The Fixer

61

The kitchen door was open, which meant Jeff was still here, though it was late. He could see light spilling into the stairwell to the second floor. Everything smelled strongly of some sort of solvent.

“Jeff?”

“Up here.” Jeff’s voice came from the floor above.

Rick climbed the stairs. The solvent smell got stronger.

“I’m up on the third,” Jeff called out.

Jeff was in a corner of the hall next to Rick’s old bedroom. Beside him was a short ladder beneath a large hole in the ceiling. He looked around. The Sheetrocking was done, ready for painting. There were several large buckets of some kind of fluid, a few of them filled with rags.

“This solvent from the floor guys?”

“Right. They’re doing some stripping before the sanding. Look, I got something for you but first I wanted to show you something I found today.” He seemed nervous.

“What’s wrong?”

“You got a serious problem,” Jeff said.

You have no idea, Rick thought. “What is it?” he said. “Something structural?”

“Over here.” Jeff beckoned Rick over to the ladder. Five foot high, four rungs, positioned in the corner of the hallway right below the hole ripped into the ceiling. Rick could see the rafters, the old plaster. “Wanna get up there and take a look?”

Rick climbed the ladder, peered into the opening in the ceiling. It was dark and hard to make anything out. “What am I looking at?”

“There’s some real termite damage in there.”

Rick peered farther into the darkness. “Where?”

“It’s all over,” Jeff said, now close behind him.

“All over where?”

Jeff spoke quietly, in a tight, choked voice, as if he was having trouble saying the words. “See, Rick, I asked around like you wanted me to do, and I heard some really interesting stuff.”

Rick wasn’t tracking. Was Jeff still talking about termites?

“The hell of it is,” Jeff went on, “if you’d been more generous from the start, their offer wouldn’ta looked so good to me, you asshole.”

“What offer?”

At the very moment that Rick realized, it was a beat too late. Jeff held a length of two-by-four and swung it at him, at his torso.

Rick tried to duck, but standing on the top rung of the ladder he risked toppling and losing his balance.

The board crashed into his ribs and Rick shouted, “What the hell?” As he began to topple from the ladder, Jeff swung at him a second time.

Rick thought: Not my head!

And he heard the impact an instant before he felt it, felt the screaming pain in his forehead, tasted blood, and then nothing…

… When he came to, he was lying crumpled on his back, his nostrils full of smoke, and he coughed violently. For a moment he had no idea how he’d gotten where he was nor how long he’d been out.

He craned his head, looked around. Flames were crackling, leaping all around. The heat seared his skin. Tall licks of orange flame leaped and danced at this end of the hall, devouring the pristine walls, the floors, climbing the newly Sheetrocked walls, searing them black, curling the paper.

The house was on fire.

Rick got up unsteadily, swaying. Then came a whump as the fire discovered another bucket of solvent-soaked rags and traced its fingers of spill along the floor. The buckets of solvent, he realized, were the accelerant. They’d all been tipped over, feeding the ravenous flames.

How could this have happened?

Through the billowing black smoke he saw Jeff’s back. Rick watched in astonishment. Jeff was kneeling, back turned toward him, a lighter in one hand, setting more of the solvent alight. Next to him was a trash barrel filled with detritus, lumber scraps and wads of paper. Jeff was taking stuff from the barrel to use for kindling.

Jeff wasn’t just burning down the house he had spent weeks renovating. He was trying to kill Rick.

He meant to leave him to be burned alive.

Rick’s heart was racing. He didn’t fully understand what Jeff was doing and why, but that no longer mattered.

He launched himself at Jeff, knocking him over. The lighter dropped to the floor. Jeff’s phone, clipped to his belt, went scuttling across the floor. Rick’s knees were planted across Jeff’s neck.

“They got to you, didn’t they?” Rick screamed. “They fucking paid you off!”

Jeff reared up, swung a fist at Rick, hit the center of Rick’s chest. “You greedy son of a bitch, you goddamned liar. You said there was forty thousand bucks there? More like three and a half million!”

Rick groaned but slammed his fist into Jeff’s left ear.

