The Colorado Kid

by Stephen King

  “So you don’t know,” she said. “You tried your best, but you just don’t know.”

  Vince looked first surprised, then amused. “As to tryin my best, Stephanie, I don’t think a person ever knows that for sure; in fact, I think most of us are condemned—damned, even!—to thinking we could have done just a little smidge better, even when we win through to whatever it was we were tryin to get. But you’re wrong—I do know. He chartered a jet out of Stapleton. That’s what happened.”

  “But you said—”

  He leaned even further forward over his clasped hands, his eyes fixed on hers. “Listen carefully and take instruction, dearheart. It’s long years since I read Sherlock Holmes, so I can’t say this exactly, but at one point the great detective tells Dr. Watson somethin like this: ‘When you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left—no matter how improbable—must be the answer.’ Now we know that the Colorado Kid was in his Denver office buildin until ten-fifteen or ten-twenty on that Wednesday morning. And we can be pretty sure he was in Jan’s Wharfside at five-thirty. Hold up your fingers like you did before, Stephanie.”

  She did as he asked, left forefinger for the Kid in Colorado, right forefinger for James Cogan in Maine. Vince unlocked his hands and touched her right forefinger briefly with one of his own, age meeting youth in midair.

  “But don’t call this finger five-thirty,” he said. “We needn’t trust the counter-girl, who wasn’t run off her feet the way she would have been in July, but who was doubtless busy all the same, it bein the supper-hour and all.”

  Stephanie nodded. In this part of the world supper came early. Dinner—pronounced dinnah—was what you ate from your lunchpail at noon, often while out in your lobster boat.

  “Let this finger be six o’clock,” he said. “The time of the last ferry.”

  She nodded again. “He had to be on that one, didn’t he?”

  “He did unless he swam the reach,” Dave said.

  “Or chartered a boat,” she said.

  “We asked,” Dave said. “More important, we asked Gard Edwick, who was the ferryman in the spring of ’80.”

  Did Cogan bring him tea? she suddenly found herself wondering. Because if you want to ride the ferry, you’re supposed to bring tea for the tillerman. You said so yourself, Dave. Or are the ferryman andthe tillerman two different people?

  “Steff?” Vince sounded concerned. “Are you all right, dear?”

  “I’m fine, why?”

  “You looked…I dunno, like you came over strange.”

  “I sort of did. It’s a strange story, isn’t it?” And then she said, “Only it’s not a story at all, you were so right about that, and if I came over strange, I suppose that’s why. It’s like trying to ride a bike across a tightrope that isn’t there.”

  Stephanie hesitated, then decided to go on and make a complete fool of herself.

  “Did Mr. Edwick remember Cogan because Cogan brought him something? Because he brought tea for the tillerman?”

  For a moment neither man said anything, just regarded her with their inscrutable eyes—so strangely young and sweetly lad-like in their old faces—and she thought she might laugh or cry or do something, break out somehow just to kill her anxiety and growing certainty that she had made a fool of herself.

  Vince said, “It was a chilly crossing. Someone—a man—brought a paper cup of coffee to the pilot house and handed it in to Gard. They only passed a few words. This was April, remember, and by then it was already going dark. The man said, ‘Smooth crossing.’ And Gard said, ‘Ayuh.’ Then the man said ‘This has been a long time coming’ or maybe ‘I’ve been a long time coming.’ Gard said it might have even been ‘Lidle’s been a long time coming.’ There is such a name; there’s none in the Tinnock phone book, but I’ve found it in quite a few others.”

  “Was Cogan wearing the green coat or the topcoat?”

  “Steff,” Vince said, “Gard not only didn’t remember whether or not the man was wearing a coat; he probably couldn’t have sworn in a court of law if the man was afoot or on hossback. It was gettin dark, for one thing; it was one little act of kindness and a few passed words recalled a year and a half downstream, for a second; for a third…well, old Gard, you know…” He made a bottle-tipping gesture.

  “Speak no ill of the dead, but the man drank like a frickin fish,” Dave said. “He lost the ferryman job in ’85, and the Town put him on the plow, mostly so his family wouldn’t starve. He had five kids, you know, and a wife with MS. But finally he cracked up the plow, doin Main Street while blotto, and put out all the frickin power for a frickin week in February, pardon my frickin français. Then he lost that job and he was on the town. So am I surprised he didn’t remember more? No, I am not. But I’m convinced from what he did remember that, ayuh, the Colorado Kid came over from the mainland on the day’s last ferry, and, ayuh, he brought tea for the tillerman, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Good on you to remember about that, Steff.” And he patted her hand. She smiled at him. It felt like a rather dazed smile.

  “As you said,” Vince resumed, “there’s that two-hour time-difference to factor in.” He moved her left finger closer to her right. “It’s quarter past twelve, east coast time, when Cogan leaves his office. He drops his easy-going, just-another-day act the minute the elevator doors open on the lobby of his building. The very second. He goes dashin outside, hellbent for election, where that fast car—and an equally fast driver—is waitin for him.

  “Half an hour later, he’s at a Stapleton FBO, and five minutes after that, he’s mounting the steps of a private jet. He hasn’t left this arrangement to chance, either. Can’t have done. There are people who fly private on a fairly regular basis, then stay for a couple of weeks. The folks who take them one-way spend those two weeks attending to other charters. Our boy would have settled on one of those planes, and almost certainly would have made a cash arrangement to fly back out with them. Eastbound.”

