Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [140]
'We were trying to establish provenance,' Mort said. 'That means -'
'I know what it means,' Shooter said, favoring Mort with a glance which was both calm and mildly contemptuous. 'I know I am wearing shitkicker clothes and driving a shitkicker car, and I come from a long line of shitkickers, and maybe that makes me a shitkicker myself, but it doesn't necessarily make me a stupid shitkicker.'
'No,' Mort agreed. 'I don't guess it does. But being smart doesn't necessarily make you honest, either. In fact, I think it's more often apt to go the other way.'
'I could figure that much out from you, had I not known it,' Shooter said dryly, and Mort felt himself flush. He didn't like to be zinged and rarely was, but Shooter had just done it with the effortless ease of an experienced shotgunner popping a clay pigeon.
His hopes of trapping Shooter dropped. Not all the way to zero, but quite a considerable way. Smart and sharp were not the same things, but he now suspected that Shooter might be both. Still, there was no sense drawing this out. He didn't want to be around the man any longer than he had to be. In some strange way he had looked forward to this confrontation, once he had become sure that another confrontation was inevitable - maybe only because it was a break in a routine which had already become dull and unpleasant. Now he wanted it over. He was no longer sure John Shooter was crazy - not completely, anyway - but he thought the man could be dangerous. He was so goddam implacable. He decided to take his best shot and get it over with - no more dancing around.
'When did you write your story, Mr Shooter?'
'Maybe my name's not Shooter,' the man said, looking faintly amused. 'Maybe that's just a pen name.'
'I see. What's your real one?'
'I didn't say it wasn't; I only said maybe. Either way, that's not part of our business.' He spoke serenely, appearing to be more interested in a cloud which was making its way slowly across the high blue sky and toward the westering sun.
'Okay,' Mort said, 'but when you wrote that story is.'
'I wrote it seven years ago,' he said, still studying the cloud - it had touched the edge of the sun now and had acquired a gold fringe. 'In 1982.'
Bingo, Mort thought. Wily old bastard or not, he stepped right into the trap after all. He got the story out of the collection, all right. And since Everybody Drops the Dime was published in 1983, he thought any date before then had to be safe. Should have read the copyright page, old son.
He waited for a feeling of triumph, but there was none. Only a muted sense of relief that this nut could be sent on his merry way with no further fuss or muss. Still, he was curious; it was the curse of the writing class. For instance, why that particular story, a story which was so out of his usual run, so downright atypical? And if the guy was going to accuse him of plagiarism, why settle for an obscure short story when he could have cobbled up the same sort of almost identical manuscript of a best-seller like The
OrganGrinder's Bay? That would have been juicy; this was almost a joke.
I suppose knocking off one of the novels would have been too much like work,
Mort thought.
'Why did you wait so long?' he asked. 'I mean, my book of short stories was published in 1983, and that's six years ago. Going on seven now.'
'Because I didn't know,' Shooter said. He removed his gaze from the cloud and studied Mort with that discomfiting look of faint contempt again. 'A man like you, I suppose that kind of man just assumes that everyone in America, if not everyone in every country where his books are published, reads what he has written.'
'I know better than that, I think,' Mort said, and it was his turn to be dry.
'But that's not true,' Shooter went on, ignoring what Mort had said in his scarily serene and utterly fixated way. 'That is not true at all. I never saw that story until the middle of June.