Four Past Midnight

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 - '

'I'm still at Ted's,' she said, and now her voice was queerly flat. 'I guess I'll be at Ted's for quite awhile to come, like it or not. Someone burned our house down, Mort. Someone burned it right to the ground.' And suddenly Amy began to cry.

15

He had become so fixated on John Shooter that his immediate assumption, as he stood numbly in the hallway of the one remaining Rainey home with the telephone screwed against his ear, was that Shooter had burned the house down. Motive? Why, certainly, officer. He burned the house, a restored Victorian worth about $800,000, to get rid of a magazine. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, to be precise; June of 1980 issue.

But could it have been Shooter? Surely not. The distance between Derry and Tashmore was over a hundred miles, and Bump's body had still been warm and flexible, the blood around the screwdriver blade tacky but not yet dry.

If he hurried

Oh, quit it, why don't you? Pretty soon you'll be blaming Shooter for your divorce and thinking you've been sleeping sixteen hours out of every twenty-four because Shooter has been putting Phenobarb in your food. And after that? You can start writing letters to the paper saying that America's cocaine kingpin is a gentleman from Crow's Ass Mississippi named John Shooter. That he killed Jimmy Hoffa and also happened to be the famous second gun who fired at Kennedy from the grassy knoll in November of 1963. The man's crazy, okay ... but do you really think he drove a hundred miles north and massacred your goddam house in order to kill a magazine? Especially when there must be copies of that magazine still in existence all across America? Get serious.

But still ... if he hurried ...

No. It was ridiculous. But, Mort suddenly realized, he wouldn't be able to show the man his goddam proof, would he? Not unless...

The study was at the back of the house; they had converted what had once been the loft of the carriagebarn.

'Amy,' he said.

'It's so horrible!' she wept. 'I was at Ted's and Isabelle called ... she said there were at least fifteen fire trucks there ... hoses spraying . . . crowds ... rubberneckers ... gawkers ... you know how I hate it when people come and gawk at the house, even when it's not burning down . . .'

He had to bite down hard on the insides of his cheeks to stifle a wild bray of laughter. To laugh now would be the worst thing, the cruellest thing he could possibly do, because he did know. His success at his chosen trade after the years of struggle had been a great and fulfilling thing for him; he sometimes felt like a man who has won his way through a perilous jungle where most other adventurers perish and has gained a fabulous prize by so doing. Amy had been glad for him, at least initially, but for her there had been a bitter downside: the loss of her identity not only as a private person but as a separate person.

'Yes,' he said as gently as he could, still biting at his cheeks to protect against the laughter which threatened. If he laughed, it would be at her unfortunate choice of phrasing, but she wouldn't see it that way. So often during their years together she had misinterpreted his laughter. 'Yes, I know, hon. Tell me what happened.'

'Somebody burned down our house!' Amy cried tearily. 'That's what happened!'

'Is it a total loss?'

'Yes. That's what the fire chief said.' He could hear her gulping, trying to get herself under control, and then her tears stormed out again. 'It b-burned fuh-fuh-flat!'

'Even my study?'

'That's w-where it st-started,' she sniffled. 'At least, that's what the fire chief said they thought. And it fits with what Patty saw.'

'Patty Champion?'

The Champions owned the house next to the Raineys' on the right; the two lots were separated by a belt of yew trees that had slowly run wild over the years.

'Yes. just a second, Mort.'

He heard a mighty honk as she blew her nose, and when she came back on the line, she seemed more composed. 'Patty was walking her dog, she told the firemen. This was a little while after it got dark. She walked past our house and saw a car parked under the portico. Then she heard a crash from inside, and saw fire in your big study window.'

'Did she see what kind of car it was?' Mort asked. He felt sick in the pit of his stomach. As the news sank in, the John Shooter business began to dwindle in size and importance. It wasn't