Four Past Midnight

stick a pin in a beetle which had been trundling across his desk. The beetle had been caught - pinned, wriggling, and dying. At the time, Mort had been sad and horrified. Now he understood. Now he only wanted to do the same thing to this man. This crazy man.

'There can't be any magazine,' Shooter said finally. 'Not with that story in it. That story is mine!'

Mort could hear anguish in the man's voice. Real anguish. It made him glad. The pin was in Shooter. He was wriggling around on it.

'It'll be here at ten tomorrow,' Mort said, 'or as soon after as FedEx drops the Tashmore stuff. I'll be happy to meet you there. You can take a look. As long a look as you want, you goddamned maniac.'

'Not there,' Shooter said after another pause. 'At your house.'

'Forget it. When I show you that issue of Ellery Queen, I want to be someplace where I can yell for help if you go apeshit.'

'You'll do it my way,' Shooter said. He sounded a little more in control ... but Mort did not believe Shooter had even half the control he'd had previously. 'If you don't, I'll see you in the Maine State Prison for murder.'

'Don't make me laugh.' But Mort felt his bowels begin to knot up again.

'I hooked you to those two men in more ways than you know,' Shooter said, 'and you have told a right smart of lies. If I just disappear, Mr Rainey, you are going to find yourself standing with your head in a noose and your feet in Crisco.'

'You don't scare me.'

'Yeah, I do,' Shooter said. He spoke almost gently. 'The only thing is. you're startin to scare me a little, too. I can't quite figure you out.'

Mort was silent.

'It'd be funny,' Shooter said in a strange, ruminating tone. 'if we had come by the same story in two different places, at two different times.'

'The thought had occurred to me.'

'Did it?'

'I dismissed it,' Mort said. 'Too much of a coincidence. If it was just the same plot, that would be one thing. But the same language? The same goddam diction?'

'Uh-huh,' Shooter said. 'I thought the same thing, pilgrim. It's just too much. Coincidence is out. You stole it from me, all right, but I'm goddamned if I can figure out how or when.'

'Oh, quit it!' Mort burst out. 'I have the magazine! I have proof! Don't you understand that? It's over! Whether it was some nutty game on your part or just a delusion, it is over! I have the magazine!'

After a long silence, Shooter said: 'Not yet, you don't.'

'How true,' Mort said. He felt a sudden and totally unwanted sense of kinship with the man. 'So what do we do tonight?'

'Why, nothing,' Shooter said. 'Those men will keep. One has a wife and kids visiting family. The other lives alone. You go and get your magazine tomorrow morning. I will come to your place around noon.'

'You'll kill me,' Mort said. He found that the idea didn't carry much terror with it - not tonight, anyway. 'If I show you the magazine, your delusion will break down and you'll kill me.'

'No!' Shooter replied, and this time he seemed clearly surprised. 'You? No, sir! But those others were going to get in the way of our business. I couldn't have that ... and I saw that I could use them to make you deal with me. To face up to your responsibility.'

'You're crafty,' Mort said. 'I'll give you that. I believe you're nuts, but I also believe you're just about the craftiest son of a bitch I ever ran across in my life.'

'Well, you can believe this,' Shooter said. 'If I come tomorrow and find you gone, Mr Rainey, I will make it my business to destroy every person in the world that you love and care for. I will burn your life like a canefield in a high wind. You will go to jail for killing those two men, but going to jail will be the least of your sorrows. Do you understand?'

'Yes,' Mort said. 'I understand. Pilgrim.'

'Then you be there.'

'And suppose - just suppose - I show you the magazine, and it has my name on the contents page and my story inside. What then?'

There was a short pause. Then Shooter said, 'I go to the authorities and confess to the whole shooting match. But I'd take care of myself long before the trial, Mr Rainey. Because if things turn out that way, then I suppose I am crazy. And that kind of a crazy man . . .' There was a sigh. 'That kind of crazy man has no excuse or reason to live.'

The words struck Mort with queer force. He's unsure, he thought. For the first time, he's really unsure ... which is more than I've ever been.

But he cut that off, and hard. He had never had a reason to be unsure. This was Shooter's fault. Every bit of it was Shooter's fault.

He said: 'How do I know you won't claim the magazine is a fake?'

He expected no response to this, except maybe something about how Mort would have to take his word, but Shooter surprised him.

'If it's real, I'll know,' he said, 'and if it's fake, we'll both know. I don't reckon you could have rigged a whole fake magazine in three days, no matter how many people you have got working for you in New York.'

It was Mort's turn to think, and he thought for a long, long time. Shooter waited for him.

'I'm going to trust you,' Mort said at last. 'I don't know why, for sure. Maybe because I don't have a lot to live for myself these days. But I'm not going to trust you whole hog. You come down here. Stand in the driveway where I can see you, and see that you're unarmed. I'll come out. Is that satisfactory?'

'That'll do her.'

'God help us both.'

'Yessir. I'll be damned if I'm sure what I'm into anymore ... and that is not a comfortable feeling.'

'Shooter?'

'Right here.'

'I want you to answer one question.'

Silence . . . but an inviting silence, Mort thought.

'Did you burn down my house in Derry?'

'No,' Shooter said at once. 'I was keeping an eye on you.'

'And Bump,' Mort said bitterly.

'Listen,' Shooter said. 'You got my hat?'

'Yes.'

'I'll want it,' Shooter said, 'one way or the other.'

And the line went dead.

Just like that.

Mort put the phone down slowly and carefully and walked back to the bathroom - once again holding his pants up as he went - to finish his business.

38

Amy did call back, around seven, and this time Mort was able to talk to her quite normally - just as if the bathroom upstairs wasn't trashed and there weren't two dead men sitting behind a screen of bushes on the path down to the lake, stiffening as the twilight turned to dark around them.

She had spoken with Fred Evans herself since her last call, she said, and she was convinced he either knew something or suspected something about the fire he didn't want to tell them. Mort tried to soothe her, and thought he succeeded to some degree, but he was worried himself. If Shooter hadn't started the fire -and Mort felt inclined to believe the man had been telling the truth about that -then it must have been raw coincidence ... right?