Yellow Mama E zine

THE UNBROKEN FIX

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by G Garnet

 

        The first thing you learn running fixes in the Indian Ocean is that bribery isn't a favor. It's a transaction. Transactions leave no marks. Only fools leave receipts.

         I live in Port Louis, Mauritius. The humidity clings to your skin like a dead man's palm twenty-four hours a day. The streets reek of fried fish, diesel, and the sweet rot of frangipani. I don't give out my first name. Everyone calls me Cole. I'm forty-two. I have a scar running down my right cheek from a knife fight in a Durban dock bar; I carry a snub-nosed .38 Special on my hip at all times, and I drink rum rough enough to strip paint off a boat.

        I don't do cheap fixes. I don't slip a traffic cop two hundred rupees to tear up a speeding ticket for a tourist. I do the fixes no one else will touch. The fixes for the yachtsman who drowned a hooker off the coast of Black River Gorges. The fixes for the diamond smugglers coming out of Botswana through Mahé, Seychelles, caught with half a million euro in uncut stones in their luggage. The fixes that don't exist on any official record—if you pay enough.

       The call came in at 4:17 am. I know the exact time because the cheap plastic clock on my scarred desk ticked the second my satellite phone buzzed on the wood. I answered on the third ring. I didn't say hello. People who call me at four in the morning don't want small talk.

It was Dupont. Desk sergeant at the main precinct in Saint-Denis, Réunion. I'd paid him off twelve times in the last two years. He was reliable. He never asked questions. He never asked for more than we agreed.

          "Zora Voss is in holding."

         I lit an unfiltered Camel. The smoke tasted of burnt paper and ash. I'd been expecting Zora to check in six hours prior, after she took the overnight ferry from Mahé to Saint-Paul.          "Speeding?"

         "Went past a speed trap on the N1 outside Saint-Denis doing 120 in an 80 zone. The cop that pulled her over is new, has a stick up his ass and wants to make detective. Plates on the rented Peugeot were clean. But she wouldn't look him in the eye. He called for a K9 unit. Dog didn't find drugs. They found three burner phones taped to the underside of the passenger seat, plus two thousand euro in untraceable 50 euro notes. Booked her for criminal association. Examining Magistrate Leroi gets her first on the docket at 9 am."

          I blew smoke at the rusted ceiling fan. It groaned like a drowning man. I ran the numbers in my head fast. Standard fix for this? Five thousand euro to Dupont, another three thousand to the duty prosecutor. The arrest record gets scrubbed. The burners are incinerated, the cash goes into Dupont's pocket. She walks out by noon, and no one ever knows I was involved. Clean. Neat. No loose ends.

          "Standard buyout is off the table?" I said.

          Dupont hesitated. That never happened. Not with Dupont. "Leroi is on the national anti-corruption task force for this quarter. His oldest boy is applying to the Sorbonne law program. He's auditing every out-of-court settlement. If I take cash for this, he finds it. I lose my job. I lose my pension. I can't do it. The low-level channels are burned for the next three weeks. You can wait, let her sit in holding until the heat dies, or you find another way."

          I knew waiting wasn't an option. Zora wasn't carrying the diamonds. She was carrying the microSD card with the serial numbers for 1.2 million euro in uncut stones, stashed in the hollow heel of her left work boot. The buyers in Dubai were waiting for the numbers to confirm the shipment was clean. If Zora sat in holding for three days, the deal died. I lost 120 grand in commission. And the Seychelles smuggling crew that had sent her? They would find me in a bar in Port Louis, put two bullets in the back of my head, and dump my body in the Indian Ocean. They didn't wait. They didn't forgive mistakes.

          I had one other option- Veronique Marchand, Chief clerk to Magistrate Leroi. I'd met her six months prior, when she was in Port Louis for a regional justice conference. Her younger brother had gotten a DUI, rolled his car, put a pedestrian in the hospital. It would have cost him his job as a first officer for Air Mauritius, ruined his life. I fixed it. I paid off the victim to drop charges, I had the arrest record scrubbed, I made sure the DUI never showed up on his employment file. We fucked once, after the paperwork was done, in the same cheap motel I take all my one-night stands to. She owed me. Big.

          If I called Veronique, she could log into the case management system at 8 am, before Leroi got into the office. She could amend the report, state the burners belonged to the previous renter of the Peugeot, state the cash was left in the car by a prior customer, mark the entire arrest as a procedural error. Zora would be released by 9:45. No charges. No record. She would get her boot, her microSD, even her two thousand euro in cash back.

