Fixer

by Gene Doucette

  He could hear ragged, shallow breathing. She was working hard, forcing the air in and out of her lungs at great effort, as if the weight was still on her back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. He already knew who it was. “I tried my best.”

  “You could have saved me,” insisted Maribel Kozminsky. She was still wearing the blue suit. Turning toward him, she revealed a back that was twisted grossly out of shape. Her neck was tilted up awkwardly, so she had to look down to see him, given how her face was pointed at the ceiling. “You were right there!”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “You could have tried harder.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “You aren’t even dead. What are you doing here? You can’t be a ghost if you’re not even dead yet.”

  “You know I can’t move my legs, right?” she said, ignoring his very good point. “Permanent damage. And for someone my size—”

  “I said I was sorry. What do you want from me?”

  She sighed, the result being a full-body shudder. And when she spoke again, her voice was deeper—a man’s voice. “I expected more from you, boy.”

  “I know. The guy . . . he stopped to look at something, except he didn’t. I don’t know what happened.”

  “You’re a moron, you know that?” she snapped, sounding like a woman again, albeit an angry one. “He didn’t stop to look at something. He stopped to look at someone. Do you even use your brain at all?”

  “Someone?” Corrigan perked up. “Who?”

  “How should I know? What makes a guy stop what he’s doing like that? A pretty girl, probably. The future was altered and the girl didn’t show. You figured this out already.”

  “I did?”

  “And you remember the last time someone other than you altered the time stream, and that’s scaring the piss out of you. You’re trying to pretend none of this happened. You’re a total mess, Corry. You should talk to Ames before it gets any worse.”

  “I don’t need Ames.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “He didn’t help me either,” said a voice from near the closet. The boy stepped into the unnatural light that was coming from nowhere and everywhere.

  “Oh Christ,” Corrigan said.

  “What’s that, honey?” the woman asked the boy.

  “He was late!” the child half-shouted. Unlike Maribel, the kid looked uninjured. That’s because Corrigan’s ghosts were eminently practical; there was basically nothing left of him after the accident. Whoever decided these things understood that a ghost that looked like a battered pile of goo wouldn’t be very communicative.

  “There was a big traffic jam that day, kid, all right? I tried my best.”

  “You always say that,” he grumbled.

  “Well, you know, I try to explain these things, but you keep coming back and yelling at me anyway. What am I supposed to do about it now? Seriously.”

  “Awww, what a cutie,” blue suit declared, running her hand through the boy’s hair.

  “See, that’s a ghost, lady,” Corrigan said, pointing. “He actually died.”

  “That’s terrible! What happened, sweetie?”

  “Fell off my bike,” the boy said.

  “Is that all?”

  Corrigan added, “In front of the Silver Line. What’s it been, twelve years?”

  “Thirteen. I’d be in college now, y’know.”

  “Right, right,” Corrigan said, rubbing his eyes. “Look, it’s not that I don’t like the company, but I have to get some sleep or tomorrow’s gonna be a bear.”

  The boy smiled. “Nuh-uh. She’s s’posed to be coming.”

  “She who?” Corrigan asked.

  “You know.” The kid, Corrigan noticed, was still smiling, only the sides of his mouth were starting to curl right around his head and past his ears, while his forehead crept upward and chased the hair away to the back of his skull. His eyes blackened, and his nice, normal-sized big boy teeth had expanded and sharpened. The light from nowhere had begun to compress toward the center of the room. She was coming. His heart started to race.

  “Come on, I don’t deserve this,” Corrigan whined quietly.

  “Corrigan Bain is going insane,” the boy with the sharpened teeth hissed. “Corrigan Bain is going insane.”

  From the hallway, possibly the window, or maybe under the bed, he heard her voice. “Corrigan. . .”

  “No . . .” he muttered.

  “You let it happen again!”

  Corrigan screamed.

  And then he was awake. He’d sat bolt upright in his bed, the bedspread curled tightly in a ball in his hands and sweat coating most of his body and a good portion of the fitted sheet. And he was still screaming.

  He stopped. The room looked exactly as it had in the dream, except that sunlight was beginning to make an impact on the shadows. A look at the clock told him it was time to get up, which was good as he had no intention of going back to sleep anyway. Probably not for a very long time.

  “I’m not crazy, Harvey,” he muttered. “Don’t tell me I am. I’m not.”

  A quick peek at the outside world confirmed that everything was more or less as he’d left it. Clouds had built up on the edge of the skyline, portending doom for those who might be looking forward to a sunny weekend.

  “All right,” he said to the ghosts that were still lingering on the edge of his consciousness, “I’m getting to it.”

  Standing at the wall ten minutes later with the computer humming eagerly, Corrigan swept through his map waiting for the usual spike. But nothing was happening. He tried it again—his fifth pass. Still nothing.

  “Ah, c’mon,” he muttered, commencing his sixth pass. Any other day, this’d be fantastic news—he hadn’t had a day off in months—but this was particularly bad timing. The problem with the nightmares, other than the fact that they were hellish in general, was that they didn’t really go away again until he had another clean day. And he couldn’t have a clean day with no appointments to meet.

