Four Past Midnight

Right was right, after all, just as Shooter had said. And fair was fair.

He got back into his car and drove off toward Derry.

17

He paid his seventy-five cents at the Augusta toll plaza, then pulled into the parking area by the telephones on the far side. The day was sunny, chilly, and windy - coming out of the southwest from the direction of Litchfield and running straight and unbroken across the open plain where the turnpike plaza lay, that wind was strong enough to bring tears to Mort's eyes. He relished it, all the same. He could almost feel it blowing the dust out of rooms inside his head which had been closed and shuttered too long.

He used his credit card to call Herb Creekmore in New York - the apartment, not the office. Herb wouldn't actually make it to James and Creekmore, Mort Rainey's literary agency, for another hour or so, but Mort had known Herb long enough to guess that the man had probably been through the shower by now and was drinking a cup of coffee while he waited for the bathroom mirror to unsteam so he could shave.

He was lucky for the second time in a row. Herb answered in a voice from which most of the sleep-fuzz had departed. Am I on a roll this morning, or what? Mort thought, and grinned into the teeth of the cold October wind. Across the four lanes of highway, he could see men stringing snowfence in preparation for the winter which lay just over the calendar's horizon.

'Hi, Herb,' he said. 'I'm calling you from a pay telephone outside the Augusta toll plaza. My divorce is final, my house in Derry burned flat last night, some nut killed my cat, and it's colder than a well-digger's belt buckle - are we having fun yet?'

He hadn't realized how absurd his catalogue of woes sounded until he heard himself reciting them aloud, and he almost laughed. jesus, it was cold out here, but didn't it feel good! Didn't it feel clean!

'Mort?' Herb said cautiously, like a man who suspects a practical joke.

'At your service,' Mort said.

'What's this about your house?'

'I'll tell you, but only once. Take notes if you have to, because I plan to be back in my car before I freeze solid to this telephone.' He began with John Shooter and John Shooter's accusation. He finished with the conversation he'd had with Amy last night.

Herb, who had spent a fair amount of time as Mort and Amy's guest (and who had been entirely dismayed by their breakup, Mort guessed), expressed his surprise and sorrow at what had happened to the house in Derry. He asked if Mort had any idea who had done it. Mort said he didn't.

'Do you suspect this guy Shooter?' Herb asked. 'I understand the significance of the cat being killed only a short time before you woke up, but -'

'I guess it's technically possible, and I'm not ruling it out completely,' Mort said, 'but I doubt it like hell. Maybe it's only because I can't get my mind around the idea of a man burning down a twenty-four-room house in order to get rid of a magazine. But I think it's mostly because I met him. He really believes I stole his story, Herb. I mean, he has no doubts at all. His attitude when I told him I could show him proof was "Go ahead, motherfucker, make my day." '

'Still ... you called the police, didn't you?'

'Yeah, I made a call this morning,' Mort said, and while this statement was a bit disingenuous, it was not an out-and-out lie. He had made a call this morning. To Greg Carstairs. But if he told Herb Creekmore, whom he could visualize sitting in the living room of his New York apartment in a pair of natty tweed pants and a strap-style tee-shirt, that he intended to handle this himself, with only Greg to lend a hand, he doubted if Herb would understand. Herb was a good friend, but he was something of a stereotype: Civilized Man, latetwentieth-century model, urban and urbane. He was the sort of man who believed in counselling. The sort of man who believed in meditation and mediation. The sort of man who believed in discussion when reason was present, and the immediate delegation of the problem to Persons in Authority when it was absent. To Herb, the concept that sometimes a man has got to do what a man has got to do was one which had its place ... but its place was in movies starring Sylvester Stallone.

'Well, that's good.' Herb sounded relieved. 'You've got enough on your plate without worrying about some psycho from Mississippi. If they find him, what will you do? Have him charged with harassment?'

'I'd rather convince him to take his persecution act and put it on the road,' Mort said. His feeling of cheery optimism, so unwarranted but indubitably real, persisted. He supposed he would crash soon enough, but for the time being, he couldn't stop grinning. So he wiped his leaking nose with the cuff of his coat and went right on doing it. He had forgotten how good it could feel to have a grin pasted onto your kisser.

'How will you do that?'

'With your help, I hope. You've got files of my stuff, right?'

'Right, but - '

'Well, I need you to pull the June, 1980, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. That's the one with "Sowing Season" in it. I can't very well pull mine because of the fire, so - '

'I don't have it,' Herb said mildly.

'You don't?' Mort blinked. This was one thing he hadn't expected. 'Why not?'

'Because 1980 was two years before I came on board as your agent. I have at least one copy of everything I sold for you, but that's one of the stories you sold yourself.'

'Oh, shit!' In his mind's eye, Mort could see the acknowledgment for 'Sowing Season' in Everybody Drops the Dime. Most of the other acknowledgments contained the line, 'Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, James and Creekmore.' The one for 'Sowing Season' (and two or three other stories in the collection) read only, 'Reprinted by permission of the author.'

'Sorry,' Herb said.

'Of course I sent it in myself - I remember writing the query letter before I submitted. It's just that it seems like you've been my agent forever.' He laughed a little then and added, 'No offense.'

'None taken,' Herb said. 'Do you want me to make a call to EQMM? They must have back issues.'

'Would you?' Mort asked gratefully. 'That'd be great.'

'I'll do it first thing. Only -' Herb paused.

'Only what?'

'Promise me you're not planning to confront this guy on your own once you have a copy of the printed story in hand.'

'I promise,' Mort agreed promptly. He was being disingenuous again, but what the hell - he had asked Greg to come along when he did it, and Greg had agreed, so he wouldn't be alone. And Herb Creekmore was his literary agent, after all, not his father. How he handled his personal problems wasn't really Herb's concern.

'Okay,' Herb said. 'I'll take care of it. Call me from Derry, Mort - maybe it isn't as bad as it seems.'

'I'd like to believe that.'

'But you don't?'

'Afraid not.'

'Okay.' Herb sighed. Then, diffidently, he added: 'Is it okay to ask you to give Amy my best?'

'It is, and I will.'

'Good. You go on and get out of the wind, Mort. I can hear it shrieking in the receiver. You must be freezing.'

'Getting there. Thanks again, Herb.'

He hung up and looked thoughtfully at the telephone for a moment. He'd forgotten that the Buick needed gas, which was minor, but he'd also forgotten that Herb Creekmore hadn't been his agent until 1982, and that wasn't so minor. Too much pressure, he supposed. It made a man wonder what else he might have forgotten.

The voice in his mind, not the midbrain voice but the one from the deep ranges. spoke up suddenly: What about stealing the story in the first place? Maybe you forgot that.

He snorted a laugh as he hurried back to his car. He had never been to Mississippi in his life, and even now, stuck in a writer's block as he was. he was a long way from stooping to plagiarism. He slid behind the wheel and started the engine, reflecting that a person's mind certainly got up to some weird shit every now and again.

18

Mort didn't believe that people - even those who tried to be fairly honest with themselves - knew when some things were over. He believed they often went on believing, or trying to believe, even when the handwriting was not only on the wall but writ in letters large enough to read a hundred yards away without a spyglass. If it was something you really cared about and felt that you needed, it was easy to cheat, easy to confuse your life with TV and convince yourself that what felt so wrong would eventually come right . . . probably after the next commercial break. He supposed that, without its great capacity for self-deception, the human race would be even crazier than it already was.

But sometimes the truth crashed through, and if you had consciously tried to think or dream your way around that truth, the results could be devastating. it was like being there when a tidal wave roared not over but straight through a dike which had been set in its way, smashing it and you flat.

Mort Rainey experienced one of these cataclysmic epiphanies after the representatives of the police and fire departments had gone and he and Amy and Ted Milner were left alone to walk slowly around the smoking ruin of the green Victorian house which had stood at 92 Kansas Street for one hundred and thirty-six years. It was while they were making that mournful inspection tour that he understood that his marriage to the former Amy Dowd of Portland, Maine, was over. It was no 'period of marital stress.' It was no 'trial separation.' It was not going to be one of those cases you heard of from time to time where both parties repented their decision and remarried. It was over. Their lives together were history. Even the house where they had shared so many good times was nothing but evilly smouldering beams tumbled into the cellar-hole like the teeth of a giant.

Their meeting at Marchman's, the little coffee shop on Witcham Street, had gone well enough. Amy had hugged him and he had hugged her back, but when he tried to kiss her mouth, she turned her head deftly aside so that the lips landed on her cheek instead. Kiss-kiss, as they said at the office parties. So good to see you, darling.

Ted Milner, blow-dried hair perfectly in place this morning and nary an Alfalfa corkscrew in sight, sat at the table in the corner, watching them. He was holding the pipe which Mort had seen clenched in his teeth at various parties over the last three years or so. Mort was convinced the pipe was an affectation, a little prop employed for the sole purpose of making its owner look older than he was. And how old was that? Mort wasn't sure, but Amy was thirty-six, and he thought Ted, in his impeccable stone-washed jeans and open-throated J. Press shirt, had to be at least four years younger than that, possibly more. He wondered if Amy knew she could be in for trouble ten years down the line - maybe even five - and then reflected it would take a better man than he was to suggest it to her.

He asked if there was anything new. Amy said there wasn't. Then Ted took over, speaking with a faintly Southern accent which was a good deal softer than John Shooter's nasal burr. He told Mort the fire chief and a lieutenant from the Derry Police Department would meet them at what Ted called 'the site.' They wanted to ask Mort a few questions. Mort said that was fine. Ted asked if he'd like a cup of coffee - they had time. Mort said that would also be fine. Ted asked how he had been. Mort used the word fine again. Each time it came out of his mouth it felt a little more threadbare. Amy watched the exchange between them with some apprehension, and Mort could understand that. On the day he had discovered the two of them in bed together, he had told Ted he would kill him. In fact, he might have said something about killing them both. His memory of the event was quite foggy. He suspected theirs might be rather foggy, too. He didn't know about the other two corners of the triangle, but he himself found that foggery not only understandable but merciful.

They had coffee. Amy asked him about 'John Shooter.' Mort said he thought that situation was pretty much under control. He did not mention cats or notes or magazines. And after awhile, they left Marchman's and went to 92 Kansas Street, which had once been a house instead of a site.

The fire chief and police detective were there as promised, and there were questions, also as promised. Most of the questions were about any people who might dislike him enough to have tossed a Texaco cocktail into his study. If Mort had been on his own, he would have left Shooter's name out of it entirely, but of course Amy would bring it up if he didn't, so he recounted the initial encounter just as it had happened.

The fire chief, Wickersham, said: 'The guy was pretty angry?'

'Yes.'

'Angry enough to have driven to Derry and torched your house?' the police detective, Bradley, asked.

He was almost positive Shooter hadn't done it, but he didn't want to delve into his brief dealings with Shooter any more deeply. It would mean telling them what Shooter had done to Bump, for one thing. That would upset Amy; it would upset her a great deal ... and it would open up a can of worms he would prefer to leave closed. It was time, Mort reckoned, to be disingenuous again.

'He might have been at first. But after I discovered the two stories really were alike, I looked up the original date of publication on mine.'

'His had never been published?' Bradley asked.

'No, I'm sure it hadn't been. Then, yesterday, he showed up again. I asked him when he'd written his story, hoping he'd mention a date that was later than the one I had. Do you understand?'

Detective Bradley nodded. 'You were hoping to prove you scooped him.'