          But it wasn't clean. It was the opposite of clean. Veronique's user access log would show she had accessed and modified the file. If any internal auditor ran a check, they would find her footprint first. If they squeezed her hard enough, she would give me up. I would be burning a contact worth easily half a million euro in future fixes, all for one courier. Any idiot would have waited three days. Any smart fixer would have found a lower-level clerk to pay off.

I wasn't being smart. Just making a point.    

         I hung up on Dupont. I dialed Veronique's personal cell number, the one she had given me, the one she didn't give to anyone else. She answered on the second ring, her voice thick with sleep.

        "You don't call me at this hour unless someone is dead."

          "Zora Voss. Arrested last night for speeding, they found burners. I need you to wipe the file and release her at 9:45."

          Veronique was quiet for ten full seconds. I could hear her lighting a cigarette on the other end of the line. "That file is on Leroi's priority docket. If I modify it, and he finds out, I lose twenty years of pension. I lose everything. You are asking me to risk my entire life for a courier I have never met."

          "I know. Your brother's pilot license renewal comes up next month. I will make sure it goes through, no medical exam, no questions asked. And ten thousand euro, dropped off to your sister's house in Saint Paul tomorrow, no contact, no trace."

         She exhaled slow. "She is released at 9:45. The burners are destroyed. The cash is returned to her. No record of the arrest exists anywhere. Don’t ever ask me for something this stupid again, Cole. If you do, I’ll give you up to Leroi myself."

         "I won't." I hung up.

         I packed a duffel with a change of clothes, extra ammo for the .38, and the thick envelope with the ten thousand euro for Veronique. I caught the first Air Mauritius flight out of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International at 7:02 am. The flight was 45 minutes long. I drank a bad coffee, didn't talk to the woman sitting next to me, watched the blue of the Indian Ocean roll by under the plane. We landed at Roland Garros Airport in Saint-Denis at 8:21 am. I picked up a rented Toyota Hilux from the lot, paid cash, no ID check, drove to the courthouse.

I parked across the street, under a banyan tree. I lit another Camel. I watched the doors. Cops walked in and out. Lawyers in cheap suits. Women carrying files. At 9:43, the doors opened.

She walked out first.

           Zora Voss. Half Seychellois, half German, 29 years old. I'd met her two weeks prior in a dock bar in Mahé, when the smuggling crew had introduced her to me as their new courier. She was tall, long black hair pulled back so tight you could see the sharp line of her jaw. There was a fresh cut over her left eyebrow, scabbed over, where one of the holding cell goons had backhanded her when she refused to give up her boot laces. She was wearing the same faded black jeans and scuffed work boots and plain black t-shirt she had worn in Mahé. She didn't walk like a woman who had just spent 12 hours in a holding cell. She walked like she was looking for the son of a bitch that had put her there, and she was going to kill him.

         She spotted my Hilux before I could signal her. She crossed the street, didn't look both ways, didn't care if a truck ran her over. She pulled the passenger door open, got in, slammed it shut behind her. She dropped the two thousand euro in cash on the dashboard.

         First thing she said, no hello, no thank you. "You didn't use Dupont."

         I stared at her. "How the hell do you know that?"

         "Standard fix would have had me out at midnight. And Dupont never gives the cash back. He keeps it. Only someone with pull all the way up to Leroi's office makes them return the money. You used Veronique Marchand."

           I didn't lie to her. There was no point. "You do your homework."

          "I know how the network works. I don't work for idiots." She turned in the seat to face me, her eyes dark, no fear, no bullshit. "You could have waited three days. You could have paid off a lower clerk, no risk, no trace. You burned a contact that is worth more than ten times the profit on this entire run. You didn't fix a problem, Cole. You showed me you can. You want me to know you can reach past the desk sergeants, past the corrupt prosecutors, right into the magistrate's office if I ever need you to pull me out of the fire. You're not working this run. You're recruiting me."

           I turned the key in the ignition, pulled out into traffic. The radio was playing old Creole sega, turned low. "The Seychelles crew is going to war with the Comoros smuggling ring next month. They are moving three times as much cargo, they need couriers that don't fold the second a cop slaps them. Most of the dumb shits I use cry and give up every name they know the second they get hit. You sat in holding for 12 hours. You didn't give my name up. You didn't give the crew's name up. You didn't even tell them you had a microSD in your boot. You're worth burning a clerk for."

          "So I owe you." She said it like she was tasting the words, making sure they fit. "Big. I owe you extraction. You got me out of a hole that would have put me in prison for five years."

         "Owing goes both ways." I said. I took the turn west towards Saint Paul, the coastal road running right along the ocean, the waves crashing against the rocks ten feet from the pavement.           "I just showed you one of the most valuable contacts I have. If you sell that information to the Comoros crew, or to the anti-corruption task force, you get half a million euro easy, and I spend the rest of my life in a prison cell on Réunion. I exposed my network's reach to you. I owe you that trust, same as you owe me for getting you out. We're tied now. No clean way out."

