The Fix Is In: Torus Intercession Book Four, page 1
THE FIX IS IN
MARY CALMES
CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
A Note From the Author
Also by Mary Calmes
About the Author
The Fix Is In
Copyright ©2021 Mary Calmes
http://marycalmes.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of author imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted on the cover is a model.
Cover art Copyright © 2021 Reese Dante
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Edit by Lisa Horan
Copy Edit by Brian Holliday and Andrea Zimmerman
Proof Edit by Will Parkinson
Created with Vellum
This one was a collective endeavor, and I have to thank Lisa and Brian, Andrea and Will. Everyone worked really hard and I appreciate you more than I can say.
Everybody needs a pony.
THE FIX IS IN
How can a man who doesn’t believe in things that go bump in the night possibly protect a man who does?
It’s safe to say that Shaw James is a pragmatist who has no patience for anything but the facts. He is good at assessing threats and focusing on a clear objective when he goes out on a job for Torus Intercession. But he hasn’t had to be a detective before, it’s all brand new, so why his boss chose him to figure out who may, or may not, be trying to kill Benjamin Grace is beyond him. Protecting a paranormal investigator from whoever—or whatever—may be trying to kill him is completely out of Shaw’s wheelhouse, and how is he supposed to help find an attacker when the guy he’s sent to protect maintains that the threat is ghostly in origin? It’s insane, and Shaw does not do insane. Benjamin Grace is going to be a problem.
But Benji is nothing at all like Shaw imagined he’d be, and the fixer is spellbound from their first meeting. Benji is kind and can laugh at himself, doesn’t take things too seriously, and, more than anything, he wants to help everyone. The man is inarguably Shaw’s polar opposite, and he brings out every protective instinct in Shaw. Best of all, though, is that Benji seems every bit as enchanted by the man sent to protect him.
Together, Benji and Shaw must work to figure out what’s happening in the small town of Rune, Oregon, and it quickly proves more difficult than it should be to keep Benji alive. When it goes from difficult to seemingly impossible, Shaw packs Benji up and takes him back home to Chicago where the most frightening thing is Shaw’s own big, loud, loving, and overly-invested-in-his-love-life family who can’t seem to resist meddling in his affairs.
Or not. Turns out the scariest thing might just be Benji, the guy who seems perfect for Shaw.
ONE
My boss was a sap. Not that this was something I was ever going to say to his face, as my survival instinct was much stronger than that, but every now and then, he went and did things that were so clearly driven by his desire to “do good” that it lapped right around the other way to the absurd. Case in point, I was in Rune, Oregon, a small—like, postage-stamp small—town between Tillamook and Seaside, on the Oregon coast, up near the border of Washington, to protect Benjamin Grace from—his friend and partner Sian Delaney had reported—bad people who were out to get him. Whatever the hell that meant.
The question was, who was Mr. Grace and why did he need protection? Who had he pissed off? What did out to get him entail? Most importantly, did the threat to him constitute a need for Torus Intercession, a company that provided advocates, bodyguards, and fixers at a price befitting round-the-clock intervention, or was the situation, whatever it was, blown way, maybe even way-way, out of proportion? Of course, the only way to truly assess the threat was to go there.
“I’m stunned, Shaw,” Ella Guzman had announced the day before, studying my face as I explained the job. “I had no idea we took on any kind of pro-bono work.”
“We didn’t until he opened his big fat mouth,” I grumbled, pointing at Cooper Davis, who was sitting across from me.
She turned to look at him, both of her perfectly shaped dark-brown eyebrows lifted.
“What?” His voice was higher pitched than normal, which made him sound guilty as hell.
“Give it a rest,” Nash Miller insisted. “It was all you, buddy.”
Cooper looked at Ella, shaking his head. “No.”
She leaned back in her chair; arms crossed. “Speak, Davis,” she ordered, using his last name for emphasis.
“Yeah, okay, so technically, maybe, this could possibly be construed as partly my fault,” Cooper conceded with a grimace.
“Technically?” Nash uttered, almost painfully. “Maybe? Partly? Are you kidding?”
Cooper threw up his hands in defeat. “Fine, it’s all my fault.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this,” Rais Solano commented, grinning evilly, clearly enjoying Cooper’s discomfort.
It was one of those rare times where none of us were out of state on a job, all of us there in the office in Oak Park, Illinois, so we’d decided to go to lunch together, en masse, and then my phone buzzed with a message from my boss and my whole afternoon went down the toilet.
Cooper cleared his throat. “Okay, so a year or so ago, when Jared was going through all our performance appraisals, he asked me what I felt we could be doing to include syzygy in our lives, and not just at work.”
“You know, that word threw me the first time I heard it,” Rais confessed, shooting the waitress a dazzling smile as she refilled his water glass, making her almost drop the pitcher. He was a handsome man and, much like others I’d known, knew how to work any situation to his advantage.
