The Colorado Kid   ::   Кинг Стивен

“Still dumb, and you needn’t be too polite to say it, you’re among friends,” Dave told herwith a grin. “But theIslander had no in’trest in makin trouble for those two detectives. I made that clear to Murray, and I also made it clear that this wasn’t a criminal matter; all I was doing was tryin my best to find out who the poor fella was, because someplace there were very likely people missin him and wantin to know what had befallen him. Murray said he’d have to get back to me on that, which I kinda expected, but I still had a bad afternoon, wonderin if maybe I should have played my cards a little different. I could have, you know; I could have had Doc Robinson make the call to Augusta, or maybe even talked Cathcart into doing it, but the idea of using either of them as a cat’s paw kind of went against my grain. I s’pose it’s corny, but I really do believe that in nine cases out of ten, honesty’s the best policy. I was just worried this one might turn out to be the tenth.

“In the end, though, it came out all right. Murray called me back just after I’d made up my mind he wasn’t going to and had started pullin on my jacket to go home for the day—isn’t that the way things like that usually go?”

“A watched pot never boils,” Vince said.

“My gosh, that’s like poitry, give me a pad and a pencil so I can write it down,” Dave said, grinning more widely than ever. The grin did more than take years off his face; it knocked them flying, and she could see the boy he had been. Then he grew serious once more, and the boy disappeared again.

“In big cities evidence gets lost all the time, I understand, but I guess Augusta’s not that big yet, even if it is the state capital. Sergeant Murray had no trouble whatsoever finding the evidence bag with Paul Devane’s signature on the Possession Slip; he said he had it ten minutes after we got done talking. The rest of the time that went by he was trying to get permission from the right person to let me know what was inside it…which he finally did. The cigarettes were Winstons, and the stamp on the bottom was just the way Paul Devane remembered: a regular little stickon type that said colorado in tiny dark letters. Murray said he’d be turning the information over to the Attorney General’s office, and they’d appreciate knowing ‘in advance of publication’ if we got anywhere in identifying the Colorado Kid. That’s what he called him, so I guess you could say it was Sergeant Murray in the A.G.’s Evidence Storage and filing Department who coined the phrase. He also said he hoped that if wedid have any luck identifying the guy, that we’d note in our story that the A.G.’s office had been helpful.