  Stephanie said, “What would he have done if the people using the plane he planned to take cancelled their flight at the last minute?”

  Dave shrugged. “Same thing he would’ve done if there was bad weather, I guess,” he said. “Put it off to another day.”

  Vince, meanwhile, had moved Stephanie’s left finger a little further to the right. “Now it’s getting close to one in the afternoon on the east coast,” he said, “but at least our friend Cogan doesn’t have to worry about a lot of security rigamarole, not back in 1980 and especially not flyin private. And we have to assume—again—that he doesn’t have to wait in line with a lot of other planes for an active runway, because it screws up the timetable if he does, and all the while on the other end—” He touched her right finger. “—that ferry’s waitin. Last one of the day.

  “So, the flight lasts three hours. We’ll say that, anyway. My colleague here got on the Internet, he loves that sucker with a passion, and he says the weather was good for flying that day and the maps show that the jet-stream was in approximately the right place—”

  “But as to how strong it was, that’s information I’ve never been able to pin down,” Dave said. He glanced at Vince. “Given the tenuousness of your case, partner, that’s probably not a real bad thing.”

  “We’ll say three hours,” Vince repeated, and moved Stephanie’s left finger (the one she was coming to think of as her Colorado Kid finger) until it was less than two inches from her right one (which she now thought of as her James Cogan-Almost Dead finger). “It can’t have been much longer than that.”

  “Because the facts won’t let it,” she murmured, fascinated (and, in truth, a little frightened) by the idea. Once, while in high school, she had read a science fiction novel called The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. She didn’t know about the moon, but she was coming to believe that was certainly true of time.

  “No, ma’am, they won’t,” he agreed. “At four o’clock or maybe four-oh-five—we’ll say four-oh-five—Cogan lands and disembarks at Twin City Civil Air, that was the
only FBO at Bangor International Airport back then—”

  “Any records of his arrival?” she asked. “Did you check?” Knowing he had, of course he had, also knowing it hadn’t done any good, one way or another. It was that kind of story. The kind that’s like a sneeze which threatens but never quite arrives.

  Vince smiled. “Sure did, but in the carefree days before Homeland Security, all Twin City kept any length of time were their account books. They had a good many cash payments that day, includin some pretty good-sized refueling tabs late in the afternoon, but even those might mean nothing. For all we know, whoever flew the Kid in might have spent the night in a Bangor hotel and flown out the next morning—”

  “Or spent the weekend,” Dave said. “Then again, the pilot might have left right away, and without refueling at all.”

  “How could he do that, after coming all the way from Denver?” Stephanie asked.

  “Could have hopped down to Portland,” Dave said, “and filled his tank up there.”

  “Why would he?”

  Dave smiled. It gave him a surprisingly foxy look that was not much like his usual expression of earnest and slightly stupid honesty. It occurred to Stephanie now that the intellect behind that chubby, rather childish face was probably as lean and quick as Vince Teague’s.

  “Cogan might’ve paid Mr. Denver Flyboy to do it that way because he was afraid of leaving a paper trail,” Dave said. “And Mr. Denver Flyboy would very likely have gone along with any reasonable request if he was being paid enough.”

  “As for the Colorado Kid,” Vince resumed, “he’s still got almost two hours to get to Tinnock, get a fish-and-chips basket at Jan’s Wharfside, sit at a table eating it while he looks out at the water, and then catch the last ferry to Moose-Lookit Island.” As he spoke, he slowly brought Stephanie’s left and right forefingers together until they touched.

  Stephanie watched, fascinated. “Could he do it?”

  “Maybe, but it’d be awful goddamned tight,” Dave said with a sigh. “I’d have never believed it if he hadn’t actually turned up dead on Hammock Beach. Would you, Vince?”

  “Nup,” Vince said, without even pausing to consider.

  Dave said, “There’s four dirt airstrips within a dozen miles or so of Tinnock, all seasonal. They do most of their trade takin up tourists on sight-seein rides in the summer, or to look at the fall foliage when the colors peak out, although that only lasts a couple of weeks. We checked em on the off-chance that Cogan might have chartered him a second plane, this one a little prop-job like a Piper Cub, and flown from Bangor to the coast.”

  “No joy there, either, I take it.”

  “You take it right,” Vince said, and his grin was gloomy rather than foxy. “Once those elevator doors slide closed on Cogan in that Denver office building, this whole business is nothing but shadows you can’t quite catch hold of…and one dead body.

  “Three of those four airstrips were deserted in April, shut right down, so a plane could have flown in to any of em and no one the wiser. The fourth one—a woman named Maisie Harrington lived out there with her father and about sixty mutt dogs, and she claimed that no one flew into their strip from October of 1979 to May of 1980, but she smelled like a distillery, and I had my doubts if she could remember what went on a week before I talked to her, let alone a year and a half before.”

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

  “Stone blind and one-legged,” 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 time-window 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. “But why? 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’t that a good question.”

  Dave said: “A rig of a question.”

  Vince said: “The main question.”

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

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

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

  17

  “Accourse, we ain’t the Boston Globe,” Vince said. “We ain’t even the Bangor Daily 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 brand-new 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 else did 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 almost has 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. Did she know that? His wife?”

  The two men looked at each other. Vince sighed and rubbed the side of his blade-thin 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.