The Fixer by Joseph Finder Read Free Book Online Page A

lovely, elegant, and jewel-like, like the woman herself, though also a bit cramped and impractical, like the woman herself. Or so he thought when she opened the door in a toxic cloud of recently reapplied Chanel No. 5. He was not in a forgiving mood.
    She’d insisted he come over and take away his Wilson Audio floorstanders or else she’d sell them to the building super. She didn’t want those giant loudspeakers, and she was in a hurry. The movers were coming tomorrow to pack and move her out. She was moving to Miami. She worked in the fashion division of a luxury branding agency, and they’d offered her a promotion and a big raise, and besides, her mother and sister lived in South Florida.
    “Oh, hi,” she said as if she didn’t expect him. As though he were a salesman, a nuisance interrupting her day. “Come on in.”
    She’d taken her lunch hour to meet him here and didn’t look pleased about it either. She was dressed for work: a black leather motorcycle jacket over a white top that draped at the neck, skinny black jeans and studded black leather booties. Her ass was perfect.
    She’d also recently reapplied her lipstick, so clearly she cared what she looked like to him, even though she had pointedly not kissed him. In her business, everyone was always kissing each other’s cheeks, even strangers’.
    “I’ve got plenty of bubble wrap if you need it.” She waved vaguely toward a few big rolls in the corner next to her vanity. Her nails were painted ruby red. He rolled in the hand truck he’d borrowed from Jeff, navigating a fjord between cliffs of neatly packed and labeled boxes.
    “Also, Rick, I’m sorry to have to ask, but you owe me like a thousand bucks.”
    “For what?”
    “The Amex bill. Remember, we had to use mine because your cards were full up?”
    “Oh, right.”
    “I’m sorry it’s come down to this. You can give it to me when you’ve got it. It’s not due until next week.”
    He took out his wallet. “
Like
a thousand?”
    “Eleven twenty-five, to be exact. One thousand, one hundred twenty—”
    “I can do math.” He shucked out eleven hundred-dollar bills, searched for a twenty, found a fifty instead, and handed her the sheaf.
    “Whoa, someone’s flush all of a sudden.” She smiled, displaying her perfectly upturned upper lip, her perfect teeth. Her parents had not stinted on their two beautiful daughters’ orthodontia.
    “Sold some of my dad’s stuff.” He began wrapping each speaker in bubble wrap and then fiddled with a complicated packing-tape dispenser, gave up trying to make it work, and scratched the end up from the roll of tape. “Congrats on the promotion,” he said.
Doing whatever it is you do, but for more money.
“What’s the new gig?”
    She did something involving “brand positioning,” developed “brand voices” for her clients, doing image and messaging revamps for fashion designers. Solving for a brand’s “challenge,” delivering an “impactful” message, working on the engagement strategy and developing actionable plans to deliver agreed-upon goals.
    Or some such mumbo jumbo. It was all just verbal Styrofoam anyway. Packing peanuts of meaninglessness. It was a job, something that paid the rent between modeling gigs, which weren’t all that plentiful in the Boston market. Her company’s motto was brilliantly stupid: “Simplify.” Maybe he should have paid more attention: When it came to their relationship, her “engagement strategy” had been to simplify him out of her life.
    “I’ll be—” she started. Then: “Like you’re actually interested.”
    “Of course I’m interested.” A car alarm went off somewhere nearby.
    “Anyway,” she said, “it’s a lot more responsibility and a thirty percent bump in pay, and I get to move back to Miami so I can be there to help out Mom.”
    “How is Jackie doing? Is the lupus flaring up again?”
    “Rick, okay, you can stop now.”
    “Stop what?” He slid the hand truck’s nose