The Fixer (23 page)

M
arblehead was a half hour’s drive from Boston, mostly up 1A, along the coast. It was a town usually called “charming,” its harbor one of the best on the eastern seaboard, allowing the chamber of commerce to call Marblehead “the yachting capital of America.”

It was not the sort of town to which cops tended to retire.

Rick had been to houses bigger and grander than Walter Conklin’s waterfront estate. But not many. And none of them belonged to retired police officers.

As he drove up he was dazzled by the light reflecting on the water, the bright white paint of the house, the emerald of the lawn. The house was situated on a bluff overlooking the ocean. It had to have water views from almost every room in the house. He parked in the circular drive beside a champagne Mercedes sedan. There was a long walk to the house. The place had absolute privacy. No neighbors to be seen.

Walter Conklin looked like a retired captain of industry, maybe a retired admiral. His full head of white hair was carefully combed back. He wore a white polo shirt under a soft blue lamb’s wool sweater, tan slacks, and moccasins. His ruddy face spoke of long afternoons spent sailing off his private beach. His handshake was unnecessarily firm.

“No problem finding me?”

His accent, however, was pure unadulterated Southie.

“Easy. Right up 1A. Beautiful setting.”

“Thank you.”

A slender woman in a tennis dress materialized from the hallway behind him. Her blond-gray hair was pulled back with a lime-green headband. She looked easily fifteen years younger than Conklin. “Lunch at one at the club?” She, too, had a working-class Boston accent, though Rick couldn’t quite place it. She kissed her husband on the cheek, gave Rick a wary glance before sliding out the front door.

The décor was Grand Hyatt tasteful. “My wife made coffee,” Conklin said. “How do you take it?”

“I’m fine.”

“Then I’ll help myself.” He led the way to a spacious kitchen—granite island, cherrywood cabinets, built-in ovens—and poured himself a mug of coffee from a Krups machine on the island. He went over to a banquette against the window next to a round wooden kitchen table and sat, gesturing to Rick to join him. Then he took a sip and looked at Rick over the rim. “So what’s your take on the wind farm gonna be?”

“Actually, I’d be more interested to hear
your
take.” He took out one of his old reporter’s notebooks and a pen and started jotting.

“You have any idea how big that thing is?” Conklin said. “It’s taller than the Statue of Liberty. It’s taller than the Zakim Bridge. I mean, each blade is like the width of a football field, you know that?”

“You’ve got a gorgeous view of the Atlantic here. How do you feel about what a windmill would do to your view?”

“The view? That ain’t the half of it. These things make a hell of a racket. I read a website about it. They disturb sleep and cause irritability. It’s like a jet engine hovering over you.”

“‘A jet engine’ . . . that’s good.”

“Plus, when it’s freezing they throw off shards of ice. And they kill birds.”

Rick nodded, pretending to take notes, as he planned how he was going to segue to the tunnel accident.

“Yeah, it’s an unholy monstrosity.” Conklin paused and gave a twist of a smile. “But I have a feeling you didn’t really come here to talk about windmills, did you, Rick?”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not exactly a
Back Bay
reader, but they never commissioned an article about the Tinker’s Island windmill. Not their kind of thing. Now, if someone wanted to put one of these wind turbines in Boston Common, maybe they’d do something.” Conklin’s eyes glittered. He took a sip of coffee.

Rick felt a surge of adrenaline, a pulse of anxiety. “I’ve changed my mind about coffee.”

“Help yourself,” Conklin said casually. “The mugs are right there. Cream in the fridge.”

Rick took an earthenware mug from a spindle by the coffee machine and poured himself a cup of coffee, and by the time he took a sip he’d thought of a response. “They usually have no idea what I’m working on until I turn it in.” He sat down at one of the uncomfortable ladder-back chairs around the table.

“Uh-huh. They also say you’re no longer on staff there.”

All the years in retirement fell away, and Conklin was a cop again, talking to a perp in an interrogation room. He stared at Rick with a zookeeper look.

