Fixer (2 page)

“It wasn’t that close,” Corrigan muttered quietly. “Leave me alone.”

The boy didn’t answer. He never answered when they were in public. He just looked at him angrily and then turned around and walked away.

A little singsong phrase popped into Corrigan’s head, the kind of thought meme that reappears when you least want to hear it and refuses to go away no matter what you try and replace it with. He didn’t know where it came from or who invented it, or if he might have invented it himself.

Corrigan Bain is going insane
. 

*  *  *

In order to reach Faneuil Hall in time, Corrigan had been forced to park his motorcycle in a nontraditional space—the sidewalk next to a parking meter across from City Hall Plaza. It was either that or steer the motorcycle down the steps, which he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to get away with. It went without saying that parking illegally right between city hall and the courthouse—and a stone’s throw from the downtown police station—would attract a parking ticket. So he was surprised to find a redhead on his bike in lieu of any sort of citation. He shook his head to see if that made her go away, but she appeared to be real.

“Maggie?” he said. “Is that you? I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Hey, yourself.” She smiled and slid off the seat of his bike. “And go to hell, I haven’t changed that much. How long’s it been?”

Maggie Trent was indeed looking as sharp as she ever did in a blue pants suit and a decent pair of heels that seemed practical only in the sense that they went well with the suit. She had on her customary dark glasses and a cigarette dangling from her lips. What had thrown him was the hair. She had magnificent hair—currently of the copper-red variety—but had chosen to pull it back past her ears to terminate in some sort of complex Gordian knot at the base of her neck. It was extremely unflattering, but that was probably the idea.

“It’s been three, four years at least,” he insisted.

“Two years. We saw each other at the mayor’s thing. You were with what’s-her-name.”

“Right.” He’d have provided the name of his date to flesh out the details, but the truth was he couldn’t remember it either.

“Never did tell me how you got invited to that,” she added while extending the pack of cigarettes. He slid one out of the box. Corrigan was not a full-time smoker but always took one when it was offered.

“I helped out a guy who knew a guy who had an extra pair of tickets. Dunno why I actually went, though. Wasn’t my sort of thing.”

“No, it wasn’t. Bet it impressed the girl.”

Corrigan leaned forward into the flame from her extended lighter, puffed the cigarette to life, and ignored the tinge of jealousy that was lacing Maggie’s comment regarding his nameless date from two years ago.

“Not as much as you might think,” he said. “So how did you come to be sitting on my bike?”

She laughed. “Seriously? Look where you are.”

He did. Without even realizing it, he’d gone and parked the bike directly in front of Center Plaza; a broad crescent-shaped building that blocked the view of Middlesex courthouse from City Hall like a medieval battlement. The FBI Boston office was in Center Plaza, and had been for years. One could not find this out by looking at the building directory, but that didn’t make it any less true.

“Huh,” he said expressively. 

“It’s enough to make a girl think you’re looking for ways to run into her.” She grinned. Not knowing how to respond to this, he simply smiled back and worked on his smoke some more. “You on duty?” she asked.

“Just finished my day,” he said.

“Everybody make it okay?”

“It was close, but yeah. Crowd.” 

She nodded, as nothing more needed saying. Anyone who’d spent a little time with Corrigan knew to keep him away from crowds. 

“So,” she said. “Down to business.”

“We have business?”

“We certainly do. You owe me a drink.”

“Do I.”

“Perhaps even dinner. You eat yet?”

“Never found time.” He had briefly toyed with the idea of picking up something in Faneuil Hall but figured he wouldn’t be able to handle the mob indoors any better than he did the one outdoors.

“Good,” she said. “I’m hungry, too.”

“Dinner’s quite a commitment,” he said, the word choice being entirely deliberate.

“I’m sure we can handle it. Just in case, we’ll hold off on dessert until we’re sure.”

“Fair enough.” He shrugged. “Not that I’m backing out, but can you tell me when I came to owe you dinner?”

“You see your bike?”

“Yeah.”

“How about the parking ticket?”

“There isn’t one.”

“Exactly. Now let’s eat.”

