The Colorado Kid by by Stephen King Page A

else, and it occurred to her that she had been picking at crumbs while there was a roast sitting on the table. She held up the forefinger of her left hand beside her left cheek. “George the Artist waves goodbye to Cogan—to the Colorado Kid—around ten-fifteen in the morning. Or maybe it’s more like ten-twenty by the time the elevator actually comes and he gets on.”
    “Ayuh,” Vince said. He was looking at her, bright-eyed. They both were.
    Now Stephanie held up the forefinger of her right hand beside her right cheek. “And the counter-girl at Jan’s Wharfside across the reach in Tinnock said he ate his fish-and-chips basket at a table looking out over the water at around five-thirty in the afternoon.”
    “Ayuh,” Vince said again.
    “What’s the time difference between Maine and Colorado? An hour?”
    “Two,” Dave said.
    “Two,” she said, and paused, and said it again. “ Two. So when George the Artist saw him for the last time, when those elevator doors slid shut, it was already past noon in Maine.”
    “Assuming the times are right,” Dave agreed, “and assume’s all we can do, isn’t it?”
    “Would it work?” she asked them. “Could he possibly have gotten here in that length of time?”
    “Yes,” Vince said.
    “No,” Dave said.
    “Maybe,” they said together, and Stephanie sat looking from one to the other, bewildered, her coffee cup forgotten in her hand.

16
    “That’s what makes this wrong for a newspaper like the Globe ,” Vince said, after a little pause to sip his milky coffee and collect his thoughts. “Even if we wanted to give it up.”
    “Which we don’t,” Dave put in (and rather testily).
    “Which we don’t,” Vince agreed. “But if we did…Steffi, when a big-city newspaper like the Globe or the New York Times does a feature story or a feature series, they want to be able to provide answers , or at least suggest them, and do I have a problem with that? The hell I do! Pick up any big-city paper, and what do you find on the front page? Questions disguised as news stories. Where is Osama Bin Laden? We don’t know. What’s the President doing in the Middle East? We don’t know because he don’t. Is the economy going to get stronger or go in the tank? Experts differ. Are eggs good for you or bad for you? Depends on which study you read. You can’t even get the weather forecasters to tell you if a nor’easter is going to come in from the nor’east, because they got burned on the last one. So if they do a feature story on better housing for minorities, they want to be able to say if you do A, B, C, and D, things’ll be better by the year 2030.”
    “And if they do a feature story on Unexplained Mysteries,” Dave said, “they want to be able to tell you the Coast Lights were reflections on the clouds, and the Church Picnic Poisonings were probably the work of a jilted Methodist secretary. But trying to deal with this business of the time…”
    “Which you happen to have put your finger on,” Vince added with a smile.
    “And of course it’s outrageous no matter how you think of it,” Dave said.
    “But I’m willing to be outrageous,” Vince said. “Hell, I looked into the matter, just about dialed the phone off the damn wall, and I guess I have a right to be outrageous.”
    “My father used to say you can cut chalk all day, yet it won’t never be cheese,” Dave said, but he was also smiling a little.
    “That’s true, but let me whittle a little bit just the same,” Vince said. “Let’s say the elevator doors close at ten-twenty, Mountain Time, okay? Let’s also say, just for the sake of argument, that this was all planned out in advance and he had a car standin by with the motor running.”
    “All right,” Stephanie said, watching him closely.
    “Pure fantasy,” Dave snorted, but he also looked interested.
    “It’s farfetched, anyway,” Vince agreed, “but he was there at quarter past ten and at Jan’s Wharfside a little more than