The second man was taller and bulkier, with long dark hair that hung over the collar of a clean white shirt. He had hard eyes and an unsmiling mouth that contrasted with the bright Winnie the Pooh tie neatly knotted at his neck. His head was almost square, set on wide, rectangular shoulders, with the barest hint of a neck intervening. He moved the way a kid moves an action figure, loping from side to side without bending his knees. Together, the two made quite a pair.

"Jeez, fellas, I think you may be a little late for trick or treat." I leaned conspiratorially toward the shorter guy. "And you know," I whispered, "if the wind changes direction, you'll be left that way."

They were cheap shots, but I didn't like people sneaking around in the mist poking guns in my back. As Billy Purdue might have said, it was kind of rude.

The shorter guy turned my gun over in his hand, examining the third-generation Smith & Wesson with an expert's appreciation.

"Nice piece," he said.

"Give it back and I'll show you how it works."

He smiled a strange, jagged smile.

"You gotta come with us." He waved me in the direction of India Street, where a pair of headlights had just flashed on in the darkness.

I looked back at the Mustang.

"Shit," said Harelip, with a look of mock concern on his face. "You worried about your car?"

He flicked the safety on my gun and fired at the Mustang, blowing out the front and rear tires on the driver's side. From somewhere close by, a car alarm began to sound.

"There," he said. "Nobody's gonna steal it now."

"I'll remember you did that," I replied.

"Uh-huh. You want me to spell my name for you, you let me know."

The taller guy gave me a shove in the direction of the car, a silver Seven Series BMW, which moved over to us and swung to the right, the rear door popping open. Inside sat another handsome devil with short brown hair and a gun resting on his thigh. The driver, younger than the rest, popped bubble gum and listened to an AOR station on the car stereo. Bryan Adams came on as I climbed into the car, singing the theme song from Don Juan DeMarco.

"Any possibility we could change the station?" I asked, as we drove off.

Beside me, Harelip prodded me hard with his gun.

"I like this song," he said, humming along. "You got no soul."

I looked at him. I think he was serious.

We drove to the Regency Hotel on Milk Street, the nicest hotel in Portland, which occupied what was once a redbrick armory in the Old Port. The driver parked in back and we walked to the rear entrance on Fore Street, where another young guy in a neat black suit opened the door for us before speaking in a mike on his lapel to advise that we were on our way up. We took the stairs to the top floor, where Harelip knocked respectfully at the end door on the right. When it opened, I was led in and brought to meet Tony Celli.

Tony sat in a big armchair with his shoeless feet on a matching footstool. His black stockings were silk and his gray trousers were immaculately pressed. He wore a blue-striped shirt with a white collar and a dark red tie marked with an intricate pattern of black spirals. Gold gleamed at his white cuffs. He was clean shaven and his black hair was neatly combed and parted to one side. His eyes were brown beneath thin, plucked eyebrows. His nose was long and unbroken, his mouth a little soft, his chin a little fat. There were no rings on his fingers, which lay clasped in his lap. In front of him, the TV was turned to the nightly financial report. On a table beside him lay a pair of headphones and a bug detector, indicating that the room had already been searched for listening devices.

I knew Tony Celli by reputation. He had worked his way up through the ranks, running porn shops and whores in Boston's Combat Zone, paying his dues, gradually building up a power base. He took cash from the people below him and paid a lot of it to the people above him. He met his obligations and was now regarded as a hot tip for the future. I knew that he already had a certain amount of responsibility in money matters, based on a perception that he was gifted with financial acumen, a perception he now reinforced with his striped shirt and the attention he was paying to the stock prices that flashed past at the bottom of the screen.

I guessed that he was forty by now, certainly no more than that. He looked good. In fact, he looked like the sort of guy you could bring home to meet your mother, if you didn't think that he'd probably torture her, fuck her, then dump her remains in Boston harbor.

The nickname Tony Clean had stuck for a number of reasons: his appearance was part of it, but mainly it was because Tony never got his hands dirty. People had washed a lot of blood off their hands for Tony's sake, watching it spiral down into cracked porcelain bathtubs or stainless steel sinks, but Tony never got so much as a speck of it on his shirt.

I heard a story about him once, back in 1990 when he was still slashing up pimps who forgot how territorial Tony could be. A guy called Stan Goodman, a Boston real estate developer, owned a weekend house in Rockport, a big old gabled place with vast green lawns and an oak tree that was about two centuries old out by the boundary wall. Rockport's a pretty nice place, a fishing village north of Boston at Cape Ann where you can still park for a penny and the Salt Water trolley will haul you around town for four dollars a day.

Goodman had a wife and two teenage children, a boy and a girl, and they loved that house as well. Tony offered Stan Goodman a lot of money for the house, but he refused. It had belonged to his father, he said, and his father had bought it from the original owner back in the forties. He offered to find Tony Clean a similar property nearby, because Stan Goodman figured that if he kept on the good side of Tony Clean then everything would turn out okay. Except Tony Clean didn't have a good side.

One night in June, someone entered the Goodman house, shot their dog, bound and gagged the four members of the family and took them out to the old granite quarries at Halibut Point. My guess is that Stan Goodman died last, after they had killed his wife, his daughter and his son by placing their heads on a flat rock and cracking them open with a sledgehammer. There was a lot of blood on the ground when they were found the next morning, and I reckon it took the men who killed them a long time to wash it from their clothes. Tony Celli bought the house the following month. There were no other bidders.

The mere fact that Tony was here after what had taken place at Prouts Neck indicated that he wasn't screwing around. Tony wanted that money, and he wanted it bad, and he was willing to risk bringing down heat on himself to find it.

"You watch the news?" he said at last. He didn't look away from the screen, but I knew that the question was directed at me.

"Nope."

He looked at me for the first time.

"You don't watch any news?"

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"It depresses me."

"You must depress easy."

"I have a sensitive nature."

The financial report ended. He clicked off the TV using a manicured finger on the remote, then turned his full attention to me.

"You know who I am?" he said.

"Yeah, I know who you are."

"Good. Then, being an intelligent man, you probably know why I'm here."

"Christmas shopping? Looking to buy a house?"

He smiled coldly. "I know all about you, Parker. You're the one that took down the Ferreras." The Ferreras were a New York crime family, were being the operative word. I had become mixed up in their business, and it had ended badly for them.

"They took themselves down. I just watched."

"That's not what I heard. A lot of people in New York would be happier if you were dead. They think you lack respect."