Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [145]
'What are you doing?' Mort asked, his voice tight. Now he felt the adrenaline dump into his body, readying him for fight or flight ... probably the latter, if Shooter was reaching for the big handgun Mort suddenly saw in the eye of his imagination.
'Just gettin m'smokes,' Shooter said. 'Hold your water.'
When he pulled his arm out of the car, he had a red package of Pall Malls in his hand. He had taken them off the dashboard. 'Want one?'
'I have my own,' Mort said rather sulkily, and took the ancient pack of L & M's from the pocket beneath the red flannel overshirt.
They lit up, each from his own pack.
'If we keep on this way, we're going to have a fight,' Shooter said finally. 'I don't want that.'
'Well, Jesus, neither do I'
'Part of you does,' Shooter contradicted. He continued to study Mort from beneath his dropped lids with that expression of country shrewdness. 'Part of you wants just that. But I don't think it's just me or my story that's making you want to fight. You have got some other bee under your blanket that's got you all riled up, and that is making this harder. Part of you wants to fight, but what you don't understand is that, if we do start to fight, it's not going to end until one or the other of us is dead.'
Mort looked for signs that Shooter was exaggerating for effect and saw none. He suddenly felt cold along the base of his spine.
'So I'm going to give you three days. You call your ex and get her to send down the magazine with your story in it, if there is such a magazine. And I'll be back. There isn't any magazine, of course; I think we both know that. But you strike me as a man who needs to do some long, hard thinking.'
He looked at Mort with a disconcerting expression of stern pity.
'You didn't believe anybody would ever catch you out, did you?' he asked. 'You really didn't.'
'If I show you the magazine, will you go away?' Mort asked. He was speaking more to himself than to Shooter. 'I guess what I really want to know is whether or not it's even worth it.'
Shooter abruptly opened his car door and slid in behind the wheel. Mort found the speed with which the man could move a little creepy. 'Three days. Use it the way you like, Mr Rainey.'
He started the engine. It ran with the low wheeze characteristic of valves which need to be reground, and the tang of oilsmoke from the old tailpipe polluted the air of the fading afternoon. 'Right is right and fair is fair. The first thing is to get you to a place where you see I have really got you, and you can't wiggle out of this mess the way you've probably been wiggling out of the messes you have made all your life. That's the first thing.'
He looked at Mort expressionlessly out of the driver's-side window.
'The second thing,' he said, 'is the real reason I come.'
'What's that?' Mort heard himself say. It was strange and not a little infuriating, but he felt that sensation of guilt creeping relentlessly over him again, as if he really had done the thing of which this rustic lunatic was accusing him.
'We'll talk about it,' Shooter said, and threw his elderly station wagon in gear. 'Meantime, you think about what's right and what's fair.'
'You're nuts!' Mort shouted, but Shooter was already rolling up Lake Drive toward where it spilled out onto Route 23.
He watched until the wagon was out of sight, then walked slowly back to the house. It felt emptier and emptier in his mind as he drew closer and closer to it. The rage and the fear were gone. He felt only cold, tired, and homesick for a marriage which no longer was, and which, it now began to seem to him, had never been at all.
The telephone started ringing when he was halfway along the driveway which ran down the steep hill from Lake Drive to the house. Mort broke into a run, knowing he wasn't going to make it but running anyway, cursing himself for his foolish reaction. Talk about Pavlov's dogs!
He had opened the screen door and was fumbling with the knob of the inside door when the phone silenced. He stepped in, closed the