        She didn't argue. She lit a cigarette from the pack I had on the dashboard, blew the smoke out the open window. We stopped at a roadside shack run by an old Creole woman, paid cash for two bottles of cheap local rum, a loaf of bread, and an extra pack of cigarettes. I didn't take her to a fancy cliffside resort full of European tourists. I took her to the same kind of cheap, no-questions motel I used for all business that I didn't want traced. It was set back from the road, half hidden by palm trees, the paint peeling off the walls, the owner took cash, didn't ask for ID, didn't look you in the eye. I paid for the room for one night. He gave me the key, didn't say a word.

        The room smelled like salt, old smoke, and bleach. There was one lumpy bed, a rickety table, two chairs, and a bathroom with a shower that sputtered rust. I put the duffel on the table, pulled out the first bottle of rum, twisted the cap off, took the first drink. It burned going down, the way I liked it. I passed it to her. She took a long drink, didn't make a face.

         We sat across from each other at the table for a long time, passing the rum back and forth, not talking much. She told me her story first. She had grown up on La Digue, Seychelles. Her dad was a fisherman. The old smuggling ring had offered him good money to run coke between Mahé and Réunion. He refused. They tied him to an anchor, dropped him in the ocean. She was 16. Her mom died of malaria a year later. She had a little sister, 14 now, in boarding school in Port Louis. She started running courier work to pay the tuition. She was good at it. She never lost cargo. She never talked. She never asked questions.

        I told her my story. I had been a homicide cop in Durban, South Africa. My partner and I were building a case against a drug lord named Radebe. Radebe offered me a bribe of two hundred thousand rand to drop the case. I refused. He killed my partner, shot him in the head in his own driveway, in front of his wife and two kids. I didn't file a report. I waited three nights, broke into Radebe's house, put two bullets in his head, same as he had done to my partner. I left South Africa the next day and never went back. I had no wife, no kids, no family. All I had was the network I had built, across Mauritius, Réunion, Seychelles. All I had was my reputation for getting fixes done, no matter what the cost.

       "Most people in this line of work lie about why they do it," she said. She finished the first bottle of rum, opened the second. "They say they want to get rich, they say they want to retire. You don't."

       "I don't retire," I said. "Guys like me don't get to retire. We get shot, or we get put in prison, or we drown in the ocean. That's the only retirement plan there is."

        The sun was going down over the ocean. The light coming through the window was orange, painting the walls the color of dried blood. She stood up first. She didn't sway, even after half two bottles of rum. She walked across the small room, stopped right in front of me.     She put her hand first on the .38 holstered at my hip, her palm flat against the cold metal. She wasn't reaching for it. She was acknowledging it. She knew I could kill her in half a second if I wanted to. She knew she could reach for the broken glass rum cap on the table and cut my throat before I could pull the trigger, if she wanted to. We were both armed. We both owed each other something no amount of money could ever pay for.

         She didn't kiss me first. There was no soft talk, no sweet nothings, no bullshit romance. She pulled me up out of the chair, her fingers rough on the collar of my work shirt. The cut over her eyebrow stung when our faces brushed, she hissed a little, didn't stop. It was rough. It wasn't gentle. It wasn't love. We didn't pretend it was. The scratchy sheets rubbed the skin raw on my back. She dug her nails into my shoulders hard enough to draw blood. I could hear the waves crashing against the rocks outside, steady, unending, same as the debts we carried.

It wasn't pleasure, not at first. It was accounting.

        We were settling the books. She was acknowledging she owed me for getting her out of that cell. I was acknowledging I owed her for the trust I had placed in her, for the piece of my network I had laid at her feet. There was no way to settle that debt fully. No amount of money, no amount of favors, would ever make us even. We weren't trying to pay it off. We were only trying to acknowledge it existed. To mark it down in the books, so neither of us ever forgot.

Afterwards, we lay side by side on the lumpy bed, smoking, not touching. The sweat dried cold on our skin. The rum had softened the edge of everything, but not enough to make us stupid.

        "We will never be even." She said it first, quiet, like she was saying it to the ceiling, not to me. "I can run a hundred runs for you. I can make you a million euro. We will never be even."

          "No," I said. "We won't. That's the point. A regular fix, you pay the money, it's done, it's over. This one doesn't end. It's unbroken."

         She turned her head to look at me. The light from the streetlamp outside coming through the window caught the scar on my cheek, caught the scab over her eyebrow. "What happens if I get arrested again? If I get caught with a shipment, if they put me away for ten years?"