'Right. "Sowing Season" was in a book of short stories I published in 1983, but it was originally published in 1980. I was hoping the guy would feel safe picking a date only a year or two before 1983. I got lucky. He said he'd written it in 1982. So you see, I had him.'

He hoped it would end there, but Wickersham, the fire chief, pursued it. 'You see and we see, Mr Rainey, but did he see?'

Mort sighed inwardly. He supposed he had known that you could only be disingenuous for so long - if things went on long enough, they almost always progressed to a point where you had to either tell the truth or carve an outright lie. And here he was, at that point. But whose business was it? Theirs or his? His. Right. And he meant to see it stayed that way.

'Yes,' he told them, 'he saw.'

'What did he do?' Ted asked. Mort looked at him with mild annoyance. Ted glanced away, looking as if he wished he had his pipe to play with. The pipe was in the car. The J. Press shirt had no pocket to carry it in.

'He went away,' Mort said. His irritation with Ted, who had absolutely no business sticking his oar in, made it easier to lie. The fact that he was lying to Ted seemed to make it more all right, too. 'He muttered some bullshit about what an incredible coincidence it all was, then jumped into his car like his hair was on fire and his ass was catching, and took off.'

'Happen to notice the make of the car and the license plate, Mr Rainey?' Bradley asked. He had taken out a pad and a ballpoint pen.

'It was a Ford,' Mort said. 'I'm sorry, but I can't help you with the plate. It wasn't a Maine plate, but other than that . . .' He shrugged and tried to look apologetic. Inside, he felt increasingly uncomfortable with the way this was going. It had seemed okay when he was just being cute, skirting around any outright lies - it had seemed a way of sparing Amy the pain of knowing that the man had broken Bump's neck and then skewered him with a screwdriver. But now he had put himself in a position where he had told different stories to different people. If they got together and did a comparison, he wouldn't look so hot. Explaining his reasons for the lies might be sticky. He supposed that such comparisons were pretty unlikely, as long as Amy didn't talk to either Greg Carstairs or Herb Creekmore, but suppose there was a hassle with Shooter when he and Greg caught up to him and shoved the June, 1980, issue of EQMM in Shooter's face?

Never mind, he told himself, we'll burn that bridge when we come to it, big guy. At this thought, he experienced a brief return of the high spirits he'd felt while talking to Herb at the toll plaza, and almost cackled aloud. He held it in. They would wonder why he was laughing if he did something like that, and he supposed they would be right to wonder.

'I think Shooter must be bound for

(Mississippi.)

' - for wherever he came from by now,' he finished, with hardly a break.

'I imagine you're right,' Lieutenant Bradley said, 'but I'm inclined to pursue this, Mr Rainey. You might have convinced the guy he was wrong, but that doesn't mean he left your place feeling mellow. It's possible that he drove up here in a rage and torched your house just because he was pissed off -pardon me, Mrs Rainey.'

Amy offered a crooked little smile and waved the apology away.

'Don't you think that's possible?'

No, Mort thought, I don't. If he'd decided to torch the house, I think he would have killed Bump before he left for Derry, just in case I woke up before he got back. In that case, the blood would have been dry and Bump would have been stiff when I found him. That isn't the way it happened ... but I can't say so. Not even if I wanted to. They'd wonder why I held back the stuff about Bump as long as I did, for one thing. They'd probably think I've got a few loose screws.

'I guess so,' he said, 'but I met the guy. He didn't strike me as the house-burning type.'

'You mean he wasn't a Snopes,' Amy said suddenly.

Mort looked at her, startled - then smiled. 'That's right,' he said. 'A Southerner, but not a Snopes.'

'Meaning what?' Bradley asked, a little warily.

'An old joke, Lieutenant,' Amy said. 'The Snopeses were characters in some novels by William Faulkner. They got their start in business burning barns.'

'Oh,' Bradley said blankly.

Wickersham said: 'There is no house-burning type, Mr Rainey. They come in all shapes and sizes. Believe me.'

'Well - '

'Give me a little more on the car, if you can,' Bradley said. He poised a pencil over his notebook. 'I want to make the State Police aware of this guy.'

Mort suddenly decided he was going to lie some more. Quite a lot more, actually.

'Well, it was a sedan. I can tell you that much for sure.'

'Uh-huh. Ford sedan. Year?'

'Somewhere in the seventies, I guess,' Mort said. He was fairly sure Shooter's station wagon had actually been built around the time a fellow named Oswald had elected Lyndon Johnson President of the United States. He paused, then added: 'The plate was a light color. It could have been Florida. I won't swear to it, but it could have been.'

'Uh-huh. And the man himself?'

'Average height. Blonde hair. Eyeglasses. The round wire-framed ones John Lennon used to wear. That's really all I re - '

'Didn't you say he was wearing a hat?' Amy asked suddenly.

Mort felt his teeth come together with a click. 'Yes,' he said pleasantly. 'That's right, I forgot. Dark gray or black. Except it was more of a cap. With a bill, you know.'

'Okay.' Bradley snapped his book closed. 'It's a start.'

'Couldn't this have been a simple case of vandalism, arson for kicks?' Mort asked. 'In novels, everything has a connection, but my experience has been that in real life, things sometimes just happen.'

'It could have been,' Wickersham agreed, 'but it doesn't hurt to check out the obvious connections.' He dropped Mort a solemn little wink and said, 'Sometimes life imitates art, you know.'

'Do you need anything else?' Ted asked them, and put an arm around Amy's shoulders.

Wickersham and Bradley exchanged a glance and then Bradley shook his head. 'I don't think so, at least not at the present.'

'I only ask because Amy and Mort will have to put in some time with the insurance agent,' Ted said. 'Probably an investigator from the parent company, as well.'

Mort found the man's Southern accent more and more irritating. He suspected that Ted came from a part of the South several states north of Faulkner country, but it was still a coincidence he could have done without.

The officials shook hands with Amy and Mort, expressed their sympathy, told them to get in touch if anything else occurred to either of them, and then took themselves off, leaving the three of them to take another turn around the house.

'I'm sorry about all of this, Amy,' Mort said suddenly. She was walking between them, and looked over at him, apparently startled by something she had heard in his voice. Simple sincerity, maybe. 'All of it. Really sorry.'

'So am I,' she said softly, and touched his hand.

'Well, Teddy makes three,' Ted said with solemn heartiness. She turned back to him, and in that moment Mort could have cheerfully strangled the man until his eyes popped out jittering at the ends of their optic strings.

They were walking up the west side of the house toward the street now. Over here had been the deep corner where his study had met the house, and not far away was Amy's flower-garden. All the flowers were dead now, and Mort reflected that was probably just as well. The fire had been hot enough to crisp what grass had remained green in a twelve-foot border all around the ruin. If the flowers had been in bloom, it would have crisped them, as well, and that would have been just too sad. It would have been

Mort stopped suddenly. He was remembering the stories. The story. You could call it 'Sowing Season' or you could call it 'Secret Window, Secret Garden,' but they were the same thing once you took the geegaws off and looked underneath. He looked up. There was nothing to see but blue sky, at least now, but before last night's fire, there would have been a window right where he was looking. It was the window in the little room next to the laundry. The little room that was Amy's office. It was where she went to write checks, to write in her daily journal, to make the telephone calls that needed to be made ... the room where, he suspected, Amy had several years ago started a novel. And, when it died, it was the room where she had buried it decently and quietly in a desk drawer. The desk had been by the window. Amy had liked to go there in the mornings. She could start the wash in the next room and then do paperwork while she waited for the buzzer which proclaimed it was time to strip the washer and feed the drier. The room was well away from the main house and she liked the quiet, she said. The quiet and the clear, sane morning light. She liked to look out the window every now and then, at her flowers growing in the deep corner formed by the house and the study ell. And he heard her saying, It's the best room in the house, at least for me, because hardly anybody ever goes there but me. It's got a secret window, and it looks down on a secret garden.

'Mort?' Amy was saying now, and for a moment Mort took no notice, confusing her real voice with her voice in his mind, which was the voice of memory. But was it a true memory or a false one? That was the real question, wasn't it? It seemed like a true memory, but he had been under a great deal of stress even before Shooter, and Bump, and the fire. Wasn't it at least possible that he was having a ... well, a recollective hallucination? That he was trying to make his own past with Amy in some way conform to that goddam story where a man had gone crazy and killed his wife?

Jesus, I hope not. I hope not, because if I am, that's too close to nervousbreakdown territory for comfort.

'Mort, are you okay?' Amy asked. She plucked fretfully at his sleeve, at least temporarily breaking his trance.

'Yes,' he said, and then, abruptly: 'No. To tell you the truth, I'm feeling a little sick.'

'Breakfast, maybe,' Ted said.

Amy gave him a look that made Mort feel a bit better. It was not a very friendly look. 'It isn't breakfast,' she said a little indignantly. She swept her arm at the blackened ruins. 'It's this. Let's get out of here.'

'The insurance people are due at noon,' Ted said.

'Well, that's more than an hour from now. Let's go to your place, Ted. I don't feel so hot myself. I'd like to sit down.'

'All right.' Ted spoke in a slightly nettled no-need-to-shout tone which also did Mort's heart good. And although he would have said at breakfast that morning that Ted Milner's place was the last one on earth he wanted to go, he accompanied them without protest.

19

They were all quiet on the ride across town to the split-level on the east side where Ted hung his hat. Mort didn't know what Amy and Ted were thinking about, although the house for Amy and whether or not they'd be on time to meet the wallahs from the insurance company for Ted would probably be a couple of good guesses, but he knew what he was thinking about. He was trying to decide if he was going crazy or not. Is it real, or is it Memorex?

He decided finally that Amy really had said that about her office next to the laundry room - it was not a false memory. Had she said it before 1982, when 'John Shooter' claimed to have written a story called 'Secret Window' Secret Garden'? He didn't know. No matter how earnestly he conned his confused and aching brain, what kept coming back was a single curt message: answer inconclusive. But if she had said it, no matter when, couldn't the title of Shooter's story still be simple coincidence? Maybe, but the

coincidences were piling up, weren't they? He had decided the fire was, must be, a coincidence. But the memory which Amy's garden with its crop of dead flowers had prodded forth ... well, it was getting harder and harder to believe all of this wasn't tied together in some strange, possibly even supernatural fashion.

And in his own way, hadn't 'Shooter' himself been just as confused? How did you get it? he had asked, his voice had been fierce with rage and puzzlement. That's what I really want to know. How in hell did a bigmoney scribbling asshole like you get down to a little shitsplat town in Mississippi and steal my goddam story? At the time, Mort had thought either that it was another sign of the man's madness or that the guy was one hell of a good actor. Now, in Ted's car, it occurred to him for the first time that it was exactly the way he himself would have reacted, had the circumstances been reversed.

As, in a way, they had been. The one place where the two stories differed completely was in the matter of the title. They both fit, but now Mort found that he had a question to ask Shooter which was very similar to the one Shooter had already asked him: How did you happen by that title, Mr Shooter? That's what I really want to know. How did you happen to know that, twelve hundred miles away from your shitsplat town in Mississippi . ' the wife of a writer you claim you never heard of before this year had her own secret window, looking down on her own secret garden?

Well, there was only one way to find out, of course. When Greg ran Shooter down Mort would have to ask him.

