' 'Come on, Herb! You can find those magazines at yard sales and in half the smalltown libraries in America!' 'But never a complete run.' Herb paused. 'Not even a phonecall 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 halfyear 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 twicetold tales. He remembered Amy reading a review of The OrganGrinder'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 nowfamiliar 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.' 'Uhhuh? 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 seventyfive 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 oldman'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 ninethirty? He'll have had twothree 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 livingroom 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 showerstall 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 baconandcheese 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 dropoff 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 keyfob 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 sweatstained 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 olivedrab coveralls laughed right along with her. Mort wished briefly for a great big gun like the one Dirty Harry wore under his tweed sportcoats. Boombangblam, 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 olivedrab 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 lovelife 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 bestselling novels as The OrganGrinder'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 ninethirty. 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 eighthundred 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 lightswitch 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 skinnedlooking, making a rough path. He walked jerkily down this path, knowing what he would find in the first goodsized 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 nerveracking, 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! But what if he called early? Or what if 'late afternoon' started after two o'clock in the deepdish, crackerbarrel South? Keep beating on your leg like that and you'll wind up with a charley horse. Then you can see how you like trying to crawl back in time to take his call. That did the trick. He was able to make himself stop. This time he got up more cautiously and just stood for a moment (he was careful to keep his back to Tom's Scout  he did not want to look inside again) before trying to walk. He found that the pins and needles were subsiding. He walked with a pronounced limp at first, but his gait began to smooth out after the first dozen strides . He was almost clear of the bushes Shooter had stripped and beaten down with Tom's Scout when he heard a car approaching. Mort dropped to his knees without even thinking about it and watched as a rusty old Cadillac swept by. It belonged to Don Bassinger, who owned a place on the far side of the lake. Bassinger, a veteran alcoholic who spent most of his time drinking up what remained of his oncesubstantial inheritance, often used Lake Drive as a shortcut to what was known as Bassinger Road. Don was about the only yearround resident down here, Mort thought. After the Caddy was out of sight, Mort got to his feet and hurried the rest of the way up to the road. Now he was glad he hadn't brought the Buick. He knew Don Bassinger's Cadillac, and Bassinger knew Mort's Buick. It was probably too early in the day for Don to be in a blackout, and he might well have remembered seeing Mort's car, if it had been there, parked not far from the place where, before too much longer, someone was going to make an extremely horrible discovery. He's busy tying you to this business, Mort thought as he limped along Lake Drive toward his house. He's been doing it all along. If anyone saw a car near Tom Greenleafs last night, it will almost certainly turn out to be your Buick. He killed them with your tools I could get rid of the tools, he thought suddenly. I could throw them in the lake. I might heave up a time or two getting them out, but I think I could go through with it. Could you? I wonder. And even if you did ... well, Shooter almost certainly will have thought of that possibility, too. He seems to have thought of all the others. And he knows that if you tried to get rid of the hatchet and the screwdriver and the police dragged the bottom for them and they were found, things would look even worse for you. Do you see what he's done? Do you? Yes. He saw. John Shooter had given him a present. It was a tar baby. A large, glistening tar baby. Mort had smacked the tar baby in the head with his left hand and it had stuck fast. So he had whopped that old tar baby in the gut with his right hand to make it let go, only his right hand had stuck, too. He had been  what was the word he had kept using with such smug satisfaction? 'Disingenuous,' wasn't it? Yes, that was it. And all the time he had been getting more entangled with John Shooter's tar baby. And now? Well, he had told lies to all sorts of people, and that would look bad if it came out, and a quarter of a mile behind him a man was wearing a hatchet for a hat and Mort's name was written on the handle, and that would look even worse. Mort imagined the telephone ringing in the empty house and forced himself into a trot. 37 Shooter didn't call. The minutes stretched out like taffy, and Shooter didn't call. Mort walked restlessly through the house, twirling and pulling at his hair. He imagined this was what it felt like to be a junkie waiting for the pusherman. Twice he had second thoughts about waiting, and went to the phone to call the authorities  not old Dave Newsome, or even the county sheriff, but the State Police. He would hew to the old Vietnam axiom Kill em all and let God sort em out. Why not? He had a good reputation, after all; he was a respected member of two Maine communities, and John Shooter was a Just what was Shooter? The word 'phantom' came to mind. The word 'willothewisp' also came to mind. But it was not this that stopped him. What stopped him was a horrible certainty that Shooter would be trying to call while Mort himself was using the line ... that Shooter would hear the busy signal, hang up, and Mort would never hear from him again. At quarter of four, it began to rain  a steady fall rain, cold and gentle, sighing down from a white sky, tapping on the roof and the stiff leaves around the house. At ten of, the telephone rang. Mort leaped for it. It was Amy. Amy wanted to talk about the fire. Amy wanted to talk about how unhappy she was, not just for herself, but for both of them. Amy wanted to tell him that Fred Evans, the insurance investigator, was still in Derry, still picking over the site, still asking . questions about everything from the most recent wiring inspection to who had the keys to the wine cellar, and Ted was suspicious of his motives. Amy wanted Mort to wonder with her if things would have been different if they had had children. Mort responded to all this as best he could, and all the time he was talking with her, he felt time  prime lateafternoon time  slipping away. He was half mad with worry that Shooter would call, find the line busy, and commit some fresh atrocity. Finally he said the only thing he could think of to get her off the line that if he didn't get to the bathroom soon, he was going to have an accident. 