Fixer Redux Read online

  Fixer Redux

  Gene Doucette

  Fixer Redux

  By Gene Doucette

  GeneDoucette.me

  Copyright © 2019 Gene Doucette

  All rights reserved

  Cover by Kim Killion, Hot Damn Designs

  This book may not be reproduced by any means including but not limited to photocopy, digital, auditory, and/or in print.

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part II

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part III

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  About the Author

  Also by Gene Doucette

  Part I

  Area Cryptid

  1

  Given we have not had a verified sighting of K for—by our count—two years, one of the things we’ve considered is whether it’s time to adjust our approach, and allow sightings of persons who do not match K’s description. We consider this, because it is no longer an idle speculation that K has stopped performing as Fixer.

  * * *

  Why? He could be dead; he could have returned to wherever it is from whence he came; it could be he simply stopped. Or, there’s another explanation. (See the ‘did K die?’ thread for a larger list of possibilities.) Our point is that we don’t know. In the meantime, perhaps someone else has taken his place, and we would be derelict if we didn’t acknowledge that possibility.

  — @MDevereaux, FindTheBostonFixer.com

  The woman was going to fall over.

  She was of an age where calling her mature was the polite way of discussing her tenure on Earth, but not quite so aged that an unexpected trip to the carpeted floor would result in a broken hip or anything quite so terrible. Late fifties, maybe; early sixties at worst. She walked the walk of a person in unfamiliar shoes or with a recent lower back injury. One of those explanations would probably be why she was about to fall.

  Corrigan watched the whole thing happen—before it happened—from his spot in a chair at the edge of the platform stage, at the back end of the room. It was a decent vantage point, as in front of him all manner of law enforcement professionals in plainclothes, and their friends and family, were busy entering the room: a poorly organized invasion, to claim all of the folding chairs not already declared Reserved. At the back of the room was a phalanx of media professionals with cameras and cell phones to record and/or broadcast the upcoming event.

  It seemed as if there were more people for the occasion than the room was capable of holding, but Corrigan was pretty sure he was the only one seeing it that way. Every person transiting into the room followed the trail of their future selves, so that each person looked—to Corrigan—like a giant centipede-thing, which fooled his mind into thinking each of them was physically occupying their entire five-second timeline, rather than just one point along the path.

  It was nearly overwhelming, which was why Corrigan was on the stage at the back of the room, facing forward, with nobody sitting behind him, rather than out in the crowd with all of the other friend-and-family.

  Maggie, the honoree he was there for, negotiated this seating arrangement well in advance of the occasion, as a condition of her attendance. She made it sound like a tremendous undertaking, this negotiation, but he doubted it took much more than her asking. Not only did she now have enough clout within the FBI to get her way more often than not, but it wasn’t really that big of an ask. He would be in the back, out of the camera shots. To most of the people there, he probably looked like a security person who just felt like sitting down.

  He focused on the woman who was about to fall over, which was just an automatic reaction, since she was already the center of attention in the future. He figured her to be the spouse of an older agent. No such older agent was standing next to her, though, so he assumed it was someone who was going to be on the stage. She did have a younger woman by her side, and they shared enough common features to strongly indicate she was a daughter. When the older woman falls over, the daughter cries out in surprise and drops to the ground so quickly, to try and catch her mother, it looks from a distance as if she too has fallen over.

  Corrigan used to spend the few seconds before an accident trying to work out how to prevent it. But he was retired now, and didn’t do that sort of thing anymore. Plus, the only way to prevent this was to somehow close the distance between, in two seconds, without causing a larger problem than the one he was trying to prevent. He might do that to intercept someone’s imminent demise, but not a sprained ankle.

  The present caught up with the future, and the woman fell over. Her daughter went down at almost the same time. Just as it did in the future, it looked as if the two of them had stepped in to a hole, vanishing from the crowd. There was a sound of metal folding chairs getting pushed around. People gasped and jumped away, knocking over more chairs.

  But it wasn’t so terrible; the woman was standing again a few seconds later, and the chairs that had been knocked askew were being re-sorted, and then it was all over. The blushing mature woman laughed it off and then walked—a little pain on her face every other step—the rest of the way into the aisle and to the seat she’d chosen to occupy.

  Maggie, in a chair that was about five feet in front of Corrigan and a little to the left, watched the scene, and then turned around to check on Corrigan. She knew him too well.

  She picked up the chair, placed it next to him, and sat back down.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, under her breath.

  “I was staring.”

  “You were staring, yes.”