20

Mort passed on the cup of coffee Ted offered and asked if he had a Coke or a Pepsi. Ted did, and after Mort had drunk it, his stomach settled. He had expected that just being here, here where Ted and Amy played house now that they no longer had to bother with the cheap little town-line motels, would make him angry and restless. It didn't. It was just a house, one where every room seemed to proclaim that the owner was a Swinging Young Bachelor Who Was Making It. Mort found that he could deal with that quite easily, although it made him feel a little nervous for Amy all over again. He thought of her little office with its clear, sane light and the soporific drone of the drier coming through the wall, her little office with its secret window, the only one in the whole place which looked down into the tight little angle of space formed by the house and the ell, and thought how much she had belonged there and how little she seemed to belong here. But that was something she would have to deal with herself, and he thought, after a few minutes in this other house which was not a dreaded den of iniquity at all but only a house, that he could live with that ... that he could even be content with it.

She asked him if he would be staying in Derry overnight.

'Uh-uh. I'll be going back as soon as we finish with the insurance adjustors. If something else pops, they can get in touch with me ... or you can.'

He smiled at her. She smiled back and touched his hand briefly. Ted didn't like it. He frowned out the window and fingered his pipe.

21

They were on time for their meeting with the representatives of the insurance company, which undoubtedly relieved Ted Milner's mind. Mort was not particularly crazy about having Ted in attendance; it had never been Ted's house, after all, not even after the divorce. Still, it seemed to ease Amy's mind to have him there, and so Mort left it alone.

Don Strick, the Consolidated Assurance Company agent with whom they had done business, conducted the meeting at his office, where they went after another brief tour of 'the site.' At the office, they met a man named Fred Evans, a Consolidated field investigator specializing in arson. The reason Evans hadn't been with Wickersham and Bradley that morning or at 'the site' when Strick met them there at noon became obvious very quickly: he had spent most of the previous night poking through the ruins with a ten-cell flashlight and a Polaroid camera. He had gone back to his motel room, he said, to catch a few winks before meeting the Raineys.

Mort liked Evans very much. He seemed to really care about the loss he and Amy had suffered, while everyone else, including Mr Teddy Makes Three, seemed to have only mouthed the traditional words of sympathy before going on to whatever they considered the business at hand (and in Ted Milner's case, Mort thought, the business at hand was getting him out of Derry and back to Tashmore Lake as soon as possible). Fred Evans did not refer to 92 Kansas Street as 'the site.' He referred to it as 'the house.'

His questions, while essentially the same as those asked by Wickersham and Bradley, were gentler, more detailed, and more probing. Although he'd had four hours' sleep at most, his eyes were bright, his speech quick and clear. After speaking with him for twenty minutes, Mort decided that he would deal with a company other than Consolidated Assurance if he ever decided to burn down a house for the insurance money. Or wait until this man retired.

When he had finished his questions, Evans smiled at them. 'You've been very helpful, and I want to thank you again, both for your thoughtful answers and for your kind treatment of me. In a lot of cases, people's feathers get ruffled the second they hear the words "insurance investigator." They're already upset, understandably so, and quite often they take the presence of an investigator on the scene as an accusation that they torched their own property.'

'Given the circumstances, I don't think we could have asked for better treatment,' Amy said, and Ted Milner nodded so violently that his head might have been on a string - one controlled by a puppeteer with a bad case of nerves.

'This next part is hard,' Evans said. He nodded to Strick, who opened a desk drawer and produced a clipboard with a computer printout on it. 'When an investigator ascertains that a fire was as serious as this one clearly was, we have to show the clients a list of claimed insurable property. You look it over, then sign an affidavit swearing that the items listed still belong to you, and that they were still in the house when the fire occurred. You should put a check mark beside any item or items you've sold since your last insurance overhaul with Mr Strick here, and any insured property which was not in the house at the time of the fire.' Evans put a fist to his lips and cleared his throat before going on. 'I'm told that there has been a separation of residence recently, so that last bit may be particularly important.'

'We're divorced,' Mort said bluntly. 'I'm living in our place on Tashmore Lake. We only used it during the summers, but it's got a furnace and is livable during the cold months. Unfortunately, I hadn't got around to moving the bulk of my things out of the house up here. I'd been putting it off.'

Don Strick nodded sympathetically. Ted crossed his legs, fiddled with his pipe, and generally gave the impression of a man who is trying not to look as deeply bored as he is.

'Do the best you can with the list,' Evans said. He took the clipboard from Strick and handed it across the desk to Amy. 'This can be a bit unpleasant - it's a little like a treasure hunt in reverse.'

Ted had put his pipe down and was craning at the list, his boredom gone' at least for the time being; his eyes were as avid as those of any bystander gleeping the aftermath of a bad accident. Amy saw him looking and obligingly tipped the form his way. Mort, who was sitting on the other side of her, tipped it back the other way.

'Do you mind?' he asked Ted. He was angry, really angry, and they all heard it in his voice.

'Mort - ' Amy said.

'I'm not going to make a big deal of this,' Mort said to her, 'but this was our stuff, Amy. Ours.'

'I hardly think - 'Ted began indignantly.

'No, he's perfectly right, Mr Milner,' Fred Evans said with a mildness Mort felt might have been deceptive. 'The law says you have no right to be looking at the listed items at all. We wink at something like that if nobody minds ... but I think Mr Rainey does.'

'You're damned tooting Mr Rainey does,' Mort said. His hands were tightly clenched in his lap; he could feel his fingernails biting smile-shapes into the soft meat of his palms.

Amy switched her look of unhappy appeal from Mort to Ted. Mort expected Ted to huff and puff and try to blow somebody's house down, but Ted did not. Mort supposed it was a measure of his own hostile feeling toward the man that he'd made such an assumption; he didn't know Ted very well (although he did know he looked a bit like Alfalfa when you woke him up suddenly in a no-tell motel), but he knew Amy. If Ted had been a blowhard, she would have left him already.

Smiling a little, speaking to her and ignoring Mort and the others completely, Ted said: 'Would it help matters if I took a walk around the block?'

Mort tried to restrain himself and couldn't quite do it. 'Why not make it two?' he asked Ted with bogus amiability.

Amy shot him a narrow, dark stare, then looked back at Ted. 'Would you? This might be a little easier . . .'

'Sure,' he said. He kissed her high on her cheekbone, and Mort had another dolorous revelation: the man cared for her. He might not always care for her, but right now he did. Mort realized he had come halfway to thinking Amy was just a toy that had captivated Ted for a little while, a toy of which he would tire soon enough. But that didn't jibe with what he knew of Amy, either. She had better instincts about people than that ... and more respect for herself.

Ted got up and left. Amy looked at Mort reproachfully. 'Are you satisfied?'

'I suppose,' he said. 'Look, Amy - I probably didn't handle that as well as I could have, but my motives are honorable enough. We shared a lot over the years. I guess this is the last thing, and I think it belongs between the two of us. Okay?'

Strick looked uncomfortable. Fred Evans did not; he looked from Mort to Amy and then back to Mort again with the bright interest of a man watching a really good tennis match.

'Okay,' Amy said in a low voice. He touched her hand lightly, and she gave him a smile. It was strained, but better than no smile at all, he reckoned.

He pulled his chair closer to hers and they bent over the list, heads close together, like kids studying for a test. It didn't take Mort long to understand why Evans had warned them. He thought he had grasped the size of the loss. He had been wrong.

Looking at the columns of cold computer type, Mort thought he could not have been more dismayed if someone had taken everything in the house at 92 Kansas Street and strewn it along the block for the whole world to stare at. He couldn't believe all the things he had forgotten, all the things that were gone.

Seven major appliances. Four TVs, one with a videotape editing hook-up. The Spode china, and the authentic Early American furniture which Amy had bought a piece at a time. The value of the antique armoire which had stood in their bedroom was listed at $14,000. They had not been serious art-collectors, but they had been appreciators, and they had lost twelve pieces of original art. Their value was listed at $22,000, but Mort didn't care about the dollar value; he was thinking about the N. C. Wyeth fine-drawing of two boys putting to sea in a small boat. It was raining in the picture; the boys were wearing slickers and galoshes and big grins. Mort had loved that picture, and now it was gone. The Waterford glassware. The sports equipment stored in the garage - skis, ten-speed bikes, and the Old Town canoe. Amy's three furs were listed. He saw her make tiny check marks beside the beaver and the mink - still in storage, apparently - but she passed the short fox jacket without checking it off. It had been hanging in the closet, warm and stylish outerware for fall, when the fire happened. He remembered giving her that coat for her birthday six or seven years ago. Gone now. His Celestron telescope. Gone. The big puzzle quilt Amy's mother had given them when they were married. Amy's mother was dead and the quilt was now so much ash in the wind.

The worst, at least for Mort, was halfway down the second column, and again it wasn't the dollar value that hurt. 124 BOTS. WINE, the item read. VALUE $4,900. Wine was something they had both liked. They weren't rabid about it, but they had built the little wine room in the cellar together, stocked it together, and had drunk the occasional bottle together.

'Even the wine,' he said to Evans. 'Even that.'

Evans gave him an odd look that Mort couldn't interpret, then nodded. 'The wine room itself didn't burn, because you had very little fuel oil in the cellar tank and there was no explosion. But it got very hot inside, and most of the bottles burst. The few that didn't ... Well, I don't know much about wine, but I doubt if it would be good to drink. Perhaps I'm wrong.'

'You're not,' Amy said. A single tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it absently away.

Evans offered her his handkerchief. She shook her head and bent over the fist with Mort again.

Ten minutes later it was finished. They signed on the correct lines and Strick witnessed their signatures. Ted Milner showed up only instants later, as if he had been watching the whole thing on some private viewscreen.

'Is there anything else?' Mort asked Evans.

'Not now. There may be. Is your number down in Tashmore unlisted, Mr Rainey?'

'Yes.' He wrote it down for Evans. 'Please get in touch if I can help.'

'I will.' He rose, hand outstretched. 'This is always a nasty business. I'm sorry you two had to go through it.'

They shook hands all around and left Strick and Evans to write reports. It was well past one, and Ted asked Mort if he'd like to have some lunch with him and Amy. Mort shook his head.

'I want to get back. Do some work and see if I can't forget all this for awhile.' And he felt as if maybe he really could write. That was not surprising. In tough times - up until the divorce, anyway, which seemed to be an exception to the general rule - he had always found it easy to write. Necessary, even. It was good to have those make-believe worlds to fall back on when the real one had hurt you.

He half-expected Amy to ask him to change his mind, but she didn't. 'Drive safe,' she said, and planted a chaste kiss on the corner of his mouth. 'Thanks for coming, and for being so ... so reasonable about everything.'

'Can I do anything for you, Amy?'

She shook her head, smiling a little, and took Ted's hand. If he had been looking for a message, this one was much too clear to miss.

They walked slowly toward Mort's Buick.

'You keepin well enough down there?' Ted asked. 'Anything you need?'

For the third time he was struck by the man's Southern accent - just one more coincidence.

'Can't think of anything,' he said, opening the Buick's door and fishing the car keys out of his pocket. 'Where do you come from originally, Ted? You or Amy must have told me sometime, but I'll be damned if I can remember. Was it Mississippi?'

Ted laughed heartily. 'A long way from there, Mort. I grew up in Tennessee. A little town called Shooter's Knob, Tennessee.'

