The Fixer by T. E. Woods Page A

Halloway. Bastard makes like he’s available to the authorities. Assisting with their investigation. When the heat turns up and it looks like his house of cards is about to collapse, Halloway takes a powder. Winds up in Costa Rica, dead in some sicko sex game.”
    “I read the papers, Robbie. Even articles you don’t write.” Mort wanted to get the dollhouses sanded and primed before supper. “What’s this got to do with me?”
    “I keep remembering what you’d say every time you were putting a case together. About how there’s no such thing as coincidence. Dad, Halloway was in his mid-fifties. Fit as a fiddle. He was also a control freak. I don’t get him letting some bimbo tie him up.”
    “People can get pretty kinky in the bedroom. You don’t wanna know what I’ve seen.”
    “No one can find the girl, Dad. She checked in two days after Halloway lands in Costa Rica. Bellman says he’d never seen her before but swore she was a pro. I’ve tried to track her down. None of the locals know her.”
    “You thinking she was there for a reason?” Mort forgot about the dollhouses.
    “A lot of people lost everything they had investing with that shithead. Some deaths, even. If there was a chance Halloway could escape justice?” Robbie sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing. The feds aren’t looking into it. But something’s nagging at me.”
    “Well, if it was a hit you’re up the creek.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “A hired gun’s a detective’s worse nightmare. Takes our two aces out of the game.”
    “What do you mean?” Robbie sounded disappointed.
    “No personal connection to the victim and no motive other than a payday. You’ll never find the shooter, Son. If you’re right, you gotta start with who might have a motive to hire him. Or her.”
    Robbie sighed. “That’s a cast of thousands, Dad.”
    “Then maybe things are exactly as they seem. Maybe the sex killed him and the hooker got scared and bolted. Don’t go looking for trouble. No matter how juicy the story might be.” Mort knew his son would ignore his advice. “Tell Claire I send my love and kiss those kids for me.”
    “Will do, Dad. I’ll call you next week. Sooner if I come up with anything.”
    Mort hung up the phone and picked up a tack rag. He was cleaning the roof of the house meant for Hadley’s dolls when he flashed on a similar design he built for Allie a quarter century earlier. He threw the rag to the floor, climbed the stairs to his empty kitchen, and poured himself three fingers of Scotch.
     
     

Chapter Ten
    The Fixer parked in the lot of a busy Korean grocery and walked five blocks to a storage facility next to an abandoned railroad line. She dressed as the character the manager knew well, knowing she would be recorded on various cameras standing as false promise of security in the high crime neighborhood. She was Maria Petard, a late-middle-aged woman who’d experienced more hard times than easy. Steel gray streaks shot through shoulder length hair the color of dirty dishwater. Forty pounds overweight. Brown eyes. Elastic waist faux-denim polyester pants and a dirty sweatshirt that urged people to Ask Me About My Grandkids. Navy blue canvas duffle thrown over stooped shoulders.
    She entered the grounds and shuffled her worn-out red sneakers across sand and weeds. Walked in the office flashing a weary smile just big enough to reveal one gold incisor to the man behind the desk.
    “Hey, Maria.” Rocky was sixty-three but looked a decade older. He bought the rundown storage facility nine years ago with the few bucks left after paying off gambling debts and two ex-wives. Thirty-eight years playing Frankie Valle in a Four Seasons cover band at state fairs, Indian Casinos, school basements, and worse left him with just enough for forty sheet metal garages barely meeting code behind a rusting chain link fence. He met Maria when she came in to empty out the back of a Chevy station wagon held together with bondo