookers and hunched his shoulders as if to get a kink out and came straight at me.

"Talked with a sheriff's deputy on the phone before I came up," I said. "Said you were crazy. Said everyone in this part of the state was afraid of you."

Bucky tried to kick me in the groin and I turned and he missed and grunted and turned toward me again.

"Said even the cops are afraid of you because you're nuts." He kicked at me again and missed again. I was moving around him. He was ma.s.sive and relentless but he wasn't very fast. If I didn't let my mind wander, I could probably avoid him. It was why I'd come out. I didn't want the fight confined in a small s.p.a.ce.

"Said you'd get on someone's case and maybe they'd be driving along at night and someone would backshoot them with a deer rifle at an intersection."

Buckey rushed at me and I slipped aside and slapped him across the face. The sound of it made several onlookers gasp.

"They know it's you but they can't catch you."

Buckey hit me a roundhouse right-hand punch on the upper left arm and numbness set in at once. He followed with a left but I rolled away from it.

"I can see why you're a backshooter, Vern," I said. "You can't hit s.h.i.t with your fists."

Buckey was a little quicker than he looked and got hold of my shirtfront, and as I tried to yank away he hit me with his right hand again, this time on the side of my head just in front of my left ear. Bells rang. I brought both fists down on his hand where it held my shirt. I didn't loosen his grip, but the shirt tore and I pulled away.

"Best punch you've got, Vern?"

He kept coming. I don't even know if he heard my chatter. His eyes pinched nearly shut. His face a fiery red, sweat running down his cheeks, a froth of saliva at the corner of his mouth, he kept at me like a Cape buffalo: stupid, implacable, brutish and mad.

Fighting is hard work. Big as he was and mean as he was, Buckey was not in training. Most of his fights were one- or two-punch affairs. Knock the victim down and then kick him awhile. Not taxing, except on the kickee. But Vern was having trouble getting me to stay still and in a while he was going to get tired: It wasn't going to be a very long while. I stepped in quick, smacked Buckey on the snout, and moved back away. Blood started down over his lips and chin. He rubbed the back of his left hand over his mouth and looked at the smear of blood and made a sort of growl and rushed at me. I spun aside and kicked him on the side of the left knee and it buckled under him and he went down. Behind me I heard a man say, "Jesus Christ."

Buckey scrambled to his feet. He limped slightly on the knee I'd kicked and he moved more slowly. The blood from his nose was reddening his T-shirt, mixing with the sweat that had already soaked it. Where he'd fallen some of the parking lot gravel stuck to the moisture. He was breathing hard. He lunged at me again and threw a handful of gravel at my face. It didn't have much effect. But it distracted me for half a second and Vern hit me on the left side of the jaw and knocked me two staggering steps and down flat on my back. My head echoed with hollow distance and my vision blurred. He jumped through the blur, kicking at my head, and, mostly on instinct, I half rolled and got my hands up and the kick hit my upper arm. I kept rolling and crab-scrambled away from the next kick and got my feet under me and was up. I felt dizzy. Vern hit me again on the upper left arm, and then on the right forearm as I covered up and deflected the punches. The ringing in my head was clearing. I could hear Vern's breath rasping in and out. He tried to get his arms around me in a bear hug and when he did I kneed him in the groin and b.u.t.ted him under the chin and broke away. He was gasping and shaking his head, half doubled over in pain. But his eyes were fixed on me with the same red intensity they had when he stepped out of the bowling alley. He was drooling a little and bleeding and soaked with sweat and filthy with dust and gravel. He was breathing like a bellows, oxygen heaving into his chest. But he had stopped coming at me. He stood still, swaying slightly, his head shaking slightly.

"Vern," I said, "you're just not in shape." I shook my head. "Shame to see a man let himself go like this."