22

Mort drove back to Tashmore Lake with his hands clamped to the steering wheel, his spine as straight as a ruler, and his eyes fixed firmly on the road. He played the radio loud and concentrated ferociously on the music each time he sensed telltale signs of mental activity behind the center of his forehead. Before he had made forty miles, he felt a pressing sensation in his bladder. He welcomed this development and did not even consider stopping at a wayside comfort-station. The need to take a whizz was another excellent distraction.

He arrived at the house around four-thirty and parked the Buick in its accustomed place around the side of the house. Eric Clapton was throttled in the middle of a full-tilt-boogie guitar solo when Mort shut off the motor, and quiet crashed down like a load of stones encased in foam rubber. There wasn't a single boat on the lake, not a single bug in the grass.

Pissing and thinking have a lot in common, he thought, climbing out of the car and unzipping his fly. You can put them both off... but not forever.

Mort Rainey stood there urinating and thought about secret windows and secret gardens; he thought about those who might own the latter and those who might look through the former. He thought about the fact that the magazine he needed to prove a certain fellow was either a lunatic or a con man had just happened to bum up on the very evening he had tried to get his hands on it. He thought about the fact that his exwife's lover, a man he cordially detested, had come from a town called Shooter's Knob and that Shooter happened to be the pseudonym of the aforementioned loony-or-con-man who had come into Mort Rainey's life at the exact time when the aforementioned Mort Rainey was beginning to grasp his divorce not just as an academic concept but as a simple fact of his life forever after. He even thought about the fact that 'John Shooter' claimed to have discovered Mort Rainey's act of plagiarism at about the same time Mort Rainey had separated from his wife.

Question: Were all of these things coincidences?

Answer: It was technically possible.

Question: Did he believe all these things were coincidences?

Answer: No.

Question: Did he believe he was going mad, then?

'The answer is no,' Mort said. 'He does not. At least not yet.' He zipped up his fly and went back around the corner to the door.

23

He found his housekey, started to put it in the lock, and then pulled it out again. His hand went to the doorknob instead, and as his fingers closed over it, he felt a clear certainty that it would rotate easily. Shooter had been here ... had been, or was still. And he wouldn't have needed to force entry, either. Nope. Not this sucker. Mort kept a spare key to the Tashmore Lake house in an old soap-dish on a high shelf in the toolshed, which was where Shooter had gone to get a screwdriver in a hurry when the time had come to nail poor old Bump to the garbage cabinet. He was in the house now, looking around ... or maybe hiding. He was

The knob refused to move; Mort's fingers simply slid around it. The door was still locked.

'Okay,' Mort said. 'Okay, no big deal.' He even laughed a little as he socked the key home and turned it. Just because the door was locked didn't mean Shooter wasn't in the house. In fact, it made it more likely that he was in the house, when you really stopped to think about it. He could have used the spare key, put it back, then locked the door from the inside to lull his enemy's suspicions. All you had to do to lock it, after all, was to press the button set into the knob. He's trying to psych me out, Mort thought as he stepped in. The house was full of dusty late-afternoon sunlight and silence. But it did not feel like unoccupied silence.

'You're trying to psych me out, aren't you?' he called. He expected to sound crazy to himself. a lonely, paranoid man addressing the intruder who only exists, after all, in his own imagination. But he didn't sound crazy to himself. He sounded, instead, like a man who has tumbled to at least half the trick. Only getting half a scam wasn't so great, maybe, but half was better than nothing.

He walked into the living room with its cathedral ceiling, its window-wall facing the lake, and, of course, The World-Famous Mort Rainey Sofa, also known as The Couch of the Comatose Writer. An economical little smile tugged at his cheeks. His balls felt high and tight against the fork of his groin.

'Half a scam's better than none, right, Mr Shooter?' he called.

The words died into dusty silence. He could smell old tobacco smoke in that dust. His eye happened on the battered package of cigarettes he had excavated from the drawer of his desk. It occurred to him that the house had a smell - almost a stink - that was horribly negative: it was an unwoman smell. Then he thought: No. That's a mistake. That's not it. What you smell is Shooter. You smell the man, and you smell his cigarettes. Not yours, his.

He turned slowly around, his head cocked back. A second-floor bedroom looked down on the living room halfway up the cream-colored wall; the opening was lined with dark-brown wooden slats. The slats were supposed to keep the unwary from failing out and splattering themselves all over the living-room floor, but they were also supposed to be decorative. Right then they didn't look particularly decorative to Mort; they looked like the bars of a jail cell. All he could see of what he and Amy had called the guest bedroom was the ceiling and one of the bed's four posts.

'You up there, Mr Shooter?' he yelled.

There was no answer.

'I know you're trying to psych me out!' Now he was beginning to feel just the tiniest bit ridiculous. 'It won't work, though!'

About six years before, they had plugged the big fieldstone fireplace in the living room with a Blackstone jersey stove. A rack of fire-tools stood beside

it. Mort grasped the handle of the ash-shovel, considered it for a moment, then let go of it and took the poker instead. He faced the barred guest-room overlook and held the poker up like a knight saluting his queen. Then he walked slowly to the stairs and began to climb them. He could feel tension worming its way into his muscles now, but he understood it wasn't Shooter he was afraid of; what he was afraid of was finding nothing.

'I know you're here, and I know you're trying to psych me out! The only thing I don't know is what it's all about, Alfie, and when I find you, you better tell me!'

He paused on the second-floor landing, his heart pumping hard in his chest now. The guest-room door was to his left. The door to the guest bathroom was to the right. And he suddenly understood that Shooter was here, all right, but not in the bedroom. No; that was just a ploy. That was just what Shooter wanted him to believe.

Shooter was in the bathroom.

And, as he stood there on the landing with the poker clutched tightly in his right hand and sweat running out of his hair and down his cheeks, Mort heard him. A faint shuffle-shuffle. He was in there, all right. Standing in the tub, by the sound. He had moved the tiniest bit. Peekaboo, Johnny-boy, I hear you. Are you armed, fuckface?

Mort thought he probably was, but he didn't think it would turn out to be a gun. Mort had an idea that the man's pen name was about as close to firearms as he had ever come. Shooter had looked like the sort of guy who would feel more at home with instruments of a blunter nature. What he had done to Bump seemed to bear this out.

I bet it's a hammer, Mort thought, and wiped sweat off the back of his neck with his free hand. He could feel his eyes pulsing in and out of their sockets in time with his heartbeat. I'm betting it's a hammer from the toolshed.

He had no more thought of this before he saw Shooter, saw him clearly, standing in the bathtub in his black round-crowned hat and his yellow shitkicker work-shoes, his lips split over his mail-order dentures in a grin which was really a grimace, sweat trickling down his own face, running down the deep lines grooved there like water running down a network of galvanized tin gutters, with the hammer from the toolshed raised to shoulder height like a judge's gavel. just standing there in the tub, waiting to bring the hammer down. Next case, bailiff.

I know you, buddy. I got your number. I got it the first time I saw you. And guess what? You picked the wrong writer to fuck with. I think I've been wanting to kill somebody since the middle of May, and you'll do as well as anybody.

He turned his head toward the bedroom door. At the same time, he reached out with his left hand (after drying it on the front of his shirt so his grip wouldn't slip at the crucial moment) and curled it around the bathroom doorknob.

'I know you're in there!' he shouted at the closed bedroom door. If you're under the bed, you better get out! I'm counting to five! If you're not out by the time I get there, I'm coming in . . . and I'll come in swinging! You hear me?'

There was no answer ... but, then, he hadn't really expected one. Or wanted one. He tightened his grip on the bathroom doorknob, but would shout the numbers toward the guest-room door. He didn't know if Shooter would hear or sense the difference if he turned his head in the direction of the bathroom, but he thought Shooter might. The man was obviously clever. Hellishly clever.

In the instant before he started counting, he heard another faint movement in the bathroom. He would have missed it, even standing this close, if he hadn't been listening with every bit of concentration he could muster.

'One!'

Christ, he was sweating! Like a pig!

'Two!'

The knob of the bathroom door was like a cold rock in his clenched fist.

'Thr -'

He turned the knob of the bathroom door and slammed in, bouncing the door off the wall hard enough to chop through the wallpaper and pop the door's lower hinge, and there he was, there he was, coming at him with a raised weapon, his teeth bared in a killer's grin, and his eyes were insane, utterly insane, and Mort brought the poker down in a whistling overhand blow and he had just time enough to realize that Shooter was also swinging a poker, and to realize that Shooter was not wearing his round-crowned black hat, and to realize it wasn't Shooter at all, to realize it was him, the madman was him, and then the poker shattered the mirror over the washbasin and silver-backed glass sprayed every whichway, twinkling in the gloom, and the medicine cabinet fell into the sink. The bent door swung open like a gaping mouth, spilling bottles of cough syrup and iodine and Listerine.

'I killed a goddam fucking mirror!' he shrieked, and was about to sling the poker away when something did move in the tub, behind the corrugated shower door. There was a frightened little squeal. Grinning, Mort slashed sideways with the poker, tearing a jagged gash through the plastic door and knocking it off its tracks. He raised the poker over his shoulder, his eyes glassy and staring, his lips drawn into the grimace he had imagined on Shooter's face.

Then he lowered the poker slowly. He found he had to use the fingers of his left hand to pry open the fingers of his right so that the poker could fall to the floor.

'Wee sleekit cowerin' beastie,' he said to the fieldmouse scurrying blindly about in the tub. 'What a panic's in thy breastie.' His voice sounded hoarse and flat and strange. It didn't sound like his own voice at all. It was like listening to himself on tape for the first time.

He turned and walked slowly out of the bathroom past the leaning door with its popped hinge, his shoes gritting on broken mirror glass.

All at once he wanted to go downstairs and lie on the couch and take a nap. All at once he wanted that more than anything else in the world.

24

It was the telephone that woke him up. Twilight had almost become night, and he made his way slowly past the glass-topped coffee table that liked to bite with a weird feeling that time had somehow doubled back on itself. His right arm ached like hell. His back wasn't in much better shape. Exactly how hard had he swung that poker, anyway? How much panic had been driving him? He didn't like to think.

He picked up the telephone, not bothering to guess who it might be. Life has been so dreadfully busy lately, darling, that it might even be the President. 'Hello?'

'How you doin, Mr Rainey?' the voice asked, and Mort recoiled, snatching the telephone away from his ear for a moment as if it were a snake which had tried to bite. He returned it slowly.

'I'm doing fine, Mr Shooter,' he said in a dry, spitless voice. 'How are you doing?'

'I'm-a country fair,' Shooter allowed, speaking in that thick crackerbarrel Southern accent that was somehow as bald and staring as an unpainted barn standing all by itself in the middle of a field. 'But I don't think you're really all that well. Stealing from another man, that don't seem to have ever bothered you none. Being caught up on, though ... that seems to have given you the pure miseries.'

'What are you talking about?'

Shooter sounded faintly amused. 'Well, I heard on the radio news that someone burned down your house. Your other house. And then, when you come back down here, it sounded like you pitched a fit or something once you got into the house. Shouting ... whacking on things ... or maybe it's just that successful writers like you throw tantrums when things don't go the way they expect. Is that it, maybe?'

My God, he was here. He was.

Mort found himself looking out the window as if Shooter still might be out there ... hiding in the bushes, perhaps, while he spoke to Mort on some sort of cordless telephone. Ridiculous, of course.

'The magazine with my story in it is on the way,' he said. 'When it gets here, are you going to leave me alone?'

