Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [143]
'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-andI'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.'
'Listen to me,' Mort said. 'Ordinarily, this is just a place my wife and I come in the summer. I have copies of my books here, and some foreign editions, but I've published in a lot of magazines as well - articles and essays as well as stories. Those magazines are in our year-round house. The one in Derry.'
'Then why aren't you there?' Shooter asked. In his eyes Mort read both disbelief and a galling satisfaction - it was clear that Shooter had expected him to try and squirm his way out of it, and in Shooter's mind, that was just what Mort was doing. Or trying to do.
'I'm here because - ' He stopped. 'How did you know I'd be here?'
'I just looked on the back of the book I bought,' Shooter said, and Mort could have slapped his own forehead in frustration and sudden understanding. Of course - there had been a picture