Fixer Redux Read online

  The cop who walked in had sergeant’s stripes. Tall and thin, he carried himself like someone who used his height to intimidate. He also looked pretty angry.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Corrigan said. “I need to contact Maggie Trent. I’ve figured out something.”

  The sergeant didn’t answer. He stood at the bars and stared down at Corrigan.

  “Did you hear me?” Corrigan asked. “Agent Maggie Trent. She works for the FBI. I have information for her.”

  “Stand up.”

  “Okay.”

  Corrigan thought maybe he was being moved, but a quick look at his future said otherwise. Something much less pleasant was happening here.

  He stood, and walked to the front of the cell.

  “I’m not supposed to question you,” the sergeant said. “Orders from the chief. We’re supposed to leave you here until he gets back. I guess he’s gathering his evidence first.”

  “All right. I didn’t do anything, so I don’t know what evidence he expects to find.”

  “Yeah. Sure thing. I’m sure it’s just safer keeping you here. Away from things that go boom.”

  Corrigan realized the camera was off. It was a low-grade security camera in the top corner of the room, inside a cage. It had a red light on the front that indicated when it was active, and that red light wasn’t showing. Corrigan couldn’t recall if it had been when he was first brought in.

  “Sergeant…”

  “Will Pekoe.”

  “Sergeant Pekoe, I need to make a phone call to FBI Senior Agent Margaret Trent. Do you know her?”

  Corrigan was doing his very best to appear normal and calm and reasonable. He was pretty sure it wasn’t working.

  “My sister’s name is Janet. Janet Pekoe, up until she married. Now it’s Janet Baskin. Like the ice cream place.”

  “Sure, okay.”

  “Baskin, like Jimmy Baskin. Her husband, my brother-in-law. Great guy. Did a tour in Iraq. IED stuff. Really hard-core. Jimmy worked the bomb unit around here.”

  Corrigan didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to look into the future to see that there was nothing to say that would sound anything other than confessional.

  “I just wanted you to know the man’s name, Mr. Bain. That’s important to me. Now, you’d like to make a phone call, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sergeant Pekoe.”

  “Yes, Sergeant Pekoe, I’d like to make my one phone call.”

  “Of course you would.”

  The sergeant pulled out a key ring and unlocked the door with his right hand. His left hand was pulling the nightstick from his belt.

  In the future, Sergeant Pekoe would be hitting Corrigan with that stick. The first swing was going to be at the stomach, and the second was going to be over the top of the head. The future got a little blurry after that, which could have meant Corrigan lost consciousness from the second shot.

  Corrigan tried out a few other futures to see if there was a way around getting roughed up that didn’t include fighting back, but nothing worked. As cliché as that seemed to be, Sergeant Will Pekoe was prepared to beat the crap out of Corrigan. He was reaching for my gun was going to be the excuse, surely, assuming he even felt like he needed one.

  All Corrigan really wanted was to make that phone call, and then wait for everyone to sort this out and go after the person who was actually responsible for the bomb, but he was in no mood to get the crap beaten out of him in order to get to that point. He’d been looking ahead at his options for defusing this situation since Pekoe walked in, and nothing appeared to work.

  The good news, he needed to get out of this cell in order to work on what had actually happened with the bomb, and he was about to get that opportunity. The bad news, he was going to end up a fugitive.

  Pekoe’s first swing—the one that was supposed to hit Corrigan in the stomach—missed, because his stomach wasn’t there anymore. The stick connected with the bars of the cell instead.

  “I just want to make the phone call,” Corrigan said, his hands up. This would do no good whatsoever, but in the event he was wrong about the camera being off—or if there was an active audio component—he wanted that on the record.

  Pekoe turned beet-red, an incoherent grunt slipping from his lips. The second swing would have connected with Corrigan’s temple if he had let it, but he ducked and backpedaled into the cell.

  Off-balance when he didn’t expect to be, the sergeant stumbled forward and nearly went to the ground. It would have been funny under different circumstances, in a Three Stooges slapstick sort of way.

  But then he went for his gun, and Corrigan knew it was time to do more than just step out of the way. Before Pekoe had the gun all the way out of the holster, Corrigan lunged forward, whacked the sergeant on the wrist and knocked the handgun free. It skittered across the floor and landed on the other side of the cell door.

  Spinning under a clumsy swing of the nightstick, Corrigan took the legs out of under Pekoe, who ended up smacking his head against one of the steel bars. It was the least harmful of the possible outcomes. In all the others, he lost consciousness, and in one of those it looked like he broke his neck.

  A few seconds later, Corrigan was standing outside the cell with Sergeant Pekoe’s cell door keys, gun and nightstick, while the sergeant was on the other side, holding his head and looking confused.

  Corrigan locked the door.

  “Goddamn you,” Pekoe muttered.

  “I told you, I just wanted the phone call,” Corrigan said. “This wasn’t my idea.”

  4

  All units, be on the lookout for Corrigan Bain. Suspect is described as a white male, approximately six foot three, two hundred and forty pounds, brown hair, fifty years of age. Suspect assaulted an officer of the law and is considered dangerous.

