It was a familiar classroom, although he couldn't have said just why. He was in the classroom with John Shooter. Shooter was holding a grocery bag in the curve of one arm. He took an orange out of the bag and bounced it reflectively up and down in his hand. He was looking in Mort's direction, but not at Mort; his gaze seemed fixed on something beyond Mort's shoulder. Mort turned and saw a cinderblock wall and a blackboard and a door with a frostedglass upper panel. After a moment he could puzzle out the backward writing on the frosted glass. WELCOME TO THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS it said. The writing on the blackboard was easier to read. SOWING SEASON A Short Story by Morton Rainey it said. Suddenly something whizzed over Mort's shoulder, just missing his head. The orange. As Mort cringed back, the orange struck the blackboard, burst open with a rotten squashing sound, and splattered gore across what had been written there. He turned back to Shooter. Stop that! he cried in a shaky, scolding voice. Shooter dipped into his bag again. What's the matter? Shooter asked in his calm, stern voice. Don't you recognize blood oranges when you see them? What kind of writer are you? He threw another one. It splattered crimson across Mort's name and began to drip slowly down the wall. No more! Mort screamed, but Shooter dipped slowly, implacably, into the bag again. His long, callused fingers sank into the skin of the orange he brought out; blood began to sweat its way onto the orange's skin in pinprick droplets. No more! No more! Please! No more! I'll admit it, I'll admit anything. everything, if you just stop! Anything, if you'll just stop! If you'll 13 stop, if you'll just stop  He was falling. Mort grabbed at the edge of the couch just in time to save himself a short and probably painful trip to the livingroom floor. He rolled toward the back of the couch and simply lay there for a moment, clutching the cushions, shivering, and trying to grasp at the ragged tails of the dream. Something about a classroom, and blood oranges, and the school of hard knocks. Even this was going, and the rest was already gone. It had been real, whatever it was. Much too real. At last he opened his eyes, but there was precious little to see; he had slept until long past sundown. He was horribly stiff, especially at the base of his neck, and he suspected he had been asleep at least four hours, maybe five. He felt his way cautiously to the livingroom lightswitch, managing to avoid the octagonal glasstopped coffee table for a change (he had an idea the coffee table was semisentient, and given to shifting its position slightly after dark, the better to hack away at his shins), and then went into the front hall to try Amy again. On the way, he checked his watch. It was quarter past ten. He had slept over five hours ... nor was this the first time. And he wouldn't even pay for it by tossing and turning all night, judging by past experience, he would be asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow in the bedroom. He picked up the phone, was momentarily puzzled by the dead silence in his ear. then remembered he had yanked the damn thing's fang. He pulled the wire through his fingers until he got to the jack, turned around to plug it in ... and paused. From here he could look out the small window to the left of the door. This gave him an angle of vision on the back porch, where the mysterious and unpleasant Mr Shooter had left his manuscript under a rock yesterday. He could also see the garbage cabinet, and there was something on it  two somethings, actually. A white something and a dark something. The dark something looked nasty; for one frightening second, Mort thought a giant spider was crouched there. He dropped the phone cord and turned on the porch light in a hurry. Then there was a space of time  he didn't know just how long and didn't care to know when he was incapable of further movement. The white thing was a sheet of paper  a perfectly ordinary 8 12" x 11" sheet of typing paper. Although the garbage cabinet was a good fifteen feet away from where Mort was standing, the few words on it were printed in large strokes and he could read them easily. He thought Shooter must have used either a pencil with an extremely soft lead or a piece of artist's charcoal. REMEMBER, YOU HAVE 3 DAYS, the message read. I AM NOT JOKING. The black thing was Bump. Shooter had apparently broken the cat's neck before nailing him to the roof of the garbage cabinet with a screwdriver from Mort's own toolshed. 14 He wasn't aware of breaking the paralysis which held him. At one moment he was standing frozen in the hall by the telephone table, looking out at good old Bump, who seemed to have grown a screwdriver handle in the middle of his chest, where there was a ruff of white fur  what Amy had liked to call Bump's bib. At the next he was standing in the middle of the porch with the chilly night air biting through his thin shirt, trying to look six different ways at once. He forced himself to stop. Shooter was gone, of course. That's why he had left the note. Nor did Shooter seem like the kind of nut who would enjoy watching Mort's obvious fear and horror. He was a nut, all right, but one which had fallen from a different tree. He had simply used Bump, used him on Mort the way a farmer might use a crowbar on a stubborn rock in his north forty. There was nothing personal in it; it was just a job that had to be done. Then he thought of how Shooter's eyes had looked that afternoon and shivered violently. No, it was personal, all right. It was all kinds of personal. 'He believes I did it,' Mort whispered to the cold western Maine night, and the words came out in ragged chunks, bitten off by his chattering teeth. 'The crazy son of a bitch really believes I did it.' He approached the garbage cabinet and his stomach rolled over like a dog doing a trick. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead, and he wasn't sure he could take care of what needed taking care of. Bump's head was cocked far to the left, giving him a grotesque questioning look. His teeth, small, neat, and needlesharp, were bared. There was a little blood around the blade of the screwdriver at the point where it was driven into his (bib) ruff, but not very much. Bump was a friendly cat; if Shooter had approached him, Bump would not have shied away. And that was what Shooter must have done, Mort thought, and wiped the sick sweat off his forehead. He had picked the cat up, snapped its neck between his fingers like a Popsicle stick, and then nailed it to the slanting roof of the garbage cabinet, all while Mort Rainey slept, if not the sleep of the just, that of the unheeding. Mort crumpled up the sheet of paper, stuffed it in his back pocket, then put his hand on Bump's chest. The body, not stiff and not even entirely cold, shifted under his hand. His stomach rolled again, but he forced his other hand to close around the screwdriver's yellow plastic handle and pull it free. He tossed the screwdriver onto the porch and held poor old Bump in his right hand like a bundle of rags. Now his stomach was in free fall, simply rolling and rolling and rolling. He lifted one of the two lids on top of the garbage cabinet, and secured it with the hookandeyelet that kept the heavy lid from crashing down on the arms or head of whoever was depositing trash inside. Three cans were lined up within. Mort lifted the lid from the center one and deposited Bump's body gently inside. It lay draped over the top of an olivegreen Hefty bag like a fur stole. He was suddenly furious with Shooter. If the man had appeared in the driveway at that second, Mort would have charged him without a second thought  driven him to the ground and choked him if he could. Easy  it really is catching. Maybe it was. And maybe he didn't care. It wasn't just that Shooter had killed his only companion in this lonely October house by the lake; it was that he had done it while Mort was asleep, and in such a way that good old Bump had become an object of revulsion, something it was hard not to puke over. Most of all it was the fact that he had been forced to put his good cat in a garbage can like a piece of worthless trash. I'll bury him tomorrow. Right over in that soft patch to the left of the house. In sight of the lake. Yes, but tonight Bump would lie in undignified state on top of a Hefty bag in the garbage cabinet because some man  some crazy son of a bitch  could be out there, and the man had a grudge over a story Mort Rainey hadn't even thought of for the last five years or so. The man was crazy, and consequently Mort was afraid to bury Bump tonight, because, note or no note, Shooter might be out there. I want to kill him. And if the crazy bastard pushes me much more, I might just try to do it. He went inside, slammed the door, and locked it. Then he walked deliberately through the house, locking all the doors and windows. When that was done, he went back to the window by the porch door and stared pensively out into the darkness. He could see the screwdriver lying on the boards, and the dark round hole the blade had made when Shooter plunged it into the righthand lid of the garbage cabinet. All at once he remembered he had been about to try Amy again. He plugged the jack into the wall. He dialled rapidly, fingers tapping the old familiar keys which added up to home, and wondered if he would tell Amy about Bump. There was an unnaturally long pause after the preliminary clicks. He was about to hang up when there was one final click  so loud it was almost a thud  followed by a robot voice telling him that the number he had dialled was out of service. 'Wonderful,' he muttered. 'What the hell did you do, Amy? Use it until it broke?' He pushed the disconnect button down, thinking he would have to call Isabelle Fortin after all, and while he was conning his memory for her number, the telephone rang in his hand. He hadn't realized how keyed up he was until that happened. He gave a screaky little cry and skipped backward, dropping the telephone handset on the floor and then almost tripping over the goddam bench Amy had bought and put by the telephone table, the bench absolutely no one, including Amy herself, ever used. He pawed out with one hand, grabbed the bookcase, and kept himself from falling. Then he snatched up the phone and said, 'Hello? Is that you, Shooter?' For in that moment, when it seemed that the whole world was slowly but surely turning topsyturvy, he couldn't imagine who else it could be. 'Mort?' It was Amy, and she was nearly screaming. He knew the tone very well from the last two years of their marriage. It was either frustration or fury, more likely the latter. 'Mort, is that you? Is it you, for God's sake? Mort? ' 'Yes, it's me,' he said. He suddenly felt weary. 'Where in the hell have you been? I've been trying to get you for the last three hours!' 'Asleep,' he said. 'You pulled the jack.' She spoke in the tired but accusatory tone of one who had been down this road before. 'Well, you picked a great time to do it this time, champ.' 'I tried to call you around five ' 'I was at Ted's.' 'Well, somebody was there,' he said. 'Maybe 'What do you mean, someone was there?' she asked, whiplash quick. 'Who was there?' 'How the hell would I know, Amy? You're the one in Derry, remember? You Derry, me Tashmore. All I know is that the line was busy when I tried to call you. If you were over at Ted's, then I assume Isabelle  ' 'I'm still at Ted's,' she said, and now her voice was queerly flat. 'I guess I'll be at Ted's for quite awhile to come, like it or not. Someone burned our house down, Mort. Someone burned it right to the ground.' And suddenly Amy began to cry. 15 He had become so fixated on John Shooter that his immediate assumption, as he stood numbly in the hallway of the one remaining Rainey home with the telephone screwed against his ear, was that Shooter had burned the house down. Motive? Why, certainly, officer. He burned the house, a restored Victorian worth about 800,000, to get rid of a magazine. