The Fixer Read Online Free

stuffed with crap. A gym bag, a pile of magazines he’d optimistically planned to read on the elliptical trainer, a set of jumper cables. He rearranged the junk, jamming old
Entertainment Weekly
s and
Back Ba
ys as far back as possible, until there was room for the six bagsful of cash. Then, after looking around outside to make sure Jeff—or anyone else—wasn’t for some reason watching, he trundled the bags carefully to the trunk.
    Then he got into the driver’s seat and sat there, thinking for a moment of where he might take 3.4 million dollars for safekeeping. The obvious place, of course, was a bank. A safe-deposit box. He didn’t have one; all he knew about safe-deposit boxes was what he’d seen in the movies and on TV. He seemed to remember a standard size of a few feet long by maybe eight or ten inches wide. Did they come in larger sizes? He assumed you could request a larger one if you wanted.
    His bank had a branch office in Harvard Square. He started the car and maneuvered down Clayton Street to Huron Ave, and then over to Garden Street toward the square. He’d begun to think more clearly now, and he started having second thoughts about carting six grocery bags of cash into the Bank of America. Was it even legal to store cash in a safe-deposit box? He pulled the car over to the shoulder in a no-stopping zone and switched on his blinkers.
    He loaded the Safari browser on his phone and searched. The answer wasn’t clear. Banks had to notify the IRS of any deposits of more than ten thousand dollars. But that referred to deposits into bank accounts. Not stashing away packets of cash.
    Still, in this post-9/11 age, banks probably had to pay close attention to the movements of large quantities of cash, right? In case it was connected to ill-gotten gains? Maybe the US government could even confiscate your cash if it thought you were engaged in criminal activity. He wasn’t sure, but it wouldn’t have surprised him if that were true.
    If he wandered into the Harvard Square branch of the Bank of America toting six shopping bags full of cash, mostly hundreds, that was as good as blowing a trumpet and announcing to the world that he was a coke dealer. He would be observed, no question about it—how could any banker who wasn’t too busy texting or checking her Facebook page
fail
to observe him carrying in a load of cash? Then the teller would summon the assistant manager, and . . .
    It no longer seemed like such a good idea to bring all this cash into a bank.
    In fact, it didn’t seem like such a good idea to carry his cash anywhere in those crappy supermarket bags. Not just because of the risk of the bags’ splitting, but also because anyone could see their contents. That was just asking to get mugged.
    He turned off his blinkers and pulled back into traffic and headed back the way he’d come, then over to Mass Ave, where he found a 7-Eleven. Parking the car in a space he could monitor from inside the store, he quickly bought a box of Glad trash bags (ForceFlex, black, extra strong) and returned to the car. Standing at the trunk, about to pop the lid, he suddenly became aware of how exposed he was.
    Any passerby, anyone peering out of a car in the honking, snarling traffic, would be able to see into the trunk. All that cash—that insane, scarcely believable quantity of cash—wasn’t something you wanted to put on display.
    He pulled the car out of the space, turned it around, front end out. Safer this way. Now maybe someone inside the store could see, if he happened to be looking. But there seemed to be no one in the 7-Eleven except the cashier. He pressed the button on the remote and the trunk opened, and there they were, six bulky overstuffed shopping bags, the diaphanous plastic strained to the breaking point. He glanced over his shoulder for the third time, reassured no one was watching, and set to work pulling a big opaque black trash bag over each smaller one, jammed with legal tender.
    Then he