“Yeah, I would have had no idea what it was without him using it in a sentence,” I admitted as well.
“None of us knew,” Cooper assured him. “It’s a weird-ass word, and Jared uses it because his vocabulary is ridiculous, but so when he asked me, I thought I was supposed to come up with something.”
“Instead of doing what I did,” Nash remarked sourly, “what all the rest of us did, and telling him that everything’s great here at Torus.”
“It’s super here at Torus,” I stated patronizingly, shooting Cooper a death glare.
“God,” he groaned.
“Uh-oh,” Ella said with a snort of laughter.
“Yeah, uh-oh is right,” Nash growled at Cooper.
He grunted.
“Tell her what you said, jackass,” I prodded him.
Long, weary exhale from him. “Okay, so I said I thought it would be good if we took one case, just every quarter or so, free of charge, and fixed something for someone who needed it but couldn’t afford to pay us our usual fee.”
“Asshole,” I muttered under my breath.
“Kiss of fuckin’ death,” Nash grumbled, but smiled when our waitress, and another, put three large deep-dish pizzas down in front of us, two spinach and one sausage. We were at Lou Malnati’s on Lake Street on a not-super-warm Thursday afternoon the second week of December, and even though I’d wanted Chinese, now that I was smelling the pizza, it was all good.
“Go on,” Ella prodded Cooper.
Holding up his plate as Nash cut—why we all waited on Nash Miller, I had no idea—Cooper’s left eye fluttered like he’d bitten a lemon. “So Jared goes, ‘that’s a great idea. I’ll put an ad up on YouTube.’”
She gasped. “He did not.”
“Oh please, this is Jared. Of course he did,” Nash told her. “You should see it. He had Owen film it and edit it, and he’s sitting there, all earnest and fatherly, and once a month Owen has to go through all the whack-job comments, and he makes sure Jared never sees the ones that start with ‘Oh, Daddy’ and get more disgusting from there.”
“Eww,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
I snickered, because yeah, Jared Colter, being a very handsome older man, all rugged and sincere, staring into the camera with genuine concern, telling people to email their stories to him so he could help, turned out to be, in many people’s minds, a siren call for porn.
“Oh God,” Rais groaned.
Nash shook his head. “I told Owen to stop sending them to me because it was way over my kink quota.”
“Eww,” Ella repeated, louder the second time, with more disgust.
“How many free jobs have you guys done?” Rais asked, picking up his knife and fork.
“The hell are you doing?” I snapped at him.
He scowled at me. “You cut pizza like a civilized person.”
“The hell you do,” Cooper replied, aghast.
“You always cut it,” Nash chimed in.
“No,” I told him, picking mine up even though it was hot.
“I agree with Shaw,” Ella told them. “I’m waiting until mine cools a bit, but yeah, you pick up pizza unless you’re a pretty, pretty princess.”
“Heathens,” Rais passed judgment, gesturing at Cooper with his fork. “Go on.”
“Okay, so six months ago, me and Loc had to follow around Mario ‘The Torch’ Riotta and his crew from one strip joint to the next while you and Nash babysat that nice young couple with the kid, remember?”
“That’s what that was?” Rais asked him. “I figured that was a paid job.”
Cooper shook his head. “No, that was a freebie.”
“What happened with that?”
“Riotta went after the couple the next night, and we caught him. He went to jail, and since the whole thing was that he was shaking them down for protection—like he was with everyone in their neighborhood—when Jared met with his father, Mario Senior said the couple was in the clear. His son was going away for attempted murder and some other stuff the state’s attorney piled on, so the Riotta crime family washed its hands of the nice young couple.”
“So it all worked out, then.”
“Yeah.” Cooper nodded.
“Didn’t Loc leave in the middle of that?” Rais seemed to be working out the timeline in his head.
“He did. He got pulled for the Nick Madison job, so Jared took over.”
“Has it crossed anybody else’s mind that Jared Colter loses a lot of fixers to love?” Ella asked the group.
We all nodded.
“I mean, I understand that Brann—what was his last name?”
“Calder,” Nash chimed in.
“Brann Calder fell in love and moved to Montana, Croy is in Vegas now, and Loc is in Santa Barbara. And they’re all married.”
Cooper sighed. “Yeah.”
“That’s crazy,” she stated with a grin.
“And before them too,” Nash let her know. “It happens a lot.”
“Although I never expected it with Loc,” Cooper announced to the table. “Who saw that shit coming?”
“Yeah, no,” I agreed. “Loc was the poster boy for assholes. I honestly didn’t think he had it in him.”
“Well, I didn’t know him as well as the rest of you guys, but still, I had no idea he could smile,” Rais said with a snicker.
“Right?” Nash chuckled. “Loc could be a real piece of work, though I feel bad saying that now since he’s so different. And alluva sudden I miss him.”