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, to be precise; June of 1980 issue. But could it have been Shooter? Surely not. The distance between Derry and Tashmore was over a hundred miles, and Bump's body had still been warm and flexible, the blood around the screwdriver blade tacky but not yet dry. If he hurried Oh, quit it, why don't you? Pretty soon you'll be blaming Shooter for your divorce and thinking you've been sleeping sixteen hours out of every twentyfour because Shooter has been putting Phenobarb in your food. And after that? You can start writing letters to the paper saying that America's cocaine kingpin is a gentleman from Crow's Ass Mississippi named John Shooter. That he killed Jimmy Hoffa and also happened to be the famous second gun who fired at Kennedy from the grassy knoll in November of 1963. The man's crazy, okay ... but do you really think he drove a hundred miles north and massacred your goddam house in order to kill a magazine? Especially when there must be copies of that magazine still in existence all across America? Get serious. But still ... if he hurried ... No. It was ridiculous. But, Mort suddenly realized, he wouldn't be able to show the man his goddam proof, would he? Not unless... The study was at the back of the house; they had converted what had once been the loft of the carriagebarn. 'Amy,' he said. 'It's so horrible!' she wept. 'I was at Ted's and Isabelle called ... she said there were at least fifteen fire trucks there ... hoses spraying . . . crowds ... rubberneckers ... gawkers ... you know how I hate it when people come and gawk at the house, even when it's not burning down . . .' He had to bite down hard on the insides of his cheeks to stifle a wild bray of laughter. To laugh now would be the worst thing, the cruellest thing he could possibly do, because he did know. His success at his chosen trade after the years of struggle had been a great and fulfilling thing for him; he sometimes felt like a man who has won his way through a perilous jungle where most other adventurers perish and has gained a fabulous prize by so doing. Amy had been glad for him, at least initially, but for her there had been a bitter downside the loss of her identity not only as a private person but as a separate person. 'Yes,' he said as gently as he could, still biting at his cheeks to protect against the laughter which threatened. If he laughed, it would be at her unfortunate choice of phrasing, but she wouldn't see it that way. So often during their years together she had misinterpreted his laughter. 'Yes, I know, hon. Tell me what happened.' 'Somebody burned down our house!' Amy cried tearily. 'That's what happened!' 'Is it a total loss?' 'Yes. That's what the fire chief said.' He could hear her gulping, trying to get herself under control, and then her tears stormed out again. 'It bburned fuhfuhflat!' 'Even my study?' 'That's wwhere it ststarted,' she sniffled. 'At least, that's what the fire chief said they thought. And it fits with what Patty saw.' 'Patty Champion?' The Champions owned the house next to the Raineys' on the right; the two lots were separated by a belt of yew trees that had slowly run wild over the years. 'Yes. just a second, Mort.' He heard a mighty honk as she blew her nose, and when she came back on the line, she seemed more composed. 'Patty was walking her dog, she told the firemen. This was a little while after it got dark. She walked past our house and saw a car parked under the portico. Then she heard a crash from inside, and saw fire in your big study window.' 'Did she see what kind of car it was?' Mort asked. He felt sick in the pit of his stomach. As the news sank in, the John Shooter business began to dwindle in size and importance. It wasn't just the goddam June, 1980, issue of EQMM; it was almost all his manuscripts, both those which had been published and those which were incomplete, it was most of his first editions, his foreign editions, his contributors' copies. Oh, but that was only the start. They had lost their books, as many as four thousand volumes. All of Amy's clothes would have burned, if the damage was as bad as she said it was, and the antique furniture she had collected  sometimes with his help, but mostly on her own  would all be cinders and clinkers now. Her jewelry and their personal papers  insurance policies and so on  would probably be okay (the safe hidden at the back of the upstairs closet was supposed to be fireproof), but the Turkish rugs would be ash, the thousand or so videotapes melted lumps of plastic, the audiovisual equipment ... his clothes ... their photographs, thousands of them ... Good Christ, and the first thing he'd thought of was that goddam magazine. 'No,' Amy was saying, answering the question he had almost forgotten asking in his realization of how enormous the personal loss must be, 'she couldn't tell what kind of car it was. She said she thought somebody must have used a Molotov cocktail, or something like that. Because of the way the fire came up in the window right after the sound of breaking glass. She said she started up the driveway and then the kitchen door opened and a man ran out. Bruno started to bark at him, but Patty got scared and pulled him back, although she said he just about ripped the leash out of her hand. 'Then the man got into the car and started it up. He turned on the headlights, and Patty said they almost blinded her. She threw her arm up to shield her eyes and the car just roared out from under the portico ... that's what she said . . . and she squeezed back against our front fence and pulled Bruno as hard as she could, or the man would have hit him. Then he turned out of the driveway and drove down the street, fast.' 'And she never saw what kind of car it was?' 'No. First it was dark, and then, when the fire started to shine through your study window, the headlights dazzled her. She ran back to the house and called the fire department. Isabelle said they came fast, but you know how old our house is ... was ... and ... and how fast dry wood burns ... especially if you use gasoline . . .' Yes, he knew. Old, dry, full of wood, the house had been an arsonist's wet dream. But who? If not Shooter, who? This terrible news, coming on top of the day's events like a hideous dessert at the end of a loathsome meal, had almost completely paralyzed his ability to think. 'He said it was probably gasoline ... the fire chief, I mean ... he was there first, but then the police came, and they kept asking questions, Mort, most about you ... about any enemies you might have made ... enemies ... and I said I didn't think you hhad any enemies ... I tried to answer all his questions . . .' 'I'm sure you did the best job you could,' he said gently. She went on as if she hadn't heard him, speaking in breathless ellipses, like a telegraph operator relating dire news aloud just as it spills off the wire. 'I didn't even know how to tell them we were divorced . . . and of course they didn't know ... it was Ted who had to tell them finally ... Mort ... my mother's Bible ... it was on the nightstand in the bedroom ... there were pictures in it of my family ... and ... and it was the only thing ... only thing of hers I hhhad . . .' Her voice dissolved into miserable sobs. 'I'll be up in the morning,' he said. 'If I leave at seven, I can be there by ninethirty. Maybe by nine, now that there's no summer traffic. Where will you stay tonight? At Ted's?' 'Yes,' she said, sniffing. 'I know you don't like him, Mort, but I don't know what I would have done without him tonight ... how I could have handled it ... you know ... all their questions . . .' 'Then I'm glad you had him,' he said firmly. He found the calmness, the civilization, in his voice really astounding. 'Take care of yourself. Have you got your pills?' She'd had a tranquilizer prescription for the last six years of their marriage, but only took them when she had to fly ... or, he remembered, when he had some public function to fulfill. One which required the presence of the Designated Spouse. 'They were in the medicine cabinet,' she said dully. 'It doesn't matter. I'm not stressed. just heartsick.' Mort almost told her he believed they were the same thing, and decided not to. 'I'll be there as soon as I can,' he said. 'If you think I could do something by coming tonight  ' 'No,' she said. 'Where should we meet? Ted's?' Suddenly, unbidden, he saw his hand holding a chambermaid's passkey. Saw it turning in the lock of a motelroom door. Saw the door swinging open. Saw the surprised faces above the sheet, Amy's on the left, Ted Milner's on the right. His blowdried look had been knocked all aslant and asprawl by sleep, and to Mort he had looked a little bit like Alfalfa in the old Little Rascals short subjects. Seeing Ted's hair in sleep corkscrews like that had also made the man look really real to Mort for the first time. He had seen their dismay and their bare shoulders. And suddenly, almost randomly, he thought A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had 'No,' he said, 'not Ted's. What about that little coffee shop on Witcham Street?' 'Would you prefer I came alone?' She didn't sound angry, but she sounded ready to be angry. How well I know her, he thought. Every move, every lift and drop of her voice, every turn of phrase. And how well she must know me. 'No,' he said. 'Bring Ted. That'd be fine.' Not fine, but he could live with it. He thought. 'Ninethirty, then,' she said, and he could hear her standing down a little. 'Marchman's.' 'Is that the name of that place?' 'Yes  Marchman's Restaurant.' 'Okay. Ninethirty or a little earlier. If I get there first, I'll chalk a mark on the door ' 'and if I get there first, I'll rub it out,' she finished the old catechism, and they both laughed a little. Mort found that even the laugh hurt. They knew each other, all right. Wasn't that what the years together were supposed to be for? And wasn't that why it hurt so goddam bad when you discovered that, not only could the years end, they really had? He suddenly thought of the note which had been stuck under one of the garbage cabinet's shake shingles  REMEMBER, YOU HAVE 3 DAYS. I AM NOT JOKING. He thought of saying, I've had a little trouble of my own down here, Amy, and then knew he couldn't add that to her current load of woe. It was his trouble. 'If it had happened later, at least you would have saved your stuff,' she was saying. 'I don't like to think about all the manuscripts you must have lost, Mort. If you'd gotten the fireproof drawers two years ago, when Herb suggested them, maybe  ' 'I don't think it matters,' Mort said. 'I've got the manuscript of the new novel down here.' He did, too. All fourteen shitty, wooden pages of it. 'To hell with the rest. I'll see you tomorrow, Amy. I (love you) He closed his lips over it. They were divorced. Could he still love her? It seemed almost perverse. And even if he did, did he have any right to say so? 'I'm sorry as hell about this,' he told her instead. 'So am I, Mort. So very sorry.' She was starting to cry again. Now he could hear someone  a woman, probably Isabelle Fortin  comforting her. 'Get some sleep, Amy.' 