Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  A few minutes later, he was in the galley kitchen, eating leftover lo mein. The kitchen looked a lot like a show room kitchen, and the living room like a furniture show room living room. The open floor plan just accentuated the effect, since the living room, such as it was, had no walls to define it: only a couch, two chairs, and a television on the wall.

  Wilcox appeared to have gone to Jordan’s Furniture and just started pointing at set pieces in order to furnish the place. Corrigan, a man who had only just recently invested in curtains, could hardly blame the guy.

  The TV looked functional—Corrigan could see the red indicator light on the bottom of the console from the kitchen. He found the remote for it on the couch, and flipped on to one of the local channels.

  Unsurprisingly, the bombing at the State House was dominant. Maybe also unsurprisingly, Corrigan was a part of every story.

  The news channels kept shuttling between Corrigan Bain: Menace, and Corrigan Bain: Hero, with hardly any nuance between those two poles. Interestingly, both versions also called him the prime suspect in the bombing, a conclusion arrived-at absent any direct input from law enforcement. It was enough for most of the local cognoscenti that he had been taken into custody after the bomb detonated, had since escaped that custody, and was currently wanted by the BPD, albeit for escaping custody and not terrorism.

  “Actually, that’s plenty,” he said aloud. “If it weren’t me, I’d think I was guilty too.”

  He turned the TV off.

  I should turn myself in, he thought.

  It was probably the most productive thing he could do with his time. As long as the police were out looking for him, instead of looking for whoever was actually responsible, they were putting the city at risk. The way to resolve that was by taking himself off the board.

  He walked back into the bedroom—the only room with real walls in the condo aside from the bathroom—and sat on the bed to figure out how that would work.

  He could pick up the phone, call Maggie, tell her he’s coming in. She’d make sure nobody tried to shoot him on the way, probably. And when he got there, if this Detective White wanted to know how Corrigan knew about the bomb, he’d just explain it. Again. Only better, and with illustrations or something. It wasn’t that Corrigan’s talent was a secret; it was more that getting someone to believe it took a lot of patience, and this cop didn’t have a ton of patience the last time around.

  There were people he could call. Smart people from MIT. Erica Smalls would be happy to help, if they could find her. Maggie had a whole file on him somewhere, in which his skills were documented in an official government record. He had friends too, friends and people he saved, like officer Wilcox.

  Maybe it wouldn’t play well in the media, but he just had to convince Boston Police enough to get a statement out that he wasn’t a suspect any more, and when the real bomber was caught everyone would forget about Corrigan.

  So, upside: he’d eventually get his name cleared, provided nobody shot him or tried to beat him up in a prison cell again. Downside…he’d be in jail for a little while, probably.

  Or, until the actual bomber set off another bomb.

  This bothered him more than he thought it probably should, but if this bomber had Corrigan’s skills, Corrigan should be the one to stop him.

  Like it was his responsibility.

  He didn’t know where to begin, though. He couldn’t just walk around the city hoping to spot anomalies, not when everyone in the city was looking for him. He needed Maggie, and the FBI.

  He reached for the phone. That was when he saw the note pad.

  It was Sal Wilcox’s pad. He handed it over when Corrigan wrote the note for Maggie, and Corrigan hung onto the pad when Sal left. Keeping it next to the bed was an old instinct.

  Corrigan didn’t remember getting up during the night and writing something down, but obviously he had, because now there was an address and a time written on the pad, and it was in his own handwriting.

  “Crap,” he said. “I thought I was done with this.”

  It was six in the morning, and Maggie was sitting at her desk, reading the note for the fiftieth time and still not really sure what to do about it.

  She hadn’t bothered to go home. It wasn’t worth the hassle, even if it meant getting a little more rest, and maybe a better set of clothes than the gym sweats from the bag under her desk.

  Technically, she still had a condo of her own. It was in Brookline, in a spot where she could decide to eat only Korean takeout she’d never tried before, and not starve for a solid six months. The place was small, and hard to get to—there wasn’t any off-street parking, which made it awful in the winter—and so she hardly ever went there except to update the clothing she kept at Corrigan’s.

  His condo was much nicer. It was in a high-rise guarded by an extremely efficient concierge with a view that caught the fireworks on the Fourth, a private parking area underneath, an in-house dry-cleaning service, and a few other amenities she had no idea could exist outside of a five-star hotel. She mostly stayed there, and when she thought of herself going home, that was the first place that came to mind.

  But she also thought of Corrigan as home. Strange, annoying, occasionally infuriating Corrigan Bain, the guy she never expected to actually end up settling down with. The guy whose most unique quality made him a social nightmare, and sometimes landed him in situations like the one he was in now.

  Where the hell are you, Corrigan?

  Both condos had been searched, and of course he wasn’t in either of them. Detective White asked her for permission to put a trace on their joint bank account, which was granted. These things weren’t going to get him his man, but he had to try. Corrigan, she told him many times, was independently wealthy. It was entirely within his means to keep another place in the city, and maybe even a money stash. If it was something he chose to keep from Maggie, he could do that too.

