‘That would be good. What time?’
‘Why not come down to the Parish Hall around nine-thirty? He’ll have had two-three cups of coffee – you can’t say boo to him before he’s had his coffee – and we can get him down off that damned scaffolding for awhile. Maybe save his life. Sound okay?’
‘Yes.’ Mort held out his hand. ‘Sorry I got you out on a wild goosechase.’ Greg shook his hand. ‘No need to be. Something’s not right here. I’m good and curious to find out what it is.’
Mort got back into his Buick, and Greg slipped behind the wheel of his truck. They drove off in opposite directions, leaving the old man to his exhausted sleep.
Mort himself did not sleep until almost three in the morning. He tossed and turned in the bedroom until the sheets were a battlefield and he could stand it no longer. Then he walked to the living-room couch in a kind of daze. He barked his shins on the rogue coffee table, cursed in a monotone, lay down, adjusted the cushions behind his head, and fell almost immediately down a black hole.
30
When he woke up at eight o’clock the next morning, he thought he felt fine. He went right on thinking so until he swung his legs off the couch and sat up. Then a groan so loud it was almost a muted scream escaped him and he could only sit for a moment, wishing he could hold his back, his knees, and his right arm all at the same time. The arm was the worst, so he settled for holding that. He had read someplace that people can accomplish almost supernatural acts of strength while in the grip of panic; that they feel nothing while lifting cars off trapped infants or strangling killer Dobermans with their bare hands, only realizing how badly they have strained their bodies after the tide of emotion has receded. Now he believed it. He had thrown open the door of the upstairs bathroom hard enough to pop one of the hinges. How hard had he swung the poker? Harder than he wanted to think about, according to the way his back and right arm felt this morning. Nor did he want to think what the damage up there might look like to a less inflamed eye. He did know that he was going to put the damage right himself – or as much of it as he could, anyway. Mort thought Greg Carstairs must have some serious doubts about his sanity already, his protestations to the
contrary notwithstanding. A look at the broken bathroom door, smashed shower-stall door, and shattered medicine cabinet would do little to improve Greg’s faith in his rationality. He remembered thinking that Shooter might be trying to make people believe he was crazy. The idea did not seem foolish at all now that he examined it in the light of day; it seemed, if anything, more logical and believable than ever.
But he had promised to meet Greg at the Parish Hall in ninety minutes – less than that, now – to talk to Tom Greenleaf. Sitting here and counting his aches wasn’t going to get him there.
Mort forced himself to his feet and walked slowly through the house to the master bathroom. He turned the shower on hot enough to send up billows of steam, swallowed three aspirin, and climbed in.
By the time he emerged, the aspirin had started its work, and he thought he could get through the day after all. It wouldn’t be fun, and he might feel as if it had lasted several years by the time it was over, but he thought he could get through it.
This is the second day, he thought as he dressed. A little cramp of apprehension went through him.
Tomorrow is his deadline. That made him think first of Amy, and then of Shooter saying, I’d leave her out of it if I could, but I’m startin to think you ain’t going to leave me that option.
The cramp returned. First the crazy son of a bitch had killed Bump, then he had threatened Tom Greenleaf (surely he must have threatened Tom Greenleaf), and, Mort had come to realize, it really was possible that Shooter could have torched the Derry house. He supposed he had known this all along, and had simply not wanted to admit it to himself. Torching the house and getting rid of the magazine had been his main mission – of course; a man as crazy as Shooter simply wouldn’t think of all the other copies of that magazine that were lying around. Such things would not be part of a lunatic’s world view.
And Bump? The cat was probably just an afterthought. Shooter got back, saw the cat on the stoop waiting to be let back in, saw that Mort was still sleeping, and killed the cat on a whim. Making a round trip to Derry that fast would have been tight, but it could have been done. It all made sense.
And now he was threatening to involve Amy.
I’ll have to warn her, he thought, stuffing his shirt into the back of his pants. Call her up this morning and come totally clean. Handling the man myself is one thing; standing by while a madman involves the only woman I’ve ever really loved in something she doesn’t know anything about … that’s something else.
Yes. But first he would talk with Tom Greenleaf and get the truth out of him. Without Tom’s corroboration of the fact that Shooter was really around and really dangerous, Mort’s own behavior was going to look suspicious or nutty, or both. Probably both. So, Tom first.
But before he met Greg at the Methodist Parish Hall, he intended to stop in at Bowie’s and have one of Gerda’s famous bacon-and-cheese omelettes. An army marches on its stomach, Private Rainey. Right you are, sir. He went out to the front hallway, opened the little wooden box mounted on the wall over the telephone table, and felt for the Buick keys. The Buick keys weren’t there.
Frowning, he walked out into the kitchen. There they were, on the counter by the sink. He picked them up and bounced them thoughtfully on the palm of his hand. Hadn’t he put them back in the box when he returned from his run to Tom’s house last night? He tried to remember, and couldn’t – not for sure.
Dropping the keys into the box after returning home was such a habit that one drop-off blended in with another. If you ask a man who likes fried eggs what he had for breakfast three days ago, he can’t remember
– he assumes he had fried eggs, because he has them so often, but he can’t be sure. This was like that. He had come back tired, achy, and preoccupied. He just couldn’t remember.
But he didn’t like it.
He didn’t like it at all.
He went to the back door and opened it. There, lying on the porch boards, was John Shooter’s black hat with the round crown.
Mort stood in the doorway looking at it, his car keys clutched in one hand with the brass key-fob hanging down so it caught and reflected a shaft of morning sunlight. He could hear his heartbeat in his ears. It was beating slowly and deliberately. Some part of him had expected this.
The hat was lying exactly where Shooter had left his manuscript. And beyond it, in the driveway, was his Buick. He had parked it around the corner when he returned last night – that he did remember – but now it was here.
‘What did you do?’ Mort Rainey screamed suddenly into the morning sunshine, and the birds which had been twittering unconcernedly away in the trees fell suddenly silent. ‘What in God’s name did you do?’
But if Shooter was there, watching him, he made no reply. Perhaps he felt that Mort would find out what he had done soon enough.
31
The Buick’s ashtray was pulled open, and there were two cigarette butts in it. They were unfiltered. Mort picked one of them out with his fingernails, his face contorted into a grimace of distaste, sure it would be a Pall Mall, Shooter’s brand. It was.
He turned the key and the engine started at once. Mort hadn’t heard it ticking and popping when he came out, but it started as if it were warm, all the same. Shooter’s hat was now in the trunk. Mort had picked it up with the same distaste he had shown for the cigarette butt, putting only enough of his fingers on the brim to get a grip on it. There had been nothing under it, and nothing inside it but a very old sweat-stained inner band. It had some other smell, however, one which was sharper and more acrid than sweat. It was a smell which Mort recognized in some vague way but could not place. Perhaps it would come to him. He put the hat in the Buick back seat, then remembered he would be seeing Greg and Tom in a little less than an hour.