“Busted,” Rick said. “You know what, you’re right. I’m actually interested in asking you about something else, and I apologize for coming here under false pretenses. I’m actually working on something a little more interesting. A story about an accident eighteen years ago in the Ted Williams Tunnel where a family was killed.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. You were a patrol officer. You signed the incident report.”

“You know how much shit I had to deal with in my twenty years on the force? How many years ago was that?”

“Eighteen years ago.”

“Come on.”

“Well, I have a fairly good working theory of what happened. You were driving by or else got the call on the radio and you discovered a grisly accident scene. You saw a car that was badly smashed up. Then you saw what had happened. You saw that a light fixture had dropped from the ceiling and crashed into the car’s windshield. And that’s when you made a really smart decision.”

Conklin was no longer meeting Rick’s eyes. He seemed deflated, maybe hostile, but hard to read.

“Because you’re a smart guy,” Rick went on, “you realized you’d just found something really valuable. Something that might be worth a hell of a lot of money to the company that had just got finished building the tunnel. You probably even had friends who’d been hired by Donegall Construction. So you knew who to call. And that was a call that made you a rich man.”

Gears were turning in the ex-cop’s mind. Maybe he was trying to decide whether to break almost two decades of silence.

“You knew that Donegall Construction really wouldn’t want it known what caused this accident. Because that would expose them to some really bad publicity and, who knows, maybe a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit? You figured out that that light fixture would be worth a hell of a lot of money to them.” Rick paused, smiled. “But only if you put it away somewhere. Made sure it wasn’t found by any other cops or state troopers or accident investigators. So you put it away somewhere. Like the trunk of your car.”

Conklin was still looking off into the distance. Rick tried to measure whether his conjecture was hitting home, whether he’d got it substantially right. But the man remained unreadable.

“My guess is, you made a really good deal with them. Maybe even millions of dollars. Because it was worth it to Donegall Construction. Given how much they’d be on the hook for if anyone found out about the fallen light fixture, that was pocket change to them.”

“It was blocking traffic,” Conklin said finally. “I wasn’t gonna leave it there.”

“Of course not.” Rick had seen moments like this before, where the interview takes a sudden turn. The hostile corporate CEO abruptly decides what the hell, why not fess up? But it was important now to lock Conklin in to a confirmation.

Rick leaned in and said deliberately, “Look, the story’s going to come out, one way or another. Your best hope is to make sure it’s a version of events that’s . . .”
Favorable to you
, he thought, but he said, “accurate as you recall it. This interview can be entirely off the record, if you prefer. Nobody needs to know that we spoke. You see, I just want to know the truth. That’s all.”

Rick looked into Conklin’s eyes, and this time the old cop returned his gaze. Conklin pursed his lips and looked as if he’d just swallowed something unpleasant. There was a long beat of silence.

“Get the hell out of my house,” he said.

C
onklin’s already ruddy face had turned dark, and his eyes twinkled with moisture. There was something in his expression very close to hatred.

Rick was about to speak, to attempt to talk the man down with some combination of wheedling and threat, when Conklin jabbed a fat finger in the air close to Rick’s nose and said, with teeth bared, “Get the fuck out of here this instant before I make you.”

There was no more reasoning with him. Anyway, Rick had gotten what he’d come for. He stood up, the ladder-back chair crashing to the kitchen floor behind him. He picked up the chair and slid it neatly against the table. Then he left the kitchen and headed down the hallway to the front door, his footsteps loud in the silence.

He descended the steps of the gray-painted wraparound porch, his heart thudding. The air was salty and the sun was so bright he had to blink a few times before his eyes adjusted. When he was a good ways down the long driveway, he heard a noise behind him. There was a scuffing sound, like a shoe against gravel, and he turned his head and for a fraction of a second he saw something in his peripheral vision: a person.

Then something walloped his upper back with such force it sent him sprawling to the ground. He heard a cracking sound on impact and wondered if it was a bone. After a brief moment of nothing, a supernova of pain exploded in his upper back, of a magnitude he’d never experienced before. Needles of pain were shooting down his arms, his hands, and radiating down to his lower back. His right cheek had scraped against the asphalt, but that hurt was insignificant.
What the hell?
He looked up, saw a guy looming over him, holding a baseball bat, silhouetted against the bright sun.

