Read HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Online
Authors: T. J. BREARTON
Milliner looked at her in the rearview mirror.
“Who do you think you shot? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
Elizabeth’s head was swaying back and forth over the bumps. She seemed to be looking at the console between the two bucket seats or, at nothing at all. Her eyes rolled up to meet his in the mirror.
“Chris,” she said.
Something fluttered in Tom’s chest. It felt like someone had stuck a hose into his solar plexus for a second and turned on the air.
She looked at him, and he thought he saw a little bit of life come back into her eyes. “My ex.”
Tom looked ahead and had to step suddenly on the brakes; the stop sign for Route 33 was coming up fast. He saw the girl’s head lurch forward as the vehicle abruptly came to a stop. He glanced at her in the mirror.
“The officers didn’t find anyone there at the house. Did you move him?”
She shook her head, and blonde hair spilled across her brow. She blew at it, her hands still shackled.
“Do you think . . .” he began, carefully mapping out the next few words, as Steph would have recommended, “Do you think that maybe he survived? Walked away himself?”
“He looked pretty dead,” she said in a low voice, and he saw in the reflection a tear rolling down her cheek, out from beneath the mass of hair.
“Looks can be deceiving. I met Christopher, you know. That’s what you call him too, right? He doesn’t like to be called Chris?”
“No,” she said, “he doesn’t. He had this thing, you know, that people are given their names and then they always get shortened. And the shorter ones always suck,” she said.
Tom smiled. He’d been a Tom, sometimes a Tommy, but never a Thomas, not for years, not since his mother had passed.
Tom liked that the girl was talking about something like this. She was barely over twenty. Kids that age needed to be able to talk and to swear and to think. Otherwise they pulled their hoods up over their heads and started getting into the weird shit. Not that shooting your ex-boyfriend was exactly
normal
.
“So, you met him?”
“Yeah. Hung out with him last night,” Tom said. He wasn’t consciously trying to use the vernacular, Tom thought, but
I had him in custody
wasn’t accurate, either.
“Oh yeah? How’d you meet?”
Tom thought she was coming back around nicely, coming back to the land of the living. He figured that the kid gloves were working, and now he could be a little blunt.
“Can I ask you something strange? You ever heard of a defective? Or a wagerer?”
She shook her head. “What are they? Oh, well, I’ve heard of a wagerer.”
“You have?”
“Yeah, um, I mean, it’s someone who places a bet. That’s the usual meaning, right?”
“Yeah, that’s the usual meaning.”
He watched as a truck bearing hay bales made the left turn at the blinking yellow where 33 intersected with 4, and he started to slow. There was Isaac Palyswate’s dairy farm on the right, and the air was redolent with manure. Tom came to a full stop at the yellow and lit up a cigarette. “You mind?”
She shook her head no, and he saw her look at him with some bewilderment. Then Tom checked all his mirrors, and, seeing no one, asked her, “What other meaning might there be?”
She shrugged. She looked out the window, at the farm. “I guess there’s an old-fashioned meaning.”
“Old-fashioned?”
“You know, archaic. A wager in older times wasn’t just a bet. It was a promise.”
“How do you know that?”
“I went to a private school. They taught us Latin and ancient civilizations and all of that. Plus, Jared, my boyfriend, he leaves me home a lot and I read.”
“Where is Jared?”
Elizabeth looked from the window to the mirror. Then she looked down, back to the space between the two seats. “I don’t know.”
Tom let it go for now. “So, it means a promise?”
She seemed grateful to avoid the subject of Jared, to have something else to talk about. She wasn’t from around here, Tom knew that. She was a gene-pool chick, well-heeled from somewhere downstate, or maybe Jersey or Connecticut.
“I think it means a pledge,” she said. “When you pledge service.”
Tom felt a little jolt. He thought of his father, telling him:
You still need to serve.
“Maybe combat service,” the girl went on. “Like, a wager meant that you gave yourself to something, you promised yourself in order to resolve an issue. Like, a major issue. And you can make payments on it.”
“Payments?”
“That was what it was, I’m pretty sure.”
Tom smiled into the rearview mirror at her. “Thanks,” he said, “that’s helpful.”
“No sweat.”
