Bad Little Falls Read Online Free PDF Page A

uniform—striped back smock, loose black pants, and a visor with the Golden Arches emblazoned on it—perhaps the least sexy outfit a woman could possibly wear. And yet she was undeniably attractive. She was short: scarcely five feet tall. Maybe a few years older than me. Her hair was chestnut-colored, although there were streaks of blond and red in there, too. She had cheekbones fit for a fashion model and a slight cleft in her chin. Her eyes were large and maple brown. Her name tag said JAMIE .
    “What will you have?” Her voice was a bit rougher than that of most women her age.
    I smiled back. “The usual.”
    She cocked an eyebrow at me. “I don’t know what that is.”
    “You will.”
    She laughed and nodded, clearly an expert in deflecting flirtations. “Nice try,” she said. “What can I get you?”
    “An egg McMuffin and a large coffee with cream and sugar.”
    She punched the order into the computerized cash register and took my money with practiced efficiency. I watched her fill a cardboard cup with steaming coffee and then place a wrapped sandwich on a plastic tray. She didn’t make eye contact again until she slid the tray across the counter at me and said, “Are you a forest ranger?”
    I tapped the badge on my chest. “Game warden.”
    “My son’s really into nature and stuff. He’s reading this book about rangers that his teacher gave him.”
    I glanced down at her hand but didn’t see a wedding ring. The mention of the boy seemed to be a yield signal, though. “Sometimes we do school visits,” I said with a bit of a stammer. “We have a display we take around of antlers and furs we’ve confiscated from poachers. We’ll have an exhibit at the Machias Blueberry Festival in the summer.”
    “I’ll tell him,” she said with another smile, this one more polite than come-hither. She looked over my shoulder at the next person in line, indicating I should move along.
    Damn, though, she was pretty.
    I carried my tray to the table where Rivard was hunched over his BlackBerry. He seemed totally preoccupied by whatever text message or e-mail he was reading. “Shit,” he said.
    “What?”
    “The National Weather Service just issued a blizzard warning for tonight.”
    “I thought we were just supposed to get a few inches.”
    “Now it’s a foot of snow, with sixty-mile-per-hour winds.”
    I thought about my soirée with Doc Larrabee, wondering if the revised forecast would be a legitimate excuse to cancel, then imagined the old widower slaving away in the kitchen in anticipation of his big dinner party. I peeled the waxed paper from the egg sandwich, took a bite, and again felt nostalgic for the home cooking at the Square Deal Diner in Sennebec.
    In the plus column, this had to be the cleanest McDonald’s I’d ever seen—not a crumb anywhere.
    My chest hurt. I’d strained one of my pectoral muscles doing push-ups. I massaged the muscle through the Gore-Tex fabric of my parka. Lately I had begun to feel like a convict doing life in prison: Compulsive exercising and masturbation seemed to be the available leisure activities.
    At the far end of the room, the door swung open, and I saw a few of the older customers stiffen in their seats.
    Two men entered the restaurant. One was fairly short and wore a watch cap, a faded denim jacket, and baggy jeans: your garden-variety Washington County hoodlum. The other guy seemed to belong to another species: Homo giganticus. He was tall, with wavy brown locks, and was dressed in a distressed-leather jacket and black cargo pants. But what you noticed all the way across the room was the Maori-style tattoo on his face. The dark spiked pattern looked like permanent war paint.
    The two men swaggered to the counter. From the angle at which I was sitting, I couldn’t see the reaction of the woman at the register, but the older people at the end of the room began whispering to one another nervously, as if trouble were brewing, and I decided I’d better take a