Shooter still sounded lazily amused. 'There isn't any magazine with that story in it, Mr Rainey. You and me, we know that. Not from 1980, there isn't. How could there be, when my story wasn't there for you to steal until 1982?'

'Goddammit, I did not steal your st-'

'When I heard about your house,' Shooter said, 'I went out and bought an Evening Express. They had a picture of what was left. Wasn't very much. Had a picture of your wife, too.' There was a long, thoughtful pause. Then Shooter said, 'She's purty.' He used the country pronunciation purposely, sarcastically. 'How'd an ugly son of a buck like you luck into such a purty wife, Mr Rainey?'

'We're divorced,' he said. 'I told you that. Maybe she discovered how ugly I was. Why don't we leave Amy out of this? It's between you and me.'

For the second time in two days, he realized he had answered the phone while he was only half awake and nearly defenseless. As a result, Shooter was in almost total control of the conversation. He was leading Mort by the nose, calling the shots.

Hang up, then.

But he couldn't. At least, not yet.

'Between you and me, is it?' Shooter asked. 'Then I don't s'pose you even mentioned me to anyone else.'

'What do you want? Tell me! What in the hell do you want?'

'You want the second reason I came, is that it?'

'Yes!'

'I want you to write me a story,' Shooter said calmly. 'I want you to write a story and put my name on it and then give it to me. You owe me that. Right is right and fair is fair.'

Mort stood in the hallway with the telephone clutched in his aching fist and a vein pulsing in the middle of his forehead. For a few moments his rage was so total that he found himself buried alive inside it and all he was capable of thinking was So THAT'S it! SO THAT'S it! SO THAT'S it! over and over again.

'You there, Mr Rainey?' Shooter asked in his calm, drawling voice.

'The only thing I'll write for you,' Mort said, his own voice slow and syrupy-thick with rage, 'is your deathwarrant, if you don't leave me alone.'

'You talk big, pilgrim,' Shooter said in the patient voice of a man explaining a simple problem to a stupid child, 'because you know I can't put no hurtin on you. If you had stolen my dog or my car, I could take your dog or car. I could do that just as easy as I broke your cat's neck. If you tried to stop me, I could put a hurtin on you and take it anyway. But this is different. The goods I want are inside your head. You got the goods locked up like they were inside a safe. Only I can't just blow off the door and torch open the back. I have to find me the combination. Don't I?'

'I don't know what you're talking about,' Mort said, 'but the day you get a story out of me will be the day the Statue of Liberty wears a diaper. Pilgrim.'

Shooter said meditatively, 'I'd leave her out of it if I could, but I'm startin to think you ain't going to leave me that option.'

All the spit in Mort's mouth was suddenly gone, leaving it dry and glassy and hot. 'What . . . what do you -'

'Do you want to wake up from one of your stupid naps and find Amy nailed to your garbage bin?' Shooter asked. 'Or turn on the radio some morning and hear she came off second best in a match with the chainsaw you keep in your garage up there? Or did the garage burn, too?'

'Watch what you say,' Mort whispered. His wide eyes began to prickle with tears of rage and fear.

'You still have two days to think about it. I'd think about it real close, Mr Rainey. I mean I'd really hunker down over her, if I were you. And I don't think I'd talk about this to anyone else. That'd be like standing out in a thunderstorm and tempting the lightning. Divorced or not, I have got an idea you still have some feeling for that lady. It's time for you to grow up a little. You can't get away with it. Don't you realize that yet? I know what you did, and I ain't quitting until I get what's mine.'

'You're crazy!' Mort screamed.

'Good night, Mr Rainey,' Shooter said, and hung up.

25

Mort stood there for a moment, the handset sinking away from his ear. Then he scooped up the bottom half of the Princess-style telephone. He was on the verge of throwing the whole combination against the wall before he was able to get hold of himself. He set it down again and took a dozen deep breaths - enough to make his head feel swimmy and light. Then he dialled Herb Creekmore's home telephone.

Herb's lady-friend, Delores, picked it up on the second ring and called Herb to the telephone.

'Hi, Mort,' Herb said. 'What's the story on the house?' His voice moved away from the telephone's mouthpiece a little. 'Delores, will you move that skillet to the back burner?'

Suppertime in New York, Mort thought, and he wants me to know it. Well, what the hell. A maniac has just threatened to turn my wife into veal cutlets, but life has to go on, right?

'The house is gone,' Mort said. 'The insurance will cover the loss.' He paused. 'The monetary loss, anyway.'

'I'm sorry,' Herb said. 'Can I do anything?'

'Well, not about the house,' Mort said, 'but thanks for offering. About the story, though -'

'What story is that, Mort?'

He felt his hand tightening down on the telephone's handset again and forced himself to loosen up. He doesn't know what the situation up here is. You have to remember that.

'The one my nutty friend is kicking sand about,' he said, trying to maintain a tone which was light and mostly unconcerned. 'Sowing Season. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine?'

'Oh, that!' Herb said.

Mort felt a jolt of fear. 'You didn't forget to call, did you?'

'No - I called,' Herb reassured him. 'I just forgot all about it for a minute. You losing your house and all .'

'Well? What did they say?'

'Don't worry about a thing. They're going to send a Xerox over to me by messenger tomorrow, and I'll send it right up to you by Federal Express. You'll have it by ten o'clock day after tomorrow.'

For a moment it seemed that all of his problems were solved, and he started to relax. Then he thought of the way Shooter's eyes had blazed. The way he had brought his face down until his forehead and Mort's were almost touching. He thought of the dry smell of cinnamon on Shooter's breath as he said, 'You lie.'

A Xerox? He was by no means sure that Shooter would accept an original copy ... but a Xerox?

'No,' he said slowly. 'That's no good, Herb. No Xerox, no phone-call from the editor. It has to be an original copy of the magazine.'

'Well, that's a little tougher. They have their editorial offices in Manhattan, of course, but they store copies at their subscription offices in Pennsylvania. They only keep about five copies of each issue - it's really all they can afford to keep, when you consider that EQMM has been publishing since 1941. They really aren't crazy about lending them out.'

'Come on, Herb! You can find those magazines at yard sales and in half the small-town libraries in America!'

'But never a complete run.' Herb paused. 'Not even a phone-call will do, huh? Are you telling me this guy is so paranoid he'd think he was talking to one of your thousands of stooges?'

From the background: 'Do you want me to pour the wine, Herb?'

Herb spoke again with his mouth away from the phone. 'Hold on a couple of minutes, Dee.'

'I'm holding up your dinner,' Mort said. 'I'm sorry.'

'It goes with the territory. Listen, Mort, be straight with me - is this guy as crazy as he sounds? Is he dangerous?'

I don't think I'd talk about this to anyone else. That'd be like standing out in a thunderstorm and tempting the lightning.

'I don't think so,' he said, 'but I want him off my back, Herb.' He hesitated, searching for the right tone. 'I've spent the last half-year or so walking through a shitstorm. This might be one thing I can do something about. I just want the doofus off my back.'

'Okay,' Herb said with sudden decision. 'I'll call Marianne Jaffery over at EQMM. I've known her for a long time. If I ask her to ask the library curator -that's what they call the guy, honest, the library curator - to send us a copy of the June, 1980, ish, she'll do it. Is it okay if I say you might have a story for them at some point in the future?'

'Sure,' Mort said, and thought: Tell her it'll be under the name John Shooter, and almost laughed aloud.

'Good. She'll have the curator send it on to you Federal Express, direct from Pennsylvania. just return it in good condition, or you'll have to find a replacement copy at one of those yard sales you were talking about.'

'Is there any chance all this could happen by the day after tomorrow?' Mort asked. He felt miserably sure that Herb would think he was crazy for even asking ... and he surely must feel that Mort was making an awfully big mountain out of one small molehill.

'I think there's a very good chance,' Herb said. 'I won't guarantee it, but I'll almost guarantee it.'

'Thanks, Herb,' Mort said with honest gratitude. 'You're swell.'

'Aw, shucks, ma'am,' Herb said, doing the bad John Wayne imitation of which he was so absurdly proud.

'Now go get your dinner. And give Delores a kiss for me.'

Herb was still in his John Wayne mode. 'To heck with that. I'll give 'er a kiss fer me, pilgrim.'

You talk big, pilgrim.

Mort felt such a spurt of horror and fear that he almost cried out aloud. Same word, same flat, staring drawl. Shooter had tapped his telephone line' somehow, and no matter who Mort tried to call or what number he dialled. it was John Shooter who answered. Herb Creekmore had become just another one of his pen names, and

'Mort? Are you still there?'

He closed his eyes. Now that Herb had dispensed with the bogus John Wayne imitation, it was okay. It was just Herb again, and always had been. Herb using that word, that had just been

What?

Just another float in the Parade of Coincidences? Okay. Sure. No problem. I'll just stand on the curb and watch it slide past. Why not? I've already watched half a dozen bigger ones go by.

'Right here, Herb,' he said, opening his eyes. 'I was just trying to figure out how do I love thee. You know, counting the ways?'

'You're thilly,' Herb said, obviously pleased. 'And you're going to handle this carefully and prudently, right?'

'Right.'

'Then I think I'll go eat supper with the light of my life.'

'That sounds like a good idea. Goodbye, Herb - and thanks.'

'You're welcome. I'll try to make it the day after tomorrow. Dee says goodbye, too.'

'If she wants to pour the wine, I bet she does,' Mort said, and they both hung up laughing.

As soon as he put the telephone back on its table, the fantasy came back. Shooter. He do the police in different voices. Of course, he was alone and it was dark, a condition which bred fantasies. Nevertheless, he did not believe - at least in his head - that John Shooter was either a supernatural being or a

supercriminal. If he had been the former, he would surely know that Morton Rainey had not committed plagiarism - at least not on that particular story - and if he had been the latter, he would have been off knocking over a bank or something, not farting around western Maine, trying to squeeze a short story out of a writer who made a lot more money from his novels.

He started slowly back toward the living room, intending to go through to the study and try the word processor, when a thought

(at least not that particular story)

struck him and stopped him.

What exactly did that mean, not that particular story? Had he ever stolen someone else's work?

For the first time since Shooter had turned up on his porch with his sheaf of pages, Mort considered this question seriously. A good many reviews of his books had suggested that he was not really an original writer; that most of his works consisted of twice-told tales. He remembered Amy reading a review of The Organ-Grinder's Boy which had first acknowledged the book's pace and readability, and then suggested a certain derivativeness in its plotting. She'd said, 'So what? Don't these people know there are only about five really good stories, and writers just tell them over and over, with different characters?'

Mort himself believed there were at least six stories: success; failure; love and loss; revenge, mistaken identity; the search for a higher power, be it God or the devil. He had told the first four over and over, obsessively, and now that he thought of it, 'Sowing Season' embodied at least three of those ideas. But was that plagiarism? If it was, every novelist at work in the world would be guilty of the crime.

Plagiarism, he decided, was outright theft. And he had never done it in his life. Never.

'Never,' he said, and strode into his study with his head up and his eyes wide, like a warrior approaching the field of battle. And there he sat for the next one hour, and words he wrote none.

26

His dry stint on the word processor convinced him that it might be a good idea to drink dinner instead of eat it, and he was on his second bourbon and water when the telephone rang again. He approached it gingerly, suddenly wishing he had a phone answering machine after all. They did have at least one sterling quality: you could monitor incoming calls and separate friend from foe.

