Free Taming a Sea Horse by Robert B. Parker

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 fucking 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 fucking shit," 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 whorehouse 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 fucking 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 whorehouse?"
    Buckey shrugged. "Place called Magic Massage 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 fucking 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 whorehouse in Portland?"
    "Un huh."
    "You're fucking crazy, man. What do you care about a whorehouse in Portland? What the fuck you care about some dead whore in New York?"
    "Vern," I said, "it was a pleasure to punch your lights out. It was such a pleasure that I may come up sometime and do it again."
    I turned and left him sitting slumped against the wall and headed for my car and drove away, back south. Toward Portland.

15
    The sky over Portland is like the sky above San Francisco, unusually blue and high, suggestive of the ocean that surrounds the city on most sides. The buildings were low and that emphasized the high of the sky and the silent presence of the ocean.
    I parked along the restored waterfront on Commercial Street and walked up through the Old Port Exchange area to Congress Street. The Old Port Exchange was urban renewal at its chichiest. The nineteenth-century granite buildings restored and full of restaurants and dress shops and places with names like The Elegant Elephant. The people walking about in the area could have been from Boston or Chicago. It was startling when they spoke in the Titus Moody accent that had persisted even here among the bleached oak and hanging plants.
    I passed a shop called Gazelle, and a bookstore that displayed the complete works of Thomas Merton in the window, and turned east on Congress Street. The Holiday Inn where I'd spent the night had a map of downtown Portland in its lobby and I had spent a minute in front of it after breakfast. Like Boston, Portland was a red-brick city. There were occasional granite and brownstone buildings and the usual ugly newer ones, but mostly it was red brick. Past Franklin Street, at the east end of Portland, the Magic Massage Parlor, Massages by Women, stood across the street from a store that sold scuba gear.
    The storefront display windows were discreetly curtained on the first floor, but a small card in the lower left-hand corner of the biggest window said OPEN. I crossed the street and leaned against the front wall of the dive shop and scoped things out.
    Magic Massage was in a three-story brick