He came at me again, but more slowly. Not cautiously, but in a slower-motion version of the way he had come at me before. There was no change in expression. I made a little feint with my left hand and hooked it over his shoulder and got him on the jaw. I moved away from his punch and hit him a combination, left, left, overhand right. And moved away. Vern turned slowly toward me. His arms were starting to drop. It was what I used to look for when I was fighting. Your opponent got arm-weary and he let them drop and you went for his head. I hit Vern another combination. My head was clear now and the oxygen was flowing in and out easily and the legs were good and the muscles were loose and I could see very clearly. I could see the openings where the punches could go and I was moving in the clean, precise automatic sequences I had learned a long time ago when I thought I was going to be heavyweight champ. Vern was pushing his punches at me now. It was almost done. I knew there were people watching and I knew the sun was out but none of that had any reality, only the swaying ma.s.sive shape in front of me and the punching lanes and the sequenced movements. It was like dancing to music only I could hear. Even Vern barely mattered in the intensity of my concentration and the rhythms of the fight. There was no pain. Later there would be, but not now. Just the patterns and the movements and the solid jolt as the punches landed.

And then he was through.

He didn't go down. But his arms dropped; he stopped coming, even slowly, and stood motionless, his arms down, gasping for air. I stepped back away from him. The intensity was gone. The meanness was gone. In his eyes there was nothing. As if all he was was mean and if he lost it he ceased to exist. Around us most of the people north of Bangor stood in a ragged semicircle in absolute silence. I could hear my breathing deep and steady easing in and out, and I could hear Buckey rasping desperately. Somewhere in the scrub forests along the highway some kind of bird was making a persistent sound like chips being sliced from a hardwood slab.

Behind me a man's voice said, "Put him away, mister."

And another voice, male also: "Put him down, man... Put the sonova b.i.t.c.h down."

I said to Buckey, "You ready to talk about Ginger?"

A woman's voice said, "Knock him down, mister." And a man said, "Don't stop until it's done."

A lot of voices chimed in. Vern wasn't only disliked. He was disliked widely.

A woman said, "Kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

Buckey still stood motionless, still swaying slightly, his head down, gasping. Then he slowly bent forward and his knees buckled and he fell like a weed wilting, crumpling to the ground and lying still with his face in the gravel. Again there was silence and then someone began to clap and then the odd rural crowd began to applaud steadily.

Now I was the toughest guy in Lindell, Maine.

14.

Buckey's pulse was strong and I propped him in the shade against the east wall of the bowling alley. The bartender with the tattoos brought me a bucket of water and some ice and a rag and I sponged Buckey off and soaked my hands and waited. I was sitting on my heels with both hands in the ice-water bucket when Buckey opened his eyes.

I didn't move. His eyes slowly focused on me. I put the ice bucket aside and rested my forearms on my thighs and folded my hands. His eyes moved past me. There was no one else. The big fight was over. The audience had gone away. He looked back at me.

"I'm going to kill you," he said. I nodded.

"When you're sleeping or getting laid or walking along not thinking about it, I'm going to be there and blow the back of your f.u.c.king head away."

I nodded again. I had my gun back on my belt and sitting still on my heels I reached around with my right hand and took it out and pointed it at the tip of Buckey's nose and said, "Maybe."

Buckey looked at the muzzle of the gun two inches from his face. He didn't say anything.

I said, "Now I want you to tell me about your daughter, Ginger."

"I ain't telling you f.u.c.king s.h.i.t," he said. But it was weak.

"You've been doing that," I said. "And look what it got you. I want to know about the wh.o.r.ehouse you sold your kid to."

"She's dead," he said.

"Yeah, she was a street hooker in New York City and somebody shot her."

"So what's the f.u.c.king difference?" Buckey said.

"Fatherhood rests but lightly on you, Vern," I said. And I thumbed the hammer back on my gun. It made the cylinder turn one notch and Vern could see the copper-jacketed slug go under the hammer. "What wh.o.r.ehouse?"

Buckey shrugged. "Place called Magic Ma.s.sage in Portland. I didn't sell her. It was a finder's fee."

"Place still there?" I said.

"Was last time I was down to Portland, on Congress Street, around the corner from Franklin."

I smiled, and turned the gun away from his face and let the hammer down gently. Then I flipped the cylinder out, turned it so there was an empty chamber under the hammer, closed the gun and put it back on my hip. Vern watched me.

"You had a f.u.c.king gun why didn't you use it," he said. "How come you come on to me without it, if you had one?"

"Wanted to see if you really were the toughest guy in Lindell," I said. I stood up. "See you around, Vern."

"That's all?" Buckey said. "You come up here all this way to fight me and find out about a wh.o.r.ehouse in Portland?"

"Un huh."