'You, too.' He hung up. All at once the house seemed much quieter than it had on any of the other nights he had been here alone; he could hear nothing but the night wind whispering around the eaves and, very far off, a loon calling on the lake. He took the note out of his pocket, smoothed it out, and read it again. It was the sort of thing you were supposed to put aside for the police. In fact, it was the sort of thing you weren't even supposed to touch until the police had had a chance to photograph it and work their juju on it. It was  ruffle of drums and blast of trumpets, please  EVIDENCE. Well, fuck it, Mort thought, crumpling it up again. No police. Dave Newsome, the local constable, probably had trouble remembering what he'd eaten for breakfast by the time lunch rolled around, and he couldn't see taking the matter to either the county sheriff or the State Police. After all, it wasn't as though an attempt had been made on his life; his cat had been killed, but a cat wasn't a person. And in the wake of Amy's devastating news, John Shooter simply didn't seem as important anymore. He was one of the Crazy Folks, he had a bee in his bonnet, and he might be dangerous ... but Mort felt more and more inclined to try and handle the business himself, even if Shooter was dangerous. Especially if he was dangerous. The house in Derry took precedence over John Shooter and John Shooter's crazy ideas. It even took precedence over who had done the deed  Shooter or some other fruitcake with a grudge, a mental problem, or both. The house, and, he supposed, Amy. She was clearly in bad shape, and it couldn't hurt either of them for him to offer her what comfort he could. Maybe she would even ... But he closed his mind to any speculation of what Amy might even do. He saw nothing but pain down that road. Better to believe that road was closed for good. He went into the bedroom, undressed, and lay down with his hands behind his head. The loon called again, desperate and distant. It occurred to him again that Shooter could be out there, creeping around, his face a pale circle beneath his odd black hat. Shooter was nuts, and although he had used his hands and a screwdriver on Bump, that did not preclude the possibility that he still might have a gun. But Mort didn't think Shooter was out there, armed or not. Calls, he thought. I'll have to make at least two on my way up to Deny. One to Greg Carstairs and one to Herb Creekmore. Too early to make them from here if I leave at seven, but I could use one of the pay phones at the Augusta tollbooths ... He turned over on his side, thinking it would be a long time before he fell asleep tonight after all ... and then sleep rolled over him in a smooth dark wave, and if anyone came to peer in on him as he slept, he did not know it. 16 The alarm got him up at sixfifteen. He took half an hour to bury Bump in the sandy patch of ground between the house and the lake, and by seven he was rolling, just as planned. He was ten miles down the road and heading into Mechanic Falls, a bustling metropolis which consisted of a textile mill that had closed in 1970, five thousand souls, and a yellow blinker at the intersection of Routes 23 and 7, when he noticed that his old Buick was running on fumes. He pulled into Bill's Chevron, cursing himself for not having checked the gauge before setting out  if he had gotten through Mechanic Falls without noticing how low the gauge had fallen, he might have had a pretty good walk for himself and ended up very late for his appointment with Amy. He went to the pay phone on the wall while the pump jockey tried to fill the Buick's bottomless pit. He dug his battered address book out of his left rear pocket and dialled Greg Carstairs's number. He thought he might actually catch Greg in this early, and he was right. 'Hello?' 'Hi, Greg  Mort Rainey.' 'Hi, Mort. I guess you've got some trouble up in Derry, huh?' 'Yes,' Mort said. 'Was it on the news?' 'Channel 5.' 'How did it look?' 'How did what look?' Greg replied. Mort winced ... but if he had to hear that from anybody, he was glad it had been Greg Carstairs. He was an amiable, longhaired exhippie who had converted to some fairly obscure religious sect  the Swedenborgians, maybe  not long after Woodstock. He had a wife and two kids, one seven and one five, and so far as Mort could tell, the whole family was as laid back as Greg himself. You got so used to the man's small but constant smile that he looked undressed on the few occasions he was without it. 'That bad, huh?' 'Yes,' Greg said simply. 'It must have gone up like a rocket. I'm really sorry, man.' 'Thank you. I'm on my way up there now, Greg. I'm calling from Mechanic Falls. Can you do me a favor while I'm gone?' 'If you mean the shingles, I think they'll be in by' 'No, not the shingles. Something else. There's been a guy bothering me the last two or three days. A crackpot. He claims I stole a story he wrote six or seven years ago. When I told him I'd written my version of the same story before he claims to have written his, and told him I could prove it, he got wiggy. I was sort of hoping I'd seen the last of him, but no such luck. Last evening, while I was sleeping on the couch, he killed my cat.' 'Bump?' Greg sounded faintly startled, a reaction that equalled roaring surprise in anyone else. 'He killed Bump?' 'That's right.' 'Did you talk to Dave Newsome about it?' 'No, and I don't want to, either. I want to handle him myself, if I can.' 'The guy doesn't exactly sound like a pacifist, Mort.' 'Killing a cat is a long way from killing a man,' Mort said, 'and I think maybe I could handle him better than Dave.' 'Well, you could have something there,' Greg agreed. 'Dave's slowed down a little since he turned seventy. What can I do for you, Mort?' 'I'd like to know where the guy is staying, for one thing.' 'What's his name?' 'I don't know. The name on the story he showed me was John Shooter, but he got cute about that later on, told me it might be a pseudonym. I think it is  it sounds like a pseudonym. Either way, I doubt if he's registered under that name if he's staying at an area motel.' 'What does he look like?' 'He's about six feet tall and fortysomething. He's got a kind of weatherbeaten face  sunwrinkles around his eyes and lines going down from the corners of the mouth, kind of bracketing the chin.' As he spoke, the face of 'John Shooter' floated into his consciousness with increasing clarity, like the face of a spirit swimming up to the curved side of a medium's crystal ball. Mort felt gooseflesh prick the backs of his hands and shivered a little. A voice in his midbrain kept muttering that he was either making a mistake or deliberately misleading Greg. Shooter was dangerous, all right. He hadn't needed to see what the man had done to Bump to know that. He had seen it in Shooter's eyes yesterday afternoon. Why was he playing vigilante, then? Because, another, deeper, voice answered with a kind of dangerous firmness. Just because, that's all. The midbrain voice spoke up again, worried Do you mean to hurt him? Is that what this is all about? Do you mean to hurt him? But the deep voice would not answer. It had fallen silent. 'Sounds like half the farmers around here,' Greg was saying doubtfully. 'Well, there's a couple of other things that may help pick him out,' Mort said. 'He's Southern, for one thing  got an accent on him that sticks out a mile. He wears a big black hat  felt, I think  with a round crown. It looks like the kind of hat Amish men wear. And he's driving a blue Ford station wagon, early or midsixties. Mississippi plates.' 'Okay  better. I'll ask around. If he's in the area, somebody'll know where. Outtastate plates stand out this time of year.' 'I know.' Something else crossed his mind suddenly. 'You might start by asking Tom Greenleaf. I was talking to this Shooter yesterday on Lake Drive, about half a mile north of my place. Tom came along in his Scout. He waved at us when he went by, and both of us waved back. Tom must have gotten a damned fine look at him.' 'Okay. I'll probably see him up at Bowie's Store if I drop by for a coffee around ten.' 'He's been there, too,' Mort said. 'I know, because he mentioned the paperback bookrack. It's one of the oldfashioned ones.' 'And if I track him down, what?' 'Nothing,' Mort said. 'Don't do a thing. I'll call you tonight. Tomorrow night I should be back at the place on the lake. I don't know what the hell I can do up in Derry, except scuffle through the ashes.' 'What about Amy?' 'She's got a guy,' Mort said, trying not to sound stiff and probably sounding that way just the same.


'I guess what Amy does next is something the two of them will have to work out.' 'Oh. Sorry.' 'No need to be,' Mort said. He looked over toward the gas islands and saw that the jockey had finished filling his tank and was now washing the Buick's windshield, a sight he had never expected to witness again in his lifetime. 'Handling this guy yourself ... are you really sure it's what you want to do?' 'Yes, I think so,' Mort said. He hesitated, suddenly understanding what was very likely going on in Greg's mind he was thinking that if he found the man in the black hat and Mort got hurt as a result, he, Greg, would be responsible. 'Listen, Greg  you could go along while I talk to the guy, if you wanted to.' 'I might just do that,' Greg said, relieved. 'It's proof he wants,' Mort said, 'so I'll just have to get it for him.' 'But you said you had proof.' 'Yes, but he didn't exactly take my word for it. I guess I'm going to have to shove it in his face to get him to leave me alone.' 'Oh.' Greg thought it over. 'The guy really is crazy, isn't he?' 'Yes indeed.' 'Well, I'll see if I can find him. Give me a call tonight.' 'I will. And thanks, Greg.' 'Don't mention it. A change is as good as a rest.' 'So they say.' He told Greg goodbye and checked his watch. It was almost seven thirty, and that was much too early to call Herb Creekmore, unless he wanted to pry Herb out of bed, and this wasn't that urgent. A stop at the Augusta tollbooths would do fine. He walked back to the Buick, replacing his address book and digging out his wallet. He asked the pump jockey how much he owed him. 'That's twentytwo fifty, with the cash discount,' the jockey said, and then looked at Mort shyly. 'I wonder if I could have your autograph, Mr Rainey? I've read all your books.' That made him think of Amy again, and how Amy had hated the autograph seekers. Mort himself didn't understand them, but saw no harm in them. For her they had seemed to sum up an aspect of their lives which she found increasingly hateful. Toward the end, he had cringed inwardly every time someone asked that question in Amy's presence. Sometimes he could almost sense her thinking If you love me, why don't you STOP them? As if he could, he thought. His job was to write books people like this guy would want to read ... or so he saw it. When he succeeded at that, they asked for autographs. He scribbled his name on the back of a credit slip for the pump jockey (who had, after all, actually washed his windshield) and reflected that if Amy had blamed him for doing something they liked  and he thought that, on some level she herself might not be aware of, she had  he supposed he was guilty. But it was only the way he had been built. Right was right, after all, just as Shooter had said. And fair was fair. He got back into his car and drove off toward Derry. 17 He paid his seventyfive cents at the Augusta toll plaza, then pulled into the parking area by the telephones on the far side. The day was sunny, chilly, and windy  coming out of the southwest from the direction of Litchfield and running straight and unbroken across the open plain where the turnpike plaza lay, that wind was strong enough to bring tears to Mort's eyes. He relished it, all the same. He could almost feel it blowing the dust out of rooms inside his head which had been closed and shuttered too long. He used his credit card to call Herb Creekmore in New York  the apartment, not the office. Herb wouldn't actually make it to James and Creekmore, Mort Rainey's literary agency, for another hour or so, but Mort had known Herb long enough to guess that the man had probably been through the shower by now and was drinking a cup of coffee while he waited for the bathroom mirror to unsteam so he could shave. He was lucky for the second time in a row. Herb answered in a voice from which most of the sleepfuzz had departed. Am I on a roll this morning, or what? Mort thought, and grinned into the teeth of the cold October wind. Across the four lanes of highway, he could see men stringing snowfence in preparation for the winter which lay just over the calendar's horizon. 