  —BOLO issued by BPD, two hours and ten minutes after the explosion

  By just about any standard, it had been an unusual day in the life of Sal Wilcox.

  It began so normally, he couldn’t entirely put together the details of the morning—what time he got to the station, who he talked to on the way, what he ate for breakfast, how the traffic was—because it was so standard his memory didn’t bother to jot anything down, and what he recalled specifically felt like it happened a week earlier.

  He did remember where he parked the cruiser, because that became important later, so it was possible the information was in his head and just waiting to be needed. It was only he would probably never have to wonder whether he got a jelly doughnut or a cruller in the context of aiding and abetting a fugitive’s escape from police custody. There were frankly very few situations in which that information would have been relevant.

  Corrigan Bain.

  Sal didn’t think that was a chip he was ever going to have to worry about getting cashed, because he didn’t think he’d see the man again. Four or five times in his life he even managed to convince himself that the person who answered to that name wasn’t real, that Sal had invented him to explain an otherwise inexplicable event. Or, when he was feeling particularly religious, that Bain was a manifestation of some manner of divine will.

  But Corrigan was as real as anyone. And now everybody in the Commonwealth knew his name.

  When the news footage of a strange, temporarily-unidentified-man flew across news sites and social media platforms, Officer Sal Wilcox was probably one of the few people in the world who immediately understood what he was watching, because he knew what Bain was capable of. He’d spent a really long time trying to talk himself out of that understanding, which is what one did when facing a reality-shaking premise.

  The man who was acting like a maniac on television could see things before they happened. He called himself a fixer, but really, he was some kind of guardian angel, whether he looked the part or not.

  When they first brought Corrigan into the station, Sal was pretty confident he was about to have a rough day. That assumption was cemented the second
Bain looked across the room and locked eyes with his.

  He remembers, Sal thought.

  Sal could already imagine how it was going to play out: Wilcox, getting called into an interrogation room where Sergeant Pekoe would be waiting, to ask him about his relationship with the suspect. Corrigan would surely drop the name of the cop whose life he saved, as a way of convincing everyone he was a good guy.

  It would have made more sense—from Corrigan’s perspective—if Sal Wilcox had become the kind of cop he thought he was on his way to being, back when he was younger and dumber and thinner, and having his ass saved by a big, ugly angel. But he didn’t have the kind of influence necessary to make a difference here.

  Bain wouldn’t know that. He would think it was time to call in a favor. Instead of getting Corrigan out of trouble, though, it would get Wilcox into trouble.

  Sal would still do it, if asked. He’d walk into a room and say Corrigan Bain is a standup guy who can see the future, and it would burn down what was left of his career. It’s what you do when a guy saves your life.

  Corrigan then lowered his eyes and pretended they didn’t know each other, and kept on going to the holding tank without a word. Wilcox went back to what he was doing, while the room murmured.

  “Was that the guy?”

  “Who is he?”

  “The one from the video?”

  “That son-of-a-bitch.”

  Sal kept his mouth shut, then logged onto the Human Resources page and checked the status of his pension.

  A frantically busy hour went by. Calls were coming in through 9-1-1 about packages all over the city, and they didn’t have nearly enough bodies to handle it. Vacations were getting canceled, days off were getting reversed, uniforms were coming back in from everywhere to help. And Wilcox, who spent about 60% of his days behind a desk, was going to have to get out there too.

  He was preparing to do just that, when he found the note on his desk.

  It was a piece of scrap paper, folded in half and left on the keyboard. It had to have been put there when he was in the john.

  Meet me in the garage—Corrigan.

  Wilcox looked around: no bodies, no carnage, nobody doing anything different than they had been before he left for the toilet. The door to the holding cells was still closed. No alarms were going off.

  Yet nobody else could have possibly left that note, so Bain was clearly no longer locked in a cell.

  Shoving the note into his pocket and not telling anyone about it would be the first time Wilcox broke the law that day.

  “Hey, I’m heading out,” he said to Lois, who occupied the desk next to his. She was eating a microwaved lunch of what smelled like old broccoli, and working at the same time. She’d clearly just gotten back from the break room and must have been in no position to see Bain walk past.

  “I’ll probably be right behind you,” she said. “Be safe.”

  “Yep.”

  He grabbed his keys and his jacket, his heart pounding.

  Look normal, look normal, he told himself all the way to the staircase.

  There were cameras. Sometime later on this day somebody would be looking at Sal Wilcox as he left his desk to go out on assignment, and they would ask themselves, does he look nervous? And that would be the end for him.

  It was two flights down to the basement garage, which was nearly empty. Six functional cruisers were parked down there, plus a couple of unmarked, and a half-dozen disabled vehicles waiting on repairs the budget didn’t have room for yet. For similar, budget-related reasons, roughly half of the garage lights were out and awaiting replacement.

  The newest light to go was right near the door to the stairs. Its absence plunged a whole corner of the garage into darkness. Sal was pretty sure that light had been working fine when he checked in earlier that morning, but that had been ages ago, when the world was still normal.