  She didn’t think he did, and she also made that perfectly clear, but it was financially within his power.

  It was a difficult balancing act. She didn’t want them thinking Corrigan had a bomb shop hidden somewhere, but she also didn’t want them to think she was withholding information.

  What she couldn’t tell them was that if there was anyone in the city capable of evading police custody, it was Corrigan.

  So, rather than go to either home, she slept on the couch in her office, for as much sleep as there was to get. It was hardly the first time, but hopefully the last, only because she was looking forward to a bigger office in the near future, with a better couch.

  That was provided this whole thing didn’t blow up in her face.

  She smiled.

  Let’s not say that one out loud around here.

  The couch was comfortable enough for two-hour catnaps. She probably got less than that, because of the note.

  There were a lot of problems with the note. First problem: it was from Corrigan. About that there wasn’t a question, even though he never signed it. She knew the handwriting, and the message was of the sort that could only have come from him.

  It read: The bomber is a fixer.

  Someone at BPD headquarters slipped this note into her jacket pocket sometime between when she arrived at the station and when she went into the conference room for the big meeting. The only time she could remember being separated from the jacket was when she left it on a chair at a desk on the third floor, while she was thirty feet away, hitting up the candy machine for something bad involving chocolate. The chair sat right in the middle of the precinct floor, and was surrounded by cops. So, either Corrigan had also developed the ability to turn invisible, or a police officer put the note in her jacket.

  That was the second problem: its presence indicated Corrigan was getting help from someone in the Boston PD. She didn’t know who it was, but by not disclosing either this fact or the fact of the note itself, she was officially withholding information, which she’d promised Justin she would not do.

  Th
e third problem was that she could think of nothing more terrifying than a terrorist who saw the world the same way Corrigan did. The fourth was that there was no way to explain to anyone else why this was terrifying.

  “Morning,” David said, from her doorway. He had two coffees in his hand; one of them was for her, and that was a great thing.

  She put Corrigan’s note down and dropped a file on top of it.

  “C’mon in,” she said.

  “Sleep here?”

  “Yeah, how do I look?”

  “Like you slept here.”

  “That is exactly the look I was aiming for. Is everyone here, or just you?”

  “It’s only six-thirty,” he said, “so it’s just me.”

  “Teacher’s pet.”

  “That I am. Where do you want to start?”

  She put her hand on the file hiding the note.

  David would know what to do with it, she thought.

  He was BPD; he could get something going without causing a mess. She could trust him.

  But she also remembered how ready he was to question Corrigan’s intentions the day before. Maybe this wasn’t the time to show it to him.

  “I thought we’d go through whatever we have on the crowd in the room,” she said.

  “Most of the cameras were covering the stage.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I bet a few of them continued to record when we all started running. Let’s start with the news stations and see what’s there.”

  “What about Nick and Sharon?’ he asked. It had become office-normal to refer to Nick Borowitz and Sharon Ledo by their first names, as if they were a part of the team, rather than the targets of that team.

  “What about them?”

  “If there’s someone from their group that’s still blowing up things, wouldn’t they be the ones to ask?”

  “Yeah, but not yet. They refused to tell us where the missing munitions were before some of it was used down the street. I can’t see either of them giving us more to work with now. I want to go at them with more.”

  “Okay. News feeds, then.”

  Joe White hadn’t had a splendid couple of days.

  Nobody in law enforcement had, so it wasn’t really worth complaining about, necessarily—he wasn’t dead, for instance, so it definitely could have been worse—but he was starting to get the idea that the bad time he was having was uniquely tailored for him, somehow.

  It was like everyone decided to stop making sense all of a sudden.

  This was what he was thinking as he stood in front of what appeared to be a shrine dedicated to Corrigan Bain. The centerpiece was a blown-up digital photo that was not of tremendous quality. It showed a partial profile of Corrigan’s face and his beefy shoulder as he was walking away from the picture-taker; clearly not something for which he posed. It wasn’t recent: the subject looked younger, and the clothing worn by the other people sharing the sidewalk with him had a certain pre-2010 vibe.

  The image had already been manipulated into something to share online before being made into a poster. It was framed in a thick black border, and written on the bottom of the border, in white letters, was the question, DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?

  Below that was a link to a website FindTheBostonFixer.com.

  The rest of the wall had what would have been called newspaper clippings about ten years ago: mostly printouts of headlines from blogs and more official providers of news. It was a collection of stories with happy endings.

  “I admit, the wall is a little embarrassing,” said the owner of the wall. Her name was Monica Devereaux. She was a short-ish woman somewhere north of her twenties, dressed in sweats and an oversized t-shirt, long hair pulled back but nonetheless pointing in several directions at once, with librarian-petite glasses that didn’t match her round face. Joe decided she was probably very cute when she felt like being cute. On this day, greeting Boston PD in her own apartment, she didn’t feel like being cute.

