Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  “Well sure. If you said he was a wizard, that would have done it too. You’re not serious, right? My boyfriend is psychic really isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

  “I never said he was psychic, I said he could see the future.”

  “Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, but I don’t see the difference.”

  “I’ve got a couple of MIT physicists on speed dial who can explain exactly what he does, and how. That’s the difference. He’s not reading tea leaves.”

  “Okay, fine, if I leave this room thinking this isn’t some kind of extended prank, I might need to talk to one of them.”

  Maggie only had one on speed dial, he was retired, and she hadn’t spoken to him for almost three years. The other one graduated and left the city. She therefore hoped David wouldn’t ask her to do this.

  Instead, she handed him a case file that was more than five years old. It was a copy; the original was archived. Back when she made the copy and stuffed it in her drawer, she asked herself what possible reason she had for doing so. Now, she was thanking the prescience of her past-self, because this was the exact occasion for it.

  “The science is bookmarked,” she said. “It’ll make your head hurt, but it’s all there.”

  He put the file on the table without opening it.

  “All right. Let’s say I believe you. You told me he can see something like five seconds before it gets blurry. But there’s this whole fixer thing. How’d he know where to go every day?”

  “Ahh…dreams? Kind of? He travels ahead in his sleep. It’s…I know, don’t make that face, I know that sounds crazy.”

  “Yes, that part in particular.”

  “But it stopped. He started getting clearer information, like people’s names and exact addresses. For most of the time he only knew to go to a certain place, but he didn’t know what was going to happen until he got there. He started to get better, and remember more, and then a lot of the time he didn’t even have to actively rescue anybody in person when a phone call would do it. A couple of years ago it stopped completely, and that’s when he started saying he was retired.”

  “But not the part where he sees the immediate future.”

  “I don’t think that’s something that will ever stop.”

  “All right, but the next contradiction is that the bomb didn’t go off, right?”

  “Yes, but…”

  She was interrupted by a knock on the door. Jeanine poked her head in. “Hey guys, pizza’s here. Also, more footage. Wanna watch? Unless there’s something more interesting in here.”

  Jeanine was probably talking about the unopened case file, but since Maggie was almost positive J thought something was going on between her and David, it could have been a more scurrilous suggestion.

  “We can take this up later,” David said, picking up the file. He looked at Maggie. “Right?”

  “Yeah. Jeanine, where’d this reel come in from?”

  Uncut footage from the day of the bombing had been rolling in one file at a time since mid-morning. All three of the local news stations had a camera at the scene, plus two local cable news channels and a half-dozen people with camera phones recording things for posterity. The news channels were easy enough to tap. A lot of the time, a subpoena was needed first, but everyone seemed content to trade footage for access, in the event the footage proved useful.

  So far, none of it had been. The team now had six different angles covering what happened on the stage, and the best thing that could be said about it was that Maggie liked her outfit that day, and thought she looked pretty good before her boyfriend knocked her over.

  What they needed was someone who was pointing their camera the other way.

  Maggie and David walked into the video room, which was low-tech by most modern audio-visual standards but a step up from a lot of the regional field offices. They had two HD monitors, five standard ones, several options for video play-back depending on what medium was being used, and stacks upon stacks of outdated equipment that ended up being useful more often than expected. It was actually sort of amazing how much information could be found on outmoded storage formats. This was probably the only room in the city, for instance, that still had use for a machine that could read a five-and-a-half inch floppy disk.

  “We’re here, we’re here,” Maggie announced. “Have you seen it yet?”

  “Waiting on you,” Patel said. He was the team’s information forensics expert, which would have made his Indian heritage a tad stereotypical if he weren’t a born-and-bred Southern Californian. “This is the last news crew, let’s all say a prayer.”

  He hit play, and the footage popped up on the main HD monitor.

  It jumped right into the middle of Duplass’s speech.

  “This isn’t the whole thing,” Jeanine noted. “And where’s the sound?”

  Patel checked the file. “No sound. This is everything we got.”

  “Wonder what they’re hiding.”

  “I’ll call ‘em back,” Brian said from the back corner of the room. “They’ve been jerking me around on this all day.”

  “Hey, maybe they are hiding something,” Jeanine said.

  “Probably caught the bad side of the reporter’s face or some shit,” Brian said.

  “Blah-blah-blah freedom,” David said, more or less along with Duplass’s recitation on the video footage. The other shots had sound, so they’d heard his speech repeatedly already. It stopped sounding inspirational a long time ago. “C’mon, cameraman, be a pro, give us some audience shots for background.”

  The camera turned to the left a tiny bit.

  “Wait, here it comes!” Patel said.

  “C’monnnnnn,” Maggie said.

  The shot panned left. The exhausted task force cheered as a group, at what was the high point of their day.

  “Hold it, hold it, hold it, don’t swing back…” Patel said.

  The terrible irony was that for this particular media professional, the footage he shot was probably of no use at all to his network, because he happened to be covering the crowd at the same time Corrigan was running across the stage. That made this camera the only one in the room that failed to record the viral event.