  In the future that didn’t end up happening, Maggie said that Corrigan had been staring at the woman who fell, and that he needed to try and keep his head in the present, but then Corrigan heard all of that and skipped ahead, so she never said any of that aloud.

  Not so long ago, Maggie would have tried to get her point across anyway, because she had not actually uttered the thing. Now she only did that when they were arguing, when it was more important to be granted the opportunity to say something out loud than it was to get the point across.

  It was fair to say Corrigan Bain was not an easy person to argue with, or even to get along with for extended periods. His head was always wandering into the near future, and that could be maddening to someone who remained in the present. Maggie stuck it out, though, and he loved her for it.

  “So, are you okay?” she asked, squeezing his hand.

  “I’m doing all right,” he said, squeezing back.

  He wasn’t all right, but he was about the best he could expect to be.

  Corrigan didn’t like crowds, and he never would. It wasn’t a phobia, so much as the fact that a large gathering of people had an incalculably large number of possible futures, and that can be a nightmarish thing for a man who can see all of those possible futures.

  He had tricks that helped. The one that worked the most consistently was focusing on one person’s specific future and ignoring all of the others. It kept him sane, but was kind of creepy. He also tended to dwell on people who were about to suffer some sort of misfortune, however minor. If this were a few hundred years earlier he probably would have been burned as a witch, as surely it must have looked as if his attention was causing the accidents.

  “No, you aren’t okay,” Maggie s
aid with a gentle laugh. “You’re going nuts. Look at you.”

  “That bad?”

  “You look a little panicky, to me, but I know what to look for. If I had you in an interrogation room, I’d say you were just about ready to confess to something. Do you want to confess to something?”

  “No ma’am.”

  She smiled, and air-kissed his cheek.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said. “It means a lot. Just don’t melt down on the stage. These people are supposed to be a little afraid of me, not you.”

  “That shouldn’t be tough,” he said. “I’m afraid of you, and you’re not even trying.”

  “Who says I’m not?”

  Maggie Trent had been Corrigan’s more-or-less exclusive girlfriend for four years and counting, which was perhaps the most miraculous thing in a life full of apparent miracles. It was the longest relationship for both of them, although it was possible the only reason they stuck it out was because they had exhausted all of the reasons they could think of to separate.

  For all of those four years—and for the many before, right up to the day they first met—she was also Agent Margaret Trent of the Boston FBI. In another hour, she would be going from that to highly decorated Agent Margaret Trent, and another week after that—although this was not yet official—she would be Assistant Special-Agent-in-Charge Margaret Trent.

  Corrigan knew all of this, but he didn’t fully appreciate how much of a big deal the whole thing really was until a few minutes earlier, when Jim Duplass, the deputy mayor of the city of Boston stopped by to say hello on the way to his seat on the other side of the stage. Maggie stepped up and shook Duplass’s hand while everyone with a camera took their picture.

  Corrigan didn’t start to relax until everyone stopped moving about the room and took their seats. This made it a little easier to tolerate the crowd.

  The problem was movement, which was a great deal more difficult to tolerate when people were walking around. Sitting, the room was still a wreck of activity—people fidgeted in their seats—but it wasn’t quite so bad. It was a haze of movement, but everyone was pretty well self-contained within their personal spheres of motion.

  Corrigan remembered seeing a collection of old photographs where the person sitting for the camera moved too much while the image was being captured, and that was exactly what this looked like. But he could deal. What was much worse was that now that everyone had gotten to their seats, they were all talking—because the ceremony hadn’t begun yet—and he could hear not just what everyone was saying but all the things they were about to say, all at once.

  Concentrate, he reminded himself.

  He picked one person out of the crowd and focused on him—an unimportant-looking man in a suit who didn’t appear to be moving much or talking to anyone in particular. He was a good anchor, this nameless fellow: white shirt, blue jacket, red tie. Probably some minor functionary for one government apparatus or another. He didn’t look like FBI—although Corrigan wasn’t certain what FBI looked like, precisely—so he figured the man worked for the state.

  They were in a wing of the statehouse for this event, a small room in a mostly forgotten part of a very large building. It was the sort of room where minority party whips held press conferences to express their discontent with the majority.

  “Hey,” Corrigan said. “Do you know that guy?”

  “Who?” Maggie asked. She hadn’t moved her chair back to where it was supposed to be yet, because the ceremony was still a few minutes off, and Corrigan probably didn’t look like he was ready to be left alone yet.

  He nodded in the direction of the man.

  “Oh yeah,” Maggie said. “One of the new kids, I forget his name. Larry something. Why?”

  “No reason.”

  She laughed.

  “You’re doing it again,” she said.

  “It helps.”