'Is it booze?' she asked, concerned. 'Have you been drinking?' 'Breakfast, I think,' he said. 'Listen, Amy, I' 'At Bowie's?' 'Yes,' he said, trying to sound strangled with pain and effort. The truth was, he felt strangled. It was all quite a comedy, when you really considered it. 'Amy, really, I ' 'God, Mort, she keeps the dirtiest grill in town,' Amy said. 'Go. I'll call back later.' The phone went dead in his ear. He put the receiver into its cradle, stood there a moment, and was amazed and dismayed to discover his fictional complaint was suddenly real his bowels had drawn themselves into an aching, throbbing knot. He ran for the bathroom, unclasping his belt as he went. It was a near thing, but he made it. He sat on the ring in the rich odor of his own wastes, his pants around his ankles, catching his breath ... and the phone began to ring again. He sprang up like a jack released from its box, cracking one knee smartly on the side of the washstand, and ran for it, holding his pants up with one hand and mincing along like a girl in a tight skirt. He had that miserable, embarrassing Ididn'thavetimetowipe feeling, and he guessed it happened to everyone, but it suddenly occurred to him he had never read about it in a book  not one single book, ever. Oh, life was such a comedy. This time it was Shooter. 'I saw you down there,' Shooter said. His voice was as calm and serene as ever. 'Down where I left them, I mean. Looked like you had you a heatstroke, only it isn't summer.' 'What do you want?' Mort switched the telephone to his other ear. His pants slid down to his ankles again. He let them go and stood there with the waistband of his jockey shorts suspended halfway between his knees and his hips. What an author photograph this would make, he thought. 'I almost pinned a note on you,' Shooter said. 'I decided not to.' He paused, then added with a kind of absent contempt 'You scare too easy.' 'What do you want?' 'Why, I told you that already, Mr Rainey. I want a story to make up for the one you stole. Ain't you ready to admit it yet?' Yes  tell him yes! Tell him anything, the earth is flat, John Kennedy and Elvis Presley are alive and well and playing banjo duets in Cuba, Meryl Streep's a transvestite, tell him ANYTHING But he wouldn't. All the fury and frustration and horror and confusion suddenly burst out of his mouth in a howl. 'I DIDN'T! I DIDN'T! YOU'RE CRAZY, AND I CAN PROVE IT! I HAVE THE MAGAZINE, YOU LOONY! DO YOU HEAR ME? I HAVE THE GODDAM MAGAZINE!' The response to this was no response. The line was silent and dead, without even the faraway gabble of a phantom voice to break that smooth darkness, like that which crept up to the windowwall each night he had spent here alone. 'Shooter?' Silence. 'Shooter, are you still there?' More silence. He was gone. Mort let the telephone sag away from his ear. He was returning it to the cradle when Shooter's voice, tinny and distant and almost lost, said . . now?' Mort put the phone back to his ear. It seemed to weigh eight hundred pounds. 'What?' he asked. 'I thought you were gone.' 'You have it? You have this socalled magazine? Now?' He thought Shooter sounded upset for the first time. Upset and unsure. 'No,' Mort said. 'Well, there!' Shooter said, sounding relieved. 'I think you might finally be ready to talk turk ' 'It's coming Federal Express,' Mort interrupted. 'It will be at the post office by ten tomorrow.' 'What will be?' Shooter asked. 'Some fuzzy old thing that's supposed to be a copy?' 'No,' Mort said. The feeling that he had rocked the man, that he had actually gotten past his defenses and hit him hard enough to make it hurt, was strong and undeniable. For a moment or two Shooter had sounded almost afraid, and Mort was angrily glad. 'The magazine. The actual magazine.' There was another long pause, but this time Mort kept the telephone screwed tightly against his ear. Shooter was there. And suddenly the story was the central issue again, the story and the accusation of plagiarism; Shooter treating him like he was a goddam college kid was the issue, and maybe the man was on the run at last. Once, in the same parochial school where Mort had learned the trick of swallowing crooked, he had seen a boy stick a pin in a beetle which had been trundling across his desk. The beetle had been caught  pinned, wriggling, and dying. At the time, Mort had been sad and horrified. Now he understood. Now he only wanted to do the same thing to this man. This crazy man. 'There can't be any magazine,' Shooter said finally. 'Not with that story in it. That story is mine!' Mort could hear anguish in the man's voice. Real anguish. It made him glad. The pin was in Shooter. He was wriggling around on it. 'It'll be here at ten tomorrow,' Mort said, 'or as soon after as FedEx drops the Tashmore stuff. I'll be happy to meet you there. You can take a look. As long a look as you want, you goddamned maniac.' 'Not there,' Shooter said after another pause. 'At your house.' 'Forget it. When I show you that issue of Ellery Queen, I want to be someplace where I can yell for help if you go apeshit.' 'You'll do it my way,' Shooter said. He sounded a little more in control ... but Mort did not believe Shooter had even half the control he'd had previously. 'If you don't, I'll see you in the Maine State Prison for murder.' 'Don't make me laugh.' But Mort felt his bowels begin to knot up again. 'I hooked you to those two men in more ways than you know,' Shooter said, 'and you have told a right smart of lies. If I just disappear, Mr Rainey, you are going to find yourself standing with your head in a noose and your feet in Crisco.' 