The car, a red 5 Series BMW, picked me up at Route 1 and stayed with me when I left the highway for Maine Mall Road. I pulled into the parking lot in front of Panera Bread and waited, but the car, with two men inside, headed on by. I gave them five minutes, then moved out of the lot, keeping an eye on my rearview mirror as I drove. I saw the BMW parked over by the Dunkin’ Donuts, but it didn’t try to follow me this time. Instead, after making a couple of loops of the area, I spotted its replacement. This time the BMW was blue, and it had only one man in the front, but it was clear that I was the object of his attentions. I almost felt resentful. Twin BMWs: these guys were being hired by the hour and being paid cheap. Part of me was tempted to confront them, but I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to control my temper, which meant there was a good chance that things could end badly. Instead I made a call. Jackie Garner answered on the first ring.

“Hey, Jackie,” I said. “Want to break some heads?”

I sat in my car outside Tim Horton’s doughnut shop. The blue BMW was in the Maine Mall’s lot across the street, while its red sibling waited in the parking lot of the Sheraton. One at each side of the road. It was still amateurish, but it showed promise.

My cell phone rang.

“How you doing, Jackie?”

“I’m at the Best Buy.”

I looked up. I could see Jackie’s van idling in the fire lane.

“It’s a blue BMW, Mass. plates, maybe three rows in. He’ll move when I move.”

“Where’s the other car?”

“Over by the Sheraton. It’s a red BMW. Two men.”

Jackie seemed confused.

“They’re using the same badge?”

“Same model, just a different color.”

“Dumb.”

“Kind of.”

“What are you going to do about the guys in red?”

“Let them come, I guess, then we can deal with them. Why?”

I got the sense that Jackie had an alternative solution.

“Well,” he said, “you see, I brought some friends. Do you want this done quietly?”

“Jackie, if I wanted it done quietly, would I have called you?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“So who did you bring along?”

He tried to avoid the question, but I pinned him down.

“Jackie, tell me: who did you bring?”

“The Fulcis.” He sounded vaguely apologetic.

Dear God: the Fulci brothers. They were mooks for hire, twin barrels of muscle and flab with more chips on their shoulders than all the employees of the Frito company put together. Even the “for hire” part was misleading. If the situation offered sufficient scope for mayhem, the Fulcis would happily offer their services for free. Tony Fulci, the elder of the two brothers, held the record for being the most expensive prisoner ever to have been jailed in Washington State, calculated on a length-of-stay basis. Tony did some time there at the end of the nineties, when a lot of prisons were hiring out their inmates to large corporations to do telesales and call-center work. Tony was given a job phoning people on behalf of a new ISP named FastWire, asking its rivals’ customers to consider switching service from their current provider to the new kid on the block. The sum total of Tony Fulci’s only conversation with a customer went pretty much as follows:

Tony (reading slowly from an idiot card): I am calling on behalf of FastWire Comm-

Customer: I’m not interested.

Tony: Hey, let me finish.

Customer: I told you: I’m not interested.

Tony: Listen, what are you, stupid? This is a good deal.

Customer: I told you, I don’t want it.

Tony: Don’t you hang up that phone. You hang up that phone, and you’re a dead man.

Customer: You can’t talk to me like that.

Tony: Hey, fuck you! I know who you are, I know where you live, and when I get out of here in five months and three days I’m gonna look you up, then I’m gonna tear you limb from limb. Now, you want this piece-of-shit deal or not?

FastWire quickly abandoned its plans to extend the use of prisoners as callers, but not quickly enough to prevent it from being sued. Tony cost Washington’s prisons $7 million in lost contracts once the FastWire story got around, or $1.16 million for every month Tony was incarcerated. And Tony was the calm one in the family. All things considered, the Fulcis made the Mongol hordes look restrained.

“You couldn’t have found anyone more psychotic?”

“Maybe, but they would have cost more.”

There was no way out of it. I told him I’d head toward Deering Avenue and try to draw the solo tail away, with Jackie following. The Fulcis could intercept the other guys wherever they chose.

“Give me two minutes,” said Jackie. “I just gotta tell the Fulcis.

Man, they’re juiced. You don’t know what this means to them, getting to do some real detective work. Tony just wished you could have given him a little more notice. He would’ve come off his meds.”

The Fulcis didn’t have to go far to take the red BMW. They simply blocked it off in the Sheraton’s lot by parking their truck behind it. The Fulcis drove a customized Dodge 4X4 inspired by the monster-truck DVDs that they watched when they weren’t making other people’s lives more interesting in a Chinese way.

The BMW’s doors opened. The driver was a clean-shaven, middle-aged man in a cheapish gray suit that made him look like an executive for a company that was struggling to make ends meet. He weighed maybe 150, or roughly half a Fulci. His companion was bigger and swarthier, possibly bringing their combined weight up to a Fulci and a quarter, or a Fulci and a half if Tony was abusing his diet pills. The Fulcis’ Dodge had smoked-glass windows, so the guy in the suit could almost have been forgiven for what he said next.

“Hey,” he said, “get that fucking tin can out of the way. We’re in a hurry here.”

Nothing happened for about fifteen seconds, while the Fulcis’ primitive, semimedicated brains tried to equate the words they’d heard spoken with their own vision of their beloved truck. Eventually, the door on the driver’s side opened, and a very large, very irate Tony Fulci jumped gracelessly from the cab to the ground. He wore a polyester golf shirt, elastic-waisted pants from a big-man store, and steel-toed work boots. His belly bulged under his shirt, the sleeves of which stopped above his enormous biceps, the material insufficiently Lycraed to make the stretch demanded of it by his pumped arms. Twin arcs of muscle reached from his shoulders to just below his ears, their symmetry undisturbed by the intrusion of a neck, giving him the appearance of a man who had recently been force-fed a very large coat hanger.

His brother Paulie joined him. He made Tony look a little on the dainty side.

“Jesus Christ,” said the BMW’s driver.

“Why?” said Tony. “Does he drive a fucking tin can as well?”

Then the Fulcis went to work.

The blue BMW stayed with me all the way to Deering Avenue, hanging back two or three cars but always keeping me in sight. Jackie Garner was behind him at every turn. I had picked the route because it was guaranteed to confuse anyone who wasn’t a native, and the fact that he was still within the Portland city limits, instead of being led into open country, would make the tail less likely to believe that he had been spotted and was about to be confronted. I reached the point where Deering becomes one-way, just before the intersection with Forest, forcing all traffic heading out of town to make a right. I took the tail with me as I turned, then went left onto Forest, left again back onto Deering, and took a hard right to Revere. The BMW had no choice but to stick with me every time or risk being dumped, so that when I braked suddenly he had to do the same. When Jackie shot in behind him he realized what was happening. There was no other option for the BMW except to try to use the bread company’s lot to buy himself some space and time. He pulled in fast, and we came at him in a V, trapping him against the wall.