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'Don't I know it.'
Shooter thought about this for a moment, then shrugged. 'Anyway, I read two more going back ... and then
that one. My story.'
He looked at the cloud, which was now an airy mass of shimmering gold, and then back at Mort. His face
was as dispassionate as ever, but Mort suddenly understood he had been badly mistaken in believing this
man possessed even the slightest shred of peace or serenity. What he had mistaken for those things was the
iron mantle of control Shooter had donned to keep himself from killing Morton Rainey with his bare hands.
The face was dispassionate, but his eyes blazed with the deepest, wildest fury Mort had ever seen. He
understood that he had stupidly walked up the path from the lake toward what might really be his own
death at this fellow's hands. Here was a man mad enough - in both senses of that word - to do murder.
'I am surprised no one has taken that story up with you before - it's not like any of the others, not a bit.'
Shooter's voice was still even, but Mort now recognized it as the voice of a man laboring mightily to keep
from striking out, bludgeoning, perhaps throttling; the voice of a man who knows that all the incentive he
would ever need to cross the line between talking and killing would be to hear his own voice begin to spiral
upward into the registers of cheated anger; the voice of a man who knows how fatally easy it would be to
become his own lynch-mob.
Mort suddenly felt like a man in a dark room which is crisscrossed with hair-thin tripwires, all of them
leading to packets of high explosive. It was hard to believe that only moments ago he had felt in charge of
this situation. His problems - Amy, his inability to write - now seemed like unimportant figures in an
unimportant landscape. In a sense, they had ceased to be problems at all. He only had one problem now,
and that was staying alive long enough to get back to his house, let alone long enough to see the sun go
down.
He opened his mouth, then closed it again. There was nothing he dared to say, not now. The room was full
of tripwires.
'I am very surprised,' Shooter repeated in that heavy even voice that now sounded like a hideous parody of
calmness.
Mort heard himself say: 'My wife. She didn't like it. She said that it wasn't like anything I'd ever written
before.'
'How did you get it?' Shooter asked slowly and fiercely. 'That's what I really want to know. How in hell did
a big-money scribbling asshole like you get down to a little shitsplat town in Mississippi and steal my
goddam story? I'd like to know why, too, unless you stole all the other ones as well, but the how of it'll be
enough to satisfy me right now.'
The monstrous unfairness of this brought Mort's own anger back like an unslaked thirst. For a moment he
forgot that he was out here on Lake Drive, alone except for this lunatic from Mississippi.
'Drop it,' he said harshly.
'Drop it?' Shooter asked, looking at Mort with a kind of clumsy amazement. 'Drop it? What in hell do you
mean, drop it?'
'You said you wrote your story in 1982,' Mort said. 'I think I wrote mine in late 1979. I can't remember the
exact date, but I do know that it was published for the first time in June of 1980. In a magazine. I beat you
by two years, Mr Shooter or whatever your name is. If anyone here has got a bitch about plagiarism, it's
me.'
Mort did not precisely see the man move. At one moment they were standing by Shooter's car, looking at
each other; at the next he found himself pressed against the driver's door, with Shooter's hands wrapped
around his upper arms and Shooter's face pressed against his own, forehead to forehead. In between his two
positions, there was only a blurred sensation of being first grabbed and then whirled.
'You lie,' Shooter said, and on his breath was a dry whiff of cinnamon.
'The fuck I do,' Mort said, and lunged forward against the man's pressing weight.
Shooter was strong, almost certainly stronger than Mort Rainey, but Mort was younger, heavier, and he had
the old blue station wagon to push against. He was able to break Shooter's hold and send him stumbling
two or three steps backward.
Now he'll come for me, Mort thought. Although he hadn't had a fight since a schoolyard you-pull-me-and-
I'll-push-you scuffle back in the fourth grade, he was astounded to find his mind was clear and cool. We're
going to duke it out over that dumb fucking story. Well, okay; I wasn't doing anything else today anyhow.
But it didn't happen. Shooter raised his hands, looked at them, saw they were knotted into fists ... and
forced them to open. Mort saw the effort it took for the man to reimpose that mantle of control, and felt a
kind of awe. Shooter put one of his open palms to his mouth and wiped his lips with it, very slowly and
very deliberately.
'Prove it,' he said.
'All right. Come back to the house with me. I'll show you the entry on the copyright page of the book.'
'No,' Shooter said. 'I don't care about the book, I don't care a pin for the book. Show me the story. Show me
the magazine with the story in it, so I can read it for myself.'
'I don't have the magazine here.'
He was about to say something else, but Shooter turned his face up toward the sky and uttered a single bark
of laughter. The sound was as dry as an axe splitting kindling wood. 'No,' he said. The fury was still blazing
and dancing in his eyes, but he seemed in charge of himself again. 'No, I bet you don't.'
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