'Hi, Herb,' he said. 'I'm calling you from a pay telephone outside the Augusta toll plaza. My divorce is final, my house in Derry burned flat last night, some nut killed my cat, and it's colder than a welldigger's belt buckle  are we having fun yet?' He hadn't realized how absurd his catalogue of woes sounded until he heard himself reciting them aloud, and he almost laughed. jesus, it was cold out here, but didn't it feel good! Didn't it feel clean! 'Mort?' Herb said cautiously, like a man who suspects a practical joke. 'At your service,' Mort said. 'What's this about your house?' 'I'll tell you, but only once. Take notes if you have to, because I plan to be back in my car before I freeze solid to this telephone.' He began with John Shooter and John Shooter's accusation. He finished with the conversation he'd had with Amy last night. Herb, who had spent a fair amount of time as Mort and Amy's guest (and who had been entirely dismayed by their breakup, Mort guessed), expressed his surprise and sorrow at what had happened to the house in Derry. He asked if Mort had any idea who had done it. Mort said he didn't. 'Do you suspect this guy Shooter?' Herb asked. 'I understand the significance of the cat being killed only a short time before you woke up, but ' 'I guess it's technically possible, and I'm not ruling it out completely,' Mort said, 'but I doubt it like hell. Maybe it's only because I can't get my mind around the idea of a man burning down a twentyfourroom house in order to get rid of a magazine. But I think it's mostly because I met him. He really believes I stole his story, Herb. I mean, he has no doubts at all. His attitude when I told him I could show him proof was "Go ahead, motherfucker, make my day." ' 'Still ... you called the police, didn't you?' 'Yeah, I made a call this morning,' Mort said, and while this statement was a bit disingenuous, it was not an outandout lie. He had made a call this morning. To Greg Carstairs. But if he told Herb Creekmore, whom he could visualize sitting in the living room of his New York apartment in a pair of natty tweed pants and a strapstyle teeshirt, that he intended to handle this himself, with only Greg to lend a hand, he doubted if Herb would understand. Herb was a good friend, but he was something of a stereotype Civilized Man, latetwentiethcentury model, urban and urbane. He was the sort of man who believed in counselling. The sort of man who believed in meditation and mediation. The sort of man who believed in discussion when reason was present, and the immediate delegation of the problem to Persons in Authority when it was absent. To Herb, the concept that sometimes a man has got to do what a man has got to do was one which had its place ... but its place was in movies starring Sylvester Stallone. 'Well, that's good.' Herb sounded relieved. 'You've got enough on your plate without worrying about some psycho from Mississippi. If they find him, what will you do? Have him charged with harassment?' 'I'd rather convince him to take his persecution act and put it on the road,' Mort said. His feeling of cheery optimism, so unwarranted but indubitably real, persisted. He supposed he would crash soon enough, but for the time being, he couldn't stop grinning. So he wiped his leaking nose with the cuff of his coat and went right on doing it. He had forgotten how good it could feel to have a grin pasted onto your kisser. 'How will you do that?' 'With your help, I hope. You've got files of my stuff, right?' 'Right, but  ' 'Well, I need you to pull the June, 1980, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. That's the one with "Sowing Season" in it. I can't very well pull mine because of the fire, so  ' 'I don't have it,' Herb said mildly. 'You don't?' Mort blinked. This was one thing he hadn't expected. 'Why not?' 'Because 1980 was two years before I came on board as your agent. I have at least one copy of everything I sold for you, but that's one of the stories you sold yourself.' 'Oh, shit!' In his mind's eye, Mort could see the acknowledgment for 'Sowing Season' in Everybody Drops the Dime. Most of the other acknowledgments contained the line, 'Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, James and Creekmore.' The one for 'Sowing Season' (and two or three other stories in the collection) read only, 'Reprinted by permission of the author.' 'Sorry,' Herb said. 'Of course I sent it in myself  I remember writing the query letter before I submitted. It's just that it seems like you've been my agent forever.' He laughed a little then and added, 'No offense.' 'None taken,' Herb said. 'Do you want me to make a call to EQMM? They must have back issues.' 'Would you?' Mort asked gratefully. 'That'd be great.' 'I'll do it first thing. Only ' Herb paused. 'Only what?' 'Promise me you're not planning to confront this guy on your own once you have a copy of the printed story in hand.' 'I promise,' Mort agreed promptly. He was being disingenuous again, but what the hell  he had asked Greg to come along when he did it, and Greg had agreed, so he wouldn't be alone. And Herb Creekmore was his literary agent, after all, not his father. How he handled his personal problems wasn't really Herb's concern. 'Okay,' Herb said. 'I'll take care of it. Call me from Derry, Mort  maybe it isn't as bad as it seems.' 'I'd like to believe that.' 'But you don't?' 'Afraid not.' 'Okay.' Herb sighed. Then, diffidently, he added 'Is it okay to ask you to give Amy my best?' 'It is, and I will.' 'Good. You go on and get out of the wind, Mort. I can hear it shrieking in the receiver. You must be freezing.' 'Getting there. Thanks again, Herb.' He hung up and looked thoughtfully at the telephone for a moment. He'd forgotten that the Buick needed gas, which was minor, but he'd also forgotten that Herb Creekmore hadn't been his agent until 1982, and that wasn't so minor. Too much pressure, he supposed. It made a man wonder what else he might have forgotten. The voice in his mind, not the midbrain voice but the one from the deep ranges. spoke up suddenly What about stealing the story in the first place? Maybe you forgot that. He snorted a laugh as he hurried back to his car. He had never been to Mississippi in his life, and even now, stuck in a writer's block as he was. he was a long way from stooping to plagiarism. He slid behind the wheel and started the engine, reflecting that a person's mind certainly got up to some weird shit every now and again. 18 Mort didn't believe that people  even those who tried to be fairly honest with themselves  knew when some things were over. He believed they often went on believing, or trying to believe, even when the handwriting was not only on the wall but writ in letters large enough to read a hundred yards away without a spyglass. If it was something you really cared about and felt that you needed, it was easy to cheat, easy to confuse your life with TV and convince yourself that what felt so wrong would eventually come right . . . probably after the next commercial break. He supposed that, without its great capacity for selfdeception, the human race would be even crazier than it already was. But sometimes the truth crashed through, and if you had consciously tried to think or dream your way around that truth, the results could be devastating. it was like being there when a tidal wave roared not over but straight through a dike which had been set in its way, smashing it and you flat. Mort Rainey experienced one of these cataclysmic epiphanies after the representatives of the police and fire departments had gone and he and Amy and Ted Milner were left alone to walk slowly around the smoking ruin of the green Victorian house which had stood at 92 Kansas Street for one hundred and thirtysix years. It was while they were making that mournful inspection tour that he understood that his marriage to the former Amy Dowd of Portland, Maine, was over. It was no 'period of marital stress.' It was no 'trial separation.' It was not going to be one of those cases you heard of from time to time where both parties repented their decision and remarried. It was over. Their lives together were history. Even the house where they had shared so many good times was nothing but evilly smouldering beams tumbled into the cellarhole like the teeth of a giant. Their meeting at Marchman's, the little coffee shop on Witcham Street, had gone well enough. Amy had hugged him and he had hugged her back, but when he tried to kiss her mouth, she turned her head deftly aside so that the lips landed on her cheek instead. Kisskiss, as they said at the office parties. So good to see you, darling. Ted Milner, blowdried hair perfectly in place this morning and nary an Alfalfa corkscrew in sight, sat at the table in the corner, watching them. He was holding the pipe which Mort had seen clenched in his teeth at various parties over the last three years or so. Mort was convinced the pipe was an affectation, a little prop employed for the sole purpose of making its owner look older than he was. And how old was that? Mort wasn't sure, but Amy was thirtysix, and he thought Ted, in his impeccable stonewashed jeans and openthroated J. Press shirt, had to be at least four years younger than that, possibly more. He wondered if Amy knew she could be in for trouble ten years down the line  maybe even five  and then reflected it would take a better man than he was to suggest it to her. He asked if there was anything new. Amy said there wasn't. Then Ted took over, speaking with a faintly Southern accent which was a good deal softer than John Shooter's nasal burr. He told Mort the fire chief and a lieutenant from the Derry Police Department would meet them at what Ted called 'the site.' They wanted to ask Mort a few questions. Mort said that was fine. Ted asked if he'd like a cup of coffee  they had time. Mort said that would also be fine. Ted asked how he had been. Mort used the word fine again. Each time it came out of his mouth it felt a little more threadbare. Amy watched the exchange between them with some apprehension, and Mort could understand that. On the day he had discovered the two of them in bed together, he had told Ted he would kill him. In fact, he might have said something about killing them both. His memory of the event was quite foggy. He suspected theirs might be rather foggy, too. He didn't know about the other two corners of the triangle, but he himself found that foggery not only understandable but merciful. They had coffee. Amy asked him about 'John Shooter.' Mort said he thought that situation was pretty much under control. He did not mention cats or notes or magazines. And after awhile, they left Marchman's and went to 92 Kansas Street, which had once been a house instead of a site. The fire chief and police detective were there as promised, and there were questions, also as promised. Most of the questions were about any people who might dislike him enough to have tossed a Texaco cocktail into his study. If Mort had been on his own, he would have left Shooter's name out of it entirely, but of course Amy would bring it up if he didn't, so he recounted the initial encounter just as it had happened. The fire chief, Wickersham, said 'The guy was pretty angry?' 'Yes.' 'Angry enough to have driven to Derry and torched your house?' the police detective, Bradley, asked. He was almost positive Shooter hadn't done it, but he didn't want to delve into his brief dealings with Shooter any more deeply. It would mean telling them what Shooter had done to Bump, for one thing. That would upset Amy; it would upset her a great deal ... and it would open up a can of worms he would prefer to leave closed. It was time, Mort reckoned, to be disingenuous again. 