‘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 forty-something. He’s got a kind of weatherbeaten face – sun-wrinkles 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 mid-sixties. Mississippi plates.’
‘Okay – better. I’ll ask around. If he’s in the area, somebody’ll know where. Outta-state 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 book-rack. It’s one of the old-fashioned 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 twenty-two 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 seventy-five 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 sleep-fuzz 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.