Free The Fixer by Joseph Finder

familiar prose.
    Working almost single-handedly, he put out a special issue of the
Linwood Owl
with a seventy-two-point headline on the front page: OWL QUESTIONS ORIGINALITY OF DR. KIRB Y’S COMMENCEMENT ADD RESS. In the piece he ran chunks of Dr. Kirby’s speech alongside identical chunks of a speech by Robert Maynard Hutchins.
    It was as if a bomb had gone off at the school. The response was swift, but it wasn’t quite what Rick had expected. Rick was suspended from school for a week for failing to submit the issue to the headmaster’s office in advance. Rick had deliberately ignored protocol because he knew the headmaster would kill the issue. Dr. Cadmus Kirby got off easy by blaming “some accidental borrowings” on his eidetic, or photographic, memory. An honest slip.
    Rick got a C- in Latin that fall.
    “My God, the hell you raised at school,” Andrea said. “You were fearless. Nothing ever stopped you. Your dad must have been so proud of you.”
    “Dad? Want to know what he told me? He said, ‘You didn’t play by the rules, Rick.’ And he smiled. Like he was watching a bloody scrimmage on
Monday Night Football
.
You didn’t play by the rules?
You call that pride?”
    She shook her head. “Well,
I
was impressed.”
    Pleased, he said teasingly, “You must have been easily impressed.”
    She gasped comically. “Thanks a lot! Hoffman, do you remember what you did to Mr. Ohlmeyer?”
    “Not really.” Mr. Ohlmeyer was a sadistic teacher who used to stroll through the dining hall stealing food off students’ trays. He had a particular fondness for the little bags of barbecue potato chips the school served with sandwiches.
    “The way you pranked him with the potato chips?”
    “Oh, right.” One day Rick took a potato-chip bag home, razor-bladed it open, sprinkled the chips heavily with cayenne pepper, and carefully sealed the bag up. He brought it to the dining hall, and sure enough, Mr. Ohlmeyer stole his bag of barbecue chips, tore it open greedily, and raced out of the dining hall, roaring in pain. A round of applause broke out in the hall.
    With a crooked smile she added, “You were always so ballsy, Hoffman.” She shook her head. “I bet you haven’t changed.”
    “I’ve grown up since then. So how’d you like working at Goldman?”
    She shook her head. “Hated it.”
    He was surprised. Not what he’d expected. “It’s a pretty high-testosterone place, I imagine. Strip clubs and steak dinners, right?”
    “Look, I
like
steak. And I don’t mind the strip clubs, really. I mean, so the traders need to blow off steam, and one way is to pay women with silicone breasts to do lap dances for them, since their wives won’t. That’s fine, I get it. I can deal.”
    “But?”
    “But in a lot of ways it felt like a frat house. Most of the inside jokes are from dumb comedies. If you never saw
Caddyshack
or
Fletch
, you miss half the jokes. ‘Just put it on the Underhills’ tab!’ Like that.”
    Rick shook his head. He knew they were classic dumb comedies but he’d never seen them either.
    A sommelier arrived with the wine and the whole elaborate ceremony: the display of the bottle, the careful extraction of the cork, the presentation of that cork, the tasting, the nod, the decanting.
    “Would you like to wait for the wine to breathe, sir, or would you like me to pour some now?” the sommelier asked.
    Rick looked at Andrea, who nodded. “We’ll have some now.”
    The wine glasses were as big as a baby’s head. He swirled his wine, watched it run down in legs along the side of the glass. It smelled a bit musty, almost barnyardy. He took a sip, sucking it in as if he were drinking through a straw. He’d gone to wine tastings, written about them. He knew good wine in theory. A wine person would probably say this one had a
complex nose
. Exotic hints of anise and soy sauce, floral and herbal notes, and a long finish. At least, that’s how the wine gurus would probably put it. He decided the