Стивен Кинг - The Colorado Kid

“What about the woman’s father?” she asked.

“Stone blind and onelegged,” Dave said. “The diabetes.”

“Ouch,” she said.

“Ayuh.”

“Let Jack n Maisie Harrington go hang,” Vince said impatiently. “I never believed in the Second Airplane Theory when it comes to Cogan any more than I ever believed in the Second Gunman Theory when it came to Kennedy. If Cogan had a car waiting for him in Denver—and I can’t see any way around it—then he could have had one waiting for him at the General Aviation Terminal, as well. And I believe he did.”

“That is just so farfetched,” Dave said. He spoke not scoffingly but dolefully.

“P’raps,” Vince responded, unperturbed, “but when you get rid of the impossible, whatever’s left…there’s your pup, scratchin at the door t’be let in.”

“He could have driven himself,” Stephanie said thoughtfully.

“A rental car?” Dave shook his head. “Don’t think so, dear. Rental agencies take only credit cards, and credit cards leave paper trails.”

“Besides,” Vince said, “Cogan didn’t know his way around eastern and coastal Maine. So far as we can discover, he’d never been here in his life. You know the roads by now, Steffi: there’s only one main one that comes out this way from Bangor to Ellsworth, but once you get to Ellsworth, there’s three or four different choices, and a flatlander, even one with a map, is apt to get confused. No, I think Dave is right. If the Kid meant to go by car, and if he knew in advance how small his timewindow was going to be, he would have wanted to have a driver standin by and waitin. Somebody who’d take cash money, drive fast, and not get lost.”

Stephanie thought for a little while. The two old men let her.

“Three hired drivers in all,” she said at last. “The one in the middle at the controls of a private jet.”

“Maybe with a copilot,” Dave put in quietly. “Them are the rules, at least.”

“It’s very outlandish,” she said.

Vince nodded and sighed. “I don’t disagree.”

“You’ve never turned up even one of these drivers, have you?”

“No.”

She thought some more, this time with her head down and her normally smooth brow furrowed in a deep frown. Once more they did not interrupt her, and after perhaps two minutes, she looked up again. “Butwhy? What could be so important for Cogan to go to such lengths?”

Vince Teague and Dave Bowie looked at each other, then back at her. Vince said: “Ain’tthat a good question.”

Dave said: “Arig of a question.”

Vince said: “Themain question.”

“Accourse it is,” Dave said. “Always was.”

Vince, quite softly: “We don’t know, Stephanie. We never have.”

Dave, more softly still: “BostonGlobe wouldn’t like that. Nope, not at all.”

“Accourse, we ain’t the BostonGlobe,” Vince said. “We ain’t even the BangorDaily News. But Stephanie, when a grown man or woman goes completely off the rails, every newspaper writer, big town or small one, looks for certain reasons. It don’t matter whether the result is most of the Methodist church picnic windin up poisoned or just the gentlemanly half of a marriage quietly disappearin one weekday morning, never to be seen alive again. Now—for the time bein never mindin where he wound up, or the improbability of how he managed to get there—tell me what some of those reasons for goin off the rails might be. Count them off for me until I see at least four of your fingers in the air.”

School is in session, she thought, and then remembered something Vince had said to her a month before, almost in passing: To be a success it the news business, it don’t hurt to have a dirty mind, dear. At the time she’d thought the remark bizarre, perhaps even borderline senile. Now she thought she understood a little better.

“Sex,” she said, raising her left forefinger—her Colorado Kid finger. “I.e., another woman.” She popped another finger. “Money problems, I’m thinking either debt or theft.”

“Don’t forget the IRS,” Dave said. “People sometimes run when they realize they’re in hock to Uncle Sam.”

“She don’t know how boogery the IRS can be,” Vince said. “You can’t hold that against her. Anyway, according to his wife Cogan had no problems with Infernal Revenue. Go on, Steffi, you’re doin fine.”

She didn’t yet have enough fingers in the air to satisfy him, but could think of only one other thing. “The urge to start a brandnew life?” she asked doubtfully, seeming to speak more to herself than to them. “To just…I don’t know…cut all the ties and start over again as a different person in a different place?” And then something elsedid occur to her. “Madness?” She had four fingers up now—one for sex, one for money, one for change, one for madness. She looked doubtfully at the last two. “Maybe change and madness are the same?”

“Maybe they are,” Vince said. “And you could argue that madness covers all sorts of addictions that people try to run from. That sort of running’s sometimes known as the ‘geographic cure.’ I’m thinking specifically of drugs and alcohol. Gambling’s another addiction people try the geographic cure on, but I guess you could file that problem under money.”

“Did he have drug or alcohol problems?”

“Arla Cogan said not, and I believe she would have known. And after sixteen months to think it over, and with him dead at the end of it, I think she would have told me.”

“But, Steffi,” Dave said (and rather gently), “when you consider it, madness almosthas to be in it somewhere, wouldn’t you say?”

She thought of James Cogan, the Colorado Kid, sitting dead on Hammock Beach with his back against a litter basket and a lump of meat lodged in his throat, his closed eyes turned in the direction of Tinnock and the reach beyond. She thought of how one hand had still been curled, as if holding the rest of his midnight snack, a piece of steak some hungry gull had no doubt stolen, leaving nothing but a sticky pattern of sand in the leftover grease on his palm. “Yes,” she said. “There’s madness in it somewhere. Didshe know that? His wife?”

The two men looked at each other. Vince sighed and rubbed the side of his bladethin nose. “She might have, but by then she had her own life to worry about, Steffi. Hers and her son’s. A man up and disappears like that, the woman left behind is apt to have a damn hard skate. She got her old job back, working in one of the Boulder banks, but there was no way she could keep the house in Nederland—”

“Hernando’s Hideaway,” Stephanie murmured, feeling a sympathetic pang.

“Ayuh, that. She kept on her feet without having to borrow too much from her folks, or anything at all from his, but she used up most of the money they’d put aside for little Mike’s college education in the process. When we saw her, I should judge she wanted two things, one practical and one what you’d call…spiritual?” He looked rather doubtfully at Dave, who shrugged and nodded as if to say that word would do.

Vince nodded himself and went on. “She wanted to be shed of the notknowing. Was he alive or dead? Was she married or a widow? Could she lay hope to rest or did she have to carry it yet awhile longer? Maybe that last sounds a trifle hardhearted, and maybe it is, but I should think that after sixteen months, hope must get damned heavy on your back—damned heavy to tote around.

“As for the practical, that was simple. She just wanted the insurance company to pay off what they owed. I know that Arla Cogan isn’t the only person in the history of the world to hate an insurance company, but I’d have to put her high on the list for sheer intensity. She’d been going along and going along, you see, her and Michael, living in a three— or fourroom apartment in Boulder—quite a change after the nice house in Nederland—and her leaving him in daycare and with babysitters she wasn’t always sure she could trust, working a job she didn’t really want to do, going to bed alone after years of having someone to snuggle up to, worrying over the bills, always watching the needle on the gasgauge because the price of gasoline was going up even then…and all the time she was sure in her heart that he was dead, but the insurance company wouldn’t pay off because of what her heart knew, not when there was no body, let alone a cause of death.