Fixer

by Gene Doucette

  Ames grabbed him by the elbow. Corrigan nearly jumped away from the contact.

  “You need rest,” he repeated.

  “Help me through this?” Corrigan asked. “Just to the curb.”

  Ames sighed. He wasn’t going to win this argument. “All right. But when this is over and you end up in a mental hospital because you’ve gone and done God knows what? Lose my number.”

  To one of the lobby occupants, it probably looked as if Corrigan Bain was helping frail old Fred Ames out to his cab. That is, unless the observer happened to listen to them as they walked. Then they would have heard Ames saying, “Step . . . step . . . step . . . that’s good . . .”

  * * *

  Corrigan put Ames into a cab first, handing the driver a hundred-dollar bill and not bothering to worry about whether that was too much money. Ames’s last words to him were, “Visit sometime, if you’re not locked up somewhere.”

  Sliding into the back of his own cab, he instructed the driver to take him to Mount Auburn hospital, and just in case he didn’t really say it out loud, he said it one more time.

  “I heard you, mon,” the driver said, stepping on the gas and peeling out of the rotunda.

  Harvey was sitting next to him. “Don’t worry,” he was saying. “We can do this.”

  “You’re not even here. How can you help?” Corrigan asked.

  “What’s ‘at?” the driver asked.

  “Talking to myself,” Corrigan said. “Just ignore me.”

  “A’right.”

  “We did this before and we can do it again,” Harvey added.

  Corrigan did his level best to ignore Harvey, staring out the window and trying to retain some semblance of a grip on the world. Cars skated through their own likely futures, catching up to themselves only at stoplights, and only briefly. Pedestrians occupied entire sections of the sidewalk, becoming fuzzy whirlwinds when they started walking. None of the blurs ever ran into one another, which was remarkable.

  Unbidden, his thoughts returned to the day in the public room when Harvey Nilsson nearly blew his head off. Through some degree of conscious effort, Corrigan had succeeded in not thinking about that moment in detail for years. And when he did think about it, it was with Ames’s help at a time when he was ready to accept any explanation the doctor would provide as the factual truth, even though deep down he knew better.

  “He lives in the future,” Harvey said. “You understand that, right? That’s why only we can see him.”

  Corrigan nodded, rather than attempting a verbal reply that might screw up his driver. But how do you stop something that has five seconds or more to react to everything you do?

  He remembered the way Harvey moved when he was up on that table with the gun. He was intentionally mucking up his own time stream to make himself a less predictable target. But that hadn’t been enough. It took two of them, both moving outside of the stream, to confuse it.

  “He was behind me the whole time,” he said. “Wasn’t he?”

  The driver looked up in the mirror, but didn’t say anything.

  Harvey said, “That’s right. He was trying to force me to shoot you. But he didn’t know you could move like me until it was too late. Winged him good, I did.”

  So how do I do this alone? he wondered.

  * * *

  From the river side, Mount Auburn Hospital was an intimidating beast of a building—actually a number of smaller buildings that had, over time and seemingly via some sort of organic process, merged into a single structure. Built on a rise overlooking the Charles River, the land had been tending to the sick and wounded since the Revolutionary War, when soldiers were laid out on the hill so that, should they soon meet their Maker, the first thing they might say to Him would be, “That was a nice view you gave me, there.”

  The only way to actually gain entrance to the hospital was on the Mount Auburn side, which was where the cab driver ended up. But rather than choosing the main entrance—actually the second floor of the building thanks to the hill—he came to a stop at the basement door to the emergency room.

  “We here,” he said, pushing the meter.

  “Why this entrance?” Corrigan asked. He hadn’t said the lobby specifically, but still.

  “Mon, you havin’ some kind of emergency, don’t tell me you ain’t.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, tossing a fifty into the front seat. “Thanks.”

  Corrigan slid out of the cab, steadied himself with help from the cab’s roof, tried walking, and then reached out and steadied himself on the roof again. Oh, this is bad, he thought.

