Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  “There’s a lot of big white guys in this town,” Janet said.

  “No shit, we’re about to meet every single one of ‘em.”

  It was ten minutes to the motel, and they were the second car there.

  “Who is that?” she asked. “Did they call for back-up? Are we back-up?”

  “Doubt it.”

  It was Caldwell and Drew. They stepped out of the office just as Aaron was parking.

  “Hey, fellas,” Janet greeted. “You get this call too?”

  Caldwell met her at her door. He was almost exactly the same dimensions as the guy they were there to check out, and probably thankful to be on duty for all of this so he didn’t end up having someone calling the cops on him.

  “Morning, Tate,” he greeted. “The office says our man’s staying in seventeen.”

  Caldwell towered over her, but didn’t make her feel like he was doing it on purpose, which she appreciated. She always liked him. His partner was an ass, but he was okay.

  “That’s great. How come you guys are here on our call?”

  “Word from on high, two cars for every positive ID.”

  She looked over at Aaron, who had apparently just heard the same from Drew. He rolled his eyes.

  “Fellas, there aren’t enough uniforms in the state to cover that,” she said.

  “Hey, word from on high, like I said,” Caldwell said. “Let’s get this done, maybe we can squeeze in a coffee at that IHOP up the road, huh?”

  Room seventeen was directly across from the office, which unfortunately meant they were convening in sight of whoever occupied the room. That didn’t become an obvious problem until the four of them were halfway to the door, when said occupant stepped out and started walking away from them at a steady but brisk pace.

  That sure looks an awful lot like our guy, Janet thought.

  “Excuse me, sir?” Caldwell said, from across the lot. “We’d like to ask you a few questions?”

  The guy started running.

  “Dammit, go!” Caldwell gestured for the three of them to sweep around.

  The man from room seventeen—she wasn’t ready to say this was Corrigan Bain yet, but it was probably Corrigan Bain—was sprinting along the carpeted runner that ran in front of the doors to the rooms. To his right was the parking lot, and ahead was a corner leading to more rooms and more cars. The whole building was flanked on two sides by busy roadways. Unless he was going to a vehicle, he had nowhere to run. Of course, he had to be going to a vehicle, for that same reason. Nobody who was staying at this motel got there on foot.

  Caldwell fell in behind the suspect, while Aaron—the fastest of the four—looped around and ahead, but not before the man they were chasing made it past the corner. Janet lost sight of both of them.

  It seemed like things went much too quickly after that. When she stepped through it all in her head, later, it seemed as if this from this moment until it was all over the morning had gone into fast-forward, only she was stuck at the same speed somehow.

  First came the gunshot. Her partner was the only officer not in view, so it was either his gun or the suspect’s. When it rang out, the first thing she registered was Drew, a few paces behind, radioing shots fired, shots fired into dispatch.

  Then Janet had her gun out. She couldn’t remember drawing it, but she had, because there it was in her hand.

  She rounded the corner on the outside of the parked cars, slowly, gun raised. To her left, Caldwell was coming around with his service revolver in hand. A Cadillac Escalade separated them.

  “Mr. Bain?” she shouted. “Come on out. Let’s not have this get out of hand.”

  The cars were only one row deep, but everyone these days drove enormous SUV’s, and on this morning, they seemed like an impenetrable phalanx. She remembered—oddly—her grandfather, a World War Two vet, a Normandy survivor, complaining for hours about the gigantic hedgerows of the French countryside, and felt like for the first time, she understood the problem.

  She found Aaron behind the fourth car. He was on his side, awake, a cloth shoved in his mouth, his hands cuffed. She holstered her weapon and knelt down to check on him as Caldwell continued past with a silent nod.

  “Hey, buddy, you okay?” she asked, un-gagging him.

  “It’s him,” he said. “Be careful.”

  She heard what happened next, but as with Aaron, didn’t see it happen.

  “Don’t move, police,” she heard Caldwell say. Then came a loud THUMP and the unmistakable sound of a gun bouncing on pavement.

  “Go,” Aaron said. “Hurry.”

  She hopped up as Drew ran past, then another gunshot and car window glass shattering, more thumps, a thud, and a car alarm was going off. The epicenter was three cars down, between a Honda and a Mazda. There was glass everywhere. Caldwell was on the ground, cuffed, and a stunned Drew was lying across the hood of the Mazda.

  “Corrigan Bain, freeze!” She barked. Her gun was drawn, her hold was steady, and she was a solid five paces from him. When she thought about it later she decided the only reason she didn’t unload on him on the spot was that he was unarmed.

  “Hi,” he said. His hands were at his sides, palms down in a keep calm gesture. “Everything’s okay, I just can’t be arrested right now.”

  “GET ON THE GROUND!”

  “You really need to listen to me, officer. Look, I’m not threatening you, okay? But if you try to shoot you’re going to miss and hit the room window behind me, and I can’t promise there isn’t anyone in there. I don’t want someone to get hurt, but I can’t let you shoot me either, do you see my problem?”