  It did look like she made an effort to pick up, but only in a regional sense. The edges of the living room spoke of a profound historical clutter only recently reallocated. The shrine to Corrigan was sort of the centerpiece, but not really. The two computer monitors on the desk beneath the shrine were the real anchors. Everything in the apartment seemed to orbit those monitors.

  And, presumably, the computer attached to them. Joe wasn’t clear which silver rectangle was the actual computer—there were several on and under the desk—but imagined at least one of them was.

  “Is this all you do?” he asked. She was standing next to the desk, madly shifting her weight from one foot to the other. He couldn’t tell if she was excitable or if she had to pee.

  “The website? No, God, of course not. I do a lot of game design, mostly freelance. Mostly from here, but I have a couple of stringer jobs that get me out. I have to meet people sometimes just to, you know, make sure I haven’t turned into a troll. Not an Internet troll, like the kind under bridges. Not that I have a bridge. You get what I’m saying.”

  He didn’t know what an Internet troll was, and how one might differ from the kind found under a bridge, but thought it was probably not all that important.

  “But the past 24 hours, it’s been all this,” she added. “I dropped everything. Hey, can I get you anything? Water? I don’t drink coffee, but I have some energy drinks if that’s what you’re looking for. Sorry, I’ve been up for like thirty-six hours I’m a little…you know, my social skills can suck when I’ve been awake this long.”

  “No, no thank you, we’re fine,” Joe said, speaking for himself and the uniform that came with him. “Tell me how all of this started. You began this website when?”

  “Seven years ago, almost to the day. I didn’t think we’d ever get this far, either. It’s like finding Bigfoot living in a trailer park and working a nine-to-five. Or, you know, discovering your guardian angel lives in a condo down the street. Because that’s what we’re talking about, right?”

  “Guardian angel?”

  “Well… yeah. That’s what he is. But you guys must know that already.”

  There were a couple of different ways Detective White could have handled Corrigan’s escape from custody. Officially, the man was only wanted in connection with the bombing at the State House, and for escaping custody. The latter charge carried real penalties, but Joe wasn’t going to be publicizing it, because it was honestly a little embarrassing. He also didn’t want to be anywhere near a microphone when explaining how that escape had taken place.

  To that end, he already knew how Bain had gotten out of his cell and why the security camera didn’t record it; Sergeant Pekoe was being reprimanded quietly, very far from the FBI and the press. Nothing after that made any sense, though. Joe appreciated that Corrigan could have been defending himself—they were probably not charging him with assault at this point—when he ended up on the other side of the bars, and given the mood of the sergeant, Joe could even understand the impulse to get out of the precinct before someone else showed up to “question” him. But most people, facing that dilemma, wouldn’t have been able to do what Corrigan did.

  After the BOLO went out, they couldn’t very well pretend that the man in the video warning everyone about the bomb hadn’t been taken into custody shortly after. There were political reasons—illogical ones—not to call him a suspect, however. Those reasons where why, when Chief Gregorian delivered the morning statement, he only called Corrigan a person of interest.

  If it had been White, he would have called Corrigan a suspect. That was what he was, and anyone who thought otherwise was engaging in some kind of weird, magical thinking that baffled the detective.

  Until there was an explanation that didn’t include fairy tales or psychics, Corrigan had to be considered an associate of the bombers. The world just didn’t work any other way.

  After the chief’s press conference, calls began pouring in from all over the city, which was expected. A little surprising, though, was that roughly one in ten of those
calls directed the police to Monica Devereaux’s website. It turned out that while the Boston Police had been looking for Corrigan for the past twenty hours, Ms. Devereaux had been looking for a whole lot longer. And she wasn’t the only one.

  “You know that huge escalator in the Porter Square station?” Devereaux asked. “That was where I met him.”

  “And that was seven years ago?”

  “Yeah, I remember because it was like a week before my birthday. So I get vertigo sometimes, right? It comes and goes. Sometimes it’s bad, most times I’m cool though. This wasn’t one of those cool times, but I had a place I had to be, near Porter, and I’d never been there before—to the station, I mean—and I didn’t know about the escalator. Like now I know I can get off at Davis and walk a little more, but I didn’t back then. Anyway…and I don’t even remember what I was late for, isn’t that weird? Anyway, I got on the escalator. But something like halfway up, I completely lost track of where up was, and next thing I know I’m falling and I don’t even realize it. I’m just leaning backwards more and more. That was when he caught me.”

  “He was behind you on the escalator and he caught you? That hardly seems…” Joe didn’t finish the sentence. He pointed to the poster instead.

  “Oh, but you don’t get it, dude…sir…officer?” Monica said.

  “Detective.”

  “Right. You don’t get it, detective.” She was getting more animated as the story went on. The enthusiasm that created an entire cult website was beginning to surface. “He wasn’t behind me. I was alone on the escalator until I started falling, and then I wasn’t.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I didn’t either! I was like, ‘where did you come from?’ and he said it was his job, then he apologized for almost being late and rode the rest of the way up to make sure I didn’t fall again. Then when we got to the street he totally just vanished. Like, I turned to ask him his name and he was gone. Swear to God.”