  He’d been all right in the car, but independent bipedal motion was much more difficult, especially since the world, in addition to not being interested in sticking to a single time frame, had also begun to spin. Dizzy, he concluded and then wondered, Did I eat anything today?

  The revolving door entrance was a few feet away but may as well have been a mile. Disengaging again from the top of the cab, he staggered toward it, freeing the driver to take off before Corrigan changed his mind.

  Standing next to the door was the boy. “Geez,” the kid said. “You look awful. You sure you’re up to this?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Seriously, maybe that old guy was right. You need some sleep.”

  “Food would’ve been good, too.”

  “Yeah, definitely. Wanna get some pizza? I love pizza.”

  “Shut up, I said.”

  Corrigan half-fell, half-pushed his way through the door, which was a nightmarish experience in and of itself because the thing spun automatically and thus appeared to be a solid mass or something that spun so quickly he had no hope of getting through unhurt. In the end he just closed his eyes and trusted that the hospital, being a hospital, wouldn’t install a door that spun eighty miles an hour.

  His ghost didn’t even bother with the door, reappearing on the inside as if there were nothing special about that. Which there wasn’t, seeing as how he wasn’t even there.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  The nurse at the emergency room desk was looking up helpfully, her words echoing through time at him. How long had he been standing there?

  “ICU,” he muttered.

  She smiled, smiled, smiled. “Down the down the down the hall red line to the follow the elevator floor first floor to the follow the red line corridor down the corridor to the set of second set of elevators elev seventh floor seventh floor.”

  Oh God.

  “I’m sorry,” Corrigan said. “Could you repeat that?”

  * * *

  “There has to be a way we can move her,” Maggie was saying to the doctor on call, a severe-looking woman named Nair. They were standing at the desk near the entrance to the ICU, twenty steps from Erica’s room.

  “To another hospital? No, ma’am,” the doctor insisted. “Another room perhaps, but I would not advise it. Out of the ICU—absolutely out of the question.”

  “Well, I’m happy that you’re thinking of the patient’s health, but so am I.”

  “As you’ve said. Yet you have provided me with no compelling argument beyond that. You have also had a policeman outside of her room since the day she arrived, and in that time she has not suffered any manner of misfortune. I fail to see how the issue is any different now that she is awake.”

  “How about, every news station in town just announced that she’s still alive because your hospital couldn’t keep a secret?” Maggie snapped. “How’s that?”

  “Again, you have an armed guard outside her door. Please tell me why that will not suffice, and then we can discuss jeopardizing her recovery.”

  Because the killer is invisible, Maggie wanted to say. But she somehow doubted that would improve the situation any. “Fine,” she said instead. “Just make her better as soon as you can.”

  “The body heals when it heals.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Maggie turned in her very expensive heels and stormed back to the policeman outside the door.


  “Any luck?” the cop asked. His name was Clancey, and he was due to be replaced in another twenty minutes, but not, unfortunately, by an entire SWAT team.

  “Course not,” she answered. “Good Christ, I need a cigarette. How’s she doing?”

  “Her friend’s in there with her.”

  “Did you check on them?”

  “You think the friend is going to do her in?”

  “No.” She cracked open the door enough to see Erica sleeping and Tanya sitting alertly by her side. She shut the door. “I’m worried about something else entirely doing her in.”

  Clancey nodded. “The boogeyman,” he said.

  “Is that what you guys are calling him?”

  “It’s better’n Kilroy.”

  “Not very imaginative, though.”

  “Sir, you can’t go down there!” somebody shouted. It sounded like Dr. Nair.

  Maggie said, “That doesn’t sound good, does it? Stay here, Clancey. Nobody goes in or out.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” he said.

  With her hand on the service revolver in her handbag, Maggie hurried back to the front desk.

  “Smalls!” a man yelled.

  “If you are not a friend or a family—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Sir, I’m calling security.”