  “Get down on your knees, RIGHT NOW, Mr. Bain, or…”

  He took a step forward, and she shot him.

  Or, she should have. She was aiming at his chest, and it was a large chest. There was no real way to miss him at this distance, despite which she missed him completely. As predicted, the bullet shattered the panoramic window of the hotel room behind him. She had exactly enough time to register this before he hit her in the stomach with his shoulder.

  He carried her a couple of feet before she landed hard on her back, gasping for air and no longer in possession of her gun. Expending hardly any effort, he had her cuffed, and then there she was, on the ground in the middle of the lot.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Let me get you out of the street. Don’t want you to get run over.”

  He picked her up and sat her down next to the front wheel of the Honda.

  “That’s better.”

  “Corrigan Bain, you have the right to remain silent,” she said. “You have the—”

  “Later,” he said. “I told you, I don’t have a choice here. If you arrest me, a lot of people are probably going to die. It’ll make sense later, I promise.”

  He stared for a second or two at the shattered picture window. She would later dwell on that moment for a while. It was inexplicably creepy.

  “Good news,” he said, finally, “the bullet didn’t hurt anyone. Sorry, I have to go.”

  He picked up a duffel bag from the ground and ran off. A second later, she heard a motorcycle engine.

  9

  The cops could find him if they wanted to. They don’t, because he’s working for the government, and the feds won’t let it happen. I thought that was obvious.

  —comment from @fixertramp27, FindTheBostonFixer.com

  Calls were coming in from all over the city. Either Corrigan Bain was actually five people or he was some kind of magician, and Joe was starting to think both theories had merit.

  It began early, with the incident at the motel on Soldier’s Field Road. That was the real Bain, certainly, but it didn’t seem possible that he was acting alone, because one unarmed man fleeing the police doesn’t just disarm all four of them, leaving three awake but cuffed—with their own handcuffs—and one needing hospitalization for a concussion. According to officer Tate, Bain also managed to dodge a bullet, which was some kind of Matrix bullshit Joe really didn’t have t
he patience to listen to.

  An hour later, Chief Gregorian was updating the press and asking again for the public’s help in locating Corrigan Bain, only this time it was for assaulting police officers and resisting arrest.

  It had been three days since the State House bombing, and suddenly Boston had something to do. Unfortunately, what the city as a whole decided to do was pick up the phone and report every sighting of a large white male. It got so bad so quickly, dispatch developed a triage approach: one unit if the suspect had a leather coat and combat boots, two if he could be connected with a motorcycle, and no units if he was described wearing different clothing or if he was no longer in the area at the time of the report.

  It was a logistical nightmare. Bain was everywhere, all the time. On four different occasions police had eyes on him, only to have him vanish or something.

  On top of that, Bain kept saving people, somehow. About two hours after the chief’s press conference, a dozen people confirmed Bain on State Street. Eyewitnesses had him parking his bike at a fire hydrant, running twenty feet to an adjacent corner, and pulling a tourist on a cell phone out of the street before she was run down by a city bus. As soon as she was safe he ran back to his motorcycle and drove off.

  The whole thing happened in under a minute. As one witness said, “it was like he was supposed to be there.”

  Forty-five minutes later, three people identified him at a construction site in Allston. From the sidewalk—he never went past the hard-hat-only sign—he chucked a rock at the head of a guy standing on an open girder, thirty feet above the ground. The rock hit the worker in the helmet and did exactly no harm to him, but did make him stop moving to figure out what just happened. Then a brick fell right past his head, dropped by the guy a couple of levels up.

  “I would’a been standing under it,” the worker told the news crew, an hour after the incident. “I don’t know how he knew.”

  By three in the afternoon, there had been five confirmed sightings, seventeen possible sightings, and two impossible rescues. All of it was buried under a thousand unconfirmed reports, about three hundred of which claimed they witnessed Corrigan Bain flying through the air.

  So, it wasn’t a great day. Joe and the BPD were being made to look foolish by one easily recognizable guy who had an uncanny ability to evade capture.

  Joe was beginning to think none of this was going to get them any closer to catching the bomber, either. As much as he was convinced Bain was connected, he couldn’t ignore the creeping sense that maybe this was a trip in the wrong direction. The news media changed its mind hourly about him, and White could see why.

  At three-thirty, the FBI called.

  “Detective White,” Agent Trent greeted. “We need to talk.”

  “Is it about catching your boyfriend?”

  “Yes it is. When can you get here?”

  “Full disclosure,” Trent said, just as soon as David closed the door. She put a cell phone on the conference room table and slid it into the middle. “He called me.”

  “When?”

  “This morning. You can check the phone for the call time yourself or ask the phone company, but if you’re looking to ballpark it, the last thing he said before hanging up was that the police were there.”

  “He called from the motel.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t know that at the time, and even if I had there was no way I could have gotten word to you before what happened there happened. I wanted to tell you before it came out another way.”

  She meant, in case Joe ever got around to subpoenaing her phone records or setting up a trace. He hadn’t, but that was because he’d been unable to convince a judge to allow either of those things to happen to the phone of an active federal agent who was by all accounts cooperating with the investigation.