*  *  *

Ten minutes later Maggie and Corrigan had taken up a corner booth in a small, moderately popular Irish pub in the crescent, no more than fifty feet from his bike. The place was only lightly populated, as the truly busy time—when it would be packed right up to the fire code limit—was a good hour or two away. Corrigan sipped from his pint of home-brewed ale, one of the pub’s specialties and quite good if one were an aficionado of beer, as he was. Less accomplished beer drinkers might deem it a tad bitter.

“So, when I last saw you, you were dating this banker . . . what was his name? Larry?”

“Gerry,” Maggie corrected, sipping from her own glass.

“How’d that work out for you?”

“Turned out Gerry was a bit of a dick. Wasted a year finding that out.”

“Sorry.”

“No, you aren’t.” She smiled back with a flirty little tilt of her head.

“Fine. I’m not.”

“How about you?”

“Free as ever,” he said. “You know how it is; hard to really develop anything long-term with my work schedule.”

This was a true but incomplete response. More accurately, there were a number of women who floated in and out of his life, much as Maggie did. Each of them was passively aware that there were others, in the same way one is passively aware of one’s own shadow. But what they all had in common, aside from a willingness to occasionally jump into bed with Corrigan, was a lack of possessiveness coupled with indifference toward long-term romantic entanglements.

“What you need, my dear, is a vacation,” Maggie said.

“I get days off.”

“And you spend them at home drinking beer.”

“Works for me.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

This temporarily brought the conversation to a halt, veering dangerously close to the subject of their last serious conversation, which had, in truth, been a volcanic argument that teetered on the edge of physical violence several times. The thesis had been that Corrigan Bain had it within his power to stop
fixing
at any time. And as he had plenty to retire on—and often complained that he didn’t even
like
saving people every damn day, every damn year—the only reason he wouldn’t quit was because he was a stubborn bastard. Maggie, for some reason, had taken his stubbornness very personally.

They sat there drinking their beer quietly for a little while, each looking for a way back into the current conversation. Corrigan was about to gamble and ask her about work when he caught something across the room. A good twenty feet away from them, at the bar, was a guy who was about to drop an entire beer down the front of another guy. It’d be an accident, but since the second guy was wearing an expensive suit, Corrigan did not see things going well from there. 

“You got a rubber band in that hair of yours?” he asked.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Give it to me.”

She did. Then she took out the clips on the side of her head, allowing her whole mane to swing loose, which was momentarily distracting in an arousing sort of way.
Boy has it been a while,
he thought.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“One second.” 

Taking careful aim, he fired the hair band at the side of the head of the guy who was about to be wearing lager. The band glanced off the man’s ear. It was not an easy shot, but Corrigan resisted the urge to brag.

“Ow!” the target exclaimed, grabbing his ear and looking toward the guilty booth. He couldn’t really tell for certain what hit him or where whatever it was had come from, but Corrigan and Maggie were a pretty good bet in the latter regard. More importantly—for the sake of his suit—he’d stopped where he was. Just then the guy at the bar turned around with his full pint and watched in great distress as it slipped from his grasp and landed on the floor with a loud crash. The target in the suit jumped back. He got splashed on the legs, which was enough to make him forget all about the unexplained impact on his earlobe but not enough to give up on the whole suit, from a dry cleaning perspective.

Maggie knew better than to turn around. “Did you just lose my rubber band?”

“ ‘Fraid so,” Corrigan said. “But I saved a suit that was a lot more expensive. That’s a decent tradeoff, yeah?”

“Sure. But now you owe me another beer.”

*  *  *

After an hour of small talk, dinner, and minor beer maintenance, Maggie and Corrigan had managed to avoid enough former relationship land mines to have an enjoyable time with one another. It was odd. For Corrigan, it felt like sliding into an old pair of pants and finding they still fit snugly even when he knew they really shouldn’t.

“Hey, you’re drifting,” Maggie snapped. She’d been complaining about her boss—an agent named Hicks that neither of them cared for—while Corrigan had been staring at a girl across the room that was about to break a heel and twist her knee.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right, I understand,” she said, following his gaze. “It’s getting busy, isn’t it?”