'You don't scare me.' 'Yeah, I do,' Shooter said. He spoke almost gently. 'The only thing is. you're startin to scare me a little, too. I can't quite figure you out.' Mort was silent. 'It'd be funny,' Shooter said in a strange, ruminating tone. 'if we had come by the same story in two different places, at two different times.' 'The thought had occurred to me.' 'Did it?' 'I dismissed it,' Mort said. 'Too much of a coincidence. If it was just the same plot, that would be one thing. But the same language? The same goddam diction?' 'Uhhuh,' Shooter said. 'I thought the same thing, pilgrim. It's just too much. Coincidence is out. You stole it from me, all right, but I'm goddamned if I can figure out how or when.' 'Oh, quit it!' Mort burst out. 'I have the magazine! I have proof! Don't you understand that? It's over! Whether it was some nutty game on your part or just a delusion, it is over! I have the magazine!' After a long silence, Shooter said 'Not yet, you don't.' 'How true,' Mort said. He felt a sudden and totally unwanted sense of kinship with the man. 'So what do we do tonight?' 'Why, nothing,' Shooter said. 'Those men will keep. One has a wife and kids visiting family. The other lives alone. You go and get your magazine tomorrow morning. I will come to your place around noon.' 'You'll kill me,' Mort said. He found that the idea didn't carry much terror with it  not tonight, anyway. 'If I show you the magazine, your delusion will break down and you'll kill me.' 'No!' Shooter replied, and this time he seemed clearly surprised. 'You? No, sir! But those others were going to get in the way of our business. I couldn't have that ... and I saw that I could use them to make you deal with me. To face up to your responsibility.' 'You're crafty,' Mort said. 'I'll give you that. I believe you're nuts, but I also believe you're just about the craftiest son of a bitch I ever ran across in my life.' 'Well, you can believe this,' Shooter said. 'If I come tomorrow and find you gone, Mr Rainey, I will make it my business to destroy every person in the world that you love and care for. I will burn your life like a canefield in a high wind. You will go to jail for killing those two men, but going to jail will be the least of your sorrows. Do you understand?' 'Yes,' Mort said. 'I understand. Pilgrim.' 'Then you be there.' 'And suppose  just suppose  I show you the magazine, and it has my name on the contents page and my story inside. What then?' There was a short pause. Then Shooter said, 'I go to the authorities and confess to the whole shooting match. But I'd take care of myself long before the trial, Mr Rainey. Because if things turn out that way, then I suppose I am crazy. And that kind of a crazy man . . .' There was a sigh. 'That kind of crazy man has no excuse or reason to live.' The words struck Mort with queer force. He's unsure, he thought. For the first time, he's really unsure ... which is more than I've ever been. But he cut that off, and hard. He had never had a reason to be unsure. This was Shooter's fault. Every bit of it was Shooter's fault. He said 'How do I know you won't claim the magazine is a fake?' He expected no response to this, except maybe something about how Mort would have to take his word, but Shooter surprised him. 'If it's real, I'll know,' he said, 'and if it's fake, we'll both know. I don't reckon you could have rigged a whole fake magazine in three days, no matter how many people you have got working for you in New York.' It was Mort's turn to think, and he thought for a long, long time. Shooter waited for him. 'I'm going to trust you,' Mort said at last. 'I don't know why, for sure. Maybe because I don't have a lot to live for myself these days. But I'm not going to trust you whole hog. You come down here. Stand in the driveway where I can see you, and see that you're unarmed. I'll come out. Is that satisfactory?' 'That'll do her.' 'God help us both.' 'Yessir. I'll be damned if I'm sure what I'm into anymore ... and that is not a comfortable feeling.' 'Shooter?' 'Right here.' 'I want you to answer one question.' Silence . . . but an inviting silence, Mort thought. 'Did you burn down my house in Derry?' 'No,' Shooter said at once. 'I was keeping an eye on you.' 'And Bump,' Mort said bitterly. 'Listen,' Shooter said. 'You got my hat?' 'Yes.' 'I'll want it,' Shooter said, 'one way or the other.' And the line went dead. Just like that. Mort put the phone down slowly and carefully and walked back to the bathroom  once again holding his pants up as he went  to finish his business. 38 Amy did call back, around seven, and this time Mort was able to talk to her quite normally  just as if the bathroom upstairs wasn't trashed and there weren't two dead men sitting behind a screen of bushes on the path down to the lake, stiffening as the twilight turned to dark around them. She had spoken with Fred Evans herself since her last call, she said, and she was convinced he either knew something or suspected something about the fire he didn't want to tell them. Mort tried to soothe her, and thought he succeeded to some degree, but he was worried himself. If Shooter hadn't started the fire and Mort felt inclined to believe the man had been telling the truth about that then it must have been raw coincidence ... right? He didn't know if it was right or not. 'Mort, I've been so worried about you,' she said suddenly. That snapped him back from his thoughts. 'Me? I'm okay.' 'Are you sure? When I saw you yesterday, I thought you looked ... strained.' She paused. 'In fact, I thought you looked like you did before you had the ... you know.' 'Amy, I did not have a nervous breakdown.' 'Well, no,' she said quickly. 'But you know what I mean. When the movie people were being so awful about The Delacourt Family.' That had been one of the bitterest experiences of Mort's life. Paramount had optioned the book for 75,000 on a pickup price Of 750,000  damned big money. And they had been on the verge of exercising their option when someone had turned up an old script in the files, something called The HomeTeam, which was enough like The Delacourt Family to open up potential legal problems. It was the only time in his career  before this nightmare, anyway when he had been exposed to the possibility of a plagiarism charge. The execs had ended up letting the option lapse at the eleventh hour. Mort still did not know if they had been really worried about plagiarism or had simply had second thoughts about his novel's film potential. If they really had been worried, he didn't know how such a bunch of pansies could make any movies. Herb Creekmore had obtained a copy of the Home Team screenplay, and Mort had seen only the most casual similarity. Amy agreed. The fuss happened just as he was reaching a dead end on a novel he had wanted desperately to write. There had been a short PR tour for the paperback version of The Delacourt Family at the same time. All of that at once had put him under a great deal of strain. But he had not had a nervous breakdown. 'I'm okay,' he insisted again, speaking gently. He had discovered an amazing and rather touching thing about Amy some years before if you spoke to her gently enough, she was apt to believe you about almost anything.


