Mort waited for his heartbeat to speed up, for the surge of adrenaline into his body, but his heart went on maintaining its normal beat, and his glands kept their own counsel - which, for the time being, seemed to be to remain quiet.
The sun, which had gone behind a cloud, came out again, and fall colors which had already been bright now seemed to burst into flame. His own shadow reappeared, dark and long and clearcut. Shooter's round black hat looked blacker, his blue shirt bluer, and the air was so clear the man seemed scissored from a swatch of reality that was brighter and more vital than the one Mort knew as a rule. And he understood that he had been wrong about his reasons for not calling Dave Newsome - wrong, or practicing a little deception - on himself as well as on Amy. The truth was that he wanted to deal with this matter himself. Maybe just to prove to myself that there are things I still deal with, he thought, and started up the hill again toward where John Shooter was leaning against his car and waiting for him.
9
His walk along the lake path had been both long and slow, and Amy's call hadn't been the only thing Mort had thought about as he picked his way over or around the occasional downed tree or paused to skip the occasional flat stone across the water (as a boy he had been able to get a really good one - what they called 'a flattie' - to skip as many as nine times, but today four was the most he'd been able to manage). He had also thought about how to deal with Shooter, when and if Shooter turned up again.
It was true he had felt a transient - or maybe not-so-transient - guilt when he saw how close to identical the two stories were, but he had worked that one out; it was only the generalized guilt he guessed all writers of fiction felt from time to time. As for Shooter himself, the only feelings he had were annoyance, anger . . . and a kind of relief. He was full of an unfocussed rage; had been for months. It was good to finally have a donkey to pin this rotten, stinking tail on.
Mort had heard the old saw about how, if four hundred monkeys banged away on four hundred typewriters for four million years, one of them would produce the complete works of Shakespeare. He didn't believe it. Even if it were true, John Shooter was no monkey and he hadn't been alive anywhere near that long, no matter how lined his face was.
So Shooter had copied his story. Why he had picked 'Sowing Season' was beyond Mort Rainey's powers of conjecture, but he knew that was what had happened because he had ruled out coincidence, and he knew damned well that, while he might have stolen that story, like all his others, from The Great Idea Bank of the Universe, he most certainly had not stolen it from Mr John Shooter of the Great State of Mississippi.
Where, then, had Shooter copied it from? Mort thought that was the most important question; his chance to expose Shooter as a fake and a cheat might lie buried within the answer to it.
There were only two possible answers, because 'Sowing Season' had only been published twice - first in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and then in his collection, Everybody Drops the Dime. The dates of publication for the short stories in a collection are usually listed on the copyright page at the front of the book, and this format had been followed in Everybody Drops the Dime. He had looked up the
acknowledgement for 'Sowing Season' and found that it had been originally published in the June, 1980, issue of EQMM. The collection, Everybody Drops the Dime, had been issued by St Martin's Press in 1983. There had been subsequent printings since then - all but one of them in paperback - but that didn't matter. All he really had to work with were those two dates 1980 and 1983 ... and his own hopeful belief that, aside from agents and publishing-company lawyers, no one paid much attention to those lines of fine print on the copyright page.
Hoping that this would prove true to John Shooter, hoping that Shooter would simply assume - as most general readers did - that a story he had read for the first time in a collection had no prior existence, Mort approached the man and finally stood before him on the edge of the road.
10
'I guess you must have had a chance to read my story by now,' Shooter said. He spoke as casually as a man commenting on the weather.
'I did.'
Shooter nodded gravely. 'I imagine it rang a bell, didn't it?'
'It certainly did,' Mort agreed, and then, with studied casualness: 'When did you write it?'
'I thought you'd ask that,' Shooter said. He smiled a secret little smile, but said no more. His arms remained crossed over his chest, his hands laid against his sides just below the armpits. He looked like a man who would be perfectly content to remain where he was forever, or at least until the sun sank below the horizon and ceased to warm his face.
'Well, sure,' Mort said, still casually. 'I have to, you know. When two fellows show up with the same story, that's serious.'
'Serious,' Shooter agreed in a deeply meditative tone of voice.
'And the only way to sort a thing like that out,' Mort continued, 'to decide who copied from whom, is to find out who wrote the words first.' He fixed Shooter's faded blue eyes with his own dry and
uncompromising gaze. Somewhere nearby a chickadee twittered self-importantly in a tangle of trees and was then quiet again. 'Wouldn't you say that's true?'
'I suppose I would,' Shooter agreed. 'I suppose that's why I came all the way up here from Miss'ippi.'
Mort heard the rumble of an approaching vehicle. They both turned in that direction, and Tom Greenleafs Scout came over the nearest hill, pulling a little cyclone of fallen leaves behind it. Tom, a hale and healthy Tashmore native of seventy-something, was the caretaker for most of the places on this side of the lake that Greg Carstairs didn't handle. Tom raised one hand in salute as he passed. Mort waved back. Shooter removed one hand from its resting place and tipped a finger at Tom in a friendly gesture which spoke in some obscure way of a great many years spent in the country, of the uncountable and unrecollected number of times he had saluted the passing drivers of passing trucks and tractors and tedders and balers in that exact same casual way. Then, as Tom's Scout passed out of sight, he returned his hand to his ribcage so that his arms were crossed again. As the leaves rattled to rest on the road, his patient, unwavering, almost eternal gaze came back to Mort Rainey's face once more. 'Now what were we saying?' he asked almost gently.
'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.'