Read Online The Colorado Kid by by Stephen King - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: by Stephen King
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sometimes maybe it is, and what’s so wrong about that? How long do you think it takes a man to choke to death on a piece of meat, and then be dead forever?”
None of them had an answer to that. On the reach, some rich summer man’s yacht tooted with hollow self-importance as it approached the Tinnock town dock.
9
“Let Paul Devane alone awhile,” Vince said. “Dave can tell you the rest of that part in a few minutes. I think maybe I ought to tell you about the gut-tossing first.”
“Ayuh,” Dave said. “It ain’t a story, Steff, but that part’d probably come next if it was.”
Vince said, “Don’t get the idea that Cathcart did the autopsy right away, because he didn’t. There’d been two people killed in the apartment house fire that brought O’Shanny and Morrison to our neck of the woods to begin with, and they came first. Not just because they died first, but because they were murder victims and John Doe looked like being just an accident victim. By the time Cathcart did get to John Doe, the detectives were gone back to Augusta, and good riddance to them.
“I was there for that autopsy when it finally happened, because I was the closest thing there was to a professional photographer in the area back in those days, and they wanted a ‘sleeping ID’ of the guy. That’s a European term, and all it means is a kind of portrait shot presentable enough to go into the newspapers. It’s supposed to make the corpse look like he’s actually snoozin.”
Stephanie looked both interested and appalled. “Does it work?”
“No,” Vince said. Then: “Well…p’raps to a kid. Or if you was to look at it quick, and with one eye winked shut. This one had to be done before the autopsy, because Cathcart thought maybe, with the throat blockage and all, he might have to stretch the lower jaw too far.”
“And you didn’t think it would look quite so much like he was sleeping if he had a belt tied around his chin to keep his mouth shut?” Stephanie asked, smiling in spite of herself. It was awful that such a thing should be funny, but it was funny; some appalling creature in her mind insisted on popping up one sicko cartoon image after another.
“Nope, probably not,” Vince agreed, and he was also smiling. Dave, too. So if she was sick, she wasn’t the only one. Thank God. “What such a thing’d look like, I think, would be a corpse with a toothache.”
Then they were all laughing. Stephanie thought that she loved these two old buzzards, she really did.
“Got to laugh at the Reaper,” Vince said, plucking his glass of Coke off the railing. He helped himself to a sip, then put it back. “Especially when you’re my age. I sense that bugger behind every door, and smell his breath on the pillow beside me where my wives used to lay their heads—God bless em both—when I put out my light.
“ Got to laugh at the Reaper.
“Anyway, Steffi, I took my head-shots—my ‘sleeping IDs’—and they came out about as you’d expect. The best one made the fella look like he mighta been sleepin off a bad drunk or was maybe in a coma, and that was the one we ran a week later. They also ran it in the Bangor Daily News , plus the Ellsworth and Portland papers. Didn’t do any good, of course, not as far as scarin up people who knew him, at least, and we eventually found out there was a perfectly good reason for that.
“In the meantime, though, Cathcart went on about his business, and with those two dumbbells from Augusta gone back to where they came from, he had no objections to me hangin around, as long as I didn’t put it in the paper that he’d let me. I said accourse I wouldn’t, and accourse I never did.
“Working from the top down, there was first that plug of steak Doc Robinson had already seen in the guy’s throat. ‘That’s your cause of death right there, Vince,’ Cathcart said, and the cerebral embolism (which he discovered long after I’d left to catch the ferry back to Moosie) never
None of them had an answer to that. On the reach, some rich summer man’s yacht tooted with hollow self-importance as it approached the Tinnock town dock.
9
“Let Paul Devane alone awhile,” Vince said. “Dave can tell you the rest of that part in a few minutes. I think maybe I ought to tell you about the gut-tossing first.”
“Ayuh,” Dave said. “It ain’t a story, Steff, but that part’d probably come next if it was.”
Vince said, “Don’t get the idea that Cathcart did the autopsy right away, because he didn’t. There’d been two people killed in the apartment house fire that brought O’Shanny and Morrison to our neck of the woods to begin with, and they came first. Not just because they died first, but because they were murder victims and John Doe looked like being just an accident victim. By the time Cathcart did get to John Doe, the detectives were gone back to Augusta, and good riddance to them.
“I was there for that autopsy when it finally happened, because I was the closest thing there was to a professional photographer in the area back in those days, and they wanted a ‘sleeping ID’ of the guy. That’s a European term, and all it means is a kind of portrait shot presentable enough to go into the newspapers. It’s supposed to make the corpse look like he’s actually snoozin.”
Stephanie looked both interested and appalled. “Does it work?”
“No,” Vince said. Then: “Well…p’raps to a kid. Or if you was to look at it quick, and with one eye winked shut. This one had to be done before the autopsy, because Cathcart thought maybe, with the throat blockage and all, he might have to stretch the lower jaw too far.”
“And you didn’t think it would look quite so much like he was sleeping if he had a belt tied around his chin to keep his mouth shut?” Stephanie asked, smiling in spite of herself. It was awful that such a thing should be funny, but it was funny; some appalling creature in her mind insisted on popping up one sicko cartoon image after another.
“Nope, probably not,” Vince agreed, and he was also smiling. Dave, too. So if she was sick, she wasn’t the only one. Thank God. “What such a thing’d look like, I think, would be a corpse with a toothache.”
Then they were all laughing. Stephanie thought that she loved these two old buzzards, she really did.
“Got to laugh at the Reaper,” Vince said, plucking his glass of Coke off the railing. He helped himself to a sip, then put it back. “Especially when you’re my age. I sense that bugger behind every door, and smell his breath on the pillow beside me where my wives used to lay their heads—God bless em both—when I put out my light.
“ Got to laugh at the Reaper.
“Anyway, Steffi, I took my head-shots—my ‘sleeping IDs’—and they came out about as you’d expect. The best one made the fella look like he mighta been sleepin off a bad drunk or was maybe in a coma, and that was the one we ran a week later. They also ran it in the Bangor Daily News , plus the Ellsworth and Portland papers. Didn’t do any good, of course, not as far as scarin up people who knew him, at least, and we eventually found out there was a perfectly good reason for that.
“In the meantime, though, Cathcart went on about his business, and with those two dumbbells from Augusta gone back to where they came from, he had no objections to me hangin around, as long as I didn’t put it in the paper that he’d let me. I said accourse I wouldn’t, and accourse I never did.
“Working from the top down, there was first that plug of steak Doc Robinson had already seen in the guy’s throat. ‘That’s your cause of death right there, Vince,’ Cathcart said, and the cerebral embolism (which he discovered long after I’d left to catch the ferry back to Moosie) never
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