He had often thought that, if it had been a specieswide trait, like showing your teeth to indicate rage or amusement, wars would have ceased millennia ago. 'Are you sure, Mort?' 'Yes. Call me if you hear any more from our insurance friend.' 'I will.' He paused. 'Are you at Ted's?' 'Yes.' 'How do you feel about him, these days?' She hesitated, then said simply 'I love him.' 'Oh.' 'I didn't go with other men,' she said suddenly. 'I've always wanted to tell you that. I didn't go with other men. But Ted ... he looked past your name and saw me, Mort. He saw me.' 'You mean I didn't.' 'You did when you were here,' she said. Her voice sounded small and forlorn. 'But you were gone so much.' His eyes widened and he was instantly ready to do battle. Righteous battle. 'What? I haven't been on tour since The Delacourt Family! And that was a short one!' 'I don't want to argue with you, Mort,' she said softly. 'That part should be over. All I'm trying to say is that, even when you were here, you were gone a lot. You had your own lover, you know. Your work was your lover.' Her voice was steady, but he sensed tears buried deep inside it. 'How I hated that bitch, Mort. She was prettier than me, smarter than me, more fun than me. How could I compete?' 'Blame it all on me, why not?' he asked her, dismayed to find himself on the edge of tears. 'What did you want me to do? Become a goddam plumber? We would have been poor and I would have been unemployed. There was nothing else I could fucking do, don't you understand that? There was nothing else I could do!' He had hoped the tears were over, at least for awhile, but here they were. Who had rubbed this horrible magic lamp again? Had it been him or her this time? 'I'm not blaming you. There's blame for me, too. You never would have found us ... the way you did ... if I hadn't been weak and cowardly. It wasn't Ted; Ted wanted us to go to you and tell you together. He kept asking. And I kept putting him off. I told him I wasn't sure. I told myself I still loved you, that things could go back to the way they were ... but things never do, I guess. I'll ' She caught her breath, and Mort realized she was crying, too. 'I'll never forget the look on your face when you opened the door of that motel room. I'll carry that to my grave.' Good! he wanted to cry out at her. Good! Because you only had to see it! I had to wear It! 'You knew my love,' he said unsteadily. 'I never hid her from you. You knew from the start.' 'But I never knew,' she said, 'how deep her embrace could be.' 'Well, cheer up,' Mort said. 'She seems to have left me now.' Amy was weeping. 'Mort, Mort  I only want you to live and be happy. Can't you see that? Can't you do that?' What he had seen was one of her bare shoulders touching one of Ted Milner's bare shoulders. He had seen their eyes, wide and frightened, and Ted's hair stuck up in an Alfalfa corkscrew. He thought of telling her this  of trying, anyway and let it go. It was enough. They had hurt each other enough. Another time, perhaps, they could go at it again. He wished she hadn't said that thing about the nervous breakdown, though. He had not had a nervous breakdown. 'Amy, I think I ought to go.' 'Yes  both of us. Ted's out showing a house, but he'll be back soon. I have to put some dinner together.' 'I'm sorry about the argument.' 'Will you call if you need me? I'm still worried.' 'Yes,' he said, and said goodbye, and hung up. He stood there by the telephone for a moment, thinking he would surely burst into tears. But it passed. That was perhaps the real horror. It passed. 39 The steadily falling rain made him feel listless and stupid. He made a little fire in the woodstove, drew a chair over, and tried to read the current issue of Harper's, but he kept nodding off and then jerking awake again as his chin dropped, squeezing his windpipe and producing a snore. I should have bought some cigarettes today, he thought. A few smokes would have kept me awake. But he hadn't bought any smokes, and he wasn't really sure they would have kept him awake, anyway. He wasn't just tired; he was suffering from shock. At last he walked over to the couch, adjusted the pillows, and lay back. Next to his cheek, cold rain spicklespackled against the dark glass. Only once, he thought. I only did it once. And then he fell deeply asleep. 40 In his dream, he was in the world's biggest classroom. The walls stretched up for miles. Each desk was a mesa, the gray tiles the endless plain which swept among them. The clock on the wall was a huge cold sun. The door to the hallway was shut, but Morton Rainey could read the words on the pebbled glass HOME TEAM WRITING ROOM PROF. DELLACOURT They spelled it wrong, Mort thought, too many L's. But another voice told him this was not so. Mort was standing on the giant blackboard's wide chalk gutter, stretching up. He had a piece of chalk the size of a baseball bat in his hand. He wanted to drop his arm, which ached ferociously, but he could not. Not until he had written the same sentence on the blackboard five hundred times I will not copy from John Kintner. He must have written it four hundred times already, he thought, but four hundred wasn't enough. Stealing a man's work when a man's work was really all he had was unforgivable. So he would have to write and write and write, and never mind the voice in his mind trying to tell him that this was a dream, that his right arm ached for other reasons. The chalk squeaked monstrously. The dust, acrid and somehow familiar  so familiar  sifted down into his face. At last he could go on no longer. His arm dropped to his side like a bag filled with lead shot. He turned on the chalk gutter, and saw that only one of the desks in the huge classroom was occupied. The occupant was a young man with a country kind