  “No, not you. I wasn’t telling you to shut up. I was telling the boy.”

  “Corrigan?” Maggie said, turning the corner. She’d pulled the gun out upon reaching the desk and had to slip it into the pocket of her jacket quickly before it caused a scene all its own.

  “Sir, what boy are you referring to?” the doctor asked.

  “Maggie?” Corrigan said, turning to an empty space to his right, empty because Maggie hadn’t gotten there yet. “Wow. You look great.”

  “Thank you,” she said, walking around to the front of the desk.

  “You know this man?” Nair asked.

  “Do I?” Corrigan said. “Haven’t slept much lately.”

  “He’s with me, Dr. Nair. Special consultant.”

  “Yes, let’s,” Corrigan said.

  “Then he’s your problem. But when he yells, he is my problem. I don’t want any problems.”

  “I understand,” Maggie said. She walked over to Corrigan and took him by the elbow.

  “Jesus,” she whispered, “you look terrible.”

  “Didn’t we just go through this?” he asked.

  “Let’s get you out of the middle here.”

  “Yes, let’s,” he agreed, now looking very confused.

  “Focus, Corrigan,” she said, leading him down the hall.

  He didn’t answer for a few seconds before saying, “I’m trying. No, I haven’t been drinking today, to answer your next question, and yes, I think I am losing my mind.”

  “You just need some coffee,” she said, but he’d stopped dead in his tracks.

  “A bald man in orange overalls.”

  “What?” A chill went down her back. It was the second time she’d heard that description in the past hour.

  “I saw him before, before at the apartment, I saw . . . Hey!”

  Everyone on the floor turned to stare at the insane shouting man. Maggie resisted the urge to slap her hand over his mouth. “Corrigan, will you—”

  “Down here?” he asked, pointing.

  “Slow down!” She grabbed him by the ears and forced him to look her in the eye, which was no small feat as he was more than a head taller. “You’re running ahead, Corrigan. What’s going on?”

  “I saw him.”

  “At her apartment, nine days ago,” she said. “You saw a bald man with orange overalls. That was what we were looking for. Only you can see him, do you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand that. I saw him.”

  “Nine days ago.”

  “A few seconds ago.”

  “What?”

  “Walking down this hallway and right past us. Where is her room? It’s down here?”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Now

  Corrigan was only dimly aware that the cop at the door very nearly shot him as he barreled down the hallway.

  “Let him pass!” Maggie was yelling behind him, either before or after the cop drew his gun. It was impossible to tell.

  “Excuse me! Excuse me!” Corrigan shouted, hoping that would get the blurs of people out of his way.

  “That door there!” Maggie said, which meant nothing to him as he had no real notion of where he was in respect to her timeline. But there was only one door with a policeman standing in front of it, so he went on the assumption that it was the one she meant.

  He hit the door with his shoulder, nearly falling over when it swung far more easily on its hinges than he’d been expecting. Tanya screamed and almost fell backward in her chair at the sight.

  “Not here, not here,” he muttered, sweeping the room. Tanya was still screaming, and he couldn’t tell whether it was because she had continued to scream after he’d burst in or if he was just hearing the initial scream on a loop.

  “Try the bathroom,” the boy said helpfully. Corrigan did, and found it to be small, clean, and empty. The closet was equally unoccupied.

  The man in orange wasn’t there.

  “It’s okay,” Maggie was saying to Tanya, at roughly the same time Erica woke up and started asking what was going on.

  “Not here,” Corrigan said again.

  “He’s not here?” Maggie repeated. “Corrigan.”

  “Not here.”

  “What the hell is going on?” the cop asked, coming in behind Maggie.

  “Let him pass!” Maggie shouted, except she couldn’t be shouting that because she shouted that earlier in the hall, and it didn’t make sense in any other context. The hell? His knees buckled, and the room swayed. Someone caught him.

  “. . . over . . .”

  “. . . chair . . .”

  “. . . heavy . . .”

