The Fixer (17 page)

H
e pulled into traffic and was at the offices of
Back Bay
magazine fifteen minutes later. He was taking a risk, appearing for a second time at the magazine. But the kind of search he had to do could be done only at the office. He needed to do an advanced search of LexisNexis by date. A conventional Internet search would take forever. You can search
The
New York Times
or
The
Boston Globe
or
The
Wall Street Journal
for incidents or names but not by what happened during three days in May in 1996. For that he needed to use LexisNexis on site.

The office was empty when he arrived. His badge got him in the door, though, and he flipped on the overhead lights, jittery fluorescents. He logged into the magazine’s intranet and found a nagging e-mail from Darren.
How’s the Sculley Q&A coming?
he wanted to know.
He’ll be at the gala at the Park Plaza on Wednesday—maybe a good chance to sit down with him?

Rick didn’t bother to reply. The best strategy with Darren was just to ignore him. Rick pulled up LexisNexis. He typed in the date range, which yielded hundreds of headlines.

He groaned. He was looking at everything that had happened in Boston and Massachusetts over those three days. Politicians in trouble in the State House, town officials accused of graft . . .
CAMBRIDGE MAN
HELD IN STABBING.
A guy was stabbed in the neck and chest at the Portuguese Football Club. 86
-Y
EAR-OLD MALDEN WOMAN
SUFFERS SEVERE BURN
S IN APARTMENT FIRE
. A sprinkling of obituaries, minor sports and medical news, the Indy 500 winner, the Fire Department’s annual ball at the Sheraton.

Nothing seemed to fit the profile: something that would require the services of a PR guy like Pappas. After a few hours of searching, his eyes were weary and his head had begun to ache. Then he noticed a story with Monica Kennedy’s byline,
The
Boston Globe
’s investigative ace.

JAMAICA PLAIN FAMILY
KILLED IN TUNNEL ACC
IDENT
.
A terrible story about a young mother and father and their fourteen-year-old daughter killed when their car hit the wall of the brand-new Ted Williams Tunnel. Rick knew the tunnel was part of the Big Dig, so he lingered on the article for a moment. A tragedy, but not something that would in any way involve his father or Alex Pappas.

So why was Monica Kennedy writing about a car accident of all things?

He looked at his watch. It was a bit after 7:00
P.M
.
Back Bay
had cleared out, but Monica worked long hours. If she wasn’t at her desk, she was on her way home. She was disturbable.

“Kennedy,” she barked after one ring.

“Monica, it’s Rick.” He paused. “Hoffman.”

There was a lot of background hubbub punctuated by the clinking of glasses or silverware. “Rick Hoffman! Coming back like a bad penny.” Her words were garbled by a mouthful of food. “What the hell you want now?” She said it jokingly, but Rick knew there was a sharp edge of truth in there.

“The Cabrera family mean anything to you?”

“The who?”

“A family from the Dominican Republic who lived in Jamaica Plain, Hyde Square. Daddy, mommy, teenage daughter killed in a traffic accident.”

“I don’t know what . . .”

“This is back in ’96.”

“Are you still playing investigative reporter for the
Shop ’n’ Save Gazette
or whatever you call that piece-of-shit supermarket circular you write for?”

“The Ted Williams Tunnel—?”

“Oh,
that
, sure, sure. Awful story. Family of three wiped out in a car crash.”

“But why were
you
on a traffic story?”

“Yeah, hold on a second.” She chewed, then took a big swallow. “You know, I never got the goods on that one. As I recall, it went like: This guy and his pregnant wife and young daughter are driving through the Ted Williams Tunnel in the middle of the night—this is right after it first opened—and the guy drives his car into the tunnel wall and they’re all killed immediately.”

“Got that. What I don’t get is what put
you
on the story.”

“The Ted Williams Tunnel. The spanking-new, just finished Ted Williams Tunnel, man. The Big Dig, what do you think? Started out I thought I had something about shoddy construction on the Big Dig and it turned out to be just a plain-vanilla accident. Nothing there. Like my Afrin bottle. Wait a second, now I remember! Alex Pappas!”

“Pappas? What about Pappas?”

“For some reason he was all over the story, playing zone defense. He called me a couple times. Yeah, Pappas was doing reputation management for one of the construction firms that built the tunnel, and he was making sure the company’s name didn’t get dragged into it. But like I said, he had nothing to worry about, ’cause it was just driver negligence or whatever. The driver was drunk, I always figured. Nothing there.”

Pappas,
he thought. Reputation management. If Pappas was talking to a reporter for the
Globe
and also talking to Lenny Hoffman . . .

Was it so farfetched? Pappas wanted Lenny’s legal help, maybe.

“You think you still have the file?”

“Somewhere. Somewhere. I don’t throw anything away. When was that again?”

“Ninety-six.”

“Probably in the file drawer at work. Now can I get back to my dinner, please?”

“I’ll come by tomorrow.”

Rick had parked his Zipcar in the big parking lot on Washington Street behind the building where
Back Bay
’s offices were, a lot that faced a sports club and the off-street patio of an Italian bistro. In the daytime the lot was always full, but now it was half empty. He pressed the Unlock button on the remote to pulse the car’s flashers and remind him where he’d parked.