of face; a face you expected to see in the north forty behind the ass end of a mule. His palebrown hair stuck up in spikes from his head. His countrycousin hands, seemingly all knuckles, were folded on the desk before him. He was looking at Mort with pale, absorbed eyes. I know you, Mort said in the dream. That's right, pilgrim, John Kintner said in his bald, drawling Southern accent. You just put me together wrong. Now keep on writing. It's not five hundred. It's five thousand. Mort started to turn, but his foot slipped on the edge of the gutter, and suddenly he was spilling outward, screaming into the dry, chalky air, and John Kintner was laughing, and he woke up on the floor with his head almost underneath the rogue coffee table, clutching at the carpet and crying out in highpitched, whinnying shrieks. He was at Tashmore Lake. Not in some weird, cyclopean classroom but at the lake ... and dawn was coming up misty in the east. I'm all right. It was just a dream and I'm all right. But he wasn't. Because it hadn't just been a dream. John Kintner had been real. How in God's name could he have forgotten John Kintner? Mort had gone to college at Bates, and had majored in creative writing. Later, when he spoke to classes of aspiring writers (a chore he ducked whenever possible), he told them that such a major was probably the worst mistake a man or woman could make, if he or she wanted to write fiction for a living. 'Get a job with the post office,' he'd say. 'It worked for Faulkner.' And they would laugh. They liked to listen to him, and he supposed he was fairly good at keeping them entertained. That seemed very important, since he doubted that he or anyone else could teach them how to write creatively. Still, he was always glad to get out at the end of the class or seminar or workshop. The kids made him nervous. He supposed John Kintner was the reason why. Had Kintner been from Mississippi? Mort couldn't remember, but he didn't think so. But he had been from some enclave of the Deep South all the same  Alabama, Louisiana, maybe the toolies of north Florida. He didn't know for sure. Bates College had been a long time ago, and he hadn't thought of John Kintner, who had suddenly dropped out one day for reasons known only to himself, in years. That's not true. You thought about him last night. Dreamed about him, you mean, Mort corrected himself quickly, but that hellish little voice inside would not let it go. No, earlier than that. You thought about him while you were talking to Shooter on the telephone. He didn't want to think about this. He wouldn't think about this. John Kintner was in the past; John Kintner had nothing to do with what was happening now. He got up and walked unsteadily toward the kitchen in the milky, early light to make strong coffee. Lots and lots of strong coffee. Except the hellish little voice wouldn't let him be. Mort looked at Amy's set of kitchen knives hanging from their magnetized steel runners and thought that if he could cut that little voice out, he would try the operation immediately. You were thinking that you rocked the man  that you finally rocked him. You were thinking that the story had become the central issue again, the story and the accusation of plagiarism. Shooter treating you like a goddam college kid was the issue. Like a goddam college kid. Like a 'Shut up,' Mort said hoarsely. 'Just shut the fuck up.' The voice did, but he found himself unable to stop thinking about John Kintner anyway. As he measured coffee with a shaking hand, he thought of his constant, strident protestations that he hadn't plagiarized Shooter's story, that he had never plagiarized anything. But he had, of course. Once. Just once. 'But that was so long ago,' he whispered. 'And it doesn't have anything to do with this.' It might be true, but that did not stop his thoughts. 42 He had been a junior, and it was spring semester. The creativewriting class of which he was a part was focussing on the short story that semester. The teacher was a fellow named Richard Perkins, Jr, who had written two novels which had gotten very good reviews and sold very few copies. Mort had tried one, and thought the good reviews and bad sales had the same root cause the books were incomprehensible. But the man hadn't been a bad teacher  he had kept them entertained, at least. There had been about a dozen students in the class. One of them was John Kintner. Kintner was only a freshman, but he had gotten special permission to take the class. And had deserved it, Mort supposed. Southernfried cracker or not, that sucker had been good. The course required each of them to write either six short stories or three longer ones. Each week, Perkins dittoed off the ones he thought would make for the liveliest discussion and handed them out at the end of the class. The students were supposed, to come the following week prepared to discuss and criticize. It was the usual way to run such a class. And one week Perkins had given them a story from John Kintner. It had been called ... What had it been called? Mort had turned on the water to fill the coffeemaker, but now he only stood, looking absently out at the fog beyond the windowwall and listening to the running water. You know damned well what It was called. 'Secret Window, Secret Garden.' 'But it wasn't!' he yelled petulantly to the empty house. He thought furiously, determined to shut the hellish little voice up once and for all ... and suddenly it came to him. '"Crowfoot Mile!" he shrieked. 'The name of the story was "Crowfoot Mile," and it doesn't have anything to do with anything!' Except that was not quite true, either, and he didn't really need the little, voice hunkered down someplace in the middle of his aching head to point out the fact. Kintner had turned in three or maybe four stories before disappearing to wherever he had disappeared to (if asked to guess, Mort would have guessed Vietnam  it was where most of them had disappeared to at the end of the sixties the young men, anyhow). 'Crowfoot Mile' hadn't been the best of Kintner's stories ... but it had been good. Kintner was clearly the best writer in Richard Perkins, Jr's class. Perkins treated the boy almost as an equal, and in Mort Rainey's notsohumble estimation, Perkins had been right to do so, because he thought Kintner had been quite a bit better than Richard Perkins, Jr. As far as that went, Mort believed he had been better. But had he been better than Kintner? 'Huhuh,' he said under his breath as he turned on the coffeemaker. 