  “I know it helps, but you’re terrible at it. I have honestly never seen someone worse at profiling than you.”

  “That’s unfair. You work in an office full of people trained to do this.”

  “What was his backstory?”

  “I hadn’t worked one out yet, but I had him pegged as a statehouse gofer.”

  “I’ll introduce you later and you can figure out where you went wrong.”

  “That’s really not necessary.”

  “No, mostly just fun.”

  “And it’s working,” he said.

  “Sorry, I know. Go ahead, pick someone else. I’ll you tell you if I know them.”

  One of the tricks he’d picked up in the past few years was to concentrate on figuring out the pasts of total strangers as a way to avoid fixating on their immediate futures. It was, as Maggie said, a kind of profiling. By studying their current appearance and speculating on what their lives were like, he was effectively forcing himself to concentrate on the present. It didn’t appear to matter that he was truly bad at the exercise.

  “How about the guy behind him, to the left,” he said.

  “Whose left, ours or his?”

  “Ours.”

  “That’s Jack. You met him twice. Remember that barbecue last summer?”

  Corrigan sighed.

  “Of course I don’t. I remember the barbecue, but not him. I met a lot of people that day.”

  “It’s all right, dear. Being ordinary takes a lot of work.”

  If overheard, this probably sounded like an insult, but Corrigan Bain had been trying for his entire life to be an ordinary person. But since for much of that life he was also racing around the city of Boston and saving people, the kind of existence where he hung out at the charcoal grill with someone named Jack and shot the shit about the Sox and the Pats and that new chick in vice, fetching a cold one and laughing stupidly at casual sexism…that kind of life was never possible for him before.

  It was only recently an option for reasons he didn’t fully understand, which was how a lot of his life went. He used to wake up every morning with information in his head—locations he had to be to prevent people from getting into potentially fatal accidents. And every day he’d drive around to those spots and rescue people. He didn’t know why, and he only came to understand how about four years ago, roughly the time he and Maggie decided they should call whatever they had going on between them, “dating”.

  It got easier to manage. He stopped having to race around the city, beating traffic and the clock, to get to certain places at certain times, because suddenly a phone call was good enough. Sure, not everyone was willing to take a call from a stranger seriously, but most of the time it worked.

  And then, one morning, it all stopped. Corrigan could still see into the immediate future—that didn’t appear to be going away ever—but he stopped waking up with important information.

  It used to be that this was the worst thing that could possibly happen to Corrigan Bain, fixer. When the pipeline of information stopped, the nightmares came, and then the ghosts of all the people he’d failed to save started showing up at inopportune moments, like in the middle of the day when he was doing something that didn’t have room in it for hallucinations.

  It didn’t happen. No nightmares or ghosts or guilt that he wasn’t saving people. Whatever it was that was compelling him to fix the future had decided he was done.

  For another six months, he checked the newspapers for reports of accidental fatalities he probably could have done something about, but then he stopped doing that too. It was okay.

  He was retired. And as a retiree, he was in a position to go out on real dates, and keep normal hours, and even have vacations outside of the city, something he had been unable to do since before he turned twenty.

  It was almost normal, and ordinary, and average, and he loved it. But there were times—at parties, or ceremonies like this one—when it was all he could do to just pretend he was like everyone else.

  Social norms were incredibly time-specific. One had to laugh at jokes at the right time, for instance. It coul
dn’t happen too long after the joke was told, and it certainly couldn’t happen before the punchline had officially been spoken aloud. The laugh had to sound genuine, which was almost impossible when you heard the whole joke five seconds before everyone else. And even if the timing was exactly right and it was the best fake laugh imaginable, people could still sense something wasn’t quite right.

  He was always going to be Spooky Corry, as the kids called him when he was growing up. It wasn’t something he much noticed or cared about when he was working full time as a fixer—people are generally extremely happy to meet the person who has just saved their lives—but now that he was a retired civilian, he was finding it really hard to act normal.

  Fortunately, Maggie didn’t much care what people thought of her boyfriend, or of her. It was possible she even enjoyed the idea that Corrigan unsettled the people she worked with, on the rare occasion he accompanied her to a function.

  Aside from Maggie, he didn’t have a fantastic history with the Boston FBI. They had him arrested once, and he’d been the target of more than one bureau investigation. But the agent behind that historical distrust had taken a job with another area office, and nobody else was around to carry on his vendettas. Corrigan doubted there was anyone left in the office who even remembered those investigations.

  People stopped fidgeting so much once the ceremony started. Corrigan lost Maggie’s immediate company—she had to push her chair back to the front of the stage and take her seat there—but by then he was okay.