The Fixer by T. E. Woods Page B

and duct tape. Said she’d been evicted by her son-of-a-bitch boyfriend and needed to store her stuff until he calmed down enough to let her explain why she drank his last Budweiser. That was six years ago. “That time again, huh?”
    Maria set her bag down and dug into the front pocket of her pants. She pulled out four wrinkled twenties and handed them over. Rocky counted out three dollars and sixteen cents change into her filthy hands. Maria paid month-to-month. Always in cash. Never wanted a receipt. Rocky slipped the four twenties into his pocket and figured what the tax man didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
    “Need help with anything?” he asked.
    Maria threw the duffle back over her shoulder. “I’m good. Just looking to change out some thing’s all.” She headed toward her unit. “See ya next month, Rock.”
    “I’ll be here, Maria.” He watched her walk out before turning back to his racing form, chuckling to himself about the way some people waste their lives.
     
    The Fixer used her keys on unit 29. She maneuvered around boxes of books and towels, sidestepped an old mattress standing on end, and made her way to a cheap pine locker nearly hidden beneath stacks of blankets and record albums. She cleared access to the chest and knelt to unzip her bag.
    She pulled out the tools of her last job. The passport of Anna Galleta Salada, recently stamped with a tourist visa to Costa Rica. Green contacts. Strawberry blonde wig. She returned them to the chest, closed the lid, and replaced the camouflage of blankets and albums. She made her way around a portable television and stacked laundry baskets to a cardboard jewelry box. She opened it and a two-inch plastic ballerina popped up, twirling in front of a cracked mirror to the strains of “Someday My Prince Will Come”. She shuffled through the contents of the cheap jewelry box, hoping for inspiration for her next character. She found it in less than two minutes. It went into the bag and Maria Petard was ready to leave.
    The Fixer never strayed from the rules she set for herself six years ago. No more than one job per country per year. Never less than two months between assignments. Only when it was clear that justice couldn’t or wouldn’t be served would she consider a case. Her jobs rarely raised a coroner’s inquest, and never a police investigation. The Fixer was invisible.
    Her new assignment culled a caution call deep within her. Costa Rica was just six weeks ago. The details of Gordon Halloway’s erotic demise and tales of an elusive hooker kept the media circus fueled for days. But the public’s appetite for fresher, fleshier, and bloodier stories from the human coliseum soon demanded another outrage. Gordon’s death was pushed off the front page by the story of a teenaged blonde kidnapped from a New Orleans mall where she’d gone to have her bikini line waxed. When her body was found in a Biloxi trailer park four days later the satisfied masses shook their collective heads in smug sorrow for nearly a week before turning their prurient peering to the tale of a single mother in Madison, Wisconsin who’d drowned her young daughters to save them from the devil’s claws.
    It wasn’t the violation of her timeline that concerned The Fixer. It was the location. The prospect wanted to meet at an address less than eighty miles from The Fixer’s home.
    The prospect’s first contact had come a week earlier. The Fixer was amused when her call back was answered with a digitized voice mimicking the same technology she liked to use. Two voices altered to disguise any hint of gender, age, or dialect spoke for less than three minutes. Another call two days later confirmed the time and place for their meeting: Pier 39 on the Seattle waterfront. A location The Fixer knew well.
     
    At precisely eleven o’clock the Fixer stepped from behind the dust-covered shipping crate that served as her surveillance spot. She’d been in the warehouse nearly two hours,