Four Past Midnight (45 page)

“Good for you,” Mort said.

Shooter ignored the sarcasm. “I got the place from my father, and added to it with a little money that came to me from my gram. I do have a dairy herd, about twenty milkers, you were right about that, too, and in the evenings I write stories. I suppose you've got one of those fancy computers with a screen, but I make do with an old typewriter.”

He fell silent, and for a moment they could both hear the crisp rustle of the leaves in the light late-afternoon wind that had sprung up.

“As for your story being the same as mine, I found that out all on my own hook. You see, I'd been thinking about selling the farm. Thinking that with a little more money, I could write days, when my mind's fresh, instead of just after dark. The realtor in Perkinsburg wanted me to meet a fellow up in Jackson, who owns a lot of dairy farms in Miss'ippi. I don't like to drive more than ten or fifteen miles at a time—it gives me a headache, especially when some of it's city driving, because that's where they let all the fools loose—and so I took the bus. I got ready to get on, and then remembered I hadn't brought anything to read. I
hate
a long bus ride without something to read.”

Mort found himself nodding involuntarily. He also hated a ride—bus, train, plane, or car—without something to read, something a little more substantial than the daily paper.

“There isn't any bus station in Perkinsburg—the Greyhound just stops at the Rexall for five minutes or so and then it's down the road. I was already inside the door of that ‘hound and starting up the steps when I realized I was empty-handed. I asked the bus driver if he'd hold it for me and he said he was damned if he would, he was late already, and he was pulling out in another three minutes by his pocket-watch. If I was with him, that would be fine by him, and if I wasn't, then I could kiss his fanny when we met up again.”

He TALKS like a storyteller,
Mort thought.
Be damned if he doesn't.
He tried to cancel this thought—it didn't seem to be a good way to be thinking—and couldn't quite do it.

“Well, I ran inside that drugstore. They've got one of those old-fashioned wire paperback racks in the Perkinsburg Rexall, the ones that turn around and around, just like the one in the little general store up the road from you.”

“Bowie's?”

Shooter nodded. “That's the place, all right. Anyway, I grabbed the first book my hand happened on. Could have been a paperback Bible, for all I saw of the cover. But it wasn't. It was your book of short stories.
Everybody Drops the Dime.
And for all I know, they were your short stories. All but that one.”

But he discovered he didn't want to. Maybe Shooter
was
a writer. He fulfilled both of the main requirements: he told a tale you wanted to hear to the end, even if you had a pretty good idea what the end was going to be, and he was so full of shit he squeaked.

Instead of saying what he should have said—that even if Shooter was by some wild stretch of the imagination telling the truth, he, Mort, had beaten him to that miserable story by two years—he said: “So you read “Sowing Season' on a Greyhound bus while you were going to Jackson to sell your dairy farm last June.”

“No. The way it happened, I read it on the way back. I sold the farm and went back on the Greyhound with a check for sixty thousand dollars in my pocket. I'd read the first half a dozen stories going down. I didn't think they were any great shakes, but they passed the time.”

“Thank you.”

Shooter studied him briefly. “Wasn't offering you any real compliment.”

“Don't I know it.”

Shooter thought about this for a moment, then shrugged. “Anyway, I read two more going back ... and then that one. My story.”

He looked at the cloud, which was now an airy mass of shimmering gold, and then back at Mort. His face was as dispassionate as ever, but Mort suddenly understood he had been badly mistaken in believing this man possessed even the slightest shred of peace or serenity. What he had mistaken for those things was the iron mantle of control Shooter had donned to keep himself from killing Morton Rainey with his bare hands. The face was dispassionate, but his eyes blazed with the deepest, wildest fury Mort had ever seen. He understood that he had stupidly walked up the path from the lake toward what might really be his own death at this fellow's hands. Here was a man mad enough—in both senses of that word—to do murder.

“I am surprised no one has taken that story up with you before—it's not like any of the others. Not a bit.” Shooter's voice was still even, but Mort now recognized it as the voice of a man laboring mightily to keep from striking out, bludgeoning, perhaps throttling; the voice of a man who knows that all the incentive he would ever need to cross the line between talking and killing would be to hear his own voice begin to spiral upward into the registers of cheated anger; the voice of a man who knows how fatally easy it would be to become his own lynch-mob.

Mort suddenly felt like a man in a dark room which is crisscrossed with hair-thin tripwires, all of them leading to packets of high explosive. It was hard to believe that only moments ago he had felt in charge of this situation. His problems—Amy, his inability to write—now seemed like unimportant figures in an unimportant landscape. In a sense, they had ceased to be problems at all. He only had one problem now, and that was staying alive long enough to get back to his house, let alone long enough to see the sun go down.

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. There was nothing he dared to say, not now. The room was full of tripwires.

“I am very surprised,” Shooter repeated in that heavy even voice that now sounded like a hideous parody of calmness.

Mort heard himself say: “My wife. She didn't like it.
She
said that it wasn't like anything I'd ever written before.”

“How did you get it?” Shooter asked slowly and fiercely. “That's what I really want to know. How in hell did a big-money scribbling asshole like you get down to a little shitsplat town in Mississippi and steal my goddam story? I'd like to know why, too, unless you stole all the other ones as well, but the how of it'll be enough to satisfy me right now.”

The monstrous unfairness of this brought Mort's own anger back like an unslaked thirst. For a moment he forgot that he was out here on Lake Drive, alone except for this lunatic from Mississippi.

“Drop it,” he said harshly.

“Drop
it?” Shooter asked, looking at Mort with a kind of clumsy amazement.
“Drop
it? What in hell do you mean,
drop
it?”