He stood over it irresolutely, thinking how much he disliked the sound modern telephones made. Once upon a time they had rung - jingled merrily, even. Now they made a shrill ululating noise that sounded like a migraine headache trying to happen.

Well, are you going to pick it up or just stand here listening to it do that?

I don't want to talk to him again. He scares me and he infuriates me, and I don't know which feeling I dislike more.

Maybe it's not him.

Maybe it is.

Listening to those two thoughts go around and around was even worse than listening to the warbling beepyawp of the phone, so he picked it up and said hello gruffly and it was, after all, no one more dangerous than his caretaker, Greg Carstairs.

Greg asked the now-familiar questions about the house and Mort answered them all again, reflecting that explaining such an event was very similar to explaining a sudden death - if anything could get you over the shock, it was the constant repetition of the known facts.

'Listen, Mort, I finally caught up with Tom Greenleaf late this afternoon,' Greg said, and Mort thought Greg sounded a little funny - a little cautious. 'He and Sonny Trotts were painting the Methodist Parish Hall.'

'Uh-huh? Did you speak to him about my buddy?'

'Yeah, I did,' Greg said. He sounded more cautious than ever.

'Well?'

There was a short pause. Then Greg said, 'Tom thought you must have been mixed up on your days.'

'Mixed up on my ... what do you mean?'

'Well,' Greg said apologetically, 'he says he did swing down Lake Drive yesterday afternoon and he did see you; he said he waved to you and you waved back. But, Mort -'

'What?' But he was afraid he already knew what.

'Tom says you were alone,' Greg finished.

27

For a long moment, Mort didn't say anything. He did not feel capable of saying anything. Greg didn't say anything, either, giving him time to think. Tom Greenleaf, of course, was no spring chicken; he was Dave Newsome's senior by at least three and perhaps as many as six years. But neither was he senile.

'Jesus,' Mort said at last. He spoke very softly. The truth was, he felt a little winded.

'My idea,' Greg said diffidently, 'was maybe Tom was the one who got a little mixed up. You know he's not exactly -'

'A spring chicken,' Mort finished. 'I know it. But if there's anybody in Tashmore with a better eye for strangers than Tom, I don't know who it is. He's been remembering strangers all his life, Greg. That's one of the things caretakers do, right?' He hesitated, then burst out: 'He looked at us! He looked right at both of us!'

Carefully, speaking as if he were only joshing, Greg said: 'Are you sure you didn't just dream this fella, Mort?'

'I hadn't even considered it,' Mort said slowly, 'until now. If none of this happened, and I'm running around telling people it did, I guess that would make me crazy.'

'Oh, I don't think that at all,' Greg said hastily.

'I do,' Mort replied. He thought: But maybe that's what he really wants. To make people think you are crazy. And, maybe in the end, to make what people think the truth.

Oh yes. Right. And he partnered up with old Tom Greenleaf to do the job. In fact, it was probably Tom who went up to Derry and burned the house, while Shooter stayed down here and wasted the cat - right?

Now, think about it. Really THINK. Was he there? Was he REALLY?

So Mort thought about it. He thought about it harder than he had ever thought about anything in his life; harder, even, than he had thought about Amy and Ted and what he should do about them after he had discovered them in bed together on that day in May. Had he hallucinated John Shooter?

He thought again of the speed with which Shooter had grabbed him and thrown him against the side of the car.

'Greg?'

'I'm here, Mort.'

'Tom didn't see the car, either? Old station wagon, Mississippi plates?'

'He says he didn't see a car on Lake Drive at all yesterday. just you, standing up by the end of the path that goes down to the lake. He thought you were admiring the view.'

Is it live, or is it Memorex?

He kept coming back to the hard grip of Shooter's hands on his upper arms, the speed with which the man had thrown him against the car. 'You lie,' Shooter had said. Mort had seen the rage chained in his eyes, and had smelled dry cinnamon on his breath.

His hands.

The pressure of his hands.

'Greg, hold the phone a sec.'

'Sure.'

Mort put the receiver down and tried to roll up his shirtsleeves. He was not very successful, because his hands were shaking badly. He unbuttoned the shirt instead, pulled it off, then held out his arms. At first he saw nothing. Then he rotated them outward as far as they would go, and there they were, two yellowing bruises on the inside of each arm, just above the elbow.

The marks made by John Shooter's thumbs when he grabbed him and threw him against the car.

He suddenly thought he might understand, and was afraid. Not for himself, though.

For old Tom Greenleaf.

28

He picked up the telephone. 'Greg?'

'I'm here.'

'Did Tom seem all right when you talked to him?'

'He was exhausted,' Greg said promptly. 'Foolish old man has got no business crawling around on a scaffold and painting all day in a cold wind. Not at his age. He looked ready to fall into the nearest pile of leaves, if he couldn't get to a bed in a hurry. I see what you're getting at, Mort, and I suppose that if he was tired enough, it could have slipped his mind, but -'

'No, that's not what I'm thinking about. Are you sure exhaustion was all it was? Could he have been scared?'

Now there was a long, thinking silence at the other end of the line. Impatient though he was, Mort did not break it. He intended to allow Greg all the thinking time he needed.

'He didn't seem himself,' Greg said at last. 'He seemed distracted ... off, somehow. I chalked it up to plain old tiredness, but maybe that wasn't it. Or not all of it.'

'Could he have been hiding something from you?'

This time the pause was not so long. 'I don't know. He might have been. That's all I can say for sure, Mort. You're making me wish I'd talked to him longer and pressed him a little harder.'

'I think it might be a good idea if we went over to his place,' Mort said.

'Now. It happened the way I told you, Greg. If Tom said something different, it could be because my friend scared the bejesus out of him. I'll meet you there.'

'Okay.' Greg sounded worried all over again. 'But, you know, Tom isn't the sort of man who'd scare easy.'

'I'm sure that was true once, but Tom's seventy-five if he's a day. I think that the older you get, the easier to scare you get.'

'Why don't I meet you there?'

'That sounds like a good idea.' Mort hung up the telephone, poured the rest of his bourbon down the sink, and headed for Tom Greenleafs house in the Buick.

29

Greg was parked in the driveway when Mort arrived. Tom's Scout was by the back door. Greg was wearing a flannel jacket with the collar turned up; the wind off the lake was keen enough to be uncomfortable.

'He's okay,' he told Mort at once.

'How do you know?'

They both spoke in low tones.

'I saw his Scout, so I went to the back door. There's a note pinned there saying he had a hard day and went to bed early.' Greg grinned and shoved his long hair out of his face. 'It also says that if any of his regular people need him, they should call me.'

'Is the note in his handwriting?'

'Yeah. Big old-man's scrawl. I'd know it anywhere. I went around and looked in his bedroom window. He's in there. The window's shut, but it's a wonder he doesn't break the damned glass, he's snoring so loud. Do you want to check for yourself?'

Mort sighed and shook his head. 'But something's wrong, Greg. Tom saw us. Both of us. The man got hot under the collar a few minutes after Tom passed and grabbed me by the arms. I'm wearing his bruises. I'll show you, if you want to see.'

Greg shook his head. 'I believe you. The more I think about it, the less I like the way he sounded when he said you were all by yourself when he saw you. There was something ... off about it. I'll talk to him again in the morning. Or we can talk to him together, if you want.'

'That would be good. What time?'

'Why not come down to the Parish Hall around nine-thirty? He'll have had two-three cups of coffee - you can't say boo to him before he's had his coffee - and we can get him down off that damned scaffolding for awhile. Maybe save his life. Sound okay?'

'Yes.' Mort held out his hand. 'Sorry I got you out on a wild goosechase.' Greg shook his hand. 'No need to be. Something's not right here. I'm good and curious to find out what it is.'

Mort got back into his Buick, and Greg slipped behind the wheel of his truck. They drove off in opposite directions, leaving the old man to his exhausted sleep.

Mort himself did not sleep until almost three in the morning. He tossed and turned in the bedroom until the sheets were a battlefield and he could stand it no longer. Then he walked to the living-room couch in a kind of daze. He barked his shins on the rogue coffee table, cursed in a monotone, lay down, adjusted the cushions behind his head, and fell almost immediately down a black hole.

30

When he woke up at eight o'clock the next morning, he thought he felt fine. He went right on thinking so until he swung his legs off the couch and sat up. Then a groan so loud it was almost a muted scream escaped him and he could only sit for a moment, wishing he could hold his back, his knees, and his right arm all at the same time. The arm was the worst, so he settled for holding that. He had read someplace that people can accomplish almost supernatural acts of strength while in the grip of panic; that they feel nothing while lifting cars off trapped infants or strangling killer Dobermans with their bare hands, only realizing how badly they have strained their bodies after the tide of emotion has receded. Now he believed it. He had thrown open the door of the upstairs bathroom hard enough to pop one of the hinges. How hard had he swung the poker? Harder than he wanted to think about, according to the way his back and right arm felt this morning. Nor did he want to think what the damage up there might look like to a less inflamed eye. He did know that he was going to put the damage right himself - or as much of it as he could, anyway. Mort thought Greg Carstairs must have some serious doubts about his sanity already, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. A look at the broken bathroom door, smashed shower-stall door, and shattered medicine cabinet would do little to improve Greg's faith in his rationality. He remembered thinking that Shooter might be trying to make people believe he was crazy. The idea did not seem foolish at all now that he examined it in the light of day; it seemed, if anything, more logical and believable than ever.

But he had promised to meet Greg at the Parish Hall in ninety minutes - less than that, now - to talk to Tom Greenleaf. Sitting here and counting his aches wasn't going to get him there.

Mort forced himself to his feet and walked slowly through the house to the master bathroom. He turned the shower on hot enough to send up billows of steam, swallowed three aspirin, and climbed in.

By the time he emerged, the aspirin had started its work, and he thought he could get through the day after all. It wouldn't be fun, and he might feel as if it had lasted several years by the time it was over, but he thought he could get through it.

This is the second day, he thought as he dressed. A little cramp of apprehension went through him. Tomorrow is his deadline. That made him think first of Amy, and then of Shooter saying, I'd leave her out of it if I could, but I'm startin to think you ain't going to leave me that option.

The cramp returned. First the crazy son of a bitch had killed Bump, then he had threatened Tom Greenleaf (surely he must have threatened Tom Greenleaf), and, Mort had come to realize, it really was possible that Shooter could have torched the Derry house. He supposed he had known this all along, and had simply not wanted to admit it to himself. Torching the house and getting rid of the magazine had been his main mission - of course; a man as crazy as Shooter simply wouldn't think of all the other copies of that magazine that were lying around. Such things would not be part of a lunatic's world view.

And Bump? The cat was probably just an afterthought. Shooter got back, saw the cat on the stoop waiting to be let back in, saw that Mort was still sleeping, and killed the cat on a whim. Making a round trip to Derry that fast would have been tight, but it could have been done. It all made sense.

And now he was threatening to involve Amy.

I'll have to warn her, he thought, stuffing his shirt into the back of his pants. Call her up this morning and come totally clean. Handling the man myself is one thing; standing by while a madman involves the only woman I've ever really loved in something she doesn't know anything about ... that's something else.

Yes. But first he would talk with Tom Greenleaf and get the truth out of him. Without Tom's corroboration of the fact that Shooter was really around and really dangerous, Mort's own behavior was going to look suspicious or nutty, or both. Probably both. So, Tom first.