'He might have been at first. But after I discovered the two stories really were alike, I looked up the original date of publication on mine.' 'His had never been published?' Bradley asked. 'No, I'm sure it hadn't been. Then, yesterday, he showed up again. I asked him when he'd written his story, hoping he'd mention a date that was later than the one I had. Do you understand?' Detective Bradley nodded. 'You were hoping to prove you scooped him.' 'Right. "Sowing Season" was in a book of short stories I published in 1983, but it was originally published in 1980. I was hoping the guy would feel safe picking a date only a year or two before 1983. I got lucky. He said he'd written it in 1982. So you see, I had him.' He hoped it would end there, but Wickersham, the fire chief, pursued it. 'You see and we see, Mr Rainey, but did he see?' Mort sighed inwardly. He supposed he had known that you could only be disingenuous for so long  if things went on long enough, they almost always progressed to a point where you had to either tell the truth or carve an outright lie. And here he was, at that point. But whose business was it? Theirs or his? His. Right. And he meant to see it stayed that way. 'Yes,' he told them, 'he saw.' 'What did he do?' Ted asked. Mort looked at him with mild annoyance. Ted glanced away, looking as if he wished he had his pipe to play with. The pipe was in the car. The J. Press shirt had no pocket to carry it in. 'He went away,' Mort said. His irritation with Ted, who had absolutely no business sticking his oar in, made it easier to lie. The fact that he was lying to Ted seemed to make it more all right, too. 'He muttered some bullshit about what an incredible coincidence it all was, then jumped into his car like his hair was on fire and his ass was catching, and took off.' 'Happen to notice the make of the car and the license plate, Mr Rainey?' Bradley asked. He had taken out a pad and a ballpoint pen. 'It was a Ford,' Mort said. 'I'm sorry, but I can't help you with the plate. It wasn't a Maine plate, but other than that . . .' He shrugged and tried to look apologetic. Inside, he felt increasingly uncomfortable with the way this was going. It had seemed okay when he was just being cute, skirting around any outright lies  it had seemed a way of sparing Amy the pain of knowing that the man had broken Bump's neck and then skewered him with a screwdriver. But now he had put himself in a position where he had told different stories to different people. If they got together and did a comparison, he wouldn't look so hot. Explaining his reasons for the lies might be sticky. He supposed that such comparisons were pretty unlikely, as long as Amy didn't talk to either Greg Carstairs or Herb Creekmore, but suppose there was a hassle with Shooter when he and Greg caught up to him and shoved the June, 1980, issue of EQMM in Shooter's face? Never mind, he told himself, we'll burn that bridge when we come to it, big guy. At this thought, he experienced a brief return of the high spirits he'd felt while talking to Herb at the toll plaza, and almost cackled aloud. He held it in. They would wonder why he was laughing if he did something like that, and he supposed they would be right to wonder. 'I think Shooter must be bound for (Mississippi.) '  for wherever he came from by now,' he finished, with hardly a break. 'I imagine you're right,' Lieutenant Bradley said, 'but I'm inclined to pursue this, Mr Rainey. You might have convinced the guy he was wrong, but that doesn't mean he left your place feeling mellow. It's possible that he drove up here in a rage and torched your house just because he was pissed off pardon me, Mrs Rainey.' Amy offered a crooked little smile and waved the apology away. 'Don't you think that's possible?' No, Mort thought, I don't. If he'd decided to torch the house, I think he would have killed Bump before he left for Derry, just in case I woke up before he got back. In that case, the blood would have been dry and Bump would have been stiff when I found him. That isn't the way it happened ... but I can't say so. Not even if I wanted to. They'd wonder why I held back the stuff about Bump as long as I did, for one thing. They'd probably think I've got a few loose screws. 'I guess so,' he said, 'but I met the guy. He didn't strike me as the houseburning type.' 'You mean he wasn't a Snopes,' Amy said suddenly. Mort looked at her, startled  then smiled. 'That's right,' he said. 'A Southerner, but not a Snopes.' 'Meaning what?' Bradley asked, a little warily. 'An old joke, Lieutenant,' Amy said. 'The Snopeses were characters in some novels by William Faulkner. They got their start in business burning barns.' 'Oh,' Bradley said blankly. Wickersham said 'There is no houseburning type, Mr Rainey. They come in all shapes and sizes. Believe me.' 'Well  ' 'Give me a little more on the car, if you can,' Bradley said. He poised a pencil over his notebook. 'I want to make the State Police aware of this guy.' Mort suddenly decided he was going to lie some more. Quite a lot more, actually. 'Well, it was a sedan. I can tell you that much for sure.' 'Uhhuh. Ford sedan. Year?' 'Somewhere in the seventies, I guess,' Mort said. He was fairly sure Shooter's station wagon had actually been built around the time a fellow named Oswald had elected Lyndon Johnson President of the United States. He paused, then added 'The plate was a light color. It could have been Florida. I won't swear to it, but it could have been.' 'Uhhuh. And the man himself?' 'Average height. Blonde hair. Eyeglasses. The round wireframed ones John Lennon used to wear. That's really all I re  ' 'Didn't you say he was wearing a hat?' Amy asked suddenly. Mort felt his teeth come together with a click. 'Yes,' he said pleasantly. 'That's right, I forgot. Dark gray or black. Except it was more of a cap. With a bill, you know.' 'Okay.' Bradley snapped his book closed. 'It's a start.' 'Couldn't this have been a simple case of vandalism, arson for kicks?' Mort asked. 'In novels, everything has a connection, but my experience has been that in real life, things sometimes just happen.' 'It could have been,' Wickersham agreed, 'but it doesn't hurt to check out the obvious connections.' He dropped Mort a solemn little wink and said, 'Sometimes life imitates art, you know.' 'Do you need anything else?' Ted asked them, and put an arm around Amy's shoulders. Wickersham and Bradley exchanged a glance and then Bradley shook his head. 'I don't think so, at least not at the present.' 'I only ask because Amy and Mort will have to put in some time with the insurance agent,' Ted said. 'Probably an investigator from the parent company, as well.' Mort found the man's Southern accent more and more irritating. He suspected that Ted came from a part of the South several states north of Faulkner country, but it was still a coincidence he could have done without. The officials shook hands with Amy and Mort, expressed their sympathy, told them to get in touch if anything else occurred to either of them, and then took themselves off, leaving the three of them to take another turn around the house. 'I'm sorry about all of this, Amy,' Mort said suddenly. She was walking between them, and looked over at him, apparently startled by something she had heard in his voice. Simple sincerity, maybe. 'All of it. Really sorry.' 'So am I,' she said softly, and touched his hand. 'Well, Teddy makes three,' Ted said with solemn heartiness. She turned back to him, and in that moment Mort could have cheerfully strangled the man until his eyes popped out jittering at the ends of their optic strings. They were walking up the west side of the house toward the street now. Over here had been the deep corner where his study had met the house, and not far away was Amy's flowergarden. All the flowers were dead now, and Mort reflected that was probably just as well. The fire had been hot enough to crisp what grass had remained green in a twelvefoot border all around the ruin. If the flowers had been in bloom, it would have crisped them, as well, and that would have been just too sad. It would have been Mort stopped suddenly. He was remembering the stories. The story. You could call it 'Sowing Season' or you could call it 'Secret Window, Secret Garden,' but they were the same thing once you took the geegaws off and looked underneath. He looked up. There was nothing to see but blue sky, at least now, but before last night's fire, there would have been a window right where he was looking. It was the window in the little room next to the laundry. The little room that was Amy's office. It was where she went to write checks, to write in her daily journal, to make the telephone calls that needed to be made ... the room where, he suspected, Amy had several years ago started a novel. And, when it died, it was the room where she had buried it decently and quietly in a desk drawer. The desk had been by the window. Amy had liked to go there in the mornings. She could start the wash in the next room and then do paperwork while she waited for the buzzer which proclaimed it was time to strip the washer and feed the drier. The room was well away from the main house and she liked the quiet, she said. The quiet and the clear, sane morning light. She liked to look out the window every now and then, at her flowers growing in the deep corner formed by the house and the study ell. And he heard her saying, It's the best room in the house, at least for me, because hardly anybody ever goes there but me. It's got a secret window, and it looks down on a secret garden. 'Mort?' Amy was saying now, and for a moment Mort took no notice, confusing her real voice with her voice in his mind, which was the voice of memory. But was it a true memory or a false one? That was the real question, wasn't it? It seemed like a true memory, but he had been under a great deal of stress even before Shooter, and Bump, and the fire. Wasn't it at least possible that he was having a ... well, a recollective hallucination? That he was trying to make his own past with Amy in some way conform to that goddam story where a man had gone crazy and killed his wife? Jesus, I hope not. I hope not, because if I am, that's too close to nervousbreakdown territory for comfort. 'Mort, are you okay?' Amy asked. She plucked fretfully at his sleeve, at least temporarily breaking his trance. 'Yes,' he said, and then, abruptly 'No. To tell you the truth, I'm feeling a little sick.' 'Breakfast, maybe,' Ted said. Amy gave him a look that made Mort feel a bit better. It was not a very friendly look. 'It isn't breakfast,' she said a little indignantly. She swept her arm at the blackened ruins. 'It's this. Let's get out of here.' 'The insurance people are due at noon,' Ted said. 'Well, that's more than an hour from now. Let's go to your place, Ted. I don't feel so hot myself. I'd like to sit down.' 'All right.' Ted spoke in a slightly nettled noneedtoshout tone which also did Mort's heart good. And although he would have said at breakfast that morning that Ted Milner's place was the last one on earth he wanted to go, he accompanied them without protest. 