An awkward silence ensued. Sometimes politeness betrayed its purpose, Tom thought, and only drew attention to the darker things at hand. He thought about Jared saying how they’d lost a child, Elizabeth and Christopher. His smile faded as he watched the road. He was reluctant to bring up the issue, sensing that while it was at the heart of things, it would be too much for the girl right now.
They entered into a long dip, and back up the other side. They would be nearing Red Rock Falls, and the Sheriff’s Department, in less than ten minutes.
They rode in silence.
The name “Red Rock” was a translation from a Native American word, Tom couldn’t remember which. The red rock that was found in the Adirondack Park was almandine garnets, circular shapes found within larger basalt rocks. They’d been discovered, and the town named, back when the mines to the northwest were still in operation, but the Native Americans had known about them long before that. Red Rock County encompassed a number of small villages, but the two most prominent were the Falls and Lake Meer.
Coming out of the dip, Tom watched the mountains to the south that rose up jagged against the sky, rocky and pined. He wondered about that boy, so long ago, who had left the phone booth after his emergency call, wandering off alone. Tom thought about the kids who’d been hanging around, their mouths pursed and eyes darting.
He looked at Liz in the backseat.
“Everything is going to be okay. We’ll sort this whole mess out.”
This time, she didn’t look at him, but stayed fixed on the space somewhere in front of her — or far beyond her. She’d apparently reverted back to the kind of numb shock she’d first been in. He regretted anything he might’ve said to provoke the relapse. But, he reconciled, she was going to go through what she was going to go through without any help from him. Whether she only thought she’d shot somebody or actually had, either way you cut it there were some things to sort out.
By the time they got to the outskirts of Red Rock, however, she was worse. She seemed completely gone, not responding when he called her name, stuck somewhere inside of herself like a garnet in the dark grey basalt.
Tom didn’t take her to the police station. He took her to the hospital.
“She was lucid for a while in the car,” he said to the PA, “and then she just went . . . I don’t know what you call that.”
The small hospital was buzzing with activity. Tom left the Goldfine girl with the PA and wandered about for a moment, lost in the din. He found himself standing outside the nurses’ station, and found Maddy at one of the desks.
He smiled at her. “Don’t you ever go home?”
She smiled back. “I could ask you the same thing.” She scribbled on the top sheet of a stack of papers and then stood, taking the sheaf of documents with her. “Did you get any sleep?”
“Not really,” said Tom.
Truth was he had slept; he’d gone down for about three hours before his beeper went off. Sheriff Johnston had called Roger Hadley for a detective to head to the Kingston house, but Hadley reported that Tom had been out there already, that he was investigating something, and so deferred. Truth was, Hadley had a new girlfriend, a real piper from Comlinks, and hadn’t wanted to get out of bed.
Tom’s sleep had been typically thin and discomfiting. In his dreams he’d been running down kids on fire, one after the other, as they stood burning in the streets. Maddy read it in his face.
“I can get you Valium.”
“I’m alright.”
“What’ve you brought me?”
“A young girl who thinks she killed somebody. Now she’s . . . I don’t know. Minimally conscious, I guess you’d say.”
Maddy scrutinized his face. Tom saw flecks of yellow in her blue irises. He felt like hugging her, but the feeling passed.
“You brought me a murder suspect?”
“There’s no body. Between you, me, and the sea, I don’t think she killed anyone. Just check her out, for me. Please.”
Her eyes continued to search him. “I’ll see to her,” she said at last, and then smiled and moved past him.
He turned and said to her back, “Seriously, why are you still here?”
“I love my job,” she said over her shoulder, and walked out of the cramped little nurses’ station.
She stopped in the doorway and turned. “A little boy needs a transfusion, and we may end up having to ship him to RRMC.”
Tom felt himself stiffen up. He thought of the baby boy, the nurse singing a lullaby.
“For a blood transfusion? You can do that here, can’t you?”
“Well, over in the Falls, yes. But, there’s other things.”
“The thing with his eyes?”
“Yes and no. We’re not entirely sure about the eyes. Anyway, if we go over there, I’m going along.”
Tom stood there, not quite knowing what to say. He knew Maddy didn’t have a car, so she must’ve meant she’d ride over to Red Rock Falls in the ambulance. She lived only a few houses down from the little hospital here in Lake Meer, and she walked everywhere, that bright orange scarf around her neck. She was singular, that woman, and she kept it that way.
“Where’s his mother? His parents?”
