Too Far Gone

70

The streets around the hotel were teeming with people who appeared to be going about the business of partying, despite the fact that Katrina was barreling toward their playground with winds approaching 195 miles per hour.

At the Marriott, the lobby was crowded with people who finally understood that it was time to set aside their go-cups and get the hell out of Dodge. Of course, now all the flights were overfilled, all available rental cars had long since left the city, and unless they could find some transportation, the luckless bastards were going to be huddled in the Superdome bleachers along with the city’s poorest, sickest, and most unsavory citizens. For hard-core criminals, a city-destroying hurricane had to look like the career opportunity of a lifetime.

On her room’s television set, a satellite picture showed Hurricane Katrina as a one-eyed saw blade of white-cloud fury that seemed to cover the entire Gulf of Mexico. Katrina’s sustained winds were expected to rise to an unbelievable 210 miles per hour and, the newscaster said soberly, she was going to be the worst hurricane ever to make landfall on American soil.

Alexa, who considered herself beyond being surprised by anything, was stunned. Before, the hurricane had seemed like some abstraction, and she hadn’t allowed herself to believe the storm was really out there, because of the tempest she’d been involved with that was already there. She had heard that people died in natural disasters because their minds couldn’t grasp an approaching cataclysmic event-the fear zone in the human brain can simply refuse to consider something that seems impossible. People see a tidal wave in movies, but one unfolding before their eyes seems a film to be viewed with awe.

The weathercaster showed a graphic of the evacuation routes out of New Orleans and warned that anybody who was foolish enough to remain in the city might well be underwater when the levees-designed for a maximum category three hurricane-were breached by billions and billions of gallons of water pushed by two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds up the Mississippi River into Lake Pontchartrain and into the vast network of canals surrounding the city. This was the perfect storm the doomsday prophets had been warning residents about for the past forty years.

There were the now-stale scenes of store owners and residents covering glass with plywood or X’s made of duct tape. There was footage of bumper-to-bumper traffic, of a fistfight at a gas station that was running dry, shots of fishing fleets tied up in harbors, and of cheering drunks in the Quarter, just around the corner from Alexa’s hotel. The bleary-eyed, bald mayor of New Orleans was hoarse from issuing warnings. How many times could one man predict ten feet of water in the city without his words sounding like static?

Alexa turned her back on the video horror, sat on the bed, slipped on a pair of surgical gloves, and removed the folded notebook from her purse. It was just a typical spiral-bound notebook, like the ones sold to students. Alexa opened the cover and began reading.

ONE WOMAN’S LIFE

LIVED IN THE SERVICE OF GREATNESS

by Dorothy Mason Fugate, RN

The writing was in an almost adolescent cursive. The author dotted her i’s and j’s with tight circles.

I remember the day I first laid eyes on the most handsome young physician (never call him a doctor) I had ever seen. I had been an RN for less than two years at that point, and I was almost knocked off my feet when he spoke his first words to me. I have never considered myself beautiful, but when he looked at me, I felt like I was the most desirable woman on the planet. (He later swore I looked just like Marilyn Monroe.) I saw the desire in his handsome face and piercing blue eyes. His blood is noble, as I will explain, and the LePointe family goes all the way back to ancient France. We had our first sexual relations a few days later, and although I was not a virgin, it was like it was my first time. When my dear William completed his psychiatric residency, he and his wife (more about that relationship, if you can call it such, later) returned to New Orleans. Knowing how some doctors tell lies to us nurses to get what they want, I must admit that I sort of thought he might not do what he said he would, about bringing me down there, but shortly after he started working at River Run, he secured a nursing position for me in that mental hospital for the criminally insane, where he was starting to do very, very important work, even though he had a thriving private practice, listening to rich people whine. He wanted to deal with really sick people. Even though he was very, very wealthy, he always worked really hard, and as a result of his work many hundreds of sick people have been made better. And I’m talking very, very ill people. Few men are blessed with greatness, and he is one in a billion. From the day I met him, I was his in every way. I have no regrets whatsoever that I have given my adult life in service to him. By serving, I made a contribution that has value far beyond what most humans, aside from Mother Teresa, ever find.

Alexa shook her head, and turned the page. On the seventh page, she found an entry highlighted with a marker. Flipping rapidly through the remaining pages, she discovered that there were a lot of highlighted sections of text. These she went back to and read carefully. Seeing no reason for the author to have defaced her all-important work that way, Alexa was certain that Doc, or Grace, had marked the most important sections-the most threatening to LePointe’s reputation.

Alexa noticed something else too. The pages were bound by spiral wire, but they were scored so that a page could be removed without leaving tattered torn edges. By removing pages that way, a strip still connected to the wire by the tiny holes remained after the page was removed. Three consecutive pages had been removed at some point by someone, perhaps Dorothy herself. Why? What could have been worse than what she had left in the book?

When Alexa finally closed the notebook, she took a deep breath and exhaled slowly to lessen her tension, gather her thoughts. The illuminated entries made her feel sick. It seemed obvious that the nurse had never intended the book to be read by anybody else. These revelations of Dorothy Fugate, committed to paper for whatever reason, explained why LePointe had agreed to pay the ransom. The nurse’s words had the power to turn not only LePointe’s world upside down, but Casey’s as well. Alexa’s dilemma was in how to close the distance between her duty as a law enforcement officer and as a human being.

She jumped when her cell phone rang. She reached into her purse for it. It was Manseur. She looked at her watch. It was two A.M.

“Yes, Michael,” she answered.

“I’m at Grace’s house. I think you’d better come over here.”

“Is she being cooperative?”

“At the moment she’s being dead.”