19 They were all quiet on the ride across town to the splitlevel on the east side where Ted hung his hat. Mort didn't know what Amy and Ted were thinking about, although the house for Amy and whether or not they'd be on time to meet the wallahs from the insurance company for Ted would probably be a couple of good guesses, but he knew what he was thinking about. He was trying to decide if he was going crazy or not. Is it real, or is it Memorex? He decided finally that Amy really had said that about her office next to the laundry room  it was not a false memory. Had she said it before 1982, when 'John Shooter' claimed to have written a story called 'Secret Window' Secret Garden'? He didn't know. No matter how earnestly he conned his confused and aching brain, what kept coming back was a single curt message answer inconclusive. But if she had said it, no matter when, couldn't the title of Shooter's story still be simple coincidence? Maybe, but the coincidences were piling up, weren't they? He had decided the fire was, must be, a coincidence. But the memory which Amy's garden with its crop of dead flowers had prodded forth ... well, it was getting harder and harder to believe all of this wasn't tied together in some strange, possibly even supernatural fashion. And in his own way, hadn't 'Shooter' himself been just as confused? How did you get it? he had asked, his voice had been fierce with rage and puzzlement. That's what I really want to know. How in hell did a bigmoney scribbling asshole like you get down to a little shitsplat town in Mississippi and steal my goddam story? At the time, Mort had thought either that it was another sign of the man's madness or that the guy was one hell of a good actor. Now, in Ted's car, it occurred to him for the first time that it was exactly the way he himself would have reacted, had the circumstances been reversed. As, in a way, they had been. The one place where the two stories differed completely was in the matter of the title. They both fit, but now Mort found that he had a question to ask Shooter which was very similar to the one Shooter had already asked him How did you happen by that title, Mr Shooter? That's what I really want to know. How did you happen to know that, twelve hundred miles away from your shitsplat town in Mississippi . ' the wife of a writer you claim you never heard of before this year had her own secret window, looking down on her own secret garden? Well, there was only one way to find out, of course. When Greg ran Shooter down Mort would have to ask him. 20 Mort passed on the cup of coffee Ted offered and asked if he had a Coke or a Pepsi. Ted did, and after Mort had drunk it, his stomach settled. He had expected that just being here, here where Ted and Amy played house now that they no longer had to bother with the cheap little townline motels, would make him angry and restless. It didn't. It was just a house, one where every room seemed to proclaim that the owner was a Swinging Young Bachelor Who Was Making It. Mort found that he could deal with that quite easily, although it made him feel a little nervous for Amy all over again. He thought of her little office with its clear, sane light and the soporific drone of the drier coming through the wall, her little office with its secret window, the only one in the whole place which looked down into the tight little angle of space formed by the house and the ell, and thought how much she had belonged there and how little she seemed to belong here. But that was something she would have to deal with herself, and he thought, after a few minutes in this other house which was not a dreaded den of iniquity at all but only a house, that he could live with that ... that he could even be content with it. She asked him if he would be staying in Derry overnight. 'Uhuh. I'll be going back as soon as we finish with the insurance adjustors. If something else pops, they can get in touch with me ... or you can.' He smiled at her. She smiled back and touched his hand briefly. Ted didn't like it. He frowned out the window and fingered his pipe. 21 They were on time for their meeting with the representatives of the insurance company, which undoubtedly relieved Ted Milner's mind. Mort was not particularly crazy about having Ted in attendance; it had never been Ted's house, after all, not even after the divorce. Still, it seemed to ease Amy's mind to have him there, and so Mort left it alone. Don Strick, the Consolidated Assurance Company agent with whom they had done business, conducted the meeting at his office, where they went after another brief tour of 'the site.' At the office, they met a man named Fred Evans, a Consolidated field investigator specializing in arson.


The reason Evans hadn't been with Wickersham and Bradley that morning or at 'the site' when Strick met them there at noon became obvious very quickly he had spent most of the previous night poking through the ruins with a tencell flashlight and a Polaroid camera. He had gone back to his motel room, he said, to catch a few winks before meeting the Raineys. Mort liked Evans very much. He seemed to really care about the loss he and Amy had suffered, while everyone else, including Mr Teddy Makes Three, seemed to have only mouthed the traditional words of sympathy before going on to whatever they considered the business at hand (and in Ted Milner's case, Mort thought, the business at hand was getting him out of Derry and back to Tashmore Lake as soon as possible). Fred Evans did not refer to 92 Kansas Street as 'the site.' He referred to it as 'the house.' His questions, while essentially the same as those asked by Wickersham and Bradley, were gentler, more detailed, and more probing. Although he'd had four hours' sleep at most, his eyes were bright, his speech quick and clear. After speaking with him for twenty minutes, Mort decided that he would deal with a company other than Consolidated Assurance if he ever decided to burn down a house for the insurance money. Or wait until this man retired. When he had finished his questions, Evans smiled at them. 'You've been very helpful, and I want to thank you again, both for your thoughtful answers and for your kind treatment of me. In a lot of cases, people's feathers get ruffled the second they hear the words "insurance investigator." They're already upset, understandably so, and quite often they take the presence of an investigator on the scene as an accusation that they torched their own property.' 'Given the circumstances, I don't think we could have asked for better treatment,' Amy said, and Ted Milner nodded so violently that his head might have been on a string  one controlled by a puppeteer with a bad case of nerves. 'This next part is hard,' Evans said. He nodded to Strick, who opened a desk drawer and produced a clipboard with a computer printout on it. 'When an investigator ascertains that a fire was as serious as this one clearly was, we have to show the clients a list of claimed insurable property. You look it over, then sign an affidavit swearing that the items listed still belong to you, and that they were still in the house when the fire occurred. You should put a check mark beside any item or items you've sold since your last insurance overhaul with Mr Strick here, and any insured property which was not in the house at the time of the fire.' Evans put a fist to his lips and cleared his throat before going on. 'I'm told that there has been a separation of residence recently, so that last bit may be particularly important.' 'We're divorced,' Mort said bluntly. 'I'm living in our place on Tashmore Lake. We only used it during the summers, but it's got a furnace and is livable during the cold months. Unfortunately, I hadn't got around to moving the bulk of my things out of the house up here. I'd been putting it off.' Don Strick nodded sympathetically. Ted crossed his legs, fiddled with his pipe, and generally gave the impression of a man who is trying not to look as deeply bored as he is. 'Do the best you can with the list,' Evans said. He took the clipboard from Strick and handed it across the desk to Amy. 'This can be a bit unpleasant  it's a little like a treasure hunt in reverse.' Ted had put his pipe down and was craning at the list, his boredom gone' at least for the time being; his eyes were as avid as those of any bystander gleeping the aftermath of a bad accident. Amy saw him looking and obligingly tipped the form his way. Mort, who was sitting on the other side of her, tipped it back the other way. 'Do you mind?' he asked Ted. He was angry, really angry, and they all heard it in his voice. 'Mort  ' Amy said. 'I'm not going to make a big deal of this,' Mort said to her, 'but this was our stuff, Amy. Ours.' 'I hardly think  'Ted began indignantly. 'No, he's perfectly right, Mr Milner,' Fred Evans said with a mildness Mort felt might have been deceptive. 'The law says you have no right to be looking at the listed items at all. We wink at something like that if nobody minds ... but I think Mr Rainey does.' 'You're damned tooting Mr Rainey does,' Mort said. His hands were tightly clenched in his lap; he could feel his fingernails biting smileshapes into the soft meat of his palms. Amy switched her look of unhappy appeal from Mort to Ted. Mort expected Ted to huff and puff and try to blow somebody's house down, but Ted did not. Mort supposed it was a measure of his own hostile feeling toward the man that he'd made such an assumption; he didn't know Ted very well (although he did know he looked a bit like Alfalfa when you woke him up suddenly in a notell motel), but he knew Amy. If Ted had been a blowhard, she would have left him already. Smiling a little, speaking to her and ignoring Mort and the others completely, Ted said 'Would it help matters if I took a walk around the block?' Mort tried to restrain himself and couldn't quite do it. 'Why not make it two?' he asked Ted with bogus amiability. Amy shot him a narrow, dark stare, then looked back at Ted. 'Would you? This might be a little easier . . .' 'Sure,' he said. He kissed her high on her cheekbone, and Mort had another dolorous revelation the man cared for her. He might not always care for her, but right now he did. Mort realized he had come halfway to thinking Amy was just a toy that had captivated Ted for a little while, a toy of which he would tire soon enough. But that didn't jibe with what he knew of Amy, either. She had better instincts about people than that ... and more respect for herself. Ted got up and left. Amy looked at Mort reproachfully. 'Are you satisfied?' 'I suppose,' he said. 'Look, Amy  I probably didn't handle that as well as I could have, but my motives are honorable enough. We shared a lot over the years. I guess this is the last thing, and I think it belongs between the two of us. Okay?' Strick looked uncomfortable. Fred Evans did not; he looked from Mort to Amy and then back to Mort again with the bright interest of a man watching a really good tennis match. 'Okay,' Amy said in a low voice. He touched her hand lightly, and she gave him a smile. It was strained, but better than no smile at all, he reckoned. He pulled his chair closer to hers and they bent over the list, heads close together, like kids studying for a test. It didn't take Mort long to understand why Evans had warned them. He thought he had grasped the size of the loss. He had been wrong. Looking at the columns of cold computer type, Mort thought he could not have been more dismayed if someone had taken everything in the house at 92 Kansas Street and strewn it along the block for the whole world to stare at. He couldn't believe all the things he had forgotten, all the things that were gone. Seven major appliances. Four TVs, one with a videotape editing hookup. The Spode china, and the authentic Early American furniture which Amy had bought a piece at a time. The value of the antique armoire which had stood in their bedroom was listed at 14,000. They had not been serious artcollectors, but they had been appreciators, and they had lost twelve pieces of original art. Their value was listed at 22,000, but Mort didn't care about the dollar value; he was thinking about the N. C. Wyeth finedrawing of two boys putting to sea in a small boat. It was raining in the picture; the boys were wearing slickers and galoshes and big grins. Mort had loved that picture, and now it was gone. The Waterford glassware. The sports equipment stored in the garage  skis, tenspeed bikes, and the Old Town canoe. Amy's three furs were listed. He saw her make tiny check marks beside the beaver and the mink  still in storage, apparently  but she passed the short fox jacket without checking it off. It had been hanging in the closet, warm and stylish outerware for fall, when the fire happened. He remembered giving her that coat for her birthday six or seven years ago. Gone now. His Celestron telescope. Gone. The big puzzle quilt Amy's mother had given them when they were married. Amy's mother was dead and the quilt was now so much ash in the wind. The worst, at least for Mort, was halfway down the second column, and again it wasn't the dollar value that hurt. 124 BOTS. WINE, the item read. VALUE 4,900. Wine was something they had both liked. They weren't rabid about it, but they had built the little wine room in the cellar together, stocked it together, and had drunk the occasional bottle together. 