The Fixer (7 page)

Mort grimaced to the empty basement. “Homicide? I thought you were doing that white collar shit.”

“I am. I’m working the Gordon Halloway story. You know it?”

“Asshole with the Ponzi scheme? Ended up dead before the trial even started?”

“That’s the one. I’m working the local angle. Colorado investors who lost their shorts to that bozo. But I keep hearing your voice in my head.”

“Yeah? What’s my voice saying? Anything about bringing the girls out for a visit?”

“You’re coming here for Thanksgiving, remember? No. It’s about Halloway. Bastard makes like he’s available to the authorities. Assisting with their investigation. When the heat turns up and it looks like his house of cards is about to collapse, Halloway takes a powder. Winds up in Costa Rica, dead in some sicko sex game.”

“I read the papers, Robbie. Even articles you don’t write.” Mort wanted to get the dollhouses sanded and primed before supper. “What’s this got to do with me?”

“I keep remembering what you’d say every time you were putting a case together. About how there’s no such thing as coincidence. Dad, Halloway was in his mid-fifties. Fit as a fiddle. He was also a control freak. I don’t get him letting some bimbo tie him up.”

“People can get pretty kinky in the bedroom. You don’t wanna know what I’ve seen.”

“No one can find the girl, Dad. She checked in two days after Halloway lands in Costa Rica. Bellman says he’d never seen her before but swore she was a pro. I’ve tried to track her down. None of the locals know her.”

“You thinking she was there for a reason?” Mort forgot about the dollhouses.

“A lot of people lost everything they had investing with that shithead. Some deaths, even. If there was a chance Halloway could escape justice?” Robbie sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing. The feds aren’t looking into it. But something’s nagging at me.”

“Well, if it was a hit you’re up the creek.”

“Why’s that?”

“A hired gun’s a detective’s worse nightmare. Takes our two aces out of the game.”

“What do you mean?” Robbie sounded disappointed.

“No personal connection to the victim and no motive other than a payday. You’ll never find the shooter, Son. If you’re right, you gotta start with who might have a motive to hire him. Or her.”

Robbie sighed. “That’s a cast of thousands, Dad.”

“Then maybe things are exactly as they seem. Maybe the sex killed him and the hooker got scared and bolted. Don’t go looking for trouble. No matter how juicy the story might be.” Mort knew his son would ignore his advice. “Tell Claire I send my love and kiss those kids for me.”

“Will do, Dad. I’ll call you next week. Sooner if I come up with anything.”

Mort hung up the phone and picked up a tack rag. He was cleaning the roof of the house meant for Hadley’s dolls when he flashed on a similar design he built for Allie a quarter century earlier. He threw the rag to the floor, climbed the stairs to his empty kitchen, and poured himself three fingers of Scotch.

The Fixer parked in the lot of a busy Korean grocery and walked five blocks to a storage facility next to an abandoned railroad line. She dressed as the character the manager knew well, knowing she would be recorded on various cameras standing as false promise of security in the high crime neighborhood. She was Maria Petard, a late-middle-aged woman who’d experienced more hard times than easy. Steel gray streaks shot through shoulder length hair the color of dirty dishwater. Forty pounds overweight. Brown eyes. Elastic waist faux-denim polyester pants and a dirty sweatshirt that urged people to Ask Me About My Grandkids. Navy blue canvas duffle thrown over stooped shoulders.

She entered the grounds and shuffled her worn-out red sneakers across sand and weeds. Walked in the office flashing a weary smile just big enough to reveal one gold incisor to the man behind the desk.

“Hey, Maria.” Rocky was sixty-three but looked a decade older. He bought the rundown storage facility nine years ago with the few bucks left after paying off gambling debts and two ex-wives. Thirty-eight years playing Frankie Valle in a Four Seasons cover band at state fairs, Indian Casinos, school basements, and worse left him with just enough for forty sheet metal garages barely meeting code behind a rusting chain link fence. He met Maria when she came in to empty out the back of a Chevy station wagon held together with bondo and duct tape. Said she’d been evicted by her son-of-a-bitch boyfriend and needed to store her stuff until he calmed down enough to let her explain why she drank his last Budweiser. That was six years ago. “That time again, huh?”

