Four Past Midnight (52 page)

“Even the wine,” he said to Evans. “Even that.”

Evans gave him an odd look that Mort couldn't interpret, then nodded. “The wine room itself didn't burn, because you had very little fuel oil in the cellar tank and there was no explosion. But it got very hot inside, and most of the bottles burst. The few that didn't ... Well, I don't know much about wine, but I doubt if it would be good to drink. Perhaps I'm wrong.”

“You're not,” Amy said. A single tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it absently away.

Evans offered her his handkerchief. She shook her head and bent over the list with Mort again.

Ten minutes later it was finished. They signed on the correct lines and Strick witnessed their signatures. Ted Milner showed up only instants later, as if he had been watching the whole thing on some private viewscreen.

“Is there anything else?” Mort asked Evans.

“Not now. There may be. Is your number down in Tashmore unlisted, Mr. Rainey?”

“Yes.” He wrote it down for Evans. “Please get in touch if I can help.”

“I will.” He rose, hand outstretched. “This is always a nasty business. I'm sorry you two had to go through it.”

They shook hands all around and left Strick and Evans to write reports. It was well past one, and Ted asked Mort if he'd like to have some lunch with him and Amy. Mort shook his head.

“I want to get back. Do some work and see if I can't forget all this for awhile.” And he felt as if maybe he really could write. That was not surprising. In tough times—up until the divorce, anyway, which seemed to be an exception to the general rule—he had always found it easy to write. Necessary, even. It was good to have those make-believe worlds to fall back on when the real one had hurt you.

He half-expected Amy to ask him to change his mind, but she didn't. “Drive safe,” she said, and planted a chaste kiss on the corner of his mouth. “Thanks for coming, and for being so ... so reasonable about everything.”

“Can I do anything for you, Amy?”

She shook her head, smiling a little, and took Ted's hand. If he had been looking for a message, this one was much too clear to miss.

They walked slowly toward Mort's Buick.

“You keepin well enough down there?” Ted asked. “Anything you need?”

For the third time he was struck by the man's Southern accent—just one more coincidence.

“Can't think of anything,” he said, opening the Buick's door and fishing the car keys out of his pocket. “Where do you come from originally, Ted? You or Amy must have told me sometime, but I'll be damned if I can remember. Was it Mississippi?”

Ted laughed heartily. “A long way from there, Mort. I grew up in Tennessee. A little town called Shooter's Knob, Tennessee.”

Mort drove back to Tashmore Lake with his hands clamped to the steering wheel, his spine as straight as a ruler, and his eyes fixed firmly on the road. He played the radio loud and concentrated ferociously on the music each time he sensed telltale signs of mental activity behind the center of his forehead. Before he had made forty miles, he felt a pressing sensation in his bladder. He welcomed this development and did not even consider stopping at a wayside comfort-station. The need to take a whizz was another excellent distraction.

He arrived at the house around four-thirty and parked the Buick in its accustomed place around the side of the house. Eric Clapton was throttled in the middle of a full-tilt-boogie guitar solo when Mort shut off the motor, and quiet crashed down like a load of stones encased in foam rubber. There wasn't a single boat on the lake, not a single bug in the grass.

Pissing and thinking have a lot in common
, he thought, climbing out of the car and unzipping his fly.
You can put them both off
...
but not forever
.

Mort Rainey stood there urinating and thought about secret windows and secret gardens; he thought about those who might own the latter and those who might look through the former. He thought about the fact that the magazine he needed to prove a certain fellow was either a lunatic or a con man had just happened to burn up on the very evening he had tried to get his hands on it. He thought about the fact that his ex-wife's lover, a man he cordially detested, had come from a town called Shooter's Knob and that Shooter happened to be the pseudonym of the aforementioned loony-or-con-man who had come into Mort Rainey's life at the exact time when the aforementioned Mort Rainey was beginning to grasp his divorce not just as an academic concept but as a simple fact of his life forever after. He even thought about the fact that “John Shooter” claimed to have discovered Mort Rainey's act of plagiarism at about the same time Mort Rainey had separated from his wife.

Question: Were all of these things coincidences?

Answer: It was technically possible.

Question: Did he
believe
all these things were coincidences?

Answer: No.

Question: Did he believe he was going mad, then?

“The answer is no,” Mort said. “He does not. At least not yet.” He zipped up his fly and went back around the corner to the door.

He found his housekey, started to put it in the lock, and then pulled it out again. His hand went to the doorknob instead, and as his fingers closed over it, he felt a clear certainty that it would rotate easily. Shooter had been here ... had been, or was still. And he wouldn't have needed to force entry, either. Nope. Not this sucker. Mort kept a spare key to the Tashmore Lake house in an old soap-dish on a high shelf in the toolshed, which was where Shooter had gone to get a screwdriver in a hurry when the time had come to nail poor old Bump to the garbage cabinet. He was in the house now, looking around ... or maybe hiding. He was—

The knob refused to move; Mort's fingers simply slid around it. The door was still locked.

“Okay,” Mort said. “Okay, no big deal.” He even laughed a little as he socked the key home and turned it. Just because the door was locked didn't mean Shooter wasn't in the house. In fact, it made it more likely that he was in the house, when you really stopped to think about it. He could have used the spare key, put it back, then locked the door from the inside to lull his enemy's suspicions. All you had to do to lock it, after all, was to press the button set into the knob.
He's trying to psych me out
, Mort thought as he stepped in.

The house was full of dusty late-afternoon sunlight and silence. But it did not feel like
unoccupied
silence.

“You're trying to psych me out, aren't you?” he called. He expected to sound crazy to himself: a lonely, paranoid man addressing the intruder who only exists, after all, in his own imagination. But he
didn't
sound crazy to himself. He sounded, instead, like a man who has tumbled to at least
half
the trick. Only getting half a scam wasn't so great, maybe, but half was better than nothing.

