Four Past Midnight (47 page)

He forced himself to stop. Shooter was gone, of course. That's why he had left the note. Nor did Shooter seem like the kind of nut who would enjoy watching Mort's obvious fear and horror. He was a nut, all right, but one which had fallen from a different tree. He had simply used Bump, used him on Mort the way a farmer might use a crowbar on a stubborn rock in his north forty. There was nothing personal in it; it was just a job that had to be done.

Then he thought of how Shooter's eyes had looked that afternoon and shivered violently. No, it was personal, all right. It was all kinds of personal.

“He believes I did it,” Mort whispered to the cold western Maine night, and the words came out in ragged chunks, bitten off by his chattering teeth. “The crazy son of a bitch really believes I did it.”

He approached the garbage cabinet and his stomach rolled over like a dog doing a trick. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead, and he wasn't sure he could take care of what needed taking care of. Bump's head was cocked far to the left, giving him a grotesque questioning look. His teeth, small, neat, and needle-sharp, were bared. There was a little blood around the blade of the screwdriver at the point where it was driven into his

(bib)

ruff, but not very much. Bump was a friendly cat; if Shooter had approached him, Bump would not have shied away. And that was what Shooter must have done, Mort thought, and wiped the sick sweat off his forehead. He had picked the cat up, snapped its neck between his fingers like a Popsicle stick, and then nailed it to the slanting roof of the garbage cabinet, all while Mort Rainey slept, if not the sleep of the just, that of the unheeding.

Mort crumpled up the sheet of paper, stuffed it in his back pocket, then put his hand on Bump's chest. The body, not stiff and not even entirely cold, shifted under his hand. His stomach rolled again, but he forced his other hand to close around the screwdriver's yellow plastic handle and pull it free.

He tossed the screwdriver onto the porch and held poor old Bump in his right hand like a bundle of rags. Now his stomach was in free fall, simply rolling and rolling and rolling. He lifted one of the two lids on top of the garbage cabinet, and secured it with the hook-and-eyelet that kept the heavy lid from crashing down on the arms or head of whoever was depositing trash inside. Three cans were lined up within. Mort lifted the lid from the center one and deposited Bump's body gently inside. It lay draped over the top of an olive-green Hefty bag like a fur stole.

He was suddenly furious with Shooter. If the man had appeared in the driveway at that second, Mort would have charged him without a second thought—driven him to the ground and choked him if he could.

Easy
—
it really is catching.

Maybe it was. And maybe he didn't care. It wasn't just that Shooter had killed his only companion in this lonely October house by the lake; it was that he had done it while Mort was asleep, and in such a way that good old Bump had become an object of revulsion, something it was hard not to puke over.

Most of all it was the fact that he had been forced to put his good cat in a garbage can like a piece of worthless trash.

Yes, but tonight Bump would lie in undignified state on top of a Hefty bag in the garbage cabinet because some man—some crazy son of a bitch—could be out there, and the man had a grudge over a story Mort Rainey hadn't 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.

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? M—”

“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 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.

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.

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 carriage-barn.

“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-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 a 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 just the goddam June, 1980, issue of
EQMM;
it was almost all his manuscripts, both those which had been published and those which were incomplete, it was most of his first editions, his foreign editions, his contributors' copies.

Oh, but that was only the start. They had lost their books, as many as four thousand volumes. All of Amy's clothes would have burned, if the damage was as bad as she said it was, and the antique furniture she had collected—sometimes with his help, but mostly on her own—would all be cinders and clinkers now. Her jewelry and their personal papers—insurance policies and so on—would probably be okay (the safe hidden at the back of the upstairs closet was supposed to be fireproof), but the Turkish rugs would be ash, the thousand or so videotapes melted lumps of plastic, the audiovisual equipment... his clothes ... their photographs, thousands of them....

Good Christ, and the first thing he'd thought of was that goddam
magazine.

“No,” Amy was saying, answering the question he had almost forgotten asking in his realization of how enormous the personal loss must be, “she couldn't tell what kind of car it was. She said she thought somebody must have used a Molotov cocktail, or something like that. Because of the way the fire came up in the window right after the sound of breaking glass. She said she started up the driveway and then the kitchen door opened and a man ran out. Bruno started to bark at him, but Patty got scared and pulled him back, although she said he just about ripped the leash out of her hand.

“Then the man got into the car and started it up. He turned on the headlights, and Patty said they almost blinded her. She threw her arm up to shield her eyes and the car just roared out from under the portico ... that's what she said ... and she squeezed back against our front fence and pulled Bruno as hard as she could, or the man would have hit him. Then he turned out of the driveway and drove down the street, fast.”

“And she never saw what kind of car it was?”

“No. First it was dark, and then, when the fire started to shine through your study window, the headlights dazzled her. She ran back to the house and called the fire department. Isabelle said they came fast, but you know how old our house is ... was... and... and how fast dry wood burns... especially if you use gasoline ...”

Yes, he knew. Old, dry, full of wood, the house had been an arsonist's wet dream. But who? If not Shooter,
who?
This terrible news, coming on top of the day's events like a hideous dessert at the end of a loathsome meal, had almost completely paralyzed his ability to think.

“He said it
was
probably gasoline... the fire chief, I mean... he was there first, but then the police came, and they kept asking questions, Mort, mostly about you... about any enemies you might have made ...
enemies
... and I said I didn't think you h-had any enemies... I tried to answer all his questions ...”