Simply put—although it was really fairly complex—the more people there were, the more likely it was that Corrigan would drift entirely out of the present and start pre-reacting to things. At best, this could be embarrassing, and at worst it could cause a scene that had people pointing and screaming. Maggie recognized the signs well enough.

Concentrating mightily to get his head back into the present, he asked, “So tell me; did you get off work early today, or do you usually get to drink while on duty?”

“Actually? I’m on a fact-finding mission,” she said with a sly smile. “You know, if it were anyone else I’d call it a coincidence, but since it’s you . . .”

“What?”

“Honest to God, Corrigan, when I walked downstairs I was on my way to find you.”

“Really,” he said, just to respect the kismet that, for most people, might be considered extraordinary. This sort of thing happened to him all the time.

“I figured I’d surprise you at home, but there was your bike. So, I just waited.”

“And you wanted to see me because . . . of a case?” A guess for most, he discerned this by cheating and looking ahead.

“Yeah. It’s about a case. We’re stumped.”

“But how can I possibly help?”

“Not here,” she said. She patted the side of her messenger bag, implying that all answers lay within. “It’s going to take some time to explain.”

Corrigan did his best to hide his disappointment, as he thought he was in the midst of a romantic encounter. Now it sounded like this was the preamble of a business meeting instead.

“Upstairs, then,” he said, referring to the FBI offices.

“God, no,” she said. “Are you kidding? How about your place?”

He grinned. Business meeting
and
romantic encounter, then. He could do that. 

The notion of bringing her back to his condo was so appealing that any lingering questions he had quickly departed—such as why Maggie was asking him for help with anything at all. She’d never done it before, and he couldn’t fathom any situation in which she might. Sure, he’d asked
her
for help once, but that was different, and it had been a long time ago.

“Place is a mess.”

“Like I care,” she said with a smile.

He nodded. “Well all right, then. Let’s get going.”

Chapter Two

Twelve years past

The lobby was intimidating all by itself. It had a small sitting area with a coffee table, a number of six-month-old magazines, and a couple of plastic plants, all of which seemed to have come directly from the
Big Book of Dental Office Decor
and could have been a waiting room just about anywhere. But beyond that there was the velvet rope partitioning the front of the room, the double-pane bulletproof glass, and the impressive legend on the wall beyond the glass, which read BOSTON FBI HEADQUARTERS. Below the headline were three portraits: the local FBI director, the national FBI director, and the President. These were positioned in such a way that one who didn’t know who was who might come to the conclusion that the President was the lowest ranking person on display. Sitting at a desk inside the glass-encased area was a fifty-year-old woman wearing pince-nez glasses who was inordinately preoccupied with whatever was displayed on her computer. Either that, or she was ignoring him with practiced skill.

The woman—identified by nameplate as Mrs. Angela Hotchkiss—had in her possession all of Corrigan’s loose change, his key chain, pocketknife, and sunglasses. This was thanks to the metal detector one had to pass through just to get to Mrs. Hotchkiss in the first place and the alarming signs posted in several places warning visitors just exactly what would happen if one were foolish enough to contemplate bringing a firearm into the office area. Corrigan imagined Mrs. Hotchkiss had a fully automatic submachine gun taped to the underside of the desk, or failing that, a SWAT team.

She also had his driver’s license. It was sitting on the counter right next to her as she tapped away at her computer, possibly reviewing his arrest record—there was none—and his driving history, which was not good. Or, she was just playing Minesweeper.

Corrigan had plenty of time to ponder because he’d been waiting nearly three hours for someone to find room in their busy day for him. Since he didn’t have any appointments until later in the afternoon, this was not the worst fate imaginable, but still, he expected them to be more efficient.

Finally, the door to the right of Mrs. Hotchkiss’s booth—the only door in the lobby other than the one Corrigan had come in through—opened, and out came a nondescript agent who introduced himself as Hicks. Hicks had a pile of folders under one arm and the butt of a gun conspicuously poking out from under his jacket. He sized up his guest.