He got in the car and pushed the ignition button and drove toward the exit, when he felt something whispering across his neck, maybe an insect, a fly, and he reached to scratch it and felt something grab his left shoulder and heard a man’s voice immediately behind him, from the backseat.

“Pull over, Mr. Hoffman, but
gently,
please, sir. What you feel against your carotid artery is a seven-inch Japanese
santoku,
a chef’s knife made of molybdenum vanadium stainless steel. Ice-tempered and hollow ground and probably the finest chef’s knife in the world.”

Rick froze, his heart fluttering wildly.

“It slices with very little pressure. So bring your chariot to a stop gently, Mr. Hoffman. This is a rental vehicle, and it’s damnably hard to get blood out of the upholstery.”

H
is body jerked slightly, he couldn’t help it, as he eased his foot down on the brake and guided the car to a stop. “Jesus,” he said. He felt the blade hot against his throat, gasped involuntarily as it broke skin.

“How much do you want?” he said.

He felt the warm wetness, the prickle of blood, and at the same time felt an icy clutch deep within his bowels.

He didn’t dare raise his hands, do anything to cause his attacker to pull the knife in any harder. He smelled that barbershop smell again and the odor of stale cigarette smoke. He sensed that his attacker was alone in the backseat of his car, and he sized up his chances for escape. They were limited. If only he could reach up and grab the wrist that squeezed hard against his neck, tight as a hug. But the blade would sink in a beat faster, he had no doubt of that. He inhaled deeply and felt the bite of the blade on his larynx and tears of pain came into his eyes. He would have to lull his attacker into momentary complacency and then move suddenly. But that sounded workable in theory; in practice, it seemed impossible.

“You want me to talk to you, it’s a lot easier if you take the goddamned knife off my throat.”

He knew what they were planning to do to him, and he knew he had to do everything in his power to get away.

In his peripheral vision he saw someone approach the driver’s-side door and the door came open and a pair of hands thrust inside, grappling with a piece of cloth. The moment had passed. The hood went over his head and everything was dark. The knife edge remained poised against his throat. It smelled of burlap and was coarse against his skin.

“But I have information for you,” Rick attempted.

“We’re not talking,” a voice finally said. Not the voice of the poetry lover. This was higher, raspier. In just a few words he could detect an Irish accent. “Now move over.”

“I can’t,” Rick said. He gestured with his hands at the console that separated the driver’s from the passenger’s seat.

A pause. “All right. Get out.”

The knife came away from his throat.

He did. Someone grabbed his elbow; the second man. He couldn’t see anything but was pushed and yanked into the backseat of the Prius. He wondered if anyone in the dark parking lot could see what was happening. He hadn’t seen anyone in the lot when he unlocked the car a few minutes earlier. If someone did see, would he or she get involved, say something, or not. In a city like New York, people didn’t get involved, as a rule. But Boston was a smaller city, in some ways like an overgrown town. Maybe someone who saw something suspicious would call the cops.

If he yelled, would that make a difference? He thought about it and decided no. It would just provoke the knife. One of the men got in the back of the car next to him, and the other must have gotten into the front, because the car began to move.

“To the plant?” the driver said.

“Yeah,” said the man next to him.

“Goddamned underpowered sardine can,” the driver said.

The man next to him muttered something inaudible in reply.

“The man’s gonna meet us there?” said the driver.

“Yeah.”

Both had Irish accents.

He tried to listen to the traffic patterns to determine which way they were heading, but it wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped. They were in traffic; that was all he knew. The Prius was quiet. They were going someplace where someone else,
the man
, would meet them.

The man would ask the questions. That was why they didn’t want him to talk. Their job, maybe, was just to bring him to the man who asked the questions.

So what did they want? Information, it seemed—not necessarily the cash. Maybe not the cash at all. Last time they’d wanted to know who he’d talked to—who had told him about the money.

He wondered where they were going.

A plant, the man had said. He wondered if it were a meat-packing plant. Maybe that was where they’d taken him the last time. There was an area in the city—in Roxbury, actually, on Newmarket Square—where a number of wholesale meat processing plants were located. They butchered and packed meat for food service accounts, schools and institutions and restaurants. Maybe it was one of those plants.

When the car finally stopped moving, he heard the front door open. Someone got out. Then he heard the clatter of a steel overhead door rolling up on its tracks, the whine of a motor. A roll-up warehouse or loading dock door. Thirty seconds later the car door slammed and the car was driven forward a bit. Into a loading bay, he supposed.

Then the backseat car door was opened and he was grabbed by the shoulder and pulled into the night air. At once he smelled that slightly rancid, rotting smell he remembered from last time. The smell of decomposition. The smell of meat. He heard footsteps echoing in a cavernous, high-ceilinged space.

He heard cars whizzing by, the wheezing brakes of an old van or truck, the screech of a gull. “Walk straight ahead.”

He walked but didn’t know what direction he was going and he found it hard to keep his balance. He gestured toward the hood. “Is this really necessary?”