  Finally, after ten tries, he admitted defeat. On the bright side, he could start drinking right away. Like, just as soon as he got out of the shower.

  But there was the matter of the phone, which was ringing. It was sitting on the table next to the computer, so he didn’t have to go that far to retrieve it.

  “How’s your schedule today?” Maggie asked without even a hello. Corrigan looked down at the answering machine and noted that there were two messages waiting for him. Either she tried to reach him while he was still sleeping or he simply didn’t hear the phone ring while busy with the map.

  “Pretty empty,” he said, adding, “I’m free all day.” For the briefest of seconds the idea that Maggie Trent might be equally free, and furthermore be calling on the off chance he was up for some extracurriculars, flitted through his brain like an unexpected cool breeze at the end of a long jog. But, of course, that wasn’t it. She had an address for him. “Be there as soon as you can,” she said. Corrigan repeated the address. The computer, ever dutiful, logged the address and plotted it on the map for him.

  * * *

  “Where’ve you been?” Maggie asked as soon as he cut the engine. Corrigan took a look at the building whose address she’d given him over an hour ago. It was a shit-brown, flat-roofed three-story beastie that would have been impossible to distinguish from the next ten in the row if not for the number on the door and the color of the wood slat exterior. He’d been down streets like this before, and it always felt to him like he was driving through a giant box of crayons.

  “Got here when I could,” he growled, not bothering to mention he’d showered, shaved, had something to eat, and just in general taken his sweet time getting there because he was going to try his damnedest to make the most of this vacation day. Showing up at a crime scene was not his idea of a good time.

  “Well come on,” she said, discarding her cigarette and leading him inside to a horribly steep flight of stairs.

  “You
know, I never said yes,” Corrigan pointed out about halfway up.

  “You looking at my ass right now?” she asked, which was a reasonable question only insofar as she was ahead of him on the stairs.

  “Actually, yes.”

  “Ever want to see it again?”

  “That’s low.”

  “Give me a little time to make my case, okay? Take a look at the scene. I just want your opinion.”

  The first room they came across on the third floor was a smallish living room space that showed the years of wear from an indifferent landlord who habitually rented to college students. One could find the same sort of apartment in about half of the city. Although in this case it was clear the tenant had made an effort to personalize things and make it feel homier. There was a nice shag rug atop the low-thread industrial carpeting that went wall-to-wall, a secondhand couch that was being held together by a series of small blankets, a set of simple white curtains that didn’t clash with anything else in the room, and enough throw pillows to strongly suggest the occupant was a female.

  But all of that was background to the main attraction, which was the large bloodstain in the middle of the shag carpet. Said carpet was beige, so the red-black bloodstain was particularly prominent. Also prominent was the tremendous number of people scattered about the room—people in police uniforms, blue FBI windbreakers, and one guy in a jumpsuit who must have been a forensic technician or something. Most of them were just standing around and staring at the walls as if microscopic evidence could be culled via naked eye examination. The only movement was coming from the two guys in lab coats kneeling over the bloodstain and extracting particulates from it, as if it were a part of some urban archeological program.

  Maggie said, “Local P.D. still has jurisdiction; we’re here as advisors.”

  “Did you empty your whole office?”

  “Just about. But this one’s a little different than the rest.”

  “How so?” he asked.

  “We’ll get to that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Come on. It starts over here.”

  She led him down a short hallway into a small room full of papers, with one computer that was clearly not where it was supposed to be. The window at the other end of the room had been shattered. An officer was standing at the center of the room, ignoring the fact that he was standing on multiple pages of mathematical calculations.

  “This was where the attack began,” Maggie said.

  “Attack?” he asked. “That is different.”

  “Her face was shoved through that window. Then she fled down the hall and got stabbed in the living room, in the back. So yeah, I’d call it an attack.”

  “Doesn’t fit the other profiles,” Corrigan said. “And it sounds more like a home invasion to me.”

  “See all the papers?”

  “Hard not to.”

  “Victim was Erica Smalls. Supposed to be some kind of genius. She was an MIT postgrad, working on her doctoral thesis in physics.”

  “Same as the others?”

  “She’s on the list.”

  “Yet this doesn’t look like any suicide or accidental death,” he said, reiterating his earlier point.

  “No, it doesn’t. Are you familiar with the concept of escalation?”

  “In what sense?”

  “Pathologically. Say somebody happens to be a serial rapist. But one time he ends up killing one of the victims—finds out he likes it. Next time he’s raping, he’s taking the next step of finishing her off, only it’s on purpose.”

  “I saw something like that on TV once,” he said, trying to recall on which of the roughly two thousand possible cop shows it could have turned up.

  “I’m thinking that’s what we have here. This girl wasn’t just killed. She was toyed with first. And he didn’t take any steps to make it look like an accident.”

  “Maybe he knows the other deaths aren’t being treated as accidents anymore.”

  “Exactly. So why not have some fun with it?”