  By the time the camera swung back, Corrigan, Duplass and Maggie were off the stage and at the cameraman’s feet. Then he was getting bumped into by the deputy’s security team. The last piece of the video was of the ceiling of the room, before it cut out.

  “I think he fell over,” Patel said. “Probably broke the camera, or I would think he’d have tried to capture the evacuation.”

  “Roll it back,” Maggie said.

  Patel rewound it to the part where the camera swung left.

  “Hey, in back there,” Jeanine said. “Another camera, from the back of the room. Did we get their footage yet?”

  Patel paused it.

  “Who is that?” Brian asked. “Is that channel four?”

  “No, four shot from the left side, we have theirs already,” David said. “I don’t know that we saw anything from that angle.”

  “Weird camera, too,” Patel said.

  The image was blurry from the motion of the cameraman, but the guy in the back of the room had what looked like a camera, except it was partly attached to the right side of his face. Instead of looking through a viewfinder, it seemed as if he was wearing one.

  “Play it through again,” Maggie said.

  It was easy to pinpoint the moment Corrigan ran across the stage. If they had audio, it would have been even easier, but as it was everyone in the room jumped, gasped, and expressed surprise in a range of other ways.

  All except for the mystery cameraman. He didn’t budge at all.

  “You know what?” Maggie said. “That isn’t a camera.”

  “What is it, then?” David asked.

  “It’s something else. We need to get Erica Smalls.”

  “Who’s that?” Jeanine asked.

  “She’s a physicist. We’re gonna have to reach out to MIT
. They should be able to track her down.”

  Hudson Street was in Chinatown, a district that was barely more than three city blocks. There were a lot of Asian restaurants and grocers crammed into those three-odd blocks, though, and by five o’clock it was full of foot traffic, and the roads were packed with cars.

  When he was doing appointments regularly, Corrigan learned a few tricks about rush hour, the first being always leave a half an hour earlier than you think you should. If you can’t do that, be prepared to stop at a certain point and carry forward on foot. The motorcycle served both concerns, in that it was much easier to maneuver around tight spaces in the city, and it could be parked on a sidewalk in a pinch. Nobody much cared for a motorcycle parked on a sidewalk, but he tended to get away with it because he rarely left it for long.

  Corrigan had three spaces rented in the garage under his condo building, which he used to store two bikes and one car. He’d much rather be driving one of those bikes than the one he’d bought off the back of the lot, but to get one of them he’d have to retrieve the keys in the condo, then get into the garage for the bike, then out of the garage. He was pretty confident he could do this even if the police were watching, so long as they weren’t actively camped out in his living room, but there was no need to provoke them if he didn’t have to. Plus, they’d track down the plates as soon as he parked it.

  He managed to find a spot for the bike that was probably legal, located about four blocks from the address, and walked the rest of the way on foot, arriving fifteen minutes before whatever it was that was supposed to happen.

  The address was a hot-pot restaurant. He walked around the sidewalk in front for a few minutes looking for anything that might be a likely trigger for an accident: potholes, pavement cracks, unsafe stairs, and so on, like he was an OSHA inspector for the department of public works. He’d gotten good at this sort of inspection because he had to do it a lot. On about half of his appointments, he knew only a little bit about what he was doing at a given location, often not knowing for certain whether it was an indoor event or an outdoor one, so he had to do a lot of advance work.

  He once again reminded himself that could have just skipped the appointment. That probably wasn’t a big deal now that his head was straight. Used to be, he skipped or somehow failed to save someone, he’d get haunted by whoever he failed to save. He wasn’t really haunted—they weren’t really the spirits of dead souls, if that was even a thing outside of movies—he just had an active unconscious mind that was sometimes interested in driving him literally insane. It took a lot of therapy and a lot of sleeping pills to get past all of that, with the takeaway being, he was pretty sure if he failed now, he had the tools to cope.

  At the same time, if he had the means to save someone, better to do it than to not, just in case. Plus, saving people was supposed to be a good thing to do.

  There wasn’t much of concern outside the restaurant, and he had a sense—he called it that but it was probably a memory from the night before—that this was going to take place inside.

  The interior of the restaurant was surprisingly spare. Wood counters made up a square bar space with customers facing in on three sides. Every seat had a hot water bath built into the counter in front of it. The dining area was more than half full, and was a somewhat even mix of business-people and tourists.

  “For one?” the hostess asked. She was standing at a podium right near the front door.

  “It looks like my friend’s not here yet,” he said. “Is it all right if I wait?”

  “We can sit you.”

  “I’d like to wait. She’ll be here in a minute, I’m sure.”

  “Okay.”

  She shoved a menu into his hand, gave him a generic hostess smile, and gestured for him to stand aside so she could greet whatever additional customers might drift in.

  He stepped past her and into a void between the door and the entrance to the bathrooms. There was still a couple of minutes to go; he spent it pretending to look at the menu while studying the room.

