Read Online HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down by T. J. Brearton - Free Book Online

big man, getting on in years, a guy with hair sprouting from his nose and ears, the sort of man who always smelled of Old Spice and Chiclets. Madison was fond of him.
    “Babylove,” she said to the kid, “sit up for me.”
    He did, looking at her with wide, blue eyes underscored with purple semicircles. His left hand was crooked-up like a paraplegic’s. Both his hands shook. She put the heated pillow behind his back. He was wheezing.
    “Okay, just breathe nice and slow, nice and slow.”
    “My hands are numb,” he said.
    “You’re hyperventilating. I need you to relax. I know you can do that for me, kiddo. Just breathe nice and slow. Not too deep, just relaxed.”
    He looked at her and he was listening to her. He was lucid enough. She could smell a kind of fruity sweat, the alcohol coming out of him.
    “Okay,” she said, “be right back.”
    Madison popped into the room next door. She was a larger woman, a plus-sized-model, she thought of herself. She had bright blue globes of her own. Roland told her she wore too much eye makeup. Roland didn’t understand what Farah Fawcett had done to women in the seventies and eighties.
    She smiled and procured the necessary paperwork. She and Roland would soon be scribbling on the forms together.
    “Maddy,” said someone. She looked up.
    In the hallway was the PA, George. “What’s the haps?”
    “I think we got some minor detox going on. He’s pretty freaked. He’s a sweetie. He’s gonna need something for his anxiety or he’s never going to get his breathing down. Maybe some Prednisone. He’s gunked up in there too.”
    George nodded and snapped his gum as he looked down the hallway. His hands were shoved into the pockets of his teal uniform which gaped at the neck revealing a hairless chest. He looked down to the other end of the hallway, then at Madison, and said “Thanks.”
    Madison smiled and went back to her paperwork. Henrietta came into the room, and Madison handed the stack off to her. Henrietta took it wordlessly and walked back into room one, where the kid was, and started asking him all of the attending questions. Madison could hear his tremulous voice. Mid-to-late twenties, she put him. Probably old enough to know better, but her heart went out.
    She pushed herself up from the desk, groaning, and then laughing quietly at the noise she’d made. She went into radiology to tell Katrine to boot things up. They’d run the kid through the X-ray and then she’d talk to him about the drinking.
    As she walked across the hallway she saw that, a little ways down, her People magazine had fallen off the counter where she’d left it. It was spine-up, and the faces of Jennifer Aniston and her father, Victor, the guy from the soaps, with the headline “Reunion Turns Ugly,” were sideways and distorted and yawed. The sight of the magazine in disarray like that, for some reason, was the only thing that had disturbed her peace all night.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Elizabeth screamed again. Something was crawling about on the back porch now as well. There was a distinct scrabbling noise — the kind of noise that only fingernails, long and tough, could make — as something fumbled with the door handle there.
    Elizabeth wheeled around at the noise and looked through the living room, out to the porch and beyond that to where snow fell over the pond. It was pretty snow, with big, fluffy flakes drifting and twirling down. The fact that it was pretty somehow made things even worse. It was as if heaven was right there, within reach — peace, tranquility, normalcy, freedom. But between her and salvation, something on the porch awaited.
    It clawed at the door, trying to open it.
    “Jaaaaareeedd!”
    He came up behind her, his breathing rapid, and the smell of him very strong. He wiped his nose with his sleeve. She wondered if he’d done a couple of lines tonight in the back of the bar, CCR blaring on the jukebox, an overturned shot glass on the wood, as his buyback for the next