'Even the wine,' he said to Evans. 'Even that.' Evans gave him an odd look that Mort couldn't interpret, then nodded. 'The wine room itself didn't burn, because you had very little fuel oil in the cellar tank and there was no explosion. But it got very hot inside, and most of the bottles burst. The few that didn't ... Well, I don't know much about wine, but I doubt if it would be good to drink. Perhaps I'm wrong.' 'You're not,' Amy said. A single tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it absently away. Evans offered her his handkerchief. She shook her head and bent over the fist with Mort again. Ten minutes later it was finished. They signed on the correct lines and Strick witnessed their signatures. Ted Milner showed up only instants later, as if he had been watching the whole thing on some private viewscreen. 'Is there anything else?' Mort asked Evans. 'Not now. There may be. Is your number down in Tashmore unlisted, Mr Rainey?' 'Yes.' He wrote it down for Evans. 'Please get in touch if I can help.' 'I will.' He rose, hand outstretched. 'This is always a nasty business. I'm sorry you two had to go through it.' They shook hands all around and left Strick and Evans to write reports. It was well past one, and Ted asked Mort if he'd like to have some lunch with him and Amy. Mort shook his head. 'I want to get back. Do some work and see if I can't forget all this for awhile.' And he felt as if maybe he really could write. That was not surprising. In tough times  up until the divorce, anyway, which seemed to be an exception to the general rule  he had always found it easy to write. Necessary, even. It was good to have those makebelieve worlds to fall back on when the real one had hurt you. He halfexpected Amy to ask him to change his mind, but she didn't. 'Drive safe,' she said, and planted a chaste kiss on the corner of his mouth. 'Thanks for coming, and for being so ... so reasonable about everything.' 'Can I do anything for you, Amy?' She shook her head, smiling a little, and took Ted's hand. If he had been looking for a message, this one was much too clear to miss. They walked slowly toward Mort's Buick. 'You keepin well enough down there?' Ted asked. 'Anything you need?' For the third time he was struck by the man's Southern accent  just one more coincidence. 'Can't think of anything,' he said, opening the Buick's door and fishing the car keys out of his pocket. 'Where do you come from originally, Ted? You or Amy must have told me sometime, but I'll be damned if I can remember. Was it Mississippi?' Ted laughed heartily. 'A long way from there, Mort. I grew up in Tennessee. A little town called Shooter's Knob, Tennessee.' 22 Mort drove back to Tashmore Lake with his hands clamped to the steering wheel, his spine as straight as a ruler, and his eyes fixed firmly on the road. He played the radio loud and concentrated ferociously on the music each time he sensed telltale signs of mental activity behind the center of his forehead. Before he had made forty miles, he felt a pressing sensation in his bladder. He welcomed this development and did not even consider stopping at a wayside comfortstation. The need to take a whizz was another excellent distraction. He arrived at the house around fourthirty and parked the Buick in its accustomed place around the side of the house. Eric Clapton was throttled in the middle of a fulltiltboogie guitar solo when Mort shut off the motor, and quiet crashed down like a load of stones encased in foam rubber. There wasn't a single boat on the lake, not a single bug in the grass. Pissing and thinking have a lot in common, he thought, climbing out of the car and unzipping his fly. You can put them both off... but not forever. Mort Rainey stood there urinating and thought about secret windows and secret gardens; he thought about those who might own the latter and those who might look through the former. He thought about the fact that the magazine he needed to prove a certain fellow was either a lunatic or a con man had just happened to bum up on the very evening he had tried to get his hands on it. He thought about the fact that his exwife's lover, a man he cordially detested, had come from a town called Shooter's Knob and that Shooter happened to be the pseudonym of the aforementioned loonyorconman who had come into Mort Rainey's life at the exact time when the aforementioned Mort Rainey was beginning to grasp his divorce not just as an academic concept but as a simple fact of his life forever after. He even thought about the fact that 'John Shooter' claimed to have discovered Mort Rainey's act of plagiarism at about the same time Mort Rainey had separated from his wife. Question Were all of these things coincidences? Answer It was technically possible. Question Did he believe all these things were coincidences? Answer No. Question Did he believe he was going mad, then? 'The answer is no,' Mort said. 'He does not. At least not yet.' He zipped up his fly and went back around the corner to the door. 23 He found his housekey, started to put it in the lock, and then pulled it out again. His hand went to the doorknob instead, and as his fingers closed over it, he felt a clear certainty that it would rotate easily. Shooter had been here ... had been, or was still. And he wouldn't have needed to force entry, either. Nope. Not this sucker. Mort kept a spare key to the Tashmore Lake house in an old soapdish on a high shelf in the toolshed, which was where Shooter had gone to get a screwdriver in a hurry when the time had come to nail poor old Bump to the garbage cabinet. He was in the house now, looking around ... or maybe hiding. He was The knob refused to move; Mort's fingers simply slid around it. The door was still locked. 'Okay,' Mort said. 'Okay, no big deal.' He even laughed a little as he socked the key home and turned it. Just because the door was locked didn't mean Shooter wasn't in the house. In fact, it made it more likely that he was in the house, when you really stopped to think about it. He could have used the spare key, put it back, then locked the door from the inside to lull his enemy's suspicions. All you had to do to lock it, after all, was to press the button set into the knob. He's trying to psych me out, Mort thought as he stepped in. The house was full of dusty lateafternoon sunlight and silence. But it did not feel like unoccupied silence. 'You're trying to psych me out, aren't you?' he called. He expected to sound crazy to himself. a lonely, paranoid man addressing the intruder who only exists, after all, in his own imagination. But he didn't sound crazy to himself. He sounded, instead, like a man who has tumbled to at least half the trick. Only getting half a scam wasn't so great, maybe, but half was better than nothing. He walked into the living room with its cathedral ceiling, its windowwall facing the lake, and, of course, The WorldFamous Mort Rainey Sofa, also known as The Couch of the Comatose Writer. An economical little smile tugged at his cheeks. His balls felt high and tight against the fork of his groin. 'Half a scam's better than none, right, Mr Shooter?' he called. The words died into dusty silence. He could smell old tobacco smoke in that dust. His eye happened on the battered package of cigarettes he had excavated from the drawer of his desk. It occurred to him that the house had a smell  almost a stink  that was horribly negative it was an unwoman smell. Then he thought No. That's a mistake. That's not it. What you smell is Shooter. You smell the man, and you smell his cigarettes. Not yours, his. He turned slowly around, his head cocked back. A secondfloor bedroom looked down on the living room halfway up the creamcolored wall; the opening was lined with darkbrown wooden slats. The slats were supposed to keep the unwary from failing out and splattering themselves all over the livingroom floor, but they were also supposed to be decorative. Right then they didn't look particularly decorative to Mort; they looked like the bars of a jail cell. All he could see of what he and Amy had called the guest bedroom was the ceiling and one of the bed's four posts. 'You up there, Mr Shooter?' he yelled. There was no answer. 'I know you're trying to psych me out!' Now he was beginning to feel just the tiniest bit ridiculous. 'It won't work, though!' About six years before, they had plugged the big fieldstone fireplace in the living room with a Blackstone jersey stove. A rack of firetools stood beside it. Mort grasped the handle of the ashshovel, considered it for a moment, then let go of it and took the poker instead. He faced the barred guestroom overlook and held the poker up like a knight saluting his queen. Then he walked slowly to the stairs and began to climb them. He could feel tension worming its way into his muscles now, but he understood it wasn't Shooter he was afraid of; what he was afraid of was finding nothing. 'I know you're here, and I know you're trying to psych me out! The only thing I don't know is what it's all about, Alfie, and when I find you, you better tell me!' He paused on the secondfloor landing, his heart pumping hard in his chest now. The guestroom door was to his left. The door to the guest bathroom was to the right. And he suddenly understood that Shooter was here, all right, but not in the bedroom. No; that was just a ploy. That was just what Shooter wanted him to believe. Shooter was in the bathroom. And, as he stood there on the landing with the poker clutched tightly in his right hand and sweat running out of his hair and down his cheeks, Mort heard him. A faint shuffleshuffle. He was in there, all right. Standing in the tub, by the sound. He had moved the tiniest bit. Peekaboo, Johnnyboy, I hear you. Are you armed, fuckface? Mort thought he probably was, but he didn't think it would turn out to be a gun. Mort had an idea that the man's pen name was about as close to firearms as he had ever come. Shooter had looked like the sort of guy who would feel more at home with instruments of a blunter nature. What he had done to Bump seemed to bear this out. I bet it's a hammer, Mort thought, and wiped sweat off the back of his neck with his free hand. He could feel his eyes pulsing in and out of their sockets in time with his heartbeat. I'm betting it's a hammer from the toolshed. He had no more thought of this before he saw Shooter, saw him clearly, standing in the bathtub in his black roundcrowned hat and his yellow shitkicker workshoes, his lips split over his mailorder dentures in a grin which was really a grimace, sweat trickling down his own face, running down the deep lines grooved there like water running down a network of galvanized tin gutters, with the hammer from the toolshed raised to shoulder height like a judge's gavel. just standing there in the tub, waiting to bring the hammer down. Next case, bailiff. I know you, buddy. I got your number. I got it the first time I saw you. And guess what? You picked the wrong writer to fuck with. I think I've been wanting to kill somebody since the middle of May, and you'll do as well as anybody. He turned his head toward the bedroom door. At the same time, he reached out with his left hand (after drying it on the front of his shirt so his grip wouldn't slip at the crucial moment) and curled it around the bathroom doorknob. 