Too Far Gone

by John Ramsey Miller

  “The federal government,” Alexa lied. “They have a fund for equipment we destroy. They’ll replace it for you as soon as all of this is straightened out. I’m sure you’ll be right back out here skinning those beavers in a few days.”

  Leland frowned. “Nutrias, you dumb ass. Beavers has flat tails. Nutrias has round ones. Nutrias is weed cutters. Beavers cut little trees to make dams with.”

  “Nutrias,” Alexa said, meekly.

  “None of this would have happened if y’all hadn’t come busting into my camp without permission. Trespassing is against the damned law.”

  “You were defending your home against an invasion,” Alexa agreed sympathetically. “Man’s got a right to defend his home. You tell them that in court, and I bet they’ll send you right back here.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “This afternoon. Tomorrow at the latest. Maybe a little longer, due to the hurricane.”

  “That hurricane Doc talked about? I can feel some pressures changing.”

  “There’s a huge hurricane coming this way.”

  “I got traps to run. How soon I get another boat like the one you burned up?”

  “No time at all. It was a nice boat. Where did you get it?”

  For the first time, Leland looked directly at her. “At the gettin’ place.”

  “It was an expensive boat. Where’d you get the money?”

  Leland narrowed his eyes. He didn’t say anything.

  “Did the guy inside get it for you?”

  “I done jobs for it. A lot of hard work too.”

  “What sort of jobs?”

  “It ain’t none of your business what work I done.”

  “Like killing two wardens?”

  “Naw, I did that on account they was trespassers.”

  “Where are their bodies?”

  “Me to know and you to find out. You can’t put them back together.”

  “How about that nurse? Did you kill her too?”

  “What nurse?”

  “Dorothy Fugate from River Run. You remember her?”

  Leland nodded. “I know her. Damned bitch, if you ask me. She say I hit her?”

  “Did you?”

  “Hell naw. I ain’t laid eyes on her since I was in that place. And she say I did, she’s a lying sow. I don’t like her, but I ain’t never hit her.”

  “Did you help take Sibby Danielson to that motel?”

  “Simpy who?”

  “The woman who was living with Nurse Fugate. Long gray hair. Doc took her in your truck.”

  “Doc drove my truck some, but I never heard of no gray-haired woman.”

  “Did you hit Gary West with a piece of pipe?”

  “You mean that guy in the fancy car?”

  Alexa nodded.

  “Doc said I had to do that job for the boat. I didn’t do it on my own account. I never saw the man before in my life.”

  “Just be sure and tell the judge that Doc told you to do it. I’m sure the judge will understand. Just tell him you did it for the boat.”

  “Until y’all shot the motor and you burned it up.”

  “Where did you meet Doc?”

  “Where do you think? He was a Doc,” Leland said, exasperated.

  “A doctor?”

  “Sure was.”

  “He was an orderly,” Alexa said. “He wasn’t a doctor. You knew him from River Run?”

  “Lying bastard told me he was a doctor. Why do people tell lies like that? I did wonder why he didn’t doctor his own self after he got shot.” Leland nodded. “He was nice and give me gum for free. He helped me get out, you know. He said I could have the boat if I would do a few jobs. Turned out, it was a lot of jobs.”

  “What about the picture?” Alexa asked.

  “What picture?”

  “Of you.”

  “What one?”

  “This one.” Alexa reached into the briefcase and unfolded the print.

  Leland smiled as he looked at it. “The picture gal give that to me. Only time I saw my own handsomeness on film paper.”

  “What does this picture gal look like?”

  Leland looked at her in the sort of stunned disbelief a man shows when he’s speaking to an idiot. “Like a man, but with teats.”

  “Tall, short? White? Black?”

  “She wasn’t any too skinny or a fat gal neither. Sort of pretty, I guess you could say.”

  “The girl who took the picture?”

  “This other gal took the picture and the other ’un give it to me. I never had nobody take my picture before except the cops, but they don’t let you have none. You won’t steal it from me, will you?”

  Alexa looked out at the smoldering hull of Leland’s boat, and suddenly felt as empty as a shattered pitcher.

  94

  The activity of the gathering of cops had drawn a crowd of civilians. NOPD Superintendent Jackson Evans waited, standing before two television crews, making a statement. Several members of his staff watched from the sidelines. The police had arrived in two helicopters, visible in the gravel lot beside Moody’s store. Alexa had intended to take Manseur’s car back to New Orleans, but she saw two men she was certain were FBI agents, walking toward her from a parked Ford sedan.