Maria set her bag down and dug into the front pocket of her pants. She pulled out four wrinkled twenties and handed them over. Rocky counted out three dollars and sixteen cents change into her filthy hands. Maria paid month-to-month. Always in cash. Never wanted a receipt. Rocky slipped the four twenties into his pocket and figured what the tax man didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

“Need help with anything?” he asked.

Maria threw the duffle back over her shoulder. “I’m good. Just looking to change out some thing’s all.” She headed toward her unit. “See ya next month, Rock.”

“I’ll be here, Maria.” He watched her walk out before turning back to his racing form, chuckling to himself about the way some people waste their lives.

The Fixer used her keys on unit 29. She maneuvered around boxes of books and towels, sidestepped an old mattress standing on end, and made her way to a cheap pine locker nearly hidden beneath stacks of blankets and record albums. She cleared access to the chest and knelt to unzip her bag.

She pulled out the tools of her last job. The passport of Anna Galleta Salada, recently stamped with a tourist visa to Costa Rica. Green contacts. Strawberry blonde wig. She returned them to the chest, closed the lid, and replaced the camouflage of blankets and albums. She made her way around a portable television and stacked laundry baskets to a cardboard jewelry box. She opened it and a two-inch plastic ballerina popped up, twirling in front of a cracked mirror to the strains of “Someday My Prince Will Come”. She shuffled through the contents of the cheap jewelry box, hoping for inspiration for her next character. She found it in less than two minutes. It went into the bag and Maria Petard was ready to leave.

The Fixer never strayed from the rules she set for herself six years ago. No more than one job per country per year. Never less than two months between assignments. Only when it was clear that justice couldn’t or wouldn’t be served would she consider a case. Her jobs rarely raised a coroner’s inquest, and never a police investigation. The Fixer was invisible.

Her new assignment culled a caution call deep within her. Costa Rica was just six weeks ago. The details of Gordon Halloway’s erotic demise and tales of an elusive hooker kept the media circus fueled for days. But the public’s appetite for fresher, fleshier, and bloodier stories from the human coliseum soon demanded another outrage. Gordon’s death was pushed off the front page by the story of a teenaged blonde kidnapped from a New Orleans mall where she’d gone to have her bikini line waxed. When her body was found in a Biloxi trailer park four days later the satisfied masses shook their collective heads in smug sorrow for nearly a week before turning their prurient peering to the tale of a single mother in Madison, Wisconsin who’d drowned her young daughters to save them from the devil’s claws.

It wasn’t the violation of her timeline that concerned The Fixer. It was the location. The prospect wanted to meet at an address less than eighty miles from The Fixer’s home.

The prospect’s first contact had come a week earlier. The Fixer was amused when her call back was answered with a digitized voice mimicking the same technology she liked to use. Two voices altered to disguise any hint of gender, age, or dialect spoke for less than three minutes. Another call two days later confirmed the time and place for their meeting: Pier 39 on the Seattle waterfront. A location The Fixer knew well.

At precisely eleven o’clock the Fixer stepped from behind the dust-covered shipping crate that served as her surveillance spot. She’d been in the warehouse nearly two hours, hoping to gain any advantage a glimpse of her prospect’s arrival might offer. But no one came. She heard no vehicle approach. No door creaked open. No flashlight broke the darkness. She’d remained hidden and watching deep in the maze of ladders, forklifts, containers, and carts that had once been the tools of an active import-export business. The company’s founder had a heart attack three years earlier trying to convince a longshoreman to work his crew past quitting time. Dropped dead into a shipment of canvas patio umbrellas at the age of fifty-three. A court battle between his two sons left the place locked and gathering cobwebs while their respective lawyers bled their legacy dry waging dueling lawsuits.

A spotlight snapped on before she made three steps. The Fixer froze. She looked up and estimated the light to be twelve feet overhead. The warehouse was an impenetrable shadow outside a three foot circle of bright white. Her eyes tried to adjust to the glare as she willed her breathing to return to normal. She took a few slow steps. The spotlight followed her. She stopped and looked up.

“Hey, no worries, huh, buddy?” she called out. “I don’t mean no harm. Just looking for a place out of the rain’s all. Thought this place was deserted. No problem. I’ll be on my way.” The Fixer headed for the door.

“Stop where you are.” A digitized voice blasted from unseen speakers.

