Cujo by Stephen King Page B

for twelve days. Well, it had to be. Roger had convinced him of that. They would have to get in there and pitch like hell.
    Good old garrulous Roger, whom Vic loved almost like a brother. Roger would have been more than glad to cruise down here to Bentley’s with him, to have a coffee with him, and to talk his ear off. But this one time, Vic needed to be alone. To think. The two of them would be spending most of two weeks together starting Monday, sweating it out, and that was quite enough, even for soul brothers.
    His mind turned toward the Red Razberry Zingers fiasco again, and he let it, knowing that sometimes a no-pressure, almost idle review of a bad situation could—for him, at least—result in some new insight, a fresh angle.
    What had happened was bad enough, and Zingers had been withdrawn from the market. Bad enough, but not terrible. It wasn’t like that canned mushroom thing; no one had gotten sick or died, and even consumers realized that a company could take a pratfall now and then. Look at that McDonald’s glass giveaway a couple-three years ago. The paint on the glasses had been found to contain an unacceptably high lead content. The glasses had been withdrawn quickly, consigned to that promotional limbo inhabited by creatures such as Speedy Alka-Seltzer and Vic’s own personal favorite, Big Dick Chewing Gum.
    The glasses had been bad for the McDonald’s Corporation, but no one had accused Ronald McDonald of trying to poison his pre-teen constituency. And no one had actually accused the Sharp Cereal Professor either, although comedians from Bob Hope to Steve Martin had taken potshots at him and Johnny Carson had run off an entiremonologue—couched in careful double entendre—about the Red Razberry Zingers affair one evening during his opening spot on The Tonight Show. Needless to say, the Sharp Cereal Professor ads had been jerked from the tube. Also needless to say, the character actor who played the Professor was wild at the way events had turned on him.
    I could imagine a worse situation, Roger had said after the first shock waves had subsided a bit and the thrice-daily long-distance calls between Portland and Cleveland were no longer flying.
    What? Vic had asked.
    Well, Roger had answered, straight-faced, we could be working on the Bon Vivant Vichysoisse account.
    â€œMore coffee, sir?”
    Vic glanced up at the waitress. He started to say no, then nodded. “Half a cup, please,” he said.
    She poured it and left. Vic stirred it randomly, not drinking it.
    There had been a mercifully brief health scare before a number of doctors spoke up on TV and in the papers, all of them saying the coloration was harmless. There had been something like it once before; the stews on a commercial airline had been struck down with weird orange skin discolorations which finally proved to be nothing more serious than a rub-off of the orange dye on the life jackets they demonstrated for their passengers before takeoff. Years before that, the food dye in a certain brand of frankfurters had produced an internal effect similar to that of Red Razberry Zingers.
    Old man Sharp’s lawyers had lodged a multimillion-dollar damage suit against the dye manufacturer, a case that would probably drag on for three years and then be settled out of court. No matter; the suit provided a forum from which to make the public aware that the fault—the totally temporary fault, the completely harmless fault—had not been that of the Sharp Company.
    Nonetheless, Sharp stock had tumbled sharply on the Big Board. It had since made up less than half the original drop. The cereals themselves had shown a sudden dip in sales but had since made up most of the ground that had been lost after Zingers showed its treacherous red face. Sharp’s All-Grain Blend, in fact, was doing better than ever before.
    So there was nothing wrong here, right?
    Wrong. So wrong.
    The Sharp Cereal Professor was what was