The Colorado Kid   ::   Кинг Стивен

“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.