John Miller - Too Far Gone

Grub waited until the TV people and the cops were about done loading up and the deputies had pulled the first of the boat trailers down to get their boats. They’d driven the amphibian up onto a flatbed eighteen-wheeler, so in a while they’d be gone and the dock would be back to normal. One good thing was that the cops had filled up all their boats with gas, and Moody was happy about that, plus on account of all the chips, sandwiches, and cold drinks he’d sold them. None of them had tipped Grub, because cops and TV people were all a bunch of stuck-up idiots. He decided that he wouldn’t ever again watch their TV shows or talk to cops if he could help it. They were all dick-brain shit-heels anyway.

Grub walked slowly to his bus and climbed inside, slamming the door behind him.

It was funny how that shot-up man in Leland’s boat had hung on to his briefcase when there weren’t nothing in it but a bunch of ruined paper. Grub had taken some of it, and now he opened his footlocker and took out the stack to look at it. With the bullet holes in them, he couldn’t even use them to draw on, but the paper felt nice to his fingers and the writing on it stuck out so you could sort of feel the words.

Grub took one of the big papers and held it up to the window and looked at the way the light went through it and showed a design that appeared to be stuck inside the piece of paper. He studied the edges for a seam, but there weren’t any, so he couldn’t figure out how they got the picture and words inside a skinny piece of paper. He didn’t know what the words said or what they could be for.

Grub knew what they’d be good for after he got tired of looking at them. Rolled up and set afire with a match, they’d reach deep enough in the heater to light it.

Back in her hotel room, Alexa ran herself a hot bath. She soaked for almost an hour, running more hot water into the tub as it cooled. After draining the water and drying off, she lay across the bed and closed her eyes. The events of the afternoon in the swamp played in her mind like a slow-motion nightmare. At least, she decided, there was only room behind her eyes for one nightmare at a time.

In her short life there had been many terrors emblazoned in her brain. A thousand insecurities, pains, and insults had occurred, and each was cataloged in her mind’s files. She wished that she could, as the local field office had, remove the files to a faraway place and leave them stored where she would never have to recover them should she choose not to do so. If only life were so simple to deal with.

She took the bundle of postcards out of her suitcase and, one by one, tore them into confetti. That done, she flushed them down the toilet, watching the shards of evil spiral down into sewer oblivion. Alexa smiled. Maybe her sister’s venomous words would live in her memory, but maybe she could erase their impact, close the open wounds in her heart. She had gathered evidence on her sister by duplicitous means, had arrested her because it was the right thing to do-the only thing she could do and remain true to herself. It had obviously hurt her more than it had her sister. Antonia was a creature who had been maimed by her early years. Alexa had come out of similar experiences and had not allowed her history to shape her into a coldly manipulating thing. Antonia would never forgive Alexa, but Alexa was going to forgive herself and move on. From now on she would never read another postcard. Never again would Antonia make Alexa feel bad.

Alexa was sure she could sleep for a week, and would have drifted off, except the ringing phone invaded her silence, demanded her attention.

She lifted the receiver. “Alexa Keen.”

“Please hold for the director,” the pleasant voice instructed.

“Agent Keen. Good job! Gary West is alive and the perps have been rounded up. The LePointes should be quite pleased. As soon as you get back to Washington, you and I are going to have lunch and you can fill me in. Agent, I’m not a man who forgets the people who make me look good. See you next week, Agent Keen. By the way, our plane will be leaving from the Naval Air Station at nine o’clock tonight. It’s over the river in Belle Chase. You weren’t thinking of staying there, I hope.”

“No, sir. I’ll be at the field.”

“Good,” he said.

After she hung up, Alexa opened her eyes. Her attention fell onto the book of portraits that Casey had given her.

She picked up the book and thumbed through the pages. Each new image was as good or better than the one on the page before it. Then Alexa turned a page and stared at the image in disbelief. Her heart began beating like a drum.

2/3/04-Violence Ward Inmate / Louisiana State Facility for the Criminally Insane, the caption read.

The image was that of a bare-chested young man with the kind of sharply defined muscles you’d see on a racehorse, and eyes that seemed like pits filled with windblown coals. Scars crisscrossed his forehead like an elaborate tattoo worn by a South Seas warrior. The calloused fingers of his upraised hands shot out from his palms like rays from the sun. It was apparent that every fiber of his being was electrically charged with blind outrage, or madness. Alexa didn’t know how many times Casey had photographed Leland Ticholet, but, due to the Polaroid that had been the man’s prized possession, she knew it had been at least twice: once when he had the hair and beard, and sometime later-after he had shaved them both off.

With this discovery still thundering through her, Alexa went to her jacket and slipped out a snapshot that she had taken from Dorothy Fugate’s house and stared at it for a very long time. She chewed her bottom lip as she ran her finger over the small face in a photograph taken years before by an anonymous photographer. A photographer she had no way of identifying.

Alexa dressed hurriedly, found her mini-recorder, and left the hotel.

At five o’clock, under fast-moving clouds, Alexa parked on the street in front of the Tulane Medical Center. As she climbed from the Bucar, a powerful gust of wind that peppered her face with dust also snatched the door from her grasp, slammed it, and, lifting her all-weather coat, flapped it behind her like a flag. A second later, just as abruptly as it had struck, the demon windblast was gone.

With so much on her mind, Alexa had not been monitoring the approaching hurricane. According to the last report she’d heard, it was still six or seven hours away. Now with the leading edges of the feeder bands ruling the skies, it was easy to believe the monster storm was coming.

Alexa knew that she’d better start making a serious effort to wind things up and get out of the city before Katrina came roaring up the Mississippi River. The idea of being trapped in a geographic bowl as it filled with dark water was a sobering thought.

Alexa entered the hospital room where a cleaned-up Sibby Danielson lay in a bed, her wrists and ankles secured with fleece-lined leather restraints. Her long gray hair had dried and had been combed. And she was smiling like a sleeping child.

A young doctor entered and hung a chart off the end of the bed. “She doesn’t look like a killer,” he remarked.

“No, she doesn’t,” Alexa said. “Did she say anything?”

“Talked total nonsense nonstop until we sedated her. Yakata, yakata, yakata. Took enough happy juice to knock out an elephant. She’s built up quite a resistance to it.”

You don’t know the half of it. “What sort of nonsense?” Alexa asked him.

“Gibberish. Rhyming nonsense. A few choice vulgarities peppered in.”

The doctor left the room and Alexa drew close to the bed and stared down at the woman, who looked like a heavier and older version of her daughter, one of New Orleans’s wealthiest citizens. Alexa’s heart went out to the woman who had spent the past three decades wrapped up in a cocoon of illness. She couldn’t imagine the torture this creature had suffered at the hands of the powerful for one night’s actions she hadn’t been capable of preventing herself from doing. Sibby wasn’t evil, but as pure a victim as there was. Alexa felt herself close to tears.