“Whoa!” She turned circles, looking up. “You some kind of robo cop? That’s cool.” The Fixer held her arms out to the side for inspection. Black leather jacket over ankle-length black velvet skirt. Men’s work boots, scuffed and scratched. Leather gloves with silver studs. Short black hair spiked and gelled. Safety pins pierced her ear lobes, complemented by a delicate silver nose ring. Heavy black eye makeup accentuated pale gray eyes. “Scan me if you want, brother. I’m clean. I got none of your crap on me, I swear. Just looking to stay dry.” She ventured another step.

“I said stop. Stand still while I figure out what to do.” The Fixer smiled at the hesitancy in the electronically masked warning.

“Hey, buddy. You wouldn’t be a fella name of Jones, would ‘ya?” She shielded her eyes with her gloved hands as she looked toward the rafters.

The silence relaxed The Fixer. She leaned against a dusty file cabinet and waited for a response.

“Are you Carr?” the mechanical voice finally asked.

“I am.” The Fixer saluted the light. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d turn down the spot.”

“But you’re a woman. I wouldn’t have guessed that.” The spotlight dimmed sufficiently enough to end the harsh glare.

“No one ever does.” The Fixer stepped to the center of the light. “Now let me see you.”

“That’s not going to happen, Ms Carr. We’ll conduct things this way, if you don’t mind.”

Her anger flared. “We’re done here, Jones. I don’t do business with invisible voices.” She walked to the door, her ire punctuated with every step.

“Wait!” A man’s voice came over the speaker. “Please. Don’t go. I need you.”

The Fixer stopped but didn’t look back. “All you have to do is step out and introduce yourself. We’ll take it from there.”

“I’m afraid, Ms Carr. This is all very new to me.” A woman’s voice over the speakers. “Please hear me out.”

“How many of you are up there?” The Fixer turned to again face the light. “I came here to meet with Jones. Just Jones.”

“And that’s what you have. I came alone.” A child’s lilt from the speakers. “Tell me a voice your comfortable with, Ms Carr. I can give it to you.”

Curiosity pulled The Fixer back a few slow steps. “What have you got up there, Jones?”

“Whose voice do you like, Ms Carr?” A woman this time. With a thick Irish brogue. “Try me.”

The Fixer stepped forward in challenge, captivated with the technology suggested. “Let’s hear Barbara Streisand.”

Nearly a minute passed in silence. The Fixer wrestled an inner warning to find the nearest door and run.

“Well hello, gorgeous.” The voice over the speaker was unmistakably Barbara Streisand’s. The cadence was slowed, as if each word was pieced together from an infinite library of the diva’s iterations, but the inflection and tone were perfect. Anyone over the age of twenty-five would be certain they were listening to the superstar.

“That’s some gadget you got there, Jones. But I’m going to have to see you if you want this conversation to go any further.”

“If you could indulge me, Ms Carr.” La Streisand asked. “Please. Watch this.”

The light that had been tracking The Fixer went dark and was replaced by the glow of a large television mounted on the side of a catwalk above her to the right. The image of a middle aged man filled the screen. Late 40’s she’d guessed. Fit, handsome, and with the body of an athlete. His face unlined and his suit custom-tailored. He walked with the easy grace of someone who knew he turned heads. There was no audio as the man ascended to a podium. He shook hands with several people before taking his place behind a lectern. He smiled into the camera and pulled note cards from his pocket.

“That’s Fred Bastian.” The speaker now projected a man’s voice. Soft southern accent. “Some say he’s the best in his field. Maybe destined for the Nobel Prize some day.”

“But you say different, I suppose.” The Fixer wanted to get to the reason for the meeting.

“Dr. Bastian is a butcher, Ms Carr. A fiend. A sadist of the highest order.”

“What is it you want, Jones? By the way, is it Miss or Mister Jones?” The Fixer grew weary of the game.

“Jones is fine, Ms Carr.” This time a woman with the nasal inflection of a New Jersey housewife. “Bastian is chair of neuroscience at the university. He’s built his career identifying and locating the molecular substrates of human emotions. Most of his work is with animals. ‘Non-human primates’ he calls them. He does most of his experiments on monkeys and chimpanzees.”

The Fixer knew of Bastian’s lab. Over the years it had been the target of demonstrations by animal rights activists. She recalled an investigation by the National Institutes of Health a few years earlier.