Стивен Кинг - The Colorado Kid

“So he bought those cigarettes, hoping they’d be overlooked,” Stephanie said.

Vince nodded. “Ayuh, and they were.”

“But overlooked bywho?”

Vince paused, then went on without answering her question. “He went down in the elevator and out through the lobby of his building. There was a car waitin to take him to Stapleton Airport, either right there or just around the corner. Maybe it was just him and the driver in that car; maybe there was someone else. We’ll never know. You asked me earlier if Cogan was wearing his overcoat when he left that morning, and I said George the Artist didn’t remember, but Arla said she never saw that overcoat no more, so maybe he was, at that. If so, I think he took it off in the car or in the airplane. I think he also took off his suitcoat jacket. I think someone either gave him the green jacket to wear in their place, or it was waitin for him.”

“In the car or on the plane.”

“Ayuh,” Dave said.

“The cigarettes?”

“Don’t know for sure, but if I had to bet, I’d bet he already had em on him,” Dave said. “He knew this was comin along…whateverthis was. He’d’ve had em in his pants pocket, I think.”

“Then, later, on the beach…” She saw Cogan, her mind’seye version of the Colorado Kid, lighting his life’s first cigarette—first and last—and then strolling down to the water’s edge with it, there on Hammock Beach, alone in the moonlight. The midnight moonlight. He takes one puff of the harsh, unfamiliar smoke. Maybe two. Then he throws the cigarette into the sea. Then…what?

What?

“The plane dropped him off in Bangor,” she heard herself saying in a voice that sounded harsh and unfamiliar to herself.

“Ayuh,” Dave agreed.

“And his ride from Bangor dropped him off in Tinnock.”

“Ayuh.” That was Vince.

“He ate a fishandchips basket.”

“So he did,” Vince agreed. “Autopsy proves it. So did my nose. I smelled the vinegar.”

“Was his wallet gone by then?”

“We don’t know,” Dave said. “We’ll never know. But I think so. I think he gave it up with his topcoat, his suitcoat, and his normal life. I think what he got in return was a green jacket, which he also gave up later on.”

“Or had taken from his dead body,” Vince said.

Stephanie shivered. She couldn’t help it. “He rides across to MooseLookit Island on the six o’clock ferry, bringing Gard Edwick a paper cup of coffee on the way—what could be construed as tea for the tillerman, or the ferryman.”

“Yuh,” Dave said. He looked very solemn.

“By then he has no wallet, no ID, just seventeen dollars and some change that maybe includes a Russian tenruble coin. Do you think that coin might have been…oh, I don’t know…some sort of identificationthingy, like in a spy novel? I mean, the cold war between Russia and the United States would have still been going on then, right?”

“Full blast,” Vince said. “But Steffi—if you were going to dicker with a Russian secret agent, would you use aruble to introduce yourself?”

“No,” she admitted. “But why else would he have it? To show it to someone, that’s all I can think of.”

“I’ve always had the intuition that someone gave it tohim,” Dave said. “Maybe along with a piece of cold sirloin steak, wrapped up in a piece of tinfoil.”

“Why?” she asked. “Why would they?”

Dave shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Was there tinfoil found at the scene? Maybe thrown into that seagrass along the far edge of the beach?”

“O’Shanny and Morrison sure didn’t look,” Dave said. “Me n Vince had a hunt all around Hammock Beach after that yella tape was taken down—not specifically for tinfoil, you understand, but for anything that looked like it might bear on the dead man, anything at all. We found nothing but the usual litter—candywrappers and such.”

“If the meat was in foil or a Baggie, the Kid might very well have tossed it into the water, along with his one cigarette,” Vince said.

“About that piece of meat in his throat…”

Vince was smiling a little. “I had several long conversations about that piece of steak with both Doc Robinson and Dr. Cathcart. Dave was in on a couple of em. I remember Cathcart saying to me once, this had to’ve been not more than a month before the heart attack that took his life six or seven years ago, ‘You go back to that old business the way a kid who’s lost a tooth goes back to the hole with the tip of his tongue.’ And I thought to myself, yep, that’s exactly right, exactly what it’s like. It’s like a hole I can’t stop poking at and licking into, trying to find the bottom of.

“First thing I wanted to know was if that piece of meat could have been jammed down Cogan’s throat, either with fingers or some sort of instrument like a lobsterpick, after he was dead. And that’s crossedyour mind, hasn’t it?”

Stephanie nodded.

“He said it was possible but unlikely, because that piece of steak had not only been chewed, but chewed enough to be swallowed. It wasn’t really meat at all anymore, but rather what Cathcart called ‘organic pulpmass.’ Someone else could have chewed it that much, but would have been unlikely to have planted it after doing so, for fear it would have looked insufficient to cause death. Are you with me?”

She nodded again.

“Healso said that meat chewed to a pulpmass would be hard to manipulate with an instrument. It would tend to break up when pushed from the back of the mouth into the throat. Fingers could do it, but Cathcart said he believed he would have seen signs of that, most likely straining of the jaw ligatures.” He paused, thinking, then shook his head. “There’s a technical term for that kind of jawpoppin, but I don’t remember it.”

“Tell her what Robinson told you,” Dave said. His eyes were sparkling. “It didn’t come to nummore’n the rest in the end, but I always thought it waswicked int’restin.”

“He said there were certain muscle relaxants, some of em exotic, and Cogan’s midnight snack might have been treated with one of those,” Vince said. “He might get the first few bites down all right, accounting for what was found in his stomach, and then find himself all at once with a bite he wasn’t able to swallow once it was chewed.”

“That must have been it!” Stephanie cried. “Whoever dosed the meat sat there and just watched him choke! Then, when Cogan was dead, the murderer propped him up against the litter basket and took away the rest of the steak so it could never be tested! It was never a gull at all! It…” She stopped, looking at them. “Why are you shaking your heads?”

“The autopsy, dear,” Vince said. “Nothing like that showed up on the bloodgas chromatograph tests.”

“But if it was something exotic enough…”

“Like in an Agatha Christie yarn?” Vince asked, with a wink and a little smile. “Well, maybe…but there was also the piece of meat in his throat, don’t you know.”

“Oh. Right. Dr. Cathcart had that to test, didn’t he?” She slumped a little.

“Ayuh,” Vince agreed, “and did. We may be country mice, but wedo have the occasional dark thought. And the closest thing to poison on that chunk of chewedup meat was a little salt.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said (in a very low voice): “Maybe it was the kind of stuff that disappears.”

“Ayuh,” Dave said, and his tongue rounded the inside of one cheek. “Like the Coast Lights after an hour or two.”

“Or the rest of theLisa Cabot ’s crew,” Vince added.

“And once he got off the ferry, you don’t know where he went.”

“No, ma’am,” Vince said. “We’ve looked off n on for over twentyfive years and never found a soul who claims to have seen him before Johnny and Nancy did around quarter past six on the morning of April 24th. And for the record—not that anyone’s keepin one—I don’t believe that anyone took what remained of that steak from his hand after he choked on his last bite. I believe a seagull stole the last of it from his dead hand, just as we always surmised. And gorry, I reallydo have to get a move on.”