'I was second.' Yes. He had been second, and he had hated that. He knew that most students taking writing courses were just marking time, pursuing a whim before giving up childish things and settling into a study of whatever it was that would be their real life's work. The creative writing most of them would do in later life would consist of contributing items to the Community Calendar pages of their local newspapers or writing advertising copy for Bright Blue Breeze dish detergent. Mort had come into Perkins's class confidently expecting to be the best, because it had never been any other way with him. For that reason, John Kintner had come as an unpleasant shock. He remembered trying to talk to the boy once ... but Kintner, who contributed in class only when asked, had proved to be almost inarticulate. When he spoke out loud, he mumbled and stumbled like a poorwhite sharecropper's boy whose education had stopped at the fourthgrade level. His writing was the only voice he had, apparently. And you stole it. 'Shut up,' he muttered. 'Just shut up.' You were second best and you hated it. You were glad when he was gone, because then you could be first again. Just like you always had been. Yes. True. And a year later, when he was preparing to graduate, he had been cleaning out the back closet of the sleazy Lewiston apartment he had shared with two other students, and had come upon a pile of offprints from Perkins's writing course. Only one of Kintner's stories had been in the stack. It happened to be 'Crowfoot Mile.' He remembered sitting on the seedy, beersmelling rug of his bedroom, reading the story, and the old jealousy had come over him again. He threw the other offprints away, but he had taken that one with him ... for reasons he wasn't sure he wanted to examine closely. As a sophomore, Mort had submitted a story to a literary magazine called Aspen Quarterly. It came back with a note which said the readers had found it quite good 'although the ending seemed rather jejune.' The note, which Mort found both patronizing and tremendously exciting, invited him to submit other material. Over the next two years, he had submitted four more stories. None were accepted, but a personal note accompanied each of the rejection slips. Mort went through an unpublished writer's agony of optimism alternating with deep pessimism. He had days when he was sure it was only a matter of time before he cracked Aspen Quarterly. And he had days when he was positive that the entire editorial staff  pencilnecked geeks to a man  was only playing with him, teasing him the way a man might tease a hungry dog by holding a piece of meat up over its head and then jerking the scrap out of reach when it leaps. He sometimes imagined one of them holding up one of his manuscripts, fresh out of its manila envelope, and shouting 'Here's another one from that putz in Maine! Who wants to write the letter this time?' And all of them cracking up, perhaps even rolling around on the floor underneath their posters of Joan Baez and Moby Grape at the Fillmore. Most days, Mort had not indulged in this sort of sad paranoia. He understood that he was good, and that it was only a matter of time. And that summer, working as a waiter in a Rockland restaurant, he thought of the story by John Kintner. He thought it was probably still in his trunk, kicking around at the bottom. He had a sudden idea. He would change the title and submit 'Crowfoot Mile' to Aspen Quarterly under his own name! He remembered thinking it would be a fine joke on them, although, looking back now, he could not imagine what the joke would have been. He did remember that he'd had no intention of publishing the story under his own name ... or, if he had had such an intention on some deeper level, he hadn't been aware of it. In the unlikely event of an acceptance, he would withdraw the story, saying he wanted to work on it some more. And if they rejected it, he could at least take some cheer in the thought that John Kintner wasn't good enough for Aspen Quarterly, either. So he had sent the story. And they had accepted it. And he had let them accept it. And they sent him a check for twentyfive dollars. 'An honorarium,' the accompanying letter had called it. And then they had published it. And Morton Rainey, overcome by belated guilt at what he had done, had cashed the check and had stuffed the bills into the poor box of St Catherine's in Augusta one day. But guilt hadn't been all he'd felt. Oh no. Mort sat at the kitchen table with his head propped in one hand, waiting for the coffee to perk. His head ached. He didn't want to be thinking about John Kintner and John Kintner's story. What he had done with 'Crowfoot Mile' had been one of the most shameful events of his life; was it really surprising that he had buried it for so many years? He wished he could bury it again now. This, after all, was going to be a big day  maybe the biggest of his life. Maybe even the last of his life. He should be thinking about going to the post office. He should be thinking about his confrontation with Shooter, but his mind would not let that sad old time alone. When he'd seen the magazine, the actual magazine with his name in it above John Kintner's story, he felt like a man waking from a horrible episode of sleepwalking, an unconscious outing in which he has done some irrevocable thing. How had he let it go so far? It was supposed to have been a joke, for Christ's sake, just a little giggle But he had let it go so far. The story had been published, and there were at least a dozen other people in the world who knew it wasn't his  including Kintner himself. And if one of them happened to pick up Aspen Quarterly He himself told no one  of course. He simply waited, sick with terror. He slept and ate very little that late summer and early fall; he lost weight and dark shadows brushed themselves under his eyes. His heart began to triphammer every time the telephone rang. If the call was for him, he would approach the instrument with dragging feet and cold sweat on his brow, sure it would be Kintner, and the first words out of Kintner's mouth would be, You stole my story, and something has got to be done about it. I think I'll start by telling everybody what kind of thief you are. The most incredible thing was this he had known better. He had known the possible consequences of such an act for a young man who hoped to make a career of writing. It was like playing Russian roulette with a bazooka. Yet still ... still ... But as that fall slipped