“Leave it . . . the fuck . . . alone,” the man said. It was the bouncer from Jugs, and the man clearly intended to kill him.

He scrambled to his feet, as the ground beneath him tilted, and he lunged unsteadily toward his car. He tried to run but for some reason he found himself moving slower than usual; maybe it was the pain that had gripped his back and shoulders.

The bouncer pulled the bat back and swung it hard at his face.

Rick watched it come at him, as if in slow motion, and he knew that the bat would derange his face as soon as it made contact, break his nose and cheekbone and probably other bones he didn’t know he had. For a split second he considered contracting into a fetal position to protect himself. But at the last moment, as the bat came at him, he spun and flung out his hands to try to block the blow, try to grab the bat out of the guy’s hands, but he managed only to have the fingers of his left hand crunch against the shank of the bat, slowing its speed and maybe altering its trajectory just enough so it cracked into his jaw. His field of vision exploded in a constellation of stars. His left arm flopped uselessly against his side and he screamed in pain. The bones in his left hand felt as if they’d shattered like glass.

He tasted the metallic tang of his own blood. A part of his brain, the project manager that was overseeing everything at a cool distance, wondered whether the bouncer intended to kill him or just inflict brain damage. Maybe he’d get hit on the side of his head and suffer a stroke, and he’d end up just like his father.

“
Hold on,
” he huffed. “
Listen
.”

Or maybe he only thought he’d spoken these words aloud. His jaw felt broken and his mouth wasn’t working.

“Leave it . . . the fuck . . . alone,” the bouncer said again.

He tried to lift his arms to ward off the next blow, but he couldn’t lift his left hand, and this time the bat connected with his trunk, slamming into his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him, doubling him over. He couldn’t breathe. For a brief instant he saw stars again. He crumpled to his knees. He gasped for air uselessly like a goldfish out of its bowl. Everything went quiet, and all he could hear was a high-pitched squeal, like feedback from a microphone. He collapsed into a ball.

But the man wasn’t done yet.

The bat connected one more time, smashing into his right shoulder and his right ear, and somehow the starburst of pain was even worse, a crescendo of agony, and his field of vision went dark and he was gone.

H
e wasn’t able to move.

“Stay still, sir,” a voice said.

“No . . . no . . .” Rick moaned.

Someone was doing something to his left arm. He tried to pull his arm away but it wouldn’t move. Then he remembered vaguely a baseball bat colliding with his hand and rendering it useless.

Someone else was jabbing something sharp, a pin or a needle of some kind, into his other arm. He was aware on some level that it hurt, but he was in such a world of pain that one more hurt barely registered.

A second voice, a woman’s, said, “Say your name. What’s your name?”

Rick Hoffman
, he may have said, or maybe he only thought it.

“BP one hundred palp,” said the first voice, a man’s voice, high and nasal.

“Out . . . out . . .” Rick said. He was trapped in something, he now realized. Or on something. His entire body was frozen in place, and he struggled with all his strength to get free.

“Big poke again,” said the woman.

“Ahh,” Rick groaned.

“You get it?” the man said.

“He feels that,” the woman said. “There’s the flash. Good IV.”

“Here’s your liter,” the man said.

Rick saw faces coming in and out of focus, in and out. “Run it wide,” the woman said. “You still with me, sir?”

Rick moaned some more and tried to tell them to leave him the hell alone.

The faces were gone now, and he could see blue sky, and then it began to move, and he saw shadows and a dark shape of some sort and he didn’t know where he was, somewhere inside now, not outside, and everything had gone dark, and he was gone.

A couple of people stood over him now. They wore yellow paper gowns. One of them said in a low, hoarse voice, “Gimme the story.”

A familiar voice—a man’s voice, high and nasal—said, “Thirtysomething male assault. Unwitnessed but the person who called 911 said something about ‘bats.’”

Rick was moving, rolling. He passed through glass doors that slid open on his approach. One of the people in the yellow paper gowns, alongside, said, “Sir, what’s your name, sir?”

Rick said his name again.

“What’s he saying?”

“Been that way the whole time.” The woman’s voice from before. “GCS maybe ten. BP one hundred palp. Pulse 120s.”