  Corrigan thought back to the girl who landed in front of a subway train and how none of the witnesses mentioned anything about her being pushed. “Are you telling me you have an invisible serial killer on the loose?”

  Maggie smiled. “I don’t know what we have yet. I’m just telling you what this crime scene is saying. But that’s not the craziest theory I’ve heard so far. Wait’ll you meet Tanya.”

  “Is she one of the people in the living room?”

  “Neighbor. She’s downstairs right now having her fourth or fifth nervous breakdown. She says she interrupted the killer in the act.”

  “That’s great, isn’t it?”

  Maggie implied, by her expression, that it was anything but great. “I’ll take you downstairs in a minute,” she said. “Finish up here first.”

  “Pretty small place,” he said. “I think I’ve already seen everything, don’t you?”

  “Not all of it, no. Anything catch your eye in here?”

  Corrigan made a show of examining the study closely. “Papers on the floor, but it looks to me like she did that herself. Computer on the floor, not so much.”

  “We think that happened during the attack.”

  “Baseball bat’s out of place,” he said, pointing to the Louisville Slugger leaning up against the wall.

  “Might’ve been used to hit her in the back of the head. We’re not sure just yet. Anything else?”

  “You know, this would be a whole hell of a lot easier if you told me what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t need you here,” she said cryptically.

  He sighed. “What did Calvin tell you about me, exactly?”

  Maggie hesitated, trying to decide whether or not to answer that. “That you may have encountered something like this before,” she said finally.

  “Well, I haven’t. Can I go home now? I have a lot of drinking to catch up on.”

  “The bedroom’s this way,” she said, ignoring his plea.

  Erica Smalls’ bedroom was tidy and only slightly larger than her study. It had a seemingly random selection of stuffed animals neatly congregated on the bed, which had been made with the efficiency of a hotel maid service. In the corner was a small jewelry stand with a mirror beside a set of dresser drawers holding an assortment of curios. Rounding out the room were two doors; one open and leading to a small closet, and one closed and leading to who knows where. Clearly, the attack hadn’t carried over into the bedroom.

  And, as with all the other rooms, there were two more law enforcement guys in there, mostly just glancing around as if they were waiting for one of the walls to start talking.

  Corrigan picked up a framed picture from the nightstand. It showed a very attractive young woman posing with a golden retriever.

  “Is this her?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Pretty, huh?”

  The hairs on the back of his neck pricked up, indicating that the answer to this question might lead him to a dangerous place if he wasn’t careful. Maggie liked to pretend she wasn’t like that, but of course she was. “Not bad,” he said, which he thought was a decent answer. Maggie huffed about it anyway.

  “Bathroom and kitchen are all that’s left,” she said, heading quickly out of the room. From the corner of his eye Corrigan caught the FBI agent coughing up a little grin.

  “What?” he asked. The man just shrugged, smiling.

  Five minutes later, Corrigan had seen both the bathroom and the half-kitchen and found nothing extraordinary about either of them, aside from the other people surveying the walls. Then he was back at the front door, standing beside Maggie and watching the nearly dozen people going about the business of doing nothing in particular.

  “Can I ask you something?” he whispered to Maggie.

  “Sure.”

  “What are they waiting for?”

  “Dunno yet,” Maggie said. “I’ll tell you when it happens. Any luck?”

  “I still don’t what I
’m looking for,” he said.

  “Something you might be uniquely equipped to see?”

  “No,” he said. “Nothing.”

  “All right,” she sighed. “Let’s go talk to Tanya.”

  * * *

  “It was a goddamn ghost!” Tanya Mifune repeated for the seventh or eighth time that day. She was shouting because this seemed to be about the only way to get anybody to believe her. Or possibly it was because she didn’t really believe it herself. Every time she mentioned ghosts, Corrigan’s flesh broke out in goose bumps. I believe you, he thought. Ghosts can be nasty.

  He could see from her clothes and the red in her eyes that Tanya hadn’t slept at all, which was sort of understandable given the circumstances. He also detected a faint whiff of alcohol. That couldn’t have helped her, story-wise, with the police.

  “You were out drinking with her,” he guessed.

  “Who the hell are you, anyway?” Tanya retorted. He didn’t look like a law enforcement officer so much as he looked like the guy who carried your couch in from the truck, so the question made sense.

  “Mr. Bain is a special consultant,” Maggie said. “Just tell him what you told me earlier.”

  Tanya reviewed Corrigan’s attire, such as it was. “You a ghostbuster or somethin’?”

  He smiled. “I’m a fixer.”

  “Yeah, all right,” she said, waving him off.

  Tanya was sitting on the lime green couch that was the centerpiece of her sparsely decorated living room. The apartment was a geometric twin to the one upstairs, but the sartorial choices made by the two women differed significantly enough to make it appear as if they were apartments in entirely different buildings. And Tanya had some decorating skills to draw from; her place seemed bigger, somehow, yet more cozy. But that could have been the lack of a bloodstain speaking.

  She picked up a cup of lukewarm tea with a shaky hand, took a few sips, and recounted the events of the prior day. Corrigan didn’t really pay attention until the end.