Four Past Midnight

alone; he could hear nothing but the night wind whispering around the eaves and, very far off, a loon calling on the lake. He took the note out of his pocket, smoothed it out, and read it again. It was the sort of thing you were supposed to put aside for the police. In fact, it was the sort of thing you weren't even supposed to touch until the police had had a chance to photograph it and work their juju on it. It was - ruffle of drums and blast of trumpets, please - EVIDENCE.

Well, fuck it, Mort thought, crumpling it up again. No police. Dave Newsome, the local constable, probably had trouble remembering what he'd eaten for breakfast by the time lunch rolled around, and he couldn't see taking the matter to either the county sheriff or the State Police. After all, it wasn't as though an attempt had been made on his life; his cat had been killed, but a cat wasn't a person. And in the wake of Amy's devastating news, John Shooter simply didn't seem as important anymore. He was one of the Crazy Folks, he had a bee in his bonnet, and he might be dangerous ... but Mort felt more and more inclined to try and handle the business himself, even if Shooter was dangerous. Especially if he was dangerous.

The house in Derry took precedence over John Shooter and John Shooter's crazy ideas. It even took precedence over who had done the deed - Shooter or some other fruitcake with a grudge, a mental problem, or both. The house, and, he supposed, Amy. She was clearly in bad shape, and it couldn't hurt either of them for him to offer her what comfort he could. Maybe she would even ...

But he closed his mind to any speculation of what Amy might even do. He saw nothing but pain down that road. Better to believe that road was closed for good.

He went into the bedroom, undressed, and lay down with his hands behind his head. The loon called again, desperate and distant. It occurred to him again that Shooter could be out there, creeping around, his face a pale circle beneath his odd black hat. Shooter was nuts, and although he had used his hands and a screwdriver on Bump, that did not preclude the possibility that he still might have a gun.

But Mort didn't think Shooter was out there, armed or not.

Calls, he thought. I'll have to make at least two on my way up to Deny. One to Greg Carstairs and one to Herb Creekmore. Too early to make them from here if I leave at seven, but I could use one of the pay phones at the Augusta tollbooths ...

He turned over on his side, thinking it would be a long time before he fell asleep tonight after all ... and then sleep rolled over him in a smooth dark wave, and if anyone came to peer in on him as he slept, he did not know it.

16

The alarm got him up at six-fifteen. He took half an hour to bury Bump in the sandy patch of ground between the house and the lake, and by seven he was rolling, just as planned. He was ten miles down the road and heading into Mechanic Falls, a bustling metropolis which consisted of a textile mill that had closed in 1970, five thousand souls, and a yellow blinker at the intersection of Routes 23 and 7, when he noticed that his old Buick was running on fumes. He pulled into Bill's Chevron, cursing himself for not having checked the gauge before setting out - if he had gotten through Mechanic Falls without noticing how low the gauge had fallen, he might have had a pretty good walk for himself and ended up very late for his appointment with Amy.

He went to the pay phone on the wall while the pump jockey tried to fill the Buick's bottomless pit. He dug his battered address book out of his left rear pocket and dialled Greg Carstairs's number. He thought he might actually catch Greg in this early, and he was right.

'Hello?'

'Hi, Greg - Mort Rainey.'

'Hi, Mort. I guess you've got some trouble up in Derry, huh?'

'Yes,' Mort said. 'Was it on the news?'

'Channel 5.'

'How did it look?'

'How did what look?' Greg replied. Mort winced ... but if he had to hear that from anybody, he was glad it had been Greg Carstairs. He was an amiable, long-haired ex-hippie who had converted to some fairly obscure religious sect - the Swedenborgians, maybe - not long after Woodstock. He had a wife and two kids, one seven and one five, and so far as Mort could tell, the whole family was as laid back as Greg himself. You got so used to the man's small but constant smile that he looked undressed on the few occasions he was without it.

'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 midsixties. 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.'