The Professional cont.

I did the Job in the obscure little counter-culture collegetown cavern, took my pay and was back on the street before noon. I still had six minutes left on the parking meter when I pulled away from the curb.

A few blocks away, while I waited for a red light, I felt the call. At this rate I would be able to afford a loft in collegetown again. I flipped on my turn signal and drove up the hill, following the pull of the Job.

In other cities and towns the wealthy often live on the hills, leaving the squalor of the streets below to the degenerates, but this city was unusual. It was one of the reasons I liked living in it.

At the top of the hill all the greed, smugness, arrogance and pettiness that wafted up from the modern bourgeois on the valley floor stagnated in a concentrated haze. A world of hovels, drug dens, destitution and hookers drew sustenance from the filthy fog of disaffection that permeated the place. The more the pompous protested down below, the thicker the miasma grew at the top.

It was my kind of place.

The pull of the Job took me through a maze of streets and alleys. I drove past garbage fires and gang warfare. The closer I got to the Job the more excited I became. I could tell this was going to be one of the best ones in a long time. I was giddy.

I left my car at the opening of a cluttered alley. The smell of stale urine competed with decomposing flesh in my nostrils. Broken glass and discarded needles ground beneath my feet. I picked my way around old boards studded with rusty nails and stepped over a car door riddled with bullet holes. I could hear the sounds of large mammals ahead. The small mammals and insects glared at me, unafraid.

In the orange light of a fire burning in a steel barrel a prostitute was taking care of a customer. They were occupied by the transaction and didn’t hear me. He was a professor I often saw in collegetown, he lived not far from where my loft had been, and he was very obviously high. She was cheap and underfed, but I knew her from around. I admired her when I first got to know her because she only ever worked freelance, like me. It didn’t take long to see she had no pride in her craft, though. Not like me.

It took a scant moment for the voice to come and announce what the Job was. I had been right about it being a big one. It wasn’t often I got two Jobs at once.