He finally understood he was in a hospital. He saw beds with patients lying in them, uniformed nurses ducking out of the way, then there was a tight turn and he was in a large space, bright and hectic, filled with people.

“Easy on my count.” The low, hoarse male voice. “One—two—
three
.”

He was lifted high up into the air, then down.

“No other medical history,” the nasal voice said. “He’s not talking much. We got a liter going.”

Now he was aware of several people looming above him, men and women. They were making him dizzy. He let his eyes fall shut. Now all around him was a hubbub, yammering indistinct voices, and everything had gone dark.

A man’s voice: “Field line in the right AC. Liter up.”

A woman’s voice: “Open your eyes, sir! Tell me your name.”

Obediently, Rick opened his eyes. He said
Rick Hoffman
but what came out sounded more like
brick house
. His mouth wasn’t working right. It hurt when he tried to speak.

“Sir, do you remember what happened?” the woman said.

Rick saw the woman’s face, looked into her eyes. He tried to nod.

“Don’t move, sir,” a man said. “Got a second line, eighteen gauge left AC.”

“Okay,” the woman doctor said, “protecting his airway for now.” She had a stethoscope in her ears and was putting the diaphragm end of it on his chest. Meanwhile someone was cutting his shirt open with a large pair of shears. “Bilateral symmetrical breath sounds.” Her voice was low and husky.

A new voice now. Male. “On the monitor—BP 108 over 64, pulse 118, sats 92 percent.”

“Good peripheral pulses all around,” said another voice.

“Show me a thumbs-up,” said the woman. “Give me a squeeze. . . .”

Rick tried to squeeze her finger, which she’d put in his left hand, but just moving it was ungodly painful.

“He’s not following commands. Sir, can you wiggle your toes?”

Rick obediently wiggled his toes.

“Guess not,” someone said.

The woman said, “Okay, two liters up, CBC and trauma panel.”

“You want some fent?” a man asked.

Some piece of equipment rolled up alongside his bed. He felt something cold and gelatinous being squirted onto his chest.

“Fifty of fent to start,” the woman said. “You still with me, sir? Open your mouth. Wide.”

Something cold and metallic, he assumed it was a probe, was moving in small circles on his chest.

Rick obeyed, or thought he did. He moaned. His jaw was incredibly painful but only when he opened his mouth to breathe or talk. His chest and stomach ached terribly. He moaned again.

“No pericardial effusion, good cardiac motion,” someone else said. A young man. “Multiple abrasions and bruises over the chest wall.”

“Ahhh,” Rick moaned. He gasped in pain.

“Sorry,” said the young man. “Good sliding motion on the lungs, no pneumo.”

“Got a big lac over the left parietal scalp,” the husky-voiced woman said. “Stapler.”

“No blood in Morison’s pouch. Left paracolic gutter dry.” The young guy.

The woman: “Let me have twenty of etomidate and 120 of succs ready in case we have to tube this guy.”

“Already got it,” a woman said.

The young guy: “He’s pretty altered; you should tube him.”

The woman: “Sir! Say your name.”

Rick tried again to say his name, but this time it came out as
Off me
.

The woman: “Sir, I have to put a tube in your throat to protect you. Do you understand? We need to put you to sleep for now.”

I don’t want a tube in my throat
, Rick tried to say.
That’s totally unnecessary
.

“FAST is negative,” said the young guy. “Call the scanner and let them know we have a tubed blunt head on the way.”

Something glinted—a blade of some sort? The doctors and nurses seemed to shift position around the bed. A baby or a kid was crying nearby.

“RT here?” asked the woman.

“He’s here,” someone said.

Someone ran past with a heavy tread. He heard a hissing noise. Then somebody put a mask, loudly hissing, over his face.

“Sats going up ninety-six.”

“Okay,” the young male doctor said. “Push the etomidate, then the succs.”

“I got your tube,” the husky-voiced female doctor said. “You do C-spine.”

“Okay.”

“Drugs are in.”

“Sir!” said the woman doctor. “Sir! You’re going to feel sleepy now. Just relax, just go to . . .”