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 1/2″ 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 needle-sharp, 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 hook-and-eyelet 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 olive-green 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 right-hand 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 topsy-turvy, 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 – ‘