'I do not accept that I did!' he shrieked. 'This is all just Part of his plan! This
I do not
is just part of his little game! His little mind-game! And I do not accept...'
Stop, the little voice whispered inside his head, and Mort stopped.
For a moment there was utter silence in both worlds: the one inside his head, and the one outside of it.
And, after an interval the little voice asked quietly: Why did You do It, Mort? This whole elaborate and homicidal episode? Shooter kept saying he wanted a story, but there is no Shooter. What do You want, Mort? What did you create John Shooter FOR?
Then, from outside, came the sound of a car rolling down the driveway. Mort looked at his watch and saw that the hands were standing straight up at noon. A blaze of triumph and relief roared through him like flames shooting up the neck of a chimney. That he had the magazine but still no proof did not matter. That Shooter might kill him did not matter. He could die happily, just knowing that there was a John Shooter and that he himself was not responsible for the horrors he had been considering.
'He's here!' he screamed joyfully, and ran out of the study. He waved his hands wildly above his head, and actually cut a little caper as he rounded the corner and came into the hall.
He stopped, looking out at the driveway past the sloping roof of the garbage cabinet where Bump's body had been nailed up. His hands dropped slowly to his sides. Dark horror stole over his brain. No, not over it; it came down, as if some merciless hand were pulling a shade. The last piece fell into place. It had occurred to him moments before in the study that he might have created a fantasy assassin because he lacked the courage to commit suicide. Now he realized that Shooter had told the truth when he said he would never kill Mort.
It wasn't John Shooter's imaginary station wagon but Amy's no-nonsense little Subaru which was just now coming to a stop. Amy was behind the wheel. She had stolen his love, and a woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman.
He loved her, all the same.
It was Shooter who hated her. It was Shooter who meant to kill her and then bury her down by the lake near Bump. where she would before long be a mystery to both of them.
'Go away, Amy,' he whispered in the palsied voice of a very old man. 'Go away before it's too late.'
But Amy was getting out of the car, and as she closed the door behind her, the hand pulled the shade in Mort's head all the way down and he was in darkness.
47
Amy tried the door and found it unlocked. She stepped in, started to call for Mort, and then didn't. She looked around, wide-eyed and startled.
The place was a mess. The trash can was full and had overflowed onto the floor. A few sluggish autumn flies were crawling in and out of an aluminum pot-pie dish that had been kicked into the corner. She could smell stale cooking and musty air. She thought she could even smell spoiled food.
'Mort?'
There was no answer. She walked further into the house, taking small steps, not entirely sure she wanted to look at the rest of the place. Mrs Gavin had been in only three days ago - how had things gotten so out of hand since then? What had happened?
She had been worried about Mort during the entire last year of their marriage, but she had been even more worried since the divorce. Worried, and, of course, guilty. She held part of the blame for herself. and supposed she always would. But Mort had never been strong ... and his greatest weakness was his stubborn (and sometimes almost hysterical) refusal to recognize the fact. This morning he had sounded like a man on the point of suicide. And the only reason she had heeded his admonition not to bring Ted was because she thought the sight of him might set Mort off if he really was poised on the edge of such an act.
The thought of murder had never crossed her mind, nor did it do so now. Even when he had brandished the gun at them that horrible afternoon at the motel, she had not been afraid. Not of that. Mort was no killer.
'Mort? M -'
She came around the kitchen counter and the word died. She stared at the big living room with wide, stunned eyes. Paper was littered everywhere. It looked as if Mort must at some point have exhumed every copy of every manuscript he had in his desk drawers and in his files and strewn the pages about in here like confetti at some black New Year's Eve celebration. The table was heaped with dirty dishes. The Silex was lying shattered on the floor by the window-wall, which was cracked.
And everywhere, everywhere, everywhere was one word. The word was SHOOTER.
SHOOTER had been written on the walls in colored chalks he must have taken from her drawer of art supplies. SHOOTER was sprayed on the window twice in what looked like dried whipped cream - and yes, there was the Redi-Whip pressure-can, lying discarded under the stove. SHOOTER was written over and over on the kitchen counters in ink, and on the wooden support posts of the deck on the far side of the house in pencil - a neat column like adding that went down in a straight line and said SHOOTER SHOOTER SHOOTER SHOOTER.
Worst of all, it had been carved into the polished cherrywood surface of the table in great jagged letters three feet high, like a grotesque declaration of love: SHOOTER.
The screwdriver he had used to do this last was lying on a chair nearby. There was red stuff on its steel shaft - stain from the cherrywood, she assumed.
'Mort?' she whispered, looking around.
Now she was frightened that she would find him dead by his own hand. And where? Why, in his study, of course. Where else? He had lived all the most important parts of his life in there; surely he had chosen to die there.
Although she had no wish to go in, no wish to be the one to find him, her feet carried her in that direction all the same. As she went, she kicked the issue of EQMM Herb Creekmore had had sent out of her way. She did not look down. She reached the study door and pushed it slowly open.
48
Mort stood in front of his old Royal typewriter; the screen-and-keyboard unit of his word processor lay overturned in a bouquet of glass on the floor. He looked strangely like a country preacher. It was partly the posture he had adopted, she supposed; he was standing almost primly with his hands behind his back. But most of it was the hat. The black hat, pulled down so it almost touched the tops of his ears. She thought he looked a little bit like the old man in that picture, 'American Gothic,' even though the man in the picture wasn't wearing a hat.