Read Online Drift by Jon McGoran - Free Book Online

he’s harmless. “He didn’t seem harmless when he grabbed the lady’s arm.”
    “Yeah, well. He’s got it bad for her.”
    “He’s got a strange way of showing it.”
    He leaned forward, the wooden chair creaking under him. “I’m afraid Dwight never got past the pigtail-pulling phase of male-female relationships.”
    It seemed like more than that to me, but the guy was making an effort, so I let it go.
    “Anyway,” he said, pushing himself to his feet. “What’ll you have?”
    I went with the bacon. The food came out fast, and it was excellent: eggs a little runny, bacon crisp and even. When I was done, Squires came back and told me it was on the house.
    “Thanks,” I said. “If I’d known ahead of time, I would have gotten the sausage, too.”
    “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
    *   *   *
    Stepping outside Branson’s, I practically bumped off of the heat. Nothing like a big fried breakfast to help you enjoy the summer weather. Still, the way the grease was sitting in my stomach, I figured a quick walk around town might help. The retail district was barely two blocks long, and I’d already walked half of it. I turned in the direction away from Bricker’s office and walked past a handful of shops and a bank before I came to a vacant hardware store and a rusty but operational gas station. That was it. I turned the corner and started heading back along the next street up, figuring I’d circle back to my car.
    The street was more like an alley, a couple of fenced yards on the left, some Dumpsters and the backs of the stores on the right. Someone was leaning against a utility pole halfway up the block, smoking a cigarette. He was doing something with his hands, but I couldn’t figure out what.
    He was big, maybe six-four. As I got closer, I saw sunlight reflecting off something shiny on his face and I recognized him as the guy from George Arnett’s Escalade. He looked like he recognized me, too, staring at me with that bored expression some people think is intimidating.
    I looked back at him with a steely gaze that I thought was intimidating, but he looked away from me, uninterested, and went back to what he was doing with his hands.
    As I got a little closer, I realized he was holding a pack of matches, and he was flicking them, lit, toward a row of fences. When I was twenty feet away, he put the cigarette to his lips and took a long pull, like there was more than one drag left in it, but he needed to finish. Then he flicked it onto the ground between us.
    I watched it bounce on the cement. Then I looked up at him. “That’s littering,” I said.
    He gave me that same bored stare and as he tore off another match, I heard a raspy mewing sound. Following both the direction of the sound and the trajectory of the matches, I looked down and saw a scruffy gray tabby backed into a corner where two sections of fence met. Its ears were flat against its head and its spine was arched. The ground in front of it was littered with matches, a few of them still lit.
    The asshole leaning against the pole was pressing another match to the flint strip on the cover. Before I really thought about it, about how I was suspended and out of jurisdiction, I reached out and slapped the matches away from him.
    Before they hit the ground, his hand shot out and smacked my face, enough to sting. I brought up my right, a tight fist with a little too much behind it.
    One moment he was there, then suddenly he wasn’t.
    One moment I felt his arm on my neck, then suddenly—well that was about it, really.
    Technically, I wouldn’t call it a K.O., but the next thing I knew, I was horizontal on the sidewalk, and I was alone. The spent matches were less than a foot from my face. One of them was still lit, but it went out as I watched, releasing a thin thread of smoke that made little loops in the turbulence from my breath.
    The cat was gone.
    I sat up slowly and looked around, but the street was empty. My head felt like it was