  “I didn’t know if you’d come,” Corrigan said. He was standing in that dark corner. “Careful, I had to break a bulb.”

  Sal took a step forward, heard the crunch of glass under his shoe, and stepped back.

  “Of course, I came,” Sal said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need a way out of here.”

  Sal looked around.

  “There’s only one camera,” Corrigan said. “I checked already. It’s near the door. We’re okay.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “No, but every other camera I’ve seen in this place is about fifteen years older than it should be. If there’s a more modern one in this building, and they decided to put it in the garage, I don’t know what to say.”

  “I’m gonna walk to my car. I back out, I stop, you have about ten seconds to get into the back seat before I start driving.”

  Wilcox had been a cop for thirty years, but he still remembered what it was like to be a teenager in the city, having just gotten his license, seeing a police car behind him and wondering if he’d done something wrong. That was how he had felt when he left the squad room, and how he felt walking alone through the garage, and how he expected to feel for the rest of the day, and perhaps the foreseeable future.

  The slight tremble in his hands caused the keys to fall to the ground. He grunted, leaned over and picked them up, and tried the door again.

  Everything’s normal over here! he thought.

  The cruiser started up. He backed out and turned the wheel to point the hood of the car toward the exit, a maneuver which hid the right side of the vehicle from the stairs and the camera at the gate. That was the side Corrigan jumped in on.

  A second later, Bain was lying on the floor in the back.

  “Ok, go,” he said.

  And goodbye to my career.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you,” Corrigan said, later, still on the floor of the car.

  “I got older,” Sal said. “And bigger. So did you, but you’re not the kind of guy people confuse for someone else.”

  “Sorry about this. I didn’t have a lot of options.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I had to ask,” Sal said.

  “I understand.”

  “You should have stayed in the cell, man. You’re just adding to the problems.”

  “Yes,” Corrigan agreed. “That would have been preferable.”

  The streets were one giant traffic jam. Boston wasn’t a large city, so if one main thoroughfare closed down unexpectedly, it tended to have an impact on every other street, sometimes all the way out into the suburbs. Boston Common was hardly the most-traveled part of the city, but it was right between the business district and the theater district on one side, and the edge of Back Bay on the other. A little further in one direction and city hall, the aquarium, and everything up to and including the Southeast Expressway got clogged up. In the other direction, Mass Ave, Kenmore Square on into Brookline, the Turnpike, and parts of Cambridge. Or, a third direction, past the theaters and into Chinatown, and South Boston.

  It wasn’t the most efficient getaway ever, basically. They were stop-and-go as soon as they got out of the garage. After fifteen minutes, they’d only traveled two blocks. Sal could have hit the siren and cut through some of it, but the idea was to call less attention, not more.

  On the other hand, if the people in the station realized Corrigan was in the back of Sal Wilcox’s car, they could probably catch up to them on foot.

  So far, that hadn’t happened. The radio was full of chatter, but no BOLO had gone out.

  He was kind of afraid to ask why that was.

  “Where am I taking you?” Sal asked.

  “I don’t know. Someplace safe, with a phone I can use. Maybe some food.”

  “Home?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not safe for me to go home.”

  “Then name a place. I’d like to say I’m happy to help, but to be honest the sooner you get the hell out of the back of my car, the better for me, you understand?”

  “Ye
s.”

  “I mean, you saved my life, and I’m grateful. But I’d like to stay out of prison if that’s okay with you.”

  “I understand,” Corrigan said. “I’m just not clear right now where to go. I need a little quiet. Some sleep, maybe. But I can’t think of anywhere that isn’t connected to me in some way.”

  Wilcox sighed.

  “I can.”

  It was a different city thirty years ago. Not as different as it was in the Seventies, with the bus strike and all that, but different anyway.

  The Washington Street L had just come down. That was a raised track for the subway that was just as dilapidated and unsound-looking as the neighborhoods it went over. That was always the problem with raised tracks. They blocked the sunlight from everything underneath, which made everything underneath dirty and cold and unpleasant. The same was true with the raised highway that cut through Boston until the Big Dig buried the Southeast Expressway underground and brought sunlight to sections of the North End that hadn’t seen the sun in fifty years.

  When the Washington Street tracks came down, they revealed a part of the city that maybe should have remained hidden a little longer, until someone showed up with a little paint or something.

  Sal was still a young man: thin, and optimistic, and maybe a little too confident. He’d been on the force for five years and had the rookie beaten out of him already, but still mostly got treated like one by his partner, Moe.

  Moe was bigger than Sal would ever be, and would end up dying on the job of congestive heart failure six years later. Since Sal mostly thought of his partner as a racist jackass, it wasn’t the sort of loss he ended up lamenting.

  It could be called ironic—for how Moe ended up dying—or just cliché, but when the call came in they were actually arguing about doughnuts. Sal could remember the details of that argument because it had started the day they partnered and didn’t end until the day Moe died. It was also the only safe thing for them to talk about, since they disagreed stridently about everything else.