But before he met Greg at the Methodist Parish Hall, he intended to stop in at Bowie's and have one of Gerda's famous bacon-and-cheese omelettes. An army marches on its stomach, Private Rainey. Right you are, sir. He went out to the front hallway, opened the little wooden box mounted on the wall over the telephone table, and felt for the Buick keys. The Buick keys weren't there.

Frowning, he walked out into the kitchen. There they were, on the counter by the sink. He picked them up and bounced them thoughtfully on the palm of his hand. Hadn't he put them back in the box when he returned from his run to Tom's house last night? He tried to remember, and couldn't - not for sure. Dropping the keys into the box after returning home was such a habit that one drop-off blended in with another. If you ask a man who likes fried eggs what he had for breakfast three days ago, he can't remember - he assumes he had fried eggs, because he has them so often, but he can't be sure. This was like that. He had come back tired, achy, and preoccupied. He just couldn't remember.

But he didn't like it.

He didn't like it at all.

He went to the back door and opened it. There, lying on the porch boards, was John Shooter's black hat with the round crown.

Mort stood in the doorway looking at it, his car keys clutched in one hand with the brass key-fob hanging down so it caught and reflected a shaft of morning sunlight. He could hear his heartbeat in his ears. It was beating slowly and deliberately. Some part of him had expected this.

The hat was lying exactly where Shooter had left his manuscript. And beyond it, in the driveway, was his Buick. He had parked it around the corner when he returned last night - that he did remember - but now it was here.

'What did you do?' Mort Rainey screamed suddenly into the morning sunshine, and the birds which had been twittering unconcernedly away in the trees fell suddenly silent. 'What in God's name did you do?'

But if Shooter was there, watching him, he made no reply. Perhaps he felt that Mort would find out what he had done soon enough.

31

The Buick's ashtray was pulled open, and there were two cigarette butts in it. They were unfiltered. Mort picked one of them out with his fingernails, his face contorted into a grimace of distaste, sure it would be a Pall Mall, Shooter's brand. It was.

He turned the key and the engine started at once. Mort hadn't heard it ticking and popping when he came out, but it started as if it were warm, all the same. Shooter's hat was now in the trunk. Mort had picked it up with the same distaste he had shown for the cigarette butt, putting only enough of his fingers on the brim to get a grip on it. There had been nothing under it, and nothing inside it but a very old sweat-stained inner band. It had some other smell, however, one which was sharper and more acrid than sweat. It was a smell which Mort recognized in some vague way but could not place. Perhaps it would come to him. He put the hat in the Buick back seat, then remembered he would be seeing Greg and Tom in a little less than an hour. He wasn't sure he wanted them to see the hat. He didn't know exactly why he felt that way, but this morning it seemed safer to follow his instincts than to question them, so he put the hat in the trunk and set off for town.

32

He passed Tom's house again on the way to Bowie's. The Scout was no longer in the driveway. For a moment this made Mort feel nervous, and then he decided it was a good sign, not a bad one - Tom must have already started his day's work. Or he might have gone to Bowie's himself - Tom was a widower, and he ate a lot of his meals at the lunch counter in the general store.

Most of the Tashmore Public Works Department was at the counter, drinking coffee and talking about the upcoming deer season, but Tom was

(dead he's dead Shooter killed him and guess whose car he used)

not among them.

'Mort Rainey!' Gerda Bowie greeted him in her usual hoarse, Bleacher Creature's shout. She was a tall woman with masses of frizzy chestnut hair and a great rounded bosom. 'Ain't seen you in a coon's age! Writing any good books lately?'

'Trying,' Mort said. 'You wouldn't make me one of your special omelettes, would you?'

'Shit, no!' Gerda said, and laughed to show she was only joking. The PW guys in their olive-drab coveralls laughed right along with her. Mort wished briefly for a great big gun like the one Dirty Harry wore under his tweed sport-coats. Boom-bang-blam, and maybe they could have a little order around here. 'Coming right up, Mort.'

'Thanks.'

When she delivered it, along with toast, coffee, and OJ, she said in a lower voice: 'I heard about your divorce. I'm sorry.'

He lifted the mug of coffee to his lips with a hand that was almost steady. 'Thanks, Gerda.'

'Are you taking care of yourself?'

'Well ... trying.'

'Because you look a little peaky.'

'It's hard work getting to sleep some nights. I guess I'm not used to the quiet yet.'

'Bullshit - it's sleeping alone you're not used to yet. But a man doesn't have to sleep alone forever, Mort, just because his woman don't know a good thing when she has it. I hope you don't mind me talking to you this way -'

'Not at all,' Mort said. But he did. He thought Gerda Bowie made a shitty Ann Landers.

'- but you're the only famous writer this town has got.'

'Probably just as well.'

She laughed and tweaked his ear. Mort wondered briefly what she would say, what the big men in the olive-drab coveralls would say, if he were to bite the hand that tweaked him. He was a little shocked at how powerfully attractive the idea was. Were they all talking about him and Amy? Some saying she didn't know a good thing when she had it, others saying the poor woman finally got tired of living with a crazy man and decided to get out, none of them knowing what the fuck they were talking about, or what he and Amy had been about when they had been good? Of course they were, he thought tiredly. That's what people were best at. Big talk about people whose names they saw in the newspapers.

He looked down at his omelette and didn't want it.

He dug in just the same, however, and managed to shovel most of it down his throat. It was still going to be a long day. Gerda Bowie's opinions on his looks and his love-life wouldn't change that.

When he finished, paid for breakfast and a paper, and left the store (the Public Works crews had decamped en masse five minutes before him, one stopping just long enough to obtain an autograph for his niece, who was having a birthday), it was five past nine. He sat behind the steering wheel long enough to check the paper for a story about the Derry house, and found one on page three. DERRY FIRE INSPECTORS REPORT NO LEADS IN RAINEY ARSON, the headline read. The story itself was less than half a column long. The last sentence read, 'Morton Rainey, known for such best-selling novels as The Organ-Grinder's Boy and The Delacourt Family, could not be reached for comment.' Which meant that Amy hadn't given them the Tashmore number. Good deal. He'd thank her for that if he talked to her later on.

Tom Greenleaf came first. It would be almost twenty past the hour by the time he reached the Methodist Parish Hall. Close enough to nine-thirty. He put the Buick in gear and drove off.

33

When he arrived at the Parish Hall, there was a single vehicle parked in the drive - an ancient Ford Bronco with a camper on the back and a sign reading SONNY TROTTS PAINTING CARETAKING GENERAL CARPENTRY on each of the doors. Mort saw Sonny himself, a short man of about forty with no hair and merry eyes, on a scaffolding. He was painting in great sweeps while the boom box beside him played something Las Vegasy by Ed Ames or Tom Jones -one of those fellows who sang with the top three buttons of their shirts undone, anyway.

'Hi, Sonny!' Mort called.

Sonny went on painting, sweeping back and forth in almost perfect rhythm as Ed Ames or whoever it was asked the musical questions what is a man, what has he got. They were questions Mort had asked himself a time or two, although without the horn section.

'Sonny!'

Sonny jerked. White paint flew from the end of his brush, and for an alarming moment Mort thought he might actually topple off the scaffold. Then he caught one of the ropes, turned, and looked down. 'Why, Mr Rainey!' he said. 'You gave me a helluva turn!'

For some reason Mort thought of the doorknob in Disney's Alice in Wonderland and had to suppress a violent bray of laughter.

'Mr Rainey? You okay?'

'Yes Mort swallowed crooked. It was a trick he had learned in parochial school about a thousand years ago, and was the only foolproof way to keep from laughing he had ever found. Like most good tricks that worked, it hurt. 'I thought you were going to fall off.'

'Not me,' Sonny said with a laugh of his own. He killed the voice coming from the boom box as it set off on a fresh voyage of emotion. 'Tom might fall off, maybe, but not me.'

'Where is Tom?' Mort asked. 'I wanted to talk to him.'

'He called early and said he couldn't make it today. I told him that was okay, there wasn't enough work for both of us anyways.'

Sonny looked down upon Mort confidentially.

'There is, a' course, but Tom ladled too much onto his plate this time. This ain't no job for a older fella. He said he was all bound up in his back. Must be, too. Didn't sound like himself at all.'

'What time was that?' Mort asked, trying hard to sound casual.

'Early,' Sonny said. 'Six or so. I was just about to step into the old shitatorium for my morning

constitutional. Awful regular, I am.' Sonny sounded extremely proud of this. 'Course Tom, he knows what time I rise and commence my doins.'

'But he didn't sound so good?'

'Nope. Not like himself at all.' Sonny paused, frowning. He looked as if he was trying very hard to remember something. Then he gave a little shrug and went on. 'Wind off the lake was fierce yesterday. Probably took a cold. But Tommy's iron. Give him a day or two and he'll be fine. I worry more about him gettin preoccupated and walkin the plank.' Sonny indicated the floor of the scaffold with his brush, sending a riffle of white drops marching up the boards past his shoes. 'Can I do anything for you, Mr Rainey?'

'No,' Mort said. There was a dull ball of dread, like a piece of crumpled canvas, under his heart. 'Have you seen Greg, by the way?'

'Greg Carstairs?'

'Yes.'

'Not this morning. Course, he deals with the carriage trade.' Sonny laughed. 'Rises later'n the rest of us, he does.'

'Well, I thought he was going to come by and see Tom, too,' Mort said. 'Do you mind if I wait a little? He might show up.'

'Be my guest,' Sonny said. 'You mind the music?'

'Not at all.'

'You can get some wowser tapes off the TV these days. All you gotta do is give em your MasterCard number. Don't even have to pay for the call. It's a eight-hundred number.' He bent toward the boom box, then looked earnestly down at Mort. 'This is Roger Whittaker,' he said in low and reverent tones.

'Oh.'

Sonny pushed PLAY. Roger Whittaker told them there were times (he was sure they knew) when he bit off more than he could chew. That was also something Mort had done without the horn section. He strolled to the edge of the driveway and tapped absently at his shirt pocket. He was a little surprised to find that the old pack of L & M's, now reduced to a single hardy survivor, was in there. He lit the last cigarette, wincing in anticipation of the harsh taste. But it wasn't bad. It had, in fact, almost no taste at all ... as if the years had stolen it away.

That's not the only thing the years have stolen.

How true. Irrelevant, but true. He smoked and looked at the road. Now Roger Whittaker was telling him and Sonny that a ship lay loaded in the harbor, and that soon for England they would sail. Sonny Trotts sang the last word of each line. No more; just the last word. Cars and trucks went back and forth on Route 23. Greg's Ford Ranger did not come. Mort pitched away his cigarette, looked at his watch, and saw it was quarter to ten. He understood that Greg, who was almost religiously punctual, was not coming, either. Shooter got them both.

Oh, bullshit! You don't know that!

Yes I do. The hat. The car. The keys.

You're not just Jumping to conclusions, you're leaping to them.

The hat. The car. The keys.

He turned and walked back toward the scaffold. 'I guess he forgot,' he said, but Sonny didn't hear him. He was swaying back and forth, lost in the art of painting and the soul of Roger Whittaker.

Mort got back into his car and drove away. Lost in his own thoughts, he never heard Sonny call after him.

The music probably would have covered it, anyway.

34

He arrived back at his house at quarter past ten, got out of the car, and started for the house. Halfway there, he turned back and opened the trunk. The hat sat inside, black and final, a real toad in an imaginary garden. He picked it up, not being so choosy of how he handled it this time, slammed the trunk shut, and went into the house.