  “Did he hurt anybody?” she asked.

  “One concussion. Mostly just bruised some egos. We think he must have had some help, though. We’re looking into it.”

  David shared a glance with his FBI friend. Joe remembered thinking, the first time he saw these two work together, that they were involved in a way that was more than just business-related. He didn’t think so anymore, only because Maggie Trent was in the process of throwing away her career for her boyfriend, and that kind of devotion isn’t the sort of thing you cheat on.

  “Why do you think he had help?” David asked.

  “Four cops? C’mon. Like I said, we’re still piecing it together, but there had to be a second perp.”

  “Maybe not, Joe,” he said.

  “Yeah? What Kool-Aid you been drinking over here, Davey?”

  David placed a large folder in front of Joe.

  “We have a lead,” he said. “But you’re not going to understand that lead until you accept a couple of things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Corrigan can see the future,” Trent said. “A couple of days ago it wasn’t necessary for you to believe that, but that’s not true anymore. Open up the folder and we’ll walk you through it, and when we’re done we can talk about how to catch the real bombers.”

  After an hour, all anybody had accomplished was to give Joe White an enormous headache.

  The folder was a case file. He recalled the case, because at the time it impacted his job a little. MIT students were dying at an unreasonably high rate due to a collection of apparent accidents and suicides. One of those kids had been his DB until the feds turned up. He never knew why that happened, but here it was: some science fiction kind of crazy was the reason.

  Planted in the middle of the file was a set of notes specifically about Corrigan Bain. It had words in it Joe was pretty positive the author just flat invented—chronoton, for instance—and sentences containing phrases like contingent temporal events.

  A week ago, he would have called it an elaborate hoax.

  “You’ve read this whole thing?” he asked David.

  “I did. I also followed up with the school. I’m waiting on a call back from the professor who authored those notes, but I understand his health is failing so that might not happen.”

  “Convenient.”

  “If you say so. Look, Joe, it took me most of the day to come to grips with this, but I think it’s legit. I really do. Everything in there fits with what we’ve been seeing.”

  “Fine, but none of it tells me why Bain isn’t a suspect.”

  “It should. It explains how he knew the bomb was there,” Trent said.

  “Actually, it doesn’t. It explains everything else, but not that.”

  “No,” she agreed. “You’re right. But we have something that does.”

  She nodded to David, who flipped open a laptop, typed up a couple of things, and then spun it around so Joe could look at the screen.

  “Who am I looking at?” he asked.

  “This guy was in the back of the room during the speech.”

  First glance, it looked like the man had a camera, but that wasn’t right, because he was wearing it. The lens was too short and covering one eye. There was tech on his arm, too, and he had a microphone next to his mouth.

  “What’s he wearing?”

  “That’s the interesting thing,” Trent said. “Here’s what I think it is. I think it’s a mobile version of the device the MIT lab was working on. It’s described in the case. The original was destroyed, but it’s possible the research wasn’t. We’ve reached out to an expert.”

  “Save me the reading and tell me what it does.”

  “If I’m right, it allows the wearer to see the world the same way Corrigan can.”

  “Or maybe he’s wearing some kind of funky camera.”

  “Sure,” David said. “Could be.”

  “Any chance you ID’ed this guy?” Joe asked.

  “No, but he turns up elsewhere,” Trent said. “We went back and looked at all the surveillance photos we had of Borowitz and Ledo. He’s in three of them.”

  “How was he not arrested before this?”

  “
I said he was in the photos, but not engaging Nick or Sharon. He was in the background every time. Crowded coffee shops, that sort of thing. We never noticed. Even if we had, there wasn’t anything actionable.”

  “So what’s his name?”

  “We don’t know. We’re tapping federal databases to get a facial match, but no luck so far.”

  “Well somebody out there knows him. We can call a press conference in the morning, plaster his face everywhere, see what shakes out.”

  “I don’t think we have enough time for that,” Trent said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “In the call, Corrigan said something big is going to happen tomorrow. I’m betting this man is going to be involved.”

  Joe threw his hands in the air. “Of course. Did he say it like a threat?”

  “No.”

  Joe got up and paced the small office for a few seconds, because he was about to start yelling, and that was probably not going to be productive in this situation.

  “Look,” he said, “no offense intended, Agent Trent, but this is exactly why you shouldn’t be anywhere near any part of this.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A suspect in a terrorist attack called the personal phone of an FBI agent eight hours ago and intimated that another attack would be taking place tomorrow. That agent sat on the information for the entire day, because he said it nicely. Imagine for just a second that you’re not the agent, and the guy on the other end of the line isn’t your boyfriend, and tell me why I’m not arresting everybody for impeding.”

  “I already told you why,” Trent said. She had the good sense to at least look a little shaken.

  “Because he can see the future.”

  “Right.”

  “He’s not abetting a terrorist cell; he’s just a weatherman.”

  “We told you this was going to be tough to get a handle on,” David said.

  Joe sighed. “Did he say where or when?”

  Trent hesitated.