‘Prove it,’ he said.
‘All right. Come back to the house with me. I’ll show you the entry on the copyright page of the book.’
‘No,’ Shooter said. ‘I don’t care about the book, I don’t care a pin for the book. Show me the story. Show me the magazine with the story in it, so I can read it for myself.’
‘I don’t have the magazine here.’
He was about to say something else, but Shooter turned his face up toward the sky and uttered a single bark of laughter. The sound was as dry as an axe splitting kindling wood. ‘No,’ he said. The fury was still blazing and dancing in his eyes, but he seemed in charge of himself again. ‘No, I bet you don’t.’
‘Listen to me,’ Mort said. ‘Ordinarily, this is just a place my wife and I come in the summer. I have copies of my books here, and some foreign editions, but I’ve published in a lot of magazines as well – articles and essays as well as stories. Those magazines are in our year-round house. The one in Derry.’
‘Then why aren’t you there?’ Shooter asked. In his eyes Mort read both disbelief and a galling satisfaction –
it was clear that Shooter had expected him to try and squirm his way out of it, and in Shooter’s mind, that was just what Mort was doing. Or trying to do.
‘I’m here because – ‘ He stopped. ‘How did you know I’d be here?’
‘I just looked on the back of the book I bought,’ Shooter said, and Mort could have slapped his own forehead in frustration and sudden understanding. Of course – there had been a picture of him on the back of both the hardcover and paperback editions of Everybody Drops the Dime. Amy had taken it herself, and it had been an excellent shot. He was in the foreground; the house was in the middle distance; Tashmore Lake was in the background. The caption had read simply, Morton Rainey at his home in western Maine.
So Shooter had come to western Maine, and he probably hadn’t had to visit too many small-town bars and/or drugstores before he found someone who said, ‘Mort Rainey? Hell, yes! Got a place over in Tashmore. Personal friend of mine, in fact!’
Well, that answered one question, anyway.
‘I’m here because my wife and I got a divorce,’ he said. ‘It just became final. She stayed in Derry. Any other year, the house down here would have been empty.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Shooter said. His tone of voice infuriated Mort all over again. You’re lying, it said, but in this case it doesn’t much matter. Because I knew you’d lie. After all, lying is mostly what you’re about, isn’t it? ‘Well, I would have found you, one place or the other.’
He fixed Mort with a flinty stare.
‘I would have found you if you’d moved to Brazil.’
‘I believe that,’ Mort said. ‘Nevertheless, you are mistaken. Or conning me. I’ll do you the courtesy of believing it’s only a mistake, because you seem sincere enough – ‘
Oh God, didn’t he.
‘ – but I published that story two years before you say you wrote it.’
He saw that mad flash in Shooter’s eyes again, and then it was gone. Not extinguished but collared, the way a man might collar a dog with an evil nature.
‘You say this magazine is at your other house?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the magazine has your story in it.’
‘Yes.’
‘And the date of that magazine is June, 1980.’
‘Yes.’
Mort had felt impatient with this laborious catechism (there was a long, thoughtful pause before each question) at first, but now he felt a little hope: it was as if the man was trying to teach himself the truth of what Mort had said … a truth, Mort thought, that part of ‘John Shooter’ must have known all along, because the almost exact similarity between the two stories was not coincidence. He still believed that firmly, but he had come around to the idea that Shooter might have no conscious memory of committing the plagiarism.
Because the man was clearly mad.
He wasn’t quite as afraid as he had been when he first saw the hate and fury dancing in Shooter’s eyes, like the reflection of a barn-fire blazing out of control. When he pushed the man, he had staggered backward, and Mort thought that if it came to a fight, he could probably hold his own … or actually put his man on the ground.
Still, it would be better if it didn’t come to that. In an odd, backhand sort of way, he had begun to feel a bit sorry for Shooter.
That gentleman, meanwhile, was stolidly pursuing his course.
‘This other house – the one your wife has now – it’s here in Maine, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s there?’
‘Yes.’
There was a much longer pause this time. In a weird way, Shooter reminded Mort of a computer processing a heavy load of information. At last he said: ‘I’ll give you three days.’
‘That’s very generous of you,’ Mort said.
Shooter’s long upper lip drew back from teeth too even to be anything but mail-order dentures. ‘Don’t you make light of me, son,’ he said. ‘I’m trying my best to hold my temper, and doing a pretty good job of it, but
-‘
‘You!’ Mort cried at him. ‘What about me? This is unbelievable! You come out of nowhere and make just about the most serious accusation a man can make against a writer, and when I tell you I’ve got proof you’re either mistaken or lying through your damned teeth, you start patting yourself on the back for holding your temper! Unbelievable!’
Shooter’s eyelids drooped, giving him a sly look. ‘Proof?’ he said. ‘I don’t see no proof. I hear you talking, but talking ain’t proof.’
‘I told you!’ Mort shouted. He felt helpless, like a man trying to box cobwebs. ‘I explained all that!’
Shooter looked at Mort for a long moment, then turned and reached through the open window of his car.
‘What are you doing?’ Mort asked, his voice tight. Now he felt the adrenaline dump into his body, readying him for fight or flight … probably the latter, if Shooter was reaching for the big handgun Mort suddenly saw in the eye of his imagination.
‘Just gettin m’smokes,’ Shooter said. ‘Hold your water.’
When he pulled his arm out of the car, he had a red package of Pall Malls in his hand. He had taken them off the dashboard. ‘Want one?’
‘I have my own,’ Mort said rather sulkily, and took the ancient pack of L & M’s from the pocket beneath the red flannel overshirt.
They lit up, each from his own pack.
‘If we keep on this way, we’re going to have a fight,’ Shooter said finally. ‘I don’t want that.’
‘Well, Jesus, neither do I’
‘Part of you does,’ Shooter contradicted. He continued to study Mort from beneath his dropped lids with that expression of country shrewdness. ‘Part of you wants just that. But I don’t think it’s just me or my story that’s making you want to fight. You have got some other bee under your blanket that’s got you all riled up, and that is making this harder. Part of you wants to fight, but what you don’t understand is that, if we do start to fight, it’s not going to end until one or the other of us is dead.’
Mort looked for signs that Shooter was exaggerating for effect and saw none. He suddenly felt cold along the base of his spine.
‘So I’m going to give you three days. You call your ex and get her to send down the magazine with your story in it, if there is such a magazine. And I’ll be back. There isn’t any magazine, of course; I think we both know that. But you strike me as a man who needs to do some long, hard thinking.’
He looked at Mort with a disconcerting expression of stern pity.
‘You didn’t believe anybody would ever catch you out, did you?’ he asked. ‘You really didn’t.’
‘If I show you the magazine, will you go away?’ Mort asked. He was speaking more to himself than to Shooter. ‘I guess what I really want to know is whether or not it’s even worth it.’
Shooter abruptly opened his car door and slid in behind the wheel. Mort found the speed with which the man could move a little creepy. ‘Three days. Use it the way you like, Mr Rainey.’
He started the engine. It ran with the low wheeze characteristic of valves which need to be reground, and the tang of oilsmoke from the old tailpipe polluted the air of the fading afternoon. ‘Right is right and fair is fair. The first thing is to get you to a place where you see I have really got you, and you can’t wiggle out of this mess the way you’ve probably been wiggling out of the messes you have made all your life. That’s the first thing.’