  He was sitting. Someone blurry was talking to him. Maggie was shouting, “Let him pass!” again. He was looking at the man in orange, walking past him in the corridor. Tanya was screaming.

  “Slow down,” Corrigan said weakly.

  “. . . drink . . .”

  “. . .”

  There was a drink in his hand.

  “Slow down,” he said again.

  “Drink the coffee,” the blur said again. Or perhaps this was the first time, repeating itself. It sounded like Maggie.

  He sipped the drink. Coffee, all right. Shitty, black coffee, but hot. He blinked. The world started to clarify itself again. He saw Maggie sitting on the edge of the bed and looking worriedly at him. She was dressed like an expensive call girl, which made him wonder if this was real or one of his better dreams. The friend—Tanya something—was sitting beside the bed, looking at him like he had horns. The cop at the door was in a quiet argument with a hospital staffer over something or other. He kept rubbing his lower back. Maybe he was the one who’d gotten Corrigan into the chair. And sitting up, studying him closely, was Erica Smalls.

  “Hi,” he said. His words echoed. That hadn’t gone away. So much for the miracle of caffeine. “I faint?”

  “Yeah,” Maggie said. “When’s the last time you ate?”

  “Dunno,” he answered, speaking over her question. “I was wondering the same thing a little while ago.”

  “You should listen to me,” the boy said. He was still around, hanging by the sliding doors of the closet.

  “I told you not to follow me,” he said.

  Everyone else in the room stared at the closet door Corrigan was talking to.

  “Is he here now?” Maggie asked quietly.

  “That’s just one of my ghosts,” Corrigan explained, skipping ahead in the conversation a couple of steps. “Thinks he’s special because he helped me get up here. I couldn’t follow the directions. Compound sentences are a problem right now.”

  “If you just listen to me, I’ll tell you when to talk,”
the kid said. “I know where the present is.”

  “You do?”

  “Corrigan, what’s happened to you?” Maggie asked. He looked over to the boy, who nodded.

  “Haven’t slept for a while is all. My head’s a bit of a mess.”

  “Ghosts?”

  Nod.

  “People I didn’t save. Long story. Hey, kid, this’ll work.”

  “Told you,” the kid said, smiling. Having a hallucination that was not only offering to help, but was successfully doing so, was certainly weird, but no weirder than anything else he’d had to deal with lately. He decided not to overthink it.

  “You’re him.”

  The voice was a quiet one, and it came from the bed. Erica Smalls was boring holes into him.

  “Hi,” he said. “Corrigan Bain, fixer, raving madman. Nice to meet you.”

  “I met this guy before,” Tanya said/was saying/was about to say. “After you were attacked. Some kinda—”

  “Can you really see the future?” Erica asked.

  He nodded. “Right now I can’t not, which is a problem. But yeah. I’m sorry, I’m usually much more charming. It’s just been a long week. Hey. Lemme ask you something. Were you in Downtown Crossing, a little before five in the afternoon, day you were attacked?”

  “You’re doing good,” the kid said near the closet door. “Didn’t think you could say that much at once.”

  “Thanks,” he said to the kid. “Trick is to just keep talking, I guess.”

  Erica glanced back over at the empty space where Corrigan’s ghost companion was standing. Upon reflection, he realized this was probably disconcerting for everyone else.

  “You’re freaking them out,” agreed the ghost.

  “Um . . . Tanya?” Erica asked, looking at her friend, who was still staring at Corrigan and wondering if he was going to tear off his clothing and announce he was the King of Prussia or something. “Downtown Crossing? I can’t remember.”

  “Yeah, we were there,” Tanya said. To Corrigan she said, “Why d’you ask?”

  “He must have been stalking you all day,” Corrigan said, shooting a look at Maggie, who was nodding. “He can alter the future, like I can. Like Harvey could.”

  “Harvey?” Maggie asked. “Who’s Harvey?”

  “Not important. My point—”