I missed him too, though less than the others, because we talked all the time. “To Loc,” I said, raising my glass of ice water. If it had been after work, I would’ve had a beer, but since we had to go back to the office, water was the option. I wasn’t a soda drinker. “We miss both the backup and the brooding.”
“The brooding I get,” Ella agreed, laughing. “But backup?”
“Oh, yeah,” I told her, “you could always count on Loc to be there.”
“Without question,” Nash agreed, sighing. “So, Shaw, where ya going?”
Instantly, I was scowling. “You’re not gonna believe me, and then you’re gonna make fun, so fuck you, you don’t get to know.”
“Oh man, that was mad crazy defensive,” Rais commented, shaking his head.
“Make fun?” Cooper said while chewing. “We would never do that.”
I flipped him off.
“Don’t be a baby,” Ella baited me. “Where the hell’re you going?”
When I glanced around the table, they were all waiting.
I was right. Of course I was right. The second I explained, they all howled.
“You’re all assholes,” I groused at them.
Cooper crossed himself and thanked God it wasn’t him, and Ella’s eyes grew big and round even as she succumbed to more giggling.
“Oh, you poor, poor bastard,” Rais whispered sympathetically, the only one who understood the true gravity of the situation.
Lunch be damned, I should have started drinking then.
The next morning, Friday, I drove into the tiny town in my rental car that I’d picked up at the airport in Portland. I had tried to fly into Seaside or Gearhart, anything closer, but there were no commercial flights flying into anywhere with a rental car counter but Portland. I had taken the red-eye in, so I was already in a crappy mood by the time we landed, and even more so when I went straight to pick up my car and the one in the parking spot waiting for me was not going to work. Of course, there was nothing anyone could do about it there, so I had to return to the terminal, which did nothing for my overall state of mind. Having to stand in line didn’t help either, but when I was finally in front of a real person, I reined in my irritation because yelling at people never accomplished anything.
After giving my name, the woman informed me that I was booked into an economy sedan and the one sitting in the parking stall was the one I chose.
“Nope. That’s not what I chose,” I told her, because I’d booked the reservation myself. “Because I know better than that. No way that car’s gonna work.”
“Sir, I assure you that—oh,” she said when she finally looked up from her monitor and then up again and then had to tilt her head back just a bit more so she could meet my gaze. “Got it,” she stated, grinning at me. “I now understand the problem with the itty-bitty car.”
Which was why being nice was always preferable to being an asshole. She was very accommodating once she understood my issue.
At six five, two hundred and sixty pounds, me fitting comfortably into the Dodge Neon that had been waiting for me was not an option. When she offered me a Ford Explorer instead, I told her that would be fine.
Now, close to two hours later, having parked on the street in front of an auto repair shop—Garnet Bakery the sign read for some unearthly reason—I killed the engine and got out, locked the door, and pulled my phone from the breast pocket of my leather jacket, checked the address, confirmed I was, in fact, in the right place, and walked up the driveway toward the front door of the business.
When I got closer, I realized that to the left of the door was a path that led down a short alley between two buildings that was wide enough for two people, but not a car. It was done in worn cobblestones and, like the ground and everything else, was damp. Between the fine mist and the cold air, the only thing I could say about Rune, thus far, was that it was soggy and gray. The entire town, which was built beside Neacoxie Creek, had a pale charcoal wash to it, gunmetal and anthracite, pewter and slate. I stepped from the alley and into a parking lot, and it too was the color of wet clay. It all felt eerily like the opening scene of a horror movie.
To my left was a small garage, and over it was what looked like an apartment that had once been some sort of sky blue, judging from the paint that was still there. Across the lot from me was a large two-story A-frame house with a wide front porch and a yard that had clearly been cut back in preparation for winter, bushes down to branches sitting low to the ground. To my right was the front of the auto garage, all aged, chipping red brick, with various cars in the stalls. It made sense then, the business in front, home in the back, though I still had no idea why the sign said it was a bakery.
Sian Coburn had said in her email to Jared Colter that she would be there at the house to meet me, but glancing around, I didn’t see anyone. Thinking that the house was my best bet, I began crossing the parking lot, gravel crunching under my duck boots, and was surprised when an old Volkswagen bus flew by me to the garage with the apartment above it, throwing up gravel and fishtailing to a stop.
I crossed my arms and waited.
The driver parked the van, turned off the engine, and then climbed out the window of the car, because why not, and ran fast to reach me. It was a young woman, emphasis on the young from what I could tell, and when she was just a few feet away from me, her shoe must have caught on something because she went flying. How she tripped I had no earthly idea. It was flat gravel she was racing over, there weren’t any large seams in the ground, no big loose rocks, but when she was close, she suddenly lost her footing and would have done a face-plant if I hadn’t caught her.