“His mother was a sixteen-year-old on methadone when she had him. And at seventeen, her boyfriend tried to convince her to get rid of him. It’s not a nice story, Tommy.”
“Get rid of him?”
“Makes other things pale in comparison, doesn’t it?”
Tom nodded grimly. “How urgent is the need for his transfusion?”
“They’re prepping him for the transfusion now. He needs it right away.”
“He’s had blood loss?”
“No.” Her eyes searched him. “I have to be careful what I say, Tommy, even to you.” She lowered her voice to the point he had to lean in, barely able to hear her. “If he doesn’t get the blood, he could die.”
“What about anyone here? You’re stocked like the Ritz on New Year’s Eve. Got any potential donors here? You must have a similar type. Is he a rare type?”
“We’re checking,” she said, “but it’s a long shot. He is. And he may need surgery. It’s going to be tough . . . there is no local anesthetic which can touch it, and general anesthesia is . . .”
She stopped, and Tom saw something pass over her. The sight of her, that steeliness coming over her in the face of emotion, it reminded him of something Maddy used to say years ago, that summer when they had spent some time together.
Better fish or cut bait, Milliner
. She was smiling again, now. Her steeliness was never able to eclipse her warmth.
“I have to go, doll.”
“Okay,” he said, for some reason reluctant to let her leave. “Let me know if I can, I don’t know, let me know if I can do anything for you. Anything.”
Jared stalked through the woods.
He moved out of the trees and into a clearing of tall, dead, goldenrod. The snow here was thin, and allowed the reeds to stand on end. Where they were still bent, he followed, moving along through the labyrinth of deer runs.
The air was fresh. It was a cool, wet, fresh thing; a living thing. The muted colors, the drab ecru of the goldenrod stalks, the dark green of the tree line hemming the clearing, the battleship grey clouds — they all seemed brighter, as though Jared’s eyes were a siphon, drawing out every last drop of color and contrast. He felt sharp, so sharp. So crisp, like the air. His hangover was nonexistent. He’d had no breakfast but didn’t require it. His breathing was low and slow, whistling through his nostrils. He felt fit, lithe, and powerful.
He moved through the deer runs, the Mossberg shotgun slung over his back, his hands out to either side of him, palms out and facing forward, splayed fingers knocking softly into stiffened reeds.
In the middle of the clearing, he stopped, squatted. He thought for a moment, and then pulled down his pants. A black crow high in a tangle of birch called while he moved his bowels. He watched it; it took off from its gnarled perch and flapped heavily across the clearing. After the interruption, utter stillness. He stood, pulled up his pants, and continued on.
Before long he found what he knew he would find. There, beside one of the deer runs, as though it had been thrown by impact, was a fawn. The small animal was bloody and already hardening. Its head had been mostly severed from its neck, and had been twisted back so that the top of its skull almost touched its spine. The dramatic angle the head had taken reminded him of a cave painting. The animal lay as though it were suspended in flight, as if its head were back so far in order that it might see God; that it reported to the heavens or received messages.
Verrega
, thought Jared, standing over the dead fawn.
Vishnu. Parratu. Deigine.
Jared looked up, sensing movement along the perimeter of the clearing. Slowly, he slid his shotgun round in front of him, dropped the strap from his shoulder, and brought the butt of the gun up to his shoulder. The rifle would have been a better weapon for the hunt, but the shotgun would work too — the Accu-choke allowed for a tight, concentrated dispersal of the shot.
He saw the back of one animal, moving through the goldenrod, only yards from the fir and balsam and pine evergreens, those romantic, hardy mates in their rows. And there was the haphazard jungle of the deciduous forest: fallen trees covered in moss, erratics, and boulders. The animals moved, faintly snapping through birch branches, over fallen boughs, pine needles.
Two of them at first, and then a third. Grey ridges, grey backs moving like smooth stones through the arboreal detritus and high, brittle weeds.
The coyotes.
* * *
Elizabeth woke up.
“Hi there, sweetie,” said a woman. “How are you feeling?”
“Uh, okay,” said Liz. Her jaw felt rusty, her tongue and mouth were parched. “Can I have something to drink?”
“I’m sorry honey, no, not now. You won’t get dehydrated though, I promise.”
“Why can’t I have something to drink?”
The woman turned from where she was watching the blood pressure monitor and spoke to someone. “Theresa, can we get her some ice chips? That okay, George?”
