The Fixer

12

At first Rick was aware of very little beyond the obvious. He knew he was in the trunk of a car, he knew he was being driven somewhere. Gradually he recognized textures and smells-besides the normal automotive smells, familiar scents like Coast soap and Speed Stick antiperspirant. He felt a jug of some sort of fluid rolling around, a nylon gym bag, and an assortment of magazines, and knew then that he was in the trunk of his own car.

His heart raced, his body crackled with adrenaline, he was damp with sweat and terror.

He remembered having dropped his car’s keyless remote. His attackers-he could tell by the voices that there’d been two at least-had retrieved it and now one of them was presumably driving the car. Taking him somewhere in his own car.

He struggled to remove his hood. His feet were bound, and so were his hands-but in front, fortunately, which made it possible at least to tug and yank at the hood. But it was secured fairly tightly around his neck. Tied, maybe.

He slid to one side of the trunk as the car took a sharp left turn. The back of his neck slammed against something, but the quick slash of pain subsided quickly. For the moment, he gave up on the hood and concentrated on feeling around the interior of the trunk, with his bound hands, looking for a way out.

There had to be an internal trunk release, a button or a toggle switch or a handle. Didn’t all cars have them now, by law? He felt around the lid and the sides of the trunk, feeling for handles or buttons, and he pushed and tugged at everything that seemed like a possibility. But nothing popped the trunk open.

He was weak with terror, and the terror came from uncertainty, not knowing why he was here and what was about to happen. The money, of course-that was obvious: It was the money that put him here. But what his abductors planned to do with him he had no idea. That was even more terrifying, the not knowing.

Though he knew this much: It had to be the construction crew. Who else could it be? Who else besides Jeff-who he was fairly certain wouldn’t take part in something like this-knew what he’d found? They’d been talking about the dinero. Jeff must have told them, must have given them a sense of how much money was there, or a wild approximation, an exaggeration. The goddamned dinero. The hood was their way to ensure Rick didn’t identify them to Jeff, their employer. It was crude, and intimidating, and it worked.

Did they somehow know where he’d stashed the money? Were they taking him to the storage place to make him unlock the unit? But if they knew where he’d put the cash, they could simply have grabbed his keys. They wouldn’t need him along. So that made no sense. Unfortunately, ruling that out meant something a lot scarier. They were going to make him hand it over, make him tell them where he’d put it.

He’d forgotten their names but he remembered their tattoos, their muscles, their menacing attitudes. One Hispanic and two black guys, all three immense.

The car slowed and came to a stop, and he heard the car doors open and slam shut. The trunk came open, and hands grasped him roughly and pulled him, stumbling, out. He careened to one side, his knees cracking against something hard, and he crashed to the floor.

He was in a cold, echoey place that smelled strongly of something rotten. A garage or a warehouse. There was a kind of musky, ripe, fatty odor, rancid and-like meat, he realized. Like a butcher shop. And it was cold. He shivered.

He was sprawled on one side on a hard floor. He tried to get to his feet, but he couldn’t, since they were bound at the ankles. He managed only to sit, knees splayed.

A voice was speaking to him, at him, now.

“Your rich uncle die on you, Mr. Hoffman?” A man’s voice, deep and commanding and resonant, echoing in this garage or warehouse or wherever he was. This butcher shop.

Rick didn’t reply. He turned his head toward where the voice was coming from.

Louder now: “I said, you have a rich uncle die on you, Mr. Hoffman? You come into an inheritance, is that it?” A baritone, precise enunciation, very reasonable sounding. A fairly strong Irish accent. And not Boston Irish either. Irish from Ireland. Not a voice he recognized. A guy speaking calmly, not raising his voice, maybe ten feet away.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Rick said, his voice muffled by the hood.

“Cute hoor, isn’t he, though?” said the voice. “Who told you about the money, Mr. Hoffman?”

“I don’t know anything about any money. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

“I’ll ask you again. Who’ve you been talking to? A simple question, Mr. Hoffman. Because your father doesn’t speak. So it’s someone else.”

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” he said again.

A gusty sigh.

“Let’s try again. Who told you about the money?”

“What money?”

The hood over his head was coarse, scratchy against his skin. He heard footsteps on a hard surface far away, echoing in what seemed a cavernous space.