        "I'll get you out," I said. "No matter what it costs. No matter how many contacts I have to burn. That's the deal."

         "What if you mess up? What if the Comoros crew puts a hit on you, what if you end up in holding?"

         "You get me out," I said. "Same as I would do for you. We don't keep score. We just keep the fix unbroken."

           I sat up, reached for the rum bottle, took a drink, passed it to her. I thought about Veronique, sitting in her apartment in Saint-Denis, knowing she had just risked her entire career for me. I thought about Dupont, back at the precinct, wondering how I had pulled off getting Zora released so fast. I thought about the smuggling crew in Mahé, waiting for us to check in, for the serial numbers on the microSD. I thought about her little sister, in boarding school in Port Louis, who had no idea what her older sister did for a living to pay her tuition. I thought about my dead partner, back in Durban, the look on his kid's face when they told him his dad was dead. All of it was weight. All of it was debt. You don't ever pay that weight off. You just find someone else who carries the same kind of weight, and you help them carry theirs.

She took the microSD card out of the heel of her boot, set it on the table between us. It was no bigger than my fingernail. It was worth more than most people make in ten years. "I give this to you tomorrow, when we fly back to Port Louis. The deal goes through. The buyers get their stones. You get your commission. I get my cut."

          "Half of my commission goes to your sister's tuition," I said. I didn't tell her I was going to do that. I just said it. She stared at me for a long time, like she was trying to work out if I was lying. I wasn't lying.

         "You don't have to do that."

         "I know I don't. I'm not doing it to pay off the debt. I'm doing it because if we're going to work together, I don't want you worrying about anything except getting the cargo where it needs to go. No loose ends, no distractions."

          She laughed, a short, sharp sound, the first time I had heard her laugh. "You're a real soft touch, Cole."

         "Soft touch gets you killed," I said. "Stupid people get sentimental. I'm being practical. If something happens to me, you make sure the tuition keeps getting paid. That's part of the deal too."

         The moon came up over the ocean, silver, bright enough to cast shadows across the floor of the room. I thought about all the fixes I had done over the last ten years. I had fixed problems for rich men, for criminals, for men who would have shot me in the back if it saved them a hundred euro. All of those fixes were done, gone, forgotten, the moment the cash changed hands. None of them mattered. This one mattered. This one would keep mattering, for as long as both of us were alive.

        She rolled over, rested her head on my chest, right over the old bullet scar I had from the fight when I killed Radebe. She didn't do it because she was soft. She did it because she knew I wouldn't push her away. "Do you ever think about getting out? Buying a small house on La Digue, no more fixes, no more couriers, no more dead bodies?"

         "All the time," I said. I ran my hand over her hair, I could feel the small scar at the back of her neck from a car crash when she was 19. "But we don't get that. The people we have crossed? The people that want us dead? They would find us. Even on La Digue. Even if we changed our names. There is no getting out. Not for people like us. The only thing we get is to have someone watching our back, when everyone else is watching for a chance to put a bullet in it."

         I lit another Camel. The smoke mixed with the smell of salt, and the cheap coconut perfume she wore, the kind she bought from a market stall in Mahé for a few rupees. Some people go their whole lives looking for something they call loyalty. They pay for it. They beg for it. They get betrayed every single time. Loyalty isn't something you buy. It is something you build, when you burn a contact worth half a million euro to get a woman out of a holding cell. It is something you build, when you do not sell the information that would put the man who got you out in prison for the rest of his life. It is built on debts you can never pay back. Debts you do not want to pay back.

         The fix was unbroken. It would stay that way until one of us died. In this line of work, that was never very far away.

 

THE END

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     George Garnet, a writer who thrives in the shadows, has seen his fiction published in esteemed publications like Mystery Tribune, Switchblade, Out of the Gutter, Mystery Weekly, Pulp Modern Flash, Yellow Mama, The Dark City, and other shadowy corners of the literary world. He calls the vibrant chaos of Melbourne home.

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     Sophia Wiseman-Rose (aka Sr. Sophia Rose) is a Paramedic and an Anglican novice Franciscan nun, in the UK.  Both careers have given Sophia a great deal of exposure to the extremes in life and have provided great inspiration for her.  

     She has travelled to many countries, on medical missions and for modelling (many years ago), but has spent most of her life between the USA and the UK. She is currently residing in a rural Franciscan community and will soon be moving to London to be with a community there.  

     In addition, Sophia had a few poems and short stories in editions of Black Petals Horror/Science Fiction Magazine

    The majority of her artwork can be found on her website.

  https://www.artstation.com/sophiaw-r6