He walked into the living room with its cathedral ceiling, its window-wall facing the lake, and, of course, The World-Famous Mort Rainey Sofa, also known as The Couch of the Comatose Writer. An economical little smile tugged at his cheeks. His balls felt high and tight against the fork of his groin.

“Half a scam's better than none, right, Mr. Shooter?” he called.

The words died into dusty silence. He could smell old tobacco smoke in that dust. His eye happened on the battered package of cigarettes he had excavated from the drawer of his desk. It occurred to him that the house had a smell-almost a stink—that was horribly negative: it was an un-woman smell. Then he thought: No.
That's a mistake
.
That's not it. What you smell is Shooter
.
You smell the man, and you smell his cigarettes
.
Not yours
,
his
.

He turned slowly around, his head cocked back. A second-floor bedroom looked down on the living room halfway up the cream-colored wall; the opening was lined with dark-brown wooden slats. The slats were supposed to keep the unwary from falling out and splattering themselves all over the living-room floor, but they were also supposed to be decorative. Right then they didn't look particularly decorative to Mort; they looked like the bars of a jail cell. All he could see of what he and Amy had called the guest bedroom was the ceiling and one of the bed's four posts.

“You up there, Mr. Shooter?” he yelled.

There was no answer.

“
I know
you're trying to psych me out!”
Now
he was beginning to feel just the tinest bit ridiculous. “It won't work, though!”

About six years before, they had plugged the big fieldstone fireplace in the living room with a Blackstone Jersey stove. A rack of fire-tools stood beside it. Mort grasped the handle of the ash-shovel, considered it for a moment, then let go of it and took the poker instead. He faced the barred guest-room overlook and held the poker up like a knight saluting his queen. Then he walked slowly to the stairs and began to climb them. He could feel tension worming its way into his muscles now, but he understood it wasn't
Shooter
he was afraid of; what he was afraid of was finding nothing.

“I know you're here, and I know you're trying to psyCh me out! The only thing I don't know is what it's all about, Alfie, and when I find you, you better tell me!”

He paused on the second-floor landing, his heart pumping hard in his chest now. The guest-room door was to his left. The door to the guest bathroom was to the right. And he suddenly understood that Shooter was here, all right, but not in the bedroom. No; that was just a ploy. That was just what Shooter wanted him to believe.

Shooter was in the bathroom.

And, as he stood there on the landing with the poker clutched tightly in his right hand and sweat running out of his hair and down his cheeks, Mort
heard
him. A faint shuffle-shuffle. He was in there, all right. Standing in the tub, by the sound. He had moved the tiniest bit. Peekaboo, Johnny-boy, I hear you. Are you armed, fuckface?

Mort thought he probably was, but he didn't think it would turn out to be a gun. Mort had an idea that the man's pen-name was about as close to firearms as he had ever come. Shooter had looked like the sort of guy who would feel more at home with instruments of a blunter nature. What he had done to Bump seemed to bear this out.

I bet it's a hammer
, Mort thought, and wiped sweat off the back of his neck with his free hand. He could feel his eyes pulsing in and out of their sockets in time with his heartbeat.
I'm betting it's a hammer from the toolshed
.

He had no more thought of this before he saw Shooter, saw him clearly, standing in the bathtub in his black round-crowned hat and his yellow shitkicker work-shoes, his lips split over his mail-order dentures in a grin which was really a grimace, sweat trickling down his own face, running down the deep lines grooved there like water running down a network of galvanized tin gutters, with the hammer from the toolshed raised to shoulder height like a judge's gavel. Just standing there in the tub, waiting to bring the hammer down. Next case, bailiff.

I know you
,
buddy
.
I got your number
.
I got it the first time I saw you
.
And guess what
?
You picked the wrong writer to fuck with
.
I think I've been wanting to kill somebody since the middle of May
,
and you'll do as well as anybody
.

He turned his head toward the bedroom door. At the same time, he reached out with his left hand (after drying it on the front of his shirt so his grip wouldn't slip at the crucial moment) and curled it around the bathroom doorknob.

“I know you're in there
!” he shouted at the closed bedroom
door
. “
If you're under the bed
,
you better get out
!
I'm counting to five
!
If you're not out by the time I get there
,
I'm coming in
...
and I'll come in swinging! You hear me
?”

There was no answer ... but then, he hadn't really expected one. Or
wanted
one. He tightened his grip on the bathroom doorknob, but would shout the numbers toward the guest-room door. He didn't know if Shooter would hear or sense the difference if he turned his head in the direction of the bathroom, but he thought Shooter might. The man was obviously clever. Hellishly clever.

In the instant before he started counting, he heard another faint movement in the bathroom. He would have missed it, even standing this close, if he hadn't been listening with every bit of concentration he could muster.

“
One
!”

Christ, he was sweating! Like a pig!

“
Two
!”

The knob of the bathroom door was like a cold rock in his clenched fist.

He turned the knob of the bathroom door and slammed in, bouncing the door off the wall hard enough to chop through the wallpaper and pop the door's lower hinge, and there he was,
there he was
, coming at him with a raised weapon, his teeth bared in a killer's grin, and his eyes were insane, utterly insane, and Mort brought the poker down in a whistling overhand blow and he had just time enough to realize that Shooter was also swinging a poker, and to realize that Shooter was not wearing his round-crowned black hat, and to realize it wasn't Shooter at all, to realize it was him, the madman was him, and then the poker shattered the mirror over the washbasin and silver-backed glass sprayed every whichway, twinkling in the gloom, and the medicine cabinet fell into the sink. The bent door swung open like a gaping mouth, spilling bottles of cough syrup and iodine and Listerine.