'I know you're in there!' he shouted at the closed bedroom door. If you're under the bed, you better get out! I'm counting to five! If you're not out by the time I get there, I'm coming in . . . and I'll come in swinging! You hear me?' There was no answer ... but, then, he hadn't really expected one. Or wanted one. He tightened his grip on the bathroom doorknob, but would shout the numbers toward the guestroom door. He didn't know if Shooter would hear or sense the difference if he turned his head in the direction of the bathroom, but he thought Shooter might. The man was obviously clever. Hellishly clever. In the instant before he started counting, he heard another faint movement in the bathroom. He would have missed it, even standing this close, if he hadn't been listening with every bit of concentration he could muster. 'One!' Christ, he was sweating! Like a pig! 'Two!' The knob of the bathroom door was like a cold rock in his clenched fist. 'Thr ' He turned the knob of the bathroom door and slammed in, bouncing the door off the wall hard enough to chop through the wallpaper and pop the door's lower hinge, and there he was, there he was, coming at him with a raised weapon, his teeth bared in a killer's grin, and his eyes were insane, utterly insane, and Mort brought the poker down in a whistling overhand blow and he had just time enough to realize that Shooter was also swinging a poker, and to realize that Shooter was not wearing his roundcrowned black hat, and to realize it wasn't Shooter at all, to realize it was him, the madman was him, and then the poker shattered the mirror over the washbasin and silverbacked glass sprayed every whichway, twinkling in the gloom, and the medicine cabinet fell into the sink. The bent door swung open like a gaping mouth, spilling bottles of cough syrup and iodine and Listerine. 'I killed a goddam fucking mirror!' he shrieked, and was about to sling the poker away when something did move in the tub, behind the corrugated shower door. There was a frightened little squeal. Grinning, Mort slashed sideways with the poker, tearing a jagged gash through the plastic door and knocking it off its tracks. He raised the poker over his shoulder, his eyes glassy and staring, his lips drawn into the grimace he had imagined on Shooter's face. Then he lowered the poker slowly. He found he had to use the fingers of his left hand to pry open the fingers of his right so that the poker could fall to the floor. 'Wee sleekit cowerin' beastie,' he said to the fieldmouse scurrying blindly about in the tub. 'What a panic's in thy breastie.' His voice sounded hoarse and flat and strange. It didn't sound like his own voice at all. It was like listening to himself on tape for the first time. He turned and walked slowly out of the bathroom past the leaning door with its popped hinge, his shoes gritting on broken mirror glass. All at once he wanted to go downstairs and lie on the couch and take a nap. All at once he wanted that more than anything else in the world. 24 It was the telephone that woke him up. Twilight had almost become night, and he made his way slowly past the glasstopped coffee table that liked to bite with a weird feeling that time had somehow doubled back on itself. His right arm ached like hell. His back wasn't in much better shape. Exactly how hard had he swung that poker, anyway? How much panic had been driving him? He didn't like to think. He picked up the telephone, not bothering to guess who it might be. Life has been so dreadfully busy lately, darling, that it might even be the President. 'Hello?' 'How you doin, Mr Rainey?' the voice asked, and Mort recoiled, snatching the telephone away from his ear for a moment as if it were a snake which had tried to bite. He returned it slowly. 'I'm doing fine, Mr Shooter,' he said in a dry, spitless voice. 'How are you doing?' 'I'ma country fair,' Shooter allowed, speaking in that thick crackerbarrel Southern accent that was somehow as bald and staring as an unpainted barn standing all by itself in the middle of a field. 'But I don't think you're really all that well. Stealing from another man, that don't seem to have ever bothered you none. Being caught up on, though ... that seems to have given you the pure miseries.' 'What are you talking about?' Shooter sounded faintly amused. 'Well, I heard on the radio news that someone burned down your house. Your other house. And then, when you come back down here, it sounded like you pitched a fit or something once you got into the house. Shouting ... whacking on things ... or maybe it's just that successful writers like you throw tantrums when things don't go the way they expect. Is that it, maybe?' My God, he was here. He was. Mort found himself looking out the window as if Shooter still might be out there ... hiding in the bushes, perhaps, while he spoke to Mort on some sort of cordless telephone. Ridiculous, of course. 'The magazine with my story in it is on the way,' he said. 'When it gets here, are you going to leave me alone?' Shooter still sounded lazily amused. 'There isn't any magazine with that story in it, Mr Rainey. You and me, we know that. Not from 1980, there isn't. How could there be, when my story wasn't there for you to steal until 1982?' 'Goddammit, I did not steal your st' 'When I heard about your house,' Shooter said, 'I went out and bought an Evening Express. They had a picture of what was left. Wasn't very much. Had a picture of your wife, too.' There was a long, thoughtful pause. Then Shooter said, 'She's purty.' He used the country pronunciation purposely, sarcastically. 'How'd an ugly son of a buck like you luck into such a purty wife, Mr Rainey?' 'We're divorced,' he said. 'I told you that. Maybe she discovered how ugly I was. Why don't we leave Amy out of this? It's between you and me.' For the second time in two days, he realized he had answered the phone while he was only half awake and nearly defenseless. As a result, Shooter was in almost total control of the conversation. He was leading Mort by the nose, calling the shots. Hang up, then. But he couldn't. At least, not yet. 'Between you and me, is it?' Shooter asked. 'Then I don't s'pose you even mentioned me to anyone else.' 'What do you want? Tell me! What in the hell do you want?' 'You want the second reason I came, is that it?' 'Yes!' 'I want you to write me a story,' Shooter said calmly. 'I want you to write a story and put my name on it and then give it to me. You owe me that. Right is right and fair is fair.' Mort stood in the hallway with the telephone clutched in his aching fist and a vein pulsing in the middle of his forehead. For a few moments his rage was so total that he found himself buried alive inside it and all he was capable of thinking was So THAT'S it! SO THAT'S it! SO THAT'S it! over and over again. 'You there, Mr Rainey?' Shooter asked in his calm, drawling voice. 'The only thing I'll write for you,' Mort said, his own voice slow and syrupythick with rage, 'is your deathwarrant, if you don't leave me alone.' 'You talk big, pilgrim,' Shooter said in the patient voice of a man explaining a simple problem to a stupid child, 'because you know I can't put no hurtin on you. If you had stolen my dog or my car, I could take your dog or car. I could do that just as easy as I broke your cat's neck. If you tried to stop me, I could put a hurtin on you and take it anyway. But this is different. The goods I want are inside your head. You got the goods locked up like they were inside a safe. Only I can't just blow off the door and torch open the back. I have to find me the combination. Don't I?' 'I don't know what you're talking about,' Mort said, 'but the day you get a story out of me will be the day the Statue of Liberty wears a diaper. Pilgrim.' Shooter said meditatively, 'I'd leave her out of it if I could, but I'm startin to think you ain't going to leave me that option.' All the spit in Mort's mouth was suddenly gone, leaving it dry and glassy and hot. 'What . . . what do you ' 'Do you want to wake up from one of your stupid naps and find Amy nailed to your garbage bin?' Shooter asked. 'Or turn on the radio some morning and hear she came off second best in a match with the chainsaw you keep in your garage up there? Or did the garage burn, too?' 'Watch what you say,' Mort whispered. His wide eyes began to prickle with tears of rage and fear. 'You still have two days to think about it. I'd think about it real close, Mr Rainey. I mean I'd really hunker down over her, if I were you. And I don't think I'd talk about this to anyone else. That'd be like standing out in a thunderstorm and tempting the lightning. Divorced or not, I have got an idea you still have some feeling for that lady. It's time for you to grow up a little. You can't get away with it. Don't you realize that yet? I know what you did, and I ain't quitting until I get what's mine.' 'You're crazy!' Mort screamed. 'Good night, Mr Rainey,' Shooter said, and hung up. 25 Mort stood there for a moment, the handset sinking away from his ear. Then he scooped up the bottom half of the Princessstyle telephone. He was on the verge of throwing the whole combination against the wall before he was able to get hold of himself. He set it down again and took a dozen deep breaths  enough to make his head feel swimmy and light. Then he dialled Herb Creekmore's home telephone. Herb's ladyfriend, Delores, picked it up on the second ring and called Herb to the telephone. 'Hi, Mort,' Herb said. 'What's the story on the house?' His voice moved away from the telephone's mouthpiece a little. 'Delores, will you move that skillet to the back burner?' Suppertime in New York, Mort thought, and he wants me to know it. Well, what the hell. A maniac has just threatened to turn my wife into veal cutlets, but life has to go on, right? 'The house is gone,' Mort said. 'The insurance will cover the loss.' He paused. 'The monetary loss, anyway.' 'I'm sorry,' Herb said. 'Can I do anything?' 'Well, not about the house,' Mort said, 'but thanks for offering. About the story, though ' 'What story is that, Mort?' He felt his hand tightening down on the telephone's handset again and forced himself to loosen up. He doesn't know what the situation up here is. You have to remember that. 'The one my nutty friend is kicking sand about,' he said, trying to maintain a tone which was light and mostly unconcerned. 'Sowing Season. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine?' 'Oh, that!' Herb said. Mort felt a jolt of fear. 'You didn't forget to call, did you?' 'No  I called,' Herb reassured him. 'I just forgot all about it for a minute. You losing your house and all .' 'Well? What did they say?' 'Don't worry about a thing. They're going to send a Xerox over to me by messenger tomorrow, and I'll send it right up to you by Federal Express. You'll have it by ten o'clock day after tomorrow.' For a moment it seemed that all of his problems were solved, and he started to relax. Then he thought of the way Shooter's eyes had blazed. The way he had brought his face down until his forehead and Mort's were almost touching. He thought of the dry smell of cinnamon on Shooter's breath as he said, 'You lie.' A Xerox? He was by no means sure that Shooter would accept an original copy ... but a Xerox? 'No,' he said slowly. 'That's no good, Herb. No Xerox, no phonecall from the editor. It has to be an original copy of the magazine.' 'Well, that's a little tougher. They have their editorial offices in Manhattan, of course, but they store copies at their subscription offices in Pennsylvania. They only keep about five copies of each issue  it's really all they can afford to keep, when you consider that EQMM has been publishing since 1941. They really aren't crazy about lending them out.