He stood in the front hallway, not sure what he wanted to do next ... and suddenly, for no reason at all, he put the hat on his head. He shuddered when he did it, the way a man will sometimes shudder after swallowing a mouthful of raw liquor. But the shudder passed.

And the hat felt like quite a good fit, actually.

He went slowly into the master bathroom, turned on the light, and positioned himself in front of the mirror. He almost burst out laughing - he looked like the man with the pitchfork in that Grant Wood painting, 'American Gothic.' He looked like that even though the guy in the picture was bareheaded. The hat covered Mort's hair completely, as it had covered Shooter's (if Shooter had hair - that was yet to be determined, although Mort supposed that he would know for sure the next time he saw him, since Mort now had his chapeau), and just touched the tops of his ears. It was pretty funny. A scream, in fact.

Then the restless voice in his head asked, Why'd you put it on? Who'd you think you'd look like? Him? and the laughter died. Why had he put the hat on in the first place?

He wanted you to, the restless voice said quietly.

Yes? But why? Why would Shooter want Mort to put on his hat?

Maybe he wants you to ...

Yes? he prompted the restless voice again. Wants me to what?

He thought the voice had gone away and was reaching for the light-switch when it spoke again.

... to get confused, it said.

The phone rang then, making him jump. He snatched the hat off guiltily (a little like a man who fears he may be caught trying on his wife's underwear) and went to answer it, thinking it would be Greg, and it would turn out Tom was at Greg's house. Yes, of course, that was what had happened; Tom had called Greg, had told him about Shooter and Shooter's threats, and Greg had taken the old man to his place. To protect him. It made such perfect sense that Mort couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it before.

Except it wasn't Greg. It was Herb Creekmore.

'Everything's arranged,' Herb said cheerfully. 'Marianne came through for me. She's a peach.'

'Marianne?' Mort asked stupidly.

'Marianne Jaffery, at EQMM!' Herb said. 'EQMM? "Sowing Season"? June, 1980? You understand dese t'ings, bwana?'

'Oh,' Mort said. 'Oh, good! Thanks, Herb! Is it for sure?'

'Yep. You'll have it tomorrow - the actual magazine, not just a Xerox of the story. It's coming up from PA Federal Express. Have you heard anything else from Mr Shooter?'

'Not yet,' Mort said., looking down at the black hat in his hand. He could still smell the odd, evocative aroma it held.

'Well, no news is good news, they say. Did you talk to the local law?'

Had he promised Herb he would do that? Mort couldn't remember for sure, but he might have. Best to play safe, anyway. 'Yes. Old Dave Newsome didn't exactly burst a gasket. He thought the guy was probably just playing games.' It was downright nasty to lie to Herb, especially after Herb had done him such a favor, but what sense would it make to tell him the truth? It was too crazy, too complicated.

'Well you passed it along. I think that's important, Mort - I really do.'

'Yes.'

'Anything else?'

'No - but thanks a million for this. You saved my life.' And maybe, he thought, that wasn't just a figure of speech.

'My pleasure. Remember that in small towns, FedEx usually delivers right to the local post office. Okay?'

'Yeah.'

'How's the new book coming? I've really been wanting to ask.'

'Great!' Mort cried heartily.

'Well, good. Get this guy off your back and turn to it. Work has saved many a better man than you or me, Mort.'

'I know. Best to your lady.'

'Thanks. Best to -' Herb stopped abruptly, and Mort could almost see him biting his lip. Separations were hard to get used to. Amputees kept feeling the foot which was no longer there, they said. '- to you,' he finished.

'I got it,' Mort said. 'Take care, Herbert.'

He walked slowly out to the deck and looked down at the lake. There were no boats on it today. I'm one step up, no matter what else happens. I can show the man the goddam magazine. It may not tame him . . . but then again, it may. He's crazy, after all, and you never know what people from the fabled tribe of the Crazy Folks will or won't do. That is their dubious charm. Anything is possible.

It was even possible that Greg was at home after all, he thought - he might have forgotten their meeting at the Parish Hall, or something totally unrelated to this business might have come up. Feeling suddenly hopeful, Mort went to the telephone and dialled Greg's number. The phone was on the third ring when he remembered Greg saying the week before that his wife and kids were going to spend some time at his inlaws'. Megan starts school next year, and it'll be harder for them to get away, he'd said.

So Greg had been alone.

(the hat)

Like Tom Greenleaf.

(the car)

The young husband and the old widower.

(the keys)

And how does it work? Why, as simple as ordering a Roger Whittaker tape off the TV. Shooter goes to Tom Greenleafs house, but not in his station wagon - oh no, that would be too much like advertising. He leaves his car parked in Mort Rainey's driveway, or maybe around the side of the house. He goes to Tom's in the Buick. Forces Tom to call Greg. Probably gets Greg out of bed, but Greg has got Tom on his mind and comes in a hurry. Then Shooter forces Tom to call Sonny Trotts and tell Sonny he doesn't feel well enough to come to work. Shooter puts a screwdriver against old Tom's jugular and suggests that if Tom doesn't make it good, he'll be one sorry old coot. Tom makes it good enough ... although even Sonny, not too bright and just out of bed, realizes that Tom doesn't sound like himself at all. Shooter uses the screwdriver on Tom. And when Greg Carstairs arrives, he uses the screwdriver - or something like it - on him. And ...

You've gone shit out of your mind. This is just a bad case of the screaming meemies and that's all. Repeat: that ... IS ... ALL.

That was reasonable, but it didn't convince him. It wasn't a Chesterfield. It didn't satisfy.

Mort walked rapidly through the downstairs part of the house, tugging and twirling at his hair.

What about the trucks? Tom's Scout, Greg's Ranger? Add the Buick and you're thinking about three vehicles here - four if you count in Shooter's Ford wagon, and Shooter is just one man.

He didn't know ... but he knew that enough was enough.

When he arrived at the telephone again, he pulled the phone book out of its drawer and started looking for the town constable's number. He stopped abruptly.

One of those vehicles was the Buick, my Buick.

He put the telephone down slowly. He tried to think of a way Shooter could have handled all of the vehicles. Nothing came. It was like sitting in front of the word processor when you were tapped for ideas - you got nothing but a blank screen. But he did know he didn't want to call Dave Newsome. Not yet. He was walking away from the telephone, headed toward no place in particular, when it rang.

It was Shooter.

'Go to where we met the other day,' Shooter said. 'Walk down the path a little way. You impress me as a man who thinks the way old folks chew their food, Mr Rainey, but I'm willing to give you all the time you need. I'll call back late this afternoon. Anybody you call between now and then is your responsibility.'

'What did you do?' he asked again. This time his voice was robbed of all force, little more than a whisper. 'What in the world did you do?'

But there was only a dead line.

35

He walked up to the place where the path and the road came together, the place where he had been talking to Shooter when Tom Greenleaf had had the misfortune to see them. For some reason he didn't like the idea of driving the Buick. The bushes on either side of the path were beaten down and skinned-looking, making a rough path. He walked jerkily down this path, knowing what he would find in the first good-sized copse of trees he came to ... and he did find it. It was Tom Greenleafs Scout. Both men were inside.

Greg Carstairs was sitting behind the wheel with his head thrown back and a screwdriver - a Phillips, this time - buried up to the hilt in his forehead, above his right eye. The screwdriver had come from a cupboard in the pantry of Mort's house. The red plastic handle was badly chipped and impossible not to recognize.

Tom Greenleaf was in the back seat with a hatchet planted in the top of his head. His eyes were open. Dried brains had trickled down around his ears. Written along the hatchet's ash handle in faded but still legible red letters was one word: RAINEY. It had come from the toolshed.

Mort stood silently. A chickadee called. A woodpecker used a hollow tree to send Morse code. A freshening breeze was producing whitecaps on the lake; the water was a dark cobalt today, and the whitecaps made a pretty contrast.

There was a rustling sound behind him. Mort wheeled around so fast he almost fell - would have fallen, if he'd not had the Scout to lean against. It wasn't Shooter. It was a squirrel. It looked down at him with bright hate from where it was frozen halfway up the trunk of a maple which blazed with red fall fire. Mort waited for his galloping heart to slow. He waited for the squirrel to dash up the tree. His heart did; the squirrel did not.

'He killed them both,' he said at last, speaking to the squirrel. 'He went to Tom's in my Buick. Then he went to Greg's in Tom's Scout, with Tom driving. He killed Greg. Then he had Tom drive down here, and killed him. He used my tools to do both of them. Then he walked back to Tom's house ... or maybe he jogged. He looks rugged enough to have jogged. Sonny didn't think Tom sounded like himself, and I know why. By the time Sonny got that call, the sun was getting ready to come up and Tom was already dead. It was Shooter, imitating Tom. And it was probably easy. From the way Sonny had his music cranked this morning, he's a little deaf, anyway. Once he was done with Sonny Trotts, he got in my Buick again and drove it back to the house. Greg's Ranger is still parked in his own driveway, where it's been all along. And that's how -'

The squirrel scurried up the trunk and disappeared into the blazing red leaves.

'-that's how it worked,' Mort finished dully.

Suddenly his legs felt watery. He took two steps back up the path, thought of Tom Greenleafs brains drying on his cheeks, and his legs just gave up. He fell down and the world swam away for awhile.

36

When he came to, Mort rolled over, sat up groggily, and turned his wrist to look at his watch. It said quarter past two, but of course it must have stopped at that time last night; he had found Tom's Scout at midmorning, and this couldn't be afternoon. He had fainted, and, considering the circumstances, that wasn't surprising. But no one faints for three and a half hours.

The watch's second hand was making its steady little circle, however.

Must have jogged it when I sat up, that's all.

But that wasn't all. The sun had changed position, and would soon be lost behind the clouds which were filling up the sky. The color of the lake had dulled to a listless chrome.

So he had started off fainting, or swooning, and then what? Well, it sounded incredible, but he supposed he must have fallen asleep. The last three days had been nerve-racking, and last night he had been sleepless until three. So call it a combination of mental and physical fatigue. His mind had just pulled the plug. And

Shooter! Christ. Shooter said he'd call!

He tried to get to his feet, then fell back with a little oof! sound of mingled pain and surprise as his left leg buckled under him. It was full of pins and needles, all of them crazily dancing. He must have lain on the goddam thing. Why hadn't he brought the Buick, for Christ's sake? If Shooter called and Mort wasn't there to take the call, the man might do anything.

He lunged to his feet again, and this time made it all the way up. But when he tried to stride on the left leg, it refused his weight and spilled him forward again. He almost hit his head on the side of the truck going down and was suddenly looking at himself in one of the hubcaps of the Scout. The convex surface made his face look like a grotesque funhouse mask. At least he had left the goddamned hat back at the house; if he had seen that on his head, Mort thought he would have screamed. He wouldn't have been able to help himself.

All at once he remembered there were two dead men in the Scout. They were sitting above him, getting stiff, and there were tools sticking out of their heads.

He crawled out of the Scout's shadow, dragged his left leg across his right with his hands, and began to pound at it with his fists, like a man trying to tenderize a cheap cut of meat.

Stop it! a small voice cried - it was the last kernel of rationality at his command, a little sane light in what felt like a vast bank of black thunderheads between his ears. Stop it! He said he'd call late in the afternoon, and it's only quarter past two! Plenty of time! Plenty of time!