Jeff was taller and probably stronger. He swung again, aiming for Rick’s gut, but Rick torqued himself to one side and the blow landed on his shoulder. He was bruised everywhere and aching, but he was powered by a great surge of anger and adrenaline. Just as Jeff swarmed at him, Rick reached over and snatched a two-by-four out of the barrel. He swung it with all of his strength at Jeff’s head. At the last instant Jeff turned so the plank cracked hard into the side of his face. Rick heard the impact, the crunch of bone.

“My eye!” Jeff screamed, flinging his hands to his face. Blood gouted down from his left eye socket.

But Rick didn’t pause. He wound up and swung the board at Jeff again, crashing into the top of his head, and Jeff went down. A whoosh and another pile of solvent-soaked rags went up in flames.

Rick got up wobblingly to his feet. Fire was all around him now, on all sides of the hall, encroaching into the staircase that led down to the second floor. He noticed Jeff’s phone on the floor and impulsively reached over and grabbed it. His own phone was charging back at the hotel, and he needed to call 911.

Jeff must have intended to light the fire and then leave by means of the staircase. But now it was too late. The flames had them surrounded. He ran into the bedroom, where the fire hadn’t yet reached, though the smoke had, and yanked open the window. A leap to the ground from the third floor would be dangerous. Below, instead of lawn, was the blacktop of the driveway.

Then he remembered the yew tree a few feet away from the window, wild and untrimmed. It wasn’t directly below the window, but it was close. Years ago when his mother was still alive he used to sneak out of the house by leaning out the window and leaping at an angle so that he could catch a branch and somehow shinny to the blacktop. But back then he was a young teenager and more agile. Not weakened by a nearly fatal beating.

He inhaled, and his trachea was singed by the heat or the smoke. He was racked by a coughing fit. He turned around and saw that the fire was now roaring across the threshold of the doorway. It was moving faster than he’d expected; the solvent had nourished the fire. Plumes of flame blackened the white-painted door, crackling the old paint. His heart was hammering.

He wanted to go grab Jeff and pull him out, but the fire was too advanced. Trying to save Jeff would likely be his own death sentence. He turned back to the window. He knew this was the only way out. But what was once, to a teenager, an exciting challenge now looked dubious. He would have to launch himself out of the window, angling to the right, hoping to grab branches of the tree before slamming into the ground.

He pulled the phone out of his pocket. Maybe he should call 911 now, in case he hit the ground and lost consciousness again.

He opened Jeff’s phone. It had a text message:

Job successfully completed?

He pressed the keys for 911. “Fire,” he choked out. He could barely breathe. “Two eighty-four Clayton Street in Cambridge.”

There wasn’t time to say any more. He closed the phone and pocketed it. Then he turned back toward the open window. The nearest branches of the yew tree were fairly close, just a couple of feet below and three or four feet off to his right.

Jump or you’ll burn alive.

Straight down was the driveway. The drop would probably kill him. If he jumped to the right and immediately grabbed at the branches…

He felt the fire roasting his back. He could hear it roaring behind him. Smoke billowed and rolled.

It was now or never.

He pulled himself up-harder than it used to be, and the pain nearly crippled him-and, pulse racing, he hurled himself forward. He felt the branches scrape against him and he grabbed with both hands. The branch in his left hand immediately snapped off. The one in his right held, though. It bent, and Rick grabbed with his left hand for a bigger branch closer to the tree’s trunk. His hands were scratched and sliced but he managed to get hold of a sizable limb just as the branch in his right hand snapped. He fell, hanging on with only his left, dangling from the foliage, his body convulsing with pain, his arms trembling from the exertion. With his right he scrabbled desperately, finding only air, grabbed again and clutched another limb. Letting the branches scrape against his face and arms, he lowered himself, and then the limb in his left hand cracked and he plummeted.

He landed, hard, on the driveway, on his knees, but his fall was broken somewhat by the tree’s foliage. It was painful, but nothing compared to what he’d recently had to endure.

He collapsed, breathed in and out, deeply, and he coughed and coughed. His throat felt as if it were burned. He coughed some more, finally gulped a deep breath, and waited for his head to stop swimming.

As soon as he could, he pulled out Jeff’s phone and texted back one word: Done.