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

cord scrunching. Neither Tom nor Christopher paid much attention to it. Even the burning “lookout” kid on Cherry Road was temporarily forgotten, too.
    “What did you say? What did you just say to me?”
    Tom searched the kid’s eyes. At the same time he felt the old familiar feelings: that coming-to-a-boil anger. The firmer tug from the drink muscle. Come on, Tom. Lay him down. Lay him down and forget all of this shit .
    “You don’t need to call and wait for back up, Tom. It’s not that kind of situation. You’ve got everything you need right here.”
    “What did you say about that? About ‘the last time I waited?’ What do you know? Who are you?”
    “Tom,” said Christopher. His voice was endlessly calm, while Tom’s had escalated to a full-throated growl. There was no stopping it this time. Fuck AA, fuck anger management. Fuck Understanding The Costs Of Anger , or Distortions of the Anger Payoff. Tom knew what the payoff would be. This kid would be out of his life, and the others with him. What the hell had he been thinking?
    “The payphone where you were tonight. Where you first saw me, at that old payphone. You always said the kids slowed you up, the kids who’d been hanging around.”
    Tom was on the verge now. The urge to reach out and put his hands around the kid’s throat was incredibly strong. He could taste it, this urge, literally taste it. It tasted the way paint thinner smelled. It tasted the way blood shone under an arc-sodium light in a parking lot, rendering it black as tar.
    “It wasn’t the kids. It was you, waiting for someone else to come and handle it. Waiting for back-up, waiting for someone sober to do your job.”
    Tom stood, unable to move. He had been a deputy then, working for the county on road patrol. There had been a call from dispatch that someone had called for the Rescue Squad — this had been in the days before the 911 offices had been set up in the county seat. The call had been generated from a phone booth at a convenience store just on the edge of Red Rock Falls. Hang-ups were usually nothing, almost always pranks, but of course, it had to be investigated. He’d been notified by dispatch over the radio at around 8:30 PM. But he’d sat for a minute, smoked, watching the darkening trees sway in the wind. It was summer, and the sun still cast a fading glow. When he’d gotten to the convenience store, there had been plenty of people around, many of them young — the pre-adolescent group (“tweens” they called them now) tended to loiter there, a group caught in that awful and awkward middle place where staying home and playing Cowboys and Indians in the back yard had long since lost its zeal, but the sufferings of freedom — bars, late nights, illicit sex, genuine trouble — were not yet available. There in the in-between, bored, full of energy and blooming sin, the kids were apt to do about anything.
    Tom had pulled in and asked a group of kids about the phone call and no one had known anything, of course. They’d played dumb and smoked cigarettes they were too young to buy and scuffed their feet over the bits of fresh summer asphalt. “No, sir, officer, we don’t have no idea,” and yet there had been a pall over them, particularly over a couple of them on the other side of the phone booth mounted on the corner of the convenience store. They were gathered just beyond the air hose ( 25 cents !) and the ice machine. Tom had approached those kids, and had sensed something, but he’d dismissed it.
    “I’ve been an investigator for thirteen years,” Tom said now, staring blankly into the kitchen. His eyes found the phone, lying on the floor, emitting a buzzing tone. The sound resembled the strange noise outside. “On road patrol for the county starting fifteen years before that. That phone-booth call hang-up came my third year on the job. That would have put it at least twenty-four years ago.”
    He finally looked up at Christopher, gripping the rifle with