Free The Colorado Kid by by Stephen King

said.
    “That’s true. As it was, she did remember him, but not if he was wearing a coat. I didn’t press her too hard on it, either, knowin that if I did she might remember somethin just to please me…or to get me out of her hair. She said ‘I seem to recall he was wearing a light green jacket, Mr. Teague, but that could be wrong.’ And maybe it was wrong, but do you know…I tend to think she was right. That he was wearing such a jacket.”
    “Then where was it?” Stephanie asked. “Did such a jacket ever turn up?”
    “No,” Dave said, “so maybe there was no jacket…although what he was doing outside on a raw seacoast night in April without one certainly beggars my imagination.”
    Stephanie turned back to Vince, suddenly with a thousand questions, all urgent, none fully articulated.
    “What are you smiling about, dear?” Vince asked.
    “I don’t know.” She paused. “Yes, I do. I have so goddamned many questions I don’t know which one to ask first.”
    Both of the old men whooped at that one. Dave actually fished a big handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped his eyes with it. “Ain’t that a corker!” he exclaimed. “Yes, ma’am! I tell you what, Steff: why don’t you pretend you’re drawin for the Tupperware set at the Ladies Auxiliary Autumn Sale? Just close your eyes and pick one out of the goldfish bowl.”
    “All right,” she said, and although she didn’t quite do that, it was close. “What about the dead man’s fingerprints? And his dental records? I thought that when it came to identifying dead people, those things were pretty much infallible.”
    “Most people do and probably they are,” Vince said, “but you have to remember this was 1980, Steff.” He was still smiling, but his eyes were serious. “Before the computer revolution, and long before the Internet, that marvelous tool young folks such as yourself take for granted. In 1980, you could check the prints and dental records of what police departments call an unsub—an unknown subject—against those of a person you thought your unsub might be, but checkin em against the prints or dental records of all the wanted felons on file in all the police departments would have taken years, and against those of all the folks reported disappeared every year in the United States? Even if you narrowed the list down to just men in their thirties and forties? Not possible, dear.”
    “But I thought the armed forces kept computer records, even back then…”
    “I don’t think so,” Vince said. “And if they did, I don’t believe the Kid’s prints were ever sent to them.”
    “In any case, the initial ID didn’t come from the man’s fingerprints or dental work,” Dave said. He laced his fingers over his considerable chest and appeared almost to preen in the day’s late sunshine, now slanting but still warm. “I believe that’s known as cuttin to the chase.”
    “So where did it come from?”
    “That brings us back to Paul Devane,” Vince said, “and I like coming back to Paul Devane, because, as I said, there’s a story there, and stories are my business. They’re my beat , we would have said back in the old, old days. Devane’s a little sip of Horatio Alger, small but satisfying. Strive and Succeed. Work and Win. ”
    “Piss and Vinegar,” Dave suggested.
    “If you like,” Vince said evenly. “Sure, ayuh, if you like. Devane goes off with those two stupid cops, O’Shanny and Morrison, as soon as Cathcart gives them the preliminary report on the burn victims from the apartment house fire, because they don’t give a heck about some accidental choking victim who died over on Moose-Lookit Island. Cathcart, meanwhile, does his gut-tossing on John Doe with yours truly in attendance. Onto the death certificate goes asphyxiation due to choking or the medical equivalent thereof. Into the newspapers goes my ‘sleeping ID’ photo, which our Victorian ancestors much more truthfully called a ‘death