Liz looked around. The place was brightly lit, not dark and cozy like her room. There were beeping machines; a general commotion or buzz.
“Sure, Maddy,” said a man standing there, dressed in blue scrubs, a stethoscope hanging around his neck. The man had tightly curled black hair flecked with grey. His face was as clean-shaven as any she’d ever seen, like he’d drawn the razor across his cheeks only moments before. The one called Theresa left the room, an older woman with grey and ruddy-brown hair piled in a bun on top of her head and a floral shirt on. Who were these people? What were they doing?
“Where am I?”
Maddy unwrapped the belt from Liz’s arm with the sound of ripping Velcro. She smiled as she put away the instruments and picked up a clipboard. “Little Rock Hospital. We’re prepping you to take a short drive over to RRMC, in the next town. It’s a bigger hospital.”
“Why are you moving me to another hospital? I don’t understand.”
Maddy looked at her.
“You can help us.”
“To do what?”
Maddy hesitated. “First, you have to sign this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a consent form.”
Liz looked from Maddy to the guy she’d called George. George had no expression on his face. If anything, he had the air of a man who felt he should be somewhere else.
“For?”
“Transplant surgery.”
“You’re crazy. What are you talking about?”
“We need you,” said Maddy. “We—”
“This is a very unusual situation,” said the PA, George, finally speaking up. He took a step towards the bed, towards Liz, and put his hand on the bed railing. Liz noticed the wiry black hairs on his knuckles. She saw the gold wedding band. “It’s really one in a million,” he said.
“Where’s the police officer, the detective? Mister Milliner?”
“Why don’t we just show you, babydoll.”
“Show me what? Where’s the detective?”
“He’ll be back. Don’t you worry.”
The two of them unlocked a mechanism so that the bed could roll, and George called out, “Theresa!” who appeared almost simultaneously with a plastic cup of ice chips. She gave George a questioning look as she walked over to Liz and handed her the cup. “There. Go ahead and enjoy those, honey.”
Liz tipped the cup back. They were good. So cold, and cutting through the cotton mouth.
People in the hallway moved around them. Liz remembered her horrible dream, a hallway corridor just like this, only empty, except for what waited at the far end. Some misshapen thing, moving around on its hands and feet, anticipating her arrival.
Liz tensed and drew in a deep breath and steeled herself to escape.
* * *
Milliner paced around in the parking lot, waiting for the ambulance to come out from the emergency kiosk. The day had warmed up considerably, but the rain still drizzled down in the gloomy afternoon. He was on his cell phone with Sheriff Johnston.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said the Sheriff.
“I’m not,” said Tom. “It’s amazing. One in a million, really. It —”
“Jesus, Tom,” barked Johnston. “That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it. What in the hell are you doing with a suspected shooter, taking her to the hospital? I don’t care whose blood type matches whose. Tom, I could pull your number on this, and you know it.”
Tom looked into the misting rain. “Talk to Michelle Branch again,” he said. “There was no body found, no blood, no—”
“Branch was all hot to come find you! She was following your GPS to the hospital when I called her, how in the hell did you think I knew where you were? I had to turn her right around when she got the news.”
“What news?” Tom felt something cold shift inside of his gut.
“The shit the trooper found out there.”
“Oh,” Tom said, feeling relieved. “There was foul play out there at place, yeah. Damaged doors, windows. The Kingston boy already made repairs. He had some coyotes attack him.”
“Coyotes?” I don’t know anything about Coyotes. The trooper says
bodies
, Tom. People. You need to bring her in right now.”
Tom felt like he’d been punched. He remembered smelling something coming from the shed. He’d assumed it was the dead animals. But, people?
“Where’s the trooper now?”
“Cruickshand stayed. Called for backup. Went after the Kingston kid.”
Tom sighed and closed his eyes. The Sheriff was right, there was no question; he was off the rails. He opened his eyes and looked into the rain again, it was covering the cars in the lot with shining beads. A hazy shape, like a young man, walked behind a row of cars, then disappeared.
“I will bring her in. I promise. She’ll be in my custody, not going anywhere. She has a chance to save a life here.”
The Sheriff was silent for a moment, a rare feat for Blake Johnston. “No way,” he said. “We have
dead bodies
out there. Your suspect called and said she killed somebody. You need to get her here right now, or I’m going to force you to finally retire, Tom.”
The Sheriff hung up.