43
RETURN
Florida
Brad Nelson poked his fingers under the frames of his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes vigorously. He’d been driving for hours, never stopping, ignoring at least three vehicle prompts to take a break. He couldn’t. And besides, he felt great. It was just that his eyes ached from the intense concentration of night driving.
It had been a long drive, but he wasn’t thinking of the immense distance he’d put behind him. He was remembering that night in Galveston eight months earlier when everything had gone to shit. Galveston had been a mistake. His life there, his job, the way the place had affected the kids and his marriage. His whole world had collapsed. It was his own damn fault, and he’d been paying the price ever since. He’d traveled a long, difficult road, and the agonizing process of self-examination and reform had taught him much. He’d been lax and careless; he’d been inattentive; he’d completely failed to take charge of his own life. And now he was going to pay for it.
Another little chime sounded—the car was nagging him again to take a break. That meant he’d done another two hundred miles. Nelson checked his watch. He’d get to Sarah’s house in just over an hour. She and the kids were probably still asleep. Or maybe they’d be up already, getting ready to leave for school and work. He needed to get there before they left, because he wasn’t sure his resolve would last until they got back later in the day. He had to take advantage of the energy that came with making his decision. He muted the chime and put the pedal to the floor. He couldn’t stop now, because it was one thing to rehearse it in his head hundreds of miles away, but acting on it was something else entirely. The wry smile on his scarred face looked like more of a grimace. The job ahead wouldn’t be easy, but he knew he could rejoice once it was all over. He’d been preparing himself for this for the past eight months.
44
CHAOS
Charity Hospital, New Orleans
6:37 a.m., Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Charity Hospital’s ground-floor emergency room was underwater. The staff had broken out all the windows along the second-story hall across the front, and the medical team was using the opening as an improvised boat dock to receive the injured. The supervising physician carried out the triage, dictating his diagnoses and instructions.
Their reception was swift, for the FBI team had radioed ahead. Triage started even before unloading. “Male, forty-four years old, tachycardia, pain and pressure in the chest, difficulty breathing, cold sweats, nausea, lost consciousness for up to six minutes but is alert now. Looks like a cardiac seizure. FBI agent involved in hostage rescue. Room 1.”
A dozen hands reached out and lifted an unresisting Dupree. He clamped his jaw shut, refusing to groan despite the pain. His face was white as a sheet as they placed him on a stretcher. Johnson swung up out of the Zodiac to follow.
The doctor turned to the old man whom the team had brought with them from the house. “Male, about eighty years old, identical symptoms, no loss of consciousness. Room 3.” The wife and grandson followed the patient’s stretcher down the hall.
The supervising physician checked his notes. “You radioed you had an injured woman as well?”
Bull jabbed a thumb toward the covered form in the stern. Medical orderlies came aboard.
“Why did you cover her up like that? She’ll stifle in this heat.”
The staff at Charity had seen almost everything in the previous forty-eight hours, but the sight that met them when the paramedic pulled back the blanket put all that to shame.
“For fuck’s sake!” he exclaimed, scrambling back so suddenly that he fell over backward. The stink of putrefaction and mold filled the boat.
“It’s a fucking corpse!” another cried.
“No, no, she’s alive,” Bull told them without looking at the patient. “Kind of, anyway.”
“Kind of alive?” an irritated Charbou snapped, glaring at his partner.
The supervising physician took charge. “Get her out of there! Woman, undetermined age, open compound fractures of tibia and fibula, extreme dehydration, extremely undernourished. Note: coming from a hostage rescue: crime victim. Do everything you can. Get it together, people! We’ve seen worse.”
“Not worse than this,” a nurse said under her breath.
Amaia looked down the hall. Johnson had stationed himself before the closed door of the room where they were treating Dupree. Charbou was with the Zodiac, trying to convince the EMS team to let him store it with the ambulances on the second floor of the garage. Someone would certainly steal it if they left it unattended.
Amaia urgently needed to question Bull, but he’d disappeared as soon as they unloaded their charges.
She looked around. Waiting rooms had been converted into medical wards and storage areas. Beds, stretchers, and wheelchairs were stacked in the middle of the space and pushed up against the walls. The air-conditioning was out. Windows stood open wherever possible. Elsewhere, the staff had smashed out the fixed panes. The heat and stink were nauseating.
She saw the boy they’d brought with them. He sat all alone on the bare floor by the nurses’ station, a plastic action figure in each hand. His lifeless eyes were fixed on the wall before him. She went to him after checking to make sure she could see Johnson from where the boy sat. She had a couple of bottles of water, and she offered him one as she settled by his side. “You’re Jacob, aren’t you?”
The boy nodded.
She’d been searching for something to say to encourage him to talk, but it wasn’t necessary.
“What’s your name?”
“My name is Amaia.” She solemnly shook his hand.
“That’s a weird name!”
She smiled. “Yes, I guess so. It’s not from here. It’s from somewhere else.”
“What does it mean?”
“Mean?” she repeated, caught off guard.
“Jacob comes from the Bible. Bella is ‘pretty’ in Italian, and Diana was queen of the moon.”
Amaia assumed that for a child of his age, a queen and a goddess were practically the same thing. “Bella and Diana are your sisters? The girls they carried off?”
He nodded.
“Where are your parents?”
“They work in Baton Rouge.” She saw the distress in his face. “They’ll be here soon,” he said without much conviction. “Granny told me so.”
“It means ‘the end.’”
Jacob was confused by her comment.
“Amaia means ‘the end’ or ‘the last.’ Some people say it’s from the first mother. The earth mother, the mother of us all. She’s the beginning and the end.”
The boy smiled. “That’s a funny name!”
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
The child held up his two little plastic figures. One was almost completely yellow, like a big, fat rabbit; the other was a little orange dragon, spitting fire out of the tip of its tail.
“Which do you like better?”
“The dragon,” she said without thinking.
“That’s Charizard, he flies and burns things up. Pikachu’s better than him.”
She gathered that Pikachu was the other figure, and she also saw that the boy was relieved she liked the dragon better.