uneventfully past, he began to relax a little. The issue of Aspen Quarterly had been replaced by a new issue. The issue was no longer lying out on tables in library periodical rooms all across the country; it had been tucked away into the stacks or transferred to microfiche. It might still cause trouble  he bleakly supposed he would have to live with that possibility for the rest of his life  but in most cases, out of sight meant out of mind. Then, in November of that year, a letter from Aspen Quarterly came. Mort held it in his hands, looking at his name on the envelope, and began to shake all over. His eyes filled with some liquid that felt too hot and corrosive to be tears, and the envelope first doubled and then trebled. Caught. They caught me. They'll want me to respond to a letter they have from Kintner ... or Perkins ... or one of the others in the class ... I'm caught. He had thought of suicide then  quite calmly and quite rationally. His mother had sleeping pills. He would use those. Somewhat eased by this prospect, he tore the envelope open and pulled out a single sheet of stationery. He held it folded in one hand for a long moment and considered burning it without even looking at it. He wasn't sure he could stand to see the accusation held baldly up in front of him. He thought it might drive him mad. Go ahead, dammit  look. The least you can do is look at the consequences. You may not be able to stand up to them, but you can byGod look at them. He unfolded the letter. Dear Mort Rainey, Your short story, 'Eye of the Crow,' was extremely well received here. I'm sorry this followup letter has been so slow in coming, but, frankly, we expected to hear from you. You have been so faithful in your submissions over the years that your silence now that you have finally succeeded in 'making it' is a little perplexing. If there was anything about the way your story was handled  typesetting, design, placement, etc.  that you didn't like, we hope you'll bring it up. Meantime, how about another tale? Respectfully yours, Charlie Charles Palmer Assistant Editor Mort had read this letter twice, and then began to peal hoarse bursts of laughter at the house, which was luckily empty. He had heard of sidesplitting laughter, and this was surely it  he felt that if he didn't stop soon, his sides really would split, and send his guts spewing out all over the floor. He had been ready to kill himself with his mother's sleeping pills, and they wanted to know if he was upset with the way the story had been typeset! He had expected to find that his career was ruined even before it was fairly begun, and they wanted more! More! He laughed  howled, actually  until his sidesplitting laughter turned to hysterical tears. Then he sat on the sofa, reread Charles Palmer's letter, and cried until he laughed again. At last he had gone into his room and lain down with the pillows arranged behind him just the way he liked, and then he had fallen asleep. He had gotten away with it. That was the upshot. He had gotten away with it, and he had never done anything even remotely like it again, and it had all happened about a thousand years ago, and so why had it come back to haunt him now? He didn't know, but he intended to stop thinking about it. 'And right now, too,' he told the empty room, and walked briskly over to the coffeemaker, trying to ignore his aching head. You know why you're thinking about it now. 'Shut up.' He spoke in a conversational tone which was rather cheery ... but his hands were shaking as he picked up the Silex. Some things you can't hide forever. You might be ill, Mort. 'Shut up, I'm warning you,' he said in his cheery conversational voice. You might be very ill. In fact, you might be having a nervous br... 'Shut up!' he cried, and threw the Silex as hard as he could. It sailed over the counter, flew across the room, turning over and over as it went, crunched into the windowwall, shattered, and fell dead on the floor. He looked at the windowwall and saw a long, silvery crack zigzagging up to the top. It started at the place where the Silex had impacted. He felt very much like a man who might have a similar crack running right through the middle of his brain. But the voice had shut up. He walked stolidly into the bedroom, got the alarm clock, and walked back into the living room. He set the alarm for tenthirty as he walked. At tenthirty he was going to go to the post office, pick up his Federal Express package, and go stolidly about the task of putting this nightmare behind him. In the meantime, though, he would sleep. He would sleep on the couch, where he had always slept best. 'I am not having a nervous breakdown,' he whispered to the little voice, but the little voice was having none of the argument. Mort thought that he might have frightened the little voice. He hoped so, because the little voice had certainly frightened him. His eyes found the silvery crack in the windowwall and traced it dully. He thought of using the chambermaid's key. How the room had been dim, and it had taken his eyes a moment to adjust. Their naked shoulders. Their frightened eyes. He had been shouting, He couldn't remember what  and had never dared to ask Amy  but it must have been some scary shit, judging from the look in their eyes. If I was ever going to have a nervous breakdown, he thought, looking at the lightningbolt senselessness of the crack, it would have been then. Hell, that letter from Aspen Quarterly was nothing compared to opening a motelroom door and seeing your wife with another man, a slick realestate agent from some shitsplat little town in Tennessee Mort closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was because another voice was clamoring. This one belonged to the alarm clock. The fog had cleared, the sun had come out, and it was time to go to the post office. 43 On the way, he became suddenly sure that Federal Express would have come and gone ... and Juliet would stand there at the window with her bare face hanging out and shake her head and tell him there was nothing for him, sorry. And his proof? It would be gone like smoke. This feeling was irrational  Herb was a cautious man, one who did not make promises that couldn't be kept  but it was almost too strong to deny. He had to force himself out of the car, and the walk from the door of the post office to the window where Juliet Stoker stood sorting mail seemed at least a thousand miles long. When he got there, he tried to speak and no words came out. His lips moved, but his throat was too dry to make the sounds. Juliet looked up at him, then took a step back. She looked alarmed. Not, however, as alarmed as Amy and Ted had looked when he opened the motelroom door and pointed the gun at them. 