“You said you wrote your story in 1982,” Mort said. “I think I wrote mine in late 1979. I can't remember the exact date, but I do know that it was published for the first time in June of 1980. In a magazine. I beat you by two years, Mr. Shooter or whatever your name is. If anyone here has got a bitch about plagiarism, it's me.”

Mort did not precisely see the man move. At one moment they were standing by Shooter's car, looking at each other; at the next he found himself pressed against the driver's door, with Shooter's hands wrapped around his upper arms and Shooter's face pressed against his own, forehead to forehead. In between his two positions, there was only a blurred sensation of being first grabbed and then whirled.

“You lie,” Shooter said, and on his breath was a dry whiff of cinnamon.

“The fuck I
do,”
Mort said, and lunged forward against the man's pressing weight.

Shooter was strong, almost certainly stronger than Mort Rainey, but Mort was younger, heavier, and he had the old blue station wagon to push against. He was able to break Shooter's hold and send him stumbling two or three steps backward.

Now he'll come for me,
Mort thought. Although he hadn't had a fight since a schoolyard you-pull-me-and-I'll-push-you scuffle back in the fourth grade, he was astounded to find his mind was clear and cool.
We're going to duke it out over that dumb fucking story. Well, okay; I wasn't doing anything else today anyhow.

But it didn't happen. Shooter raised his hands, looked at them, saw they were knotted into fists... and forced them to open. Mort saw the effort it took for the man to reimpose that mantle of control, and felt a kind of awe. Shooter put one of his open palms to his mouth and wiped his lips with it, very slowly and very deliberately.

“Prove it,” he said.

“All right. Come back to the house with me. I'll show you the entry on the copyright page of the book.”

“No,” Shooter said. “I don't care about the
book.
I don't care a
pin
for the
book.
Show me the
story.
Show me the magazine with the story in it, so I can read it for myself.”

“I don't have the magazine here.”

He was about to say something else, but Shooter turned his face up toward the sky and uttered a single bark of laughter. The sound was as dry as an axe splitting kindling wood. “No,” he said. The fury was still blazing and dancing in his eyes, but he seemed in charge of himself again. “No, I bet you
don't.”

“Listen to me,” Mort said. “Ordinarily, this is just a place my wife and I come in the summer. I have copies of my books here, and some foreign editions, but I've published in a lot of magazines as well—articles and essays as well as stories. Those magazines are in our year-round house. The one in Derry.”

“Then why aren't you there?” Shooter asked. In his eyes Mort read both disbelief and a galling satisfaction—it was clear that Shooter had expected him to try and squirm his way out of it, and in Shooter's mind, that was just what Mort was doing. Or trying to do.

“I'm here because—” He stopped. “How did
you
know I'd be here?”

“I just looked on the back of the book I bought,” Shooter said, and Mort could have slapped his own forehead in frustration and sudden understanding. Of course—there had been a picture of him on the back of both the hardcover and paperback editions of
Everybody Drops the Dime.
Amy had taken it herself, and it had been an excellent shot. He was in the foreground; the house was in the middle distance; Tashmore Lake was in the background. The caption had read simply,
Morton Rainey at his home in western Maine.
So Shooter had come to western Maine, and he probably hadn't had to visit too many small-town bars and/or drugstores before he found someone who said, “Mort Rainey? Hell, yes! Got a place over in Tashmore. Personal friend of mine, in fact!”

Well, that answered one question, anyway.

“I'm here because my wife and I got a divorce,” he said. “It just became final. She stayed in Derry. Any other year, the house down here would have been empty.”

“Uh-huh,” Shooter said. His tone of voice infuriated Mort all over again. You're lying, it said,
but in this case it doesn't much matter. Because I knew you'd lie. After all, lying is mostly

what you're about, isn't it?
“Well, I would have found you, one place or the other.”

He fixed Mort with a flinty stare.

“I would have found you if you'd moved to Brazil.”

“I believe that,” Mort said. “Nevertheless, you are mistaken. Or conning me. I'll do you the courtesy of believing it's only a mistake, because you
seem
sincere enough—”

Oh God, didn't he.

“—but I published that story two years before you say you wrote it.”

He saw that mad flash in Shooter's eyes again, and then it was gone. Not extinguished but collared, the way a man might collar a dog with an evil nature.

“You say this magazine is at your other house?”

“Yes.”

“And the magazine has your story in it.”

“Yes.”

“And the date of that magazine is June, 1980.”

“Yes.”

Mort had felt impatient with this laborious catechism (there was a long, thoughtful pause before each question) at first, but now he felt a little hope: it was as if the man was trying to teach himself the truth of what Mort had said... a truth, Mort thought, that part of “John Shooter” must have known all along, because the almost exact similarity between the two stories was
not
coincidence. He still believed that firmly, but he
had
come around to the idea that Shooter might have no conscious memory of committing the plagiarism. Because the man was clearly mad.

He wasn't quite as afraid as he had been when he first saw the hate and fury dancing in Shooter's eyes, like the reflection of a barn-fire blazing out of control. When he pushed the man, he had staggered backward, and Mort thought that if it came to a fight, he could probably hold his own... or actually put his man on the ground.

Still, it would be better if it didn't come to that. In an odd, backhand sort of way, he had begun to feel a bit sorry for Shooter.

That gentleman, meanwhile, was stolidly pursuing his course.

“This other house—the one your wife has now—it's here in Maine, too?”

“Yes.”

“She's there?”

“Yes.”

There was a much longer pause this time. In a weird way, Shooter reminded Mort of a computer processing a heavy load of information. At last he said: “I'll give you three days.”

“That's very generous of you,” Mort said.

Shooter's long upper lip drew back from teeth too even to be anything but mail-order dentures. “Don't you make light of me, son,” he said. “I'm trying my best to hold my temper, and doing a pretty good job of it, but—”