  Bond had called Manseur’s wife to tell her about Michael’s condition before she saw or heard it on the news. He had told her they were going to the trauma center in Baton Rouge, where Manseur would receive the best of care. She said she’d leave her daughters at her sister’s and make her way there.

  As the boats approached the dock, the news crews abandoned the superintendent. They scrambled to get footage of the wounded detectives as well as the covered bodies of Deputy Boudreaux and Andy Tinsdale. Leland smiled at the attention. Jackson Evans hurried to the dock, perhaps out of genuine concern as well as the fact that it would enable him to get in the frame. As the crews recorded, Jackson Evans shook the sheriff’s hand briskly. Several still photographers painted the scene with their flashes. Alexa could see Leland talking to the cameras as he was being perp-walked to a waiting ambulance. She was pretty sure he was telling the world about how that black woman FBI cop had burned up his wonderful new boat—earned by the honest sweat of his brow.

  Alexa used her anonymity and the general confusion to escape the media. Luckily, Jackson Evans was too busy basking in the spotlight to think to share it.

  The agents approached as Alexa was striding from the dock. “Agent Keen,” the older one said. “I’m Special Agent Moore and this is Special Agent Montgomery. We’re here to assist you as necessary.”

  “I’m all done here,” she told them. “I could sure use a ride back to my hotel.”

  “There’s a Lojac in it to direct us. By the way, the director asked me to tell you that he would appreciate a call at your earliest convenience,” Agent Moore told her. “He said to tell you, ‘Job well done.’ He will send in a plane if you’d like to fly out of here. You sure don’t want to try to drive. The field office is closed down. We’ve evacuated personnel, computers, and files. We’ll be relocating to Baton Rouge until all’s clear.”

  “Sounds like an intelligent course,” Alexa said.

  “Did you recover the ransom?” he asked.

  Alexa held up the briefcase. “The majority of the bearer bonds are in here. Make sure Dr. LePointe gets them back, will you. I need to get the briefcase processed.”

  “How much is there?”

  “Two million, three hundred thousand. Twenty of the bonds are missing. Maybe NOPD will turn up the rest in their investigation.”

  “Two hundred thousand in bearer bonds turn up in an NOPD investigation?” Montgomery smiled. “Like that’ll happen in our lifetimes.”

  Alexa studied him. “What is that supposed to mean? The detectives I worked with are one hundred percent professionals. Don’t you dare question their integrity in front of me. If you knew them, you wouldn’t say such a thing.”

  The agent’s face reddened. “Sorry. I didn�
�t mean anything about them. There are a few good eggs in the carton.”

  She watched as the wounded detectives were being fed into the life-flight helicopter. She waved at Manseur, who was walking with the help of a pair of deputies. He saw her and weakly waved back.

  “This is New Orleans, Agent Keen,” Moore reminded her.

  “So they tell me,” she said.

  95

  Grub watched the excitement on the dock through the store’s window because he didn’t want Leland to see him and think he was gloating. He was sure that Leland would be back, because he was too mean not to. Grub liked pissing him off, because it was such good sport that he couldn’t help it, but there wasn’t any future in pressing your luck too far when it came to old Leland.

  Grub heard one of the deputies saying that a boat had gotten burned up and they could use the smoke to get a fix on the location. He heard one of them telling the fat deputy that Leland had killed the deputy that had gone out with the other cops and that he’d shot up two of the cops that came from New Orleans to arrest him. They also said Leland had killed two missing game and fish officers. Like that was a surprise. They were lucky they’d shot Leland before he’d killed all of them.

  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.

  96

  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.

  97

  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.

  “Sleep, Sibby,” Alexa said, close to tears. “You’ve earned it.” She picked up her purse, and when she looked back at Sibby, the woman’s eyes were open and searching the room wildly.

  “Sibby?” Alexa said.

  “Sibhon. Sibby. Sibhon.” Her intonation was as flat as a tabletop.

  “Sibhon.” Alexa smiled down at her.

  Sibby’s eyes darted around as though she were looking for someone else, perhaps a point of reference.

  Suddenly she fixed Alexa in her gaze. Her lips curled back from her yellowed teeth. “Sibhon. Remember. Never forget.”

  Alexa nodded. “Are you comfortable?”

  “Cut the cop. Cut the fog. Sibby. Sibby. Sibby. Here I am. Don’t forget. Never quit. Tell the lies. Find them always where they hide. Say the poems. Say the poems. Find the poems.”

  “You know a poem?”