'Mr Rainey? Are you all right?' He cleared his throat. 'Sorry, Juliet. My throat kind of doubleclutched on me for a second.' 'You're very pale,' she said, and he could hear in her voice that tone so many of the Tashmore residents used when they spoke to him  it was a sort of pride, but it held an undertaste of irritation and condescension, as though he was a child prodigy who needed special care and feeding. 'Something I ate last night, I guess,' he said. 'Did Federal Express leave anything for me?' 'No, not a thing.' He gripped the underside of the counter desperately, and for a moment thought he would faint, although he had understood almost immediately that that was not what she had said. 'Pardon me?' She had already turned away; her sturdy country bum was presented to him as she shuffled through some packages on the floor. 'Just the one thing, I said,' she replied, and then turned around and slid the package across the counter to him. He saw the return address was EQMM in Pennsylvania, and Pelt relief course through him. It felt like cool water pouring down a dry throat. 'Thank you.' 'Welcome. You know, the post office would have a cow if they knew we handle that Federal Express man's mail.' 'Well, I certainly appreciate it,' Mort said. Now that he had the magazine, he felt a need to get away, to get back to the house. This need was so strong it was almost elemental. He didn't know why  it was an hour and a quarter until noon but it was there. In his distress and confusion, he actually thought of giving Juliet a tip to shut her up ... and that would have caused her soul, Yankee to its roots, to rise up in a clamor. 'You won't tell them, will you?' she asked archly. 'No way,' he said, managing a grin. 'Good,' Juliet Stoker said, and smiled. 'Because I saw what you did.' He stopped by the door. 'Pardon me?' 'I said they'd shoot me if you did,' she said, and looked closely at his face. 'You ought to go home and lie down, Mr Rainey. You really don't look well at all.' I feel like I spent the last three days lying down, Juliet  the time I didn't spend hitting things, that is. 'Well,' he said, 'maybe that's not such a bad idea. I still feel weak.' 'There's a virus going around. You probably caught it.' Then the two women from Camp Wigmore  the ones everybody in town suspected of being lesbians, albeit discreet ones  came in, and Mort made good his escape. He sat in the Buick with the blue package on his lap, not liking the way everybody kept saying he looked sick, liking the way his mind had been working even less. It doesn't matter. It's almost over. He started to pull the envelope open, and then the ladies from Camp Wigmore came back out and looked at him. They put their heads together. One of them smiled. The other laughed out loud. And Mort suddenly decided he would wait until he got back home. 44 He parked the Buick around the side of the house, in its customary place, turned off the ignition ... and then a soft grayness came over his vision. When it drew back, he felt strange and frightened. Was something wrong with him, then? Something physical? No  he was just under strain, he decided. He heard something  or thought he did  and looked around quickly. Nothing there. Get hold of your nerves, he told himself shakily. That's really all you have to do just get hold of your motherfucking nerves. And then he thought I did have a gun. That day. But it was unloaded. I told them that, later. Amy believed me. I don't know about Milner, but Amy did, and Was it, Mort? Was it really unloaded? He thought of the crack in the windowwall again, senseless silver lightningbolt zigzagging right up through the middle of things. That's how it happens, he thought. That's how it happens in a person's life. Then he looked down at the Federal Express package again. This was what he should be thinking about, not Amy and Mr Ted KissMyAss from Shooter's Knob, Tennessee, but this. The flap was already halfopen  everyone was careless these days. He pulled it up and shook the magazine out into his lap. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, the logo said in bright red letters. Beneath that, in much smaller type, June, 1980. And below that, the names of some of the writers featured in the issue. Edward D. Hoch. Ruth Rendell. Ed McBain. Patricia Highsmith. Lawrence Block. His name wasn't on the cover. Well, of course not. He was scarcely known as a writer at all then, and certainly not as a writer of mystery stories; 'Sowing Season' had been a oner. His name would have meant nothing to regular readers of the magazine, so the editors would not have put it on. He turned the cover back. There was no contents page beneath. The contents page had been cut out. He thumbed frantically through the magazine, dropping it once and then picking it up with a little cry. He didn't find the excision the first time, but on the second pass, he realized that pages 83 to 97 were gone. 'You cut it out!' he screamed. He screamed so loudly that his eyeballs bulged from their sockets. He began to bring his fists down on the steering wheel of the Buick, again and again and again. The horn burped and blared. 'You cut it out, you son of a bitch! How did you do that? You cut it out! You cut it out! You cut it out!' 45 He was halfway to the house before the deadly little voice again wondered how Shooter could have done that. The envelope had come Federal Express from Pennsylvania, and Juliet had taken possession of it, so how, how in God's name He stopped. Good, Juliet had said. Good, because I saw what you did. That was it; that explained it. Juliet was in on it. Except  Except Juliet had been in Tashmore since forever. Except that hadn't been what she said. That had only been his mind. A little paranoid flatulence. 'He's doing it, though,' Mort said. He went into the house and once he was inside the door, he threw the magazine as hard as he could. It flew like a startled bird, pages riffling, and landed on the floor with a slap. 'Oh yeah, you bet, you bet your fucking ass, he's doing it. But I don't have to wait around for him.! ' He saw Shooter's hat. Shooter's hat was lying on the floor in front of the door to his study. Mort stood where he was for a moment, heart thundering in his ears, and then walked over to the stove in great cartoon tippytoe steps.