Now the reasonable voice was very close, so close that Rick could smell the eggy breath. “They tell me you’re a literary man, Mr. Hoffman. A scribbler. You write on the computer? Type with both your hands?”

“What?”

“My question is very simple: Do you use both hands when you type on the computer? Or do you dictate?”

Rick didn’t know what his questioner was getting at, and he didn’t reply.

“You know the poem ‘Does It Matter,’ Mr. Hoffman? Hmm? No?”

“No, I-”

“It’s a grand poem. You should know it. We learned it by heart in school.” Then he declaimed: “Does it matter, losing your legs? For people will always be kind. Surely you know it, Mr. Hoffman. A great poem, and you’re a man of the word. And you need not show that you mind. When-” he hesitated-“the others come in after hunting to gobble their muffins and eggs.”

His abductor was some kind of lunatic, Rick realized with a cold spasm of fear. Completely out of his mind.

“Gents, hoist him up, will you, please?”

Someone grabbed him from behind at the ankles, and someone else grabbed him by his wrists. He bucked violently to throw them off, managing to land one heel in something soft and he heard a snarled epithet before his ankles were grasped again, and then he was lifted, wriggling and torquing his body, and slammed down, his face on something cold and hard and metal.

Then there was a click and a high-pitched whining sound, a sawing sound, quite unmistakable, the sound just a few inches away. A power saw.

“I’ve yet to meet a man who could stand up to the Butcher Boy. Tell me, Mr. Hoffman, are you left-handed or right-handed?”

Rick unloosed a torrent of obscenity.

An adenoidal laugh, a smoker’s cough. “The lip on this one! But you’ll want to answer me, because I’m giving you a choice this time. It’s your choice. It’s up to you. Which one’s your better hand, Mr. Hoffman? Left or right? I’ll only take the one this time.”

Suddenly, Rick found it hard to catch his breath. Panic flooded his body. The power saw whined shrilly maybe twelve inches from where his cheek rested on cold metal. He tried to wrench his hands free, but the grip was too strong. He smelled rancid meat again, and the dark odor of motor oil.

“He’s right-handed,” the Irishman said. “Let’s do him a kindness and take the left. Leave him his right.”

“No!” Rick shouted. “God, no!”

His hands were yanked across the hard metal surface, the saw shrilling just inches away. “No!” he said, unable to jerk his hands free, and then something cold and sharp sliced through the puffy parka sleeve and into his wrist-and the saw’s whine became a shriek, and then there was silence, except for the echo of Rick’s own screams.

His left wrist was hot and sticky with blood.

“Mr. Hoffman,” came the voice, “my father used to tell us kids, ‘The first time you get a talking to. The second time it’ll be the strap.’ Well, you’ll wish it was the strap, Mr. Hoffman. So I want you to think very hard because we will speak anon. Anon we will speak, Mr. Hoffman. And if we find you’ve held out on us, next time I won’t be asking ‘left or right.’”

Rick was drenched with sweat, his heart galloping, and all of a sudden he was grabbed by the knees and the hands again and dumped back into the trunk.

He heard the engine’s dull roar and the car was moving. With the fingers of his right hand he felt the cut on his left wrist. There was a lot of blood but the cut seemed superficial. The blade had cut through the sleeve of his parka. He could feel the tufts of down spilling out of the slash. Then he noticed that the saw blade had nipped partway through the plastic flex-cuff restraint. He twisted his hands around in opposite directions and yanked them back and forth and finally the plastic broke through and the cuff came apart.

Now that his hands were free, he tugged at the hood and managed finally to get it off. He jerked at the restraints securing his ankles, but what he needed was something sharp, and he succeeded only in tightening the cuff still more.

Sometime later-he could no longer keep track of time-the trunk lid was popped open and he heard the roar of traffic close by. He bucked, thrusting his feet first in one direction, then the other. It was dark, and he couldn’t see well, but two bulky men, both with shaven heads, were grabbing him. One got hold of his left ankle and the other grabbed his right wrist, then his left, and he was swung into the air and was dropped hard onto grass.

He could hear car doors open and slam and heard the gunning of a car’s engine. He scrambled to his knees, stumbled and tipped to one side, keeling over into the soft turf. He took a gulp of air and saw that he was sitting on the grassy median of a busy highway-he didn’t immediately recognize his whereabouts-and that his BMW was parked partly on the shoulder, partly on the grass, nearby.