“Shut your bake, you fecking eejit.” He was yanked even harder and almost stumbled. He resumed walking, his hands stretched in front of him.

“He’s not here,” one of the men said.

“Tie him up,” the other said. “The pole over there.”

The other one said something inaudible ending in “Get me something.”

The steel overhead door rattled closed and the outside sounds grew muted. More echoing footsteps, the sound of metal scraping against metal. The blat of a motorcycle racing past outside far away.

He was grabbed and jerked a few feet to his left. Did they keep him hooded so he wouldn’t know where he was, or how he got here? Both, maybe.

A mobile phone rang, a burst of tinny music.

“Yes, sir? . . . Okay, right, then.”

“Where is he?”

“Awwright, this one’s gonna have to wait here while we go get the man.”

“You go, I’ll watch this bowsie.”

“Man wants both of us there.”

“We just leave him here? This gobshite? He’ll do a legger.”

“Tie him up to that and tie him up good. Check his pockets for knives or anything.”

“Stick your hands out,” said the voice nearest him, punching him on the shoulder.

He stuck out his hands, then felt something being wound around his wrists, something coarse and prickly, maybe rope. Then something was wound around his ankles and around his legs and he realized he’d been bound to a stout steel pole.

He wondered what the hell they were doing to him now. All he could tell was that he was being tied up in order to wait for someone, presumably someone senior. Their boss. Whoever it was they called Sir.

Neither of his abductors spoke to him. They spoke to each other quietly, at the far end of the cavernous space they were in. After a few minutes he didn’t hear their voices anymore. He heard footsteps in the distance. A door opening and closing.

He waited.

Another few minutes went by. He heard the distant buzz of traffic.

“Hello?” he called out.

The rope was uncomfortable at his wrists and ankles. He was restrained in a position that forced him to remain standing. If he tried to sit, the ropes on his legs tightened painfully. He tried to untie the ropes that wound around his wrists, but gave up after a few agonizing moments. His legs began to cramp.

“What the hell’s going on?” he said, louder.

No reply.

He had no idea how much time had passed since he’d been carjacked. An hour, maybe? Two? He knew he was somewhere within the city limits, or just outside. In a meat-packing plant or food-processing place of some kind, near a busy road.

And he waited.

And the notion occurred to him suddenly that he was not powerless, not as helpless as he felt. “Hey,” he said. “If you get me out of here, I can make you rich.”

There was silence.

“Hey!” he said louder. “You know I have a lot of money, it’s why I’m here, and if you cut me loose, I’ll make you rich.”

Silence.

Louder still, he said, “Hello? You hear me? Let’s make a deal.”

Silence.

“
Hello?
” He waited five, ten seconds more. “You hear me?”

But no reply. Either they were gone or they were untemptable.

He heard the squeal of brakes close by. Voices. Then the motorized whir and the metallic rattle of the overhead door opening. A rush of cold air.

“That’s the car, man.” A voice, no Irish accent.

Another voice: “
Jesús Cristo!
Mira!
Look at the guy!”

“Shit!”

These weren’t the guys with the Irish accents, not the ones who’d brought him here. Then who were they? The voices were vaguely familiar.

“Can somebody help me?” Rick said. “Get this hood off me?”

“The hell’s going on here?” the first voice said, getting closer. “Look at this!”

“All tied up and shit.
Jesús Cristo.
”

Then, abruptly, the hood came off and Rick was momentarily disoriented, but a few seconds later he realized he was looking at two familiar faces. It took him another second to remember who they were.

The guys from Jeff’s construction crew. Santiago and Marlon.

“Thank you,” Rick said, gulping fresh air. “What—what’re you guys doing here?”

“What happened to him?” said Marlon. “You’re bleeding.” He touched his own neck. “On your throat, like.”

“Can you guys untie me?”

“You got a knife on you?” Marlon said. “Maybe a box cutter?”

“What happened to you, man? Who did this to you?”

“Hurry, could you?” Rick said. “They could be back here at any minute.”

Marlon produced a utility knife and slashed at the ropes around Rick’s wrists while Santiago untied the knots at his ankles, and within five minutes the three of them were crowded into the front seat of the Demo King Trash-a-Way pickup truck and on their way from South Boston to Cambridge.

“So how’d you guys end up here?” Rick asked. “I don’t get it.”

The two were silent.

“Were you following me in the car?”

Silence.

“Did you put a GPS on my car?”

Marlon said, “Tell him about your brother, Santiago.”

Another pause, then Santiago said, “My brother works at the Chevy dealer in Arlington.”

Rick remembered Santiago showing up late with his car, horn blasting. “You guys LoJacked my car! That’s what took you so long!”

They both laughed uneasily.

“Son of a bitch,” Rick said.

“We wasn’t gonna rip you off,” said Santiago. “We just know you got all this money and shit.”

“And you wanted to find out where I put it,” Rick said.

The two were silent again. He didn’t know what to think about this. It was creepy, anxiety-provoking how easily they were able to find him, but he was hardly in a position to complain. They’d saved him from whatever the Irish gang intended.

He owed them something.