  He couldn’t quite understand why he was there.

  Really, when it came to appointments, that was his normal state, which was to say he almost never knew who was going to require saving, before they actually required saving. But whatever was about to happen in this restaurant had effectively pulled him out of retirement, and there didn’t appear to be any kind of opportunity for an event of that scale to take place in this location.

  None of this makes sense, does it? he thought.

  Fixing something in a restaurant usually involved saving a choking victim. He used to think there was some greater or lesser choking likelihood based on the kind of food served at wherever he happened to be, but he once saved a girl from choking on ice cream, so there was no telling. This place had a lot of large portion vegetables and meats, though, so choking seemed like a good bet.

  The conceit of hot-pot dining, was that everyone got their food raw and cooked it in the broth simmering in front of their plates. There were no knives in evidence, just chopsticks and tongs.

  He focused on the futures of the diners, looking for the one who was most likely to start laughing at the exact wrong moment, or shove too many things in at the same time. In doing so, he nearly missed the groaning noise.

  It came from the ceiling. He heard it before anyone else because he heard it first in the future, but when the room caught up the restaurant quieted down considerably.

  It sounded like an animal. More precisely, it sounded like what a made-up animal in a sci-fi movie might sound like: an alien, or a dragon. It was the low baritone of a predatory creature.

  Except it wasn’t actually any of those things. Some monsters were real, but this wasn’t one of them. It was a water pipe.

  He dropped the menu and ran to the spot where the ceiling was going to come down. There was a couple dining there, halfway across the room, staring in mild confusion at the growing bulge over their heads. They were about to be crushed by a three foot piece of rusted metal piping, propelled ahead of a large quantity of water.

  Neither impact looked deadly, but he wasn’t going to watch the whole thing play out to be sure. He didn’t have time.

  There was also no time for tact. All he could do was pull their chairs backwards, somewhat violently.

  The action caught the man—a white male, slightly overweight, a little balding, in a business suit that had seen a lot of years—off-balance. He ended up toppling over onto his back, which was fine because he landed far enough away from the source of the danger.

  The woman was a problem. She was younger and fitter, and dressed more informally. She was either a mistress or his daughter; there didn’t seem to be any other options. She had enough of an opportunity to recognize a man seemingly assaulting her, and leapt to her feet as the chair fell backwards beneath her.

  “Hey!” she shouted. That was all she got to say, as the ceiling came down right then.

  Corrigan wrapped his arms around her and took her to the floor, away from the falling debris, with one ceiling tile narrowly missing his head.

  The rusty pipe landed where she had just been standing, and impacted the floor with a disconcerting degree of force.

  Next came a ton of water. It was, thankfully, not so aggressive as to present an immediate threat of death, and it was also not sewage, which was great. Corrigan jumped to his feet—the water already ankle-deep—and helped the woman up.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t have a lot of time.”

  She nodded wordlessly, and pushed past him to help her friend and/or father/or whatever they were to one another off the floor.

  Water was still coming through the pipe at the kind of rate that would give the restaurant’s insurance company a migraine, but it was no longer an active crisis, and getting the restaurant evacuated didn’t take any special skill. Corrigan mostly blended in with the rest of the room as they made their way out, hoping as he went that nobody would take the time to look carefully enough at hi
s face to recognize him.

  Someone there did recognize him, but not in a way he was expecting. It happened once he was outside and drifting away from the crowd, listening as fire truck sirens grew louder and trying to remember which street he came down so he could get back to the bike.

  “Aren’t you the boy scout?”

  He was in the middle of a chattering crowd of thirty or forty people, all making a tremendous amount of present-tense and future-tense noise, but this woman’s voice came through clearer than anything else. It took him a second to understand why: she was speaking in the future.

  The only other person Corrigan ever knew, who could do what he did, was an asylum patient named Harvey. Harvey used to speak to the twelve-year old version of Corrigan by talking only in the future. When Corrigan asked him how he did it, Harvey said, just decide to speak, but when you get there, don’t.

  Whoever this woman was, she had just accomplished the same trick.

  Corrigan spun around, trying to pick her out of the crowd, but it was impossible. The people from inside the restaurant had already commingled with gawkers from the street, and now it was much too crowded for him to cope. To pick her out, he needed her to speak again, or to do something wrong, something out of place with the future. But everyone followed their own paths and said the things they were about to say.

  “Who are you?” he said aloud, in the present and the future.

  His question caught the attention of four or five confused people, but none of them had an answer, and the woman didn’t respond.

  The firetrucks were getting closer, and a second set of sirens—police—were joining them. It was time to get out of there.

  Just as he was fleeing the scene—walking rapidly, with purpose, trying not to draw too much attention—he saw something else unexpected. There was a Kilroy, across the street, staring at Corrigan.

  Corrigan ignored it, and kept going.

  8

  Kiki: After what happened in Chinatown, I’m ready to say it.