Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [142]
He TALKS like a storyteller, Mort thought. Be damned if he doesn't. He tried to cancel this thought - it didn't seem to be a good way to be thinking - and couldn't quite do it.
'Well, I ran inside that drugstore. They've got one of those old fashioned wire paperback racks in the Perkinsburg Rexall, the ones that turn around and around, just like the one in the little general store up the road from you.'
'Bowie's?'
Shooter nodded. 'That's the place, all right. Anyway, I grabbed the first book my hand happened on. Could have been a paperback Bible, for all I saw of the cover. But it wasn't. It was your book of short stories. Everybody Drops the Dime. And for all I know, they were your short stories. All but that one.'
Stop this now. He's working up a head of steam, so spike his boiler right now.
But he discovered. he didn't want to. Maybe Shooter was a writer. He fulfilled both of the main requirements: he told a tale you wanted to hear to the end, even if you had a pretty good idea what the end was going to be, and he was so full of shit he squeaked.
Instead of saying what he should have said - that even if Shooter was by some wild stretch of the imagination telling the truth, he, Mort, had beaten him to that miserable story by two years - he said: 'So you read "Sowing Season" on a Greyhound bus while you were going to Jackson to sell your dairy farm last June.'
'No. The way it happened, I read it on the way back. I sold the farm and went back on the Greyhound with a check for sixty thousand dollars in my pocket. I'd read the first half a dozen stories going down. I didn't think they were any great shakes, but they passed the time.'
'